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Jasper Bernes, "The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising" (Verso Books, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Dr. Jasper Burns
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- [01:21]
Morteza Hajizadev
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadev. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Jasper Burns about his most recent book, which has been published by Vercel. The book we're going to discuss is called the Future of Revolution, Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising. A very topical book which I'm sure a lot of our listeners and viewers will be interested in. Dr. Jasper Burns lives in Oakland and teaches in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley, and he's a regular contributor to the Field Notes section of the Brooklyn Rail, is also the author of the Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization and two books of poetry. One of them is called We Are Nothing and the other one We Are Nothing and so can you. And also star down. Jasper, welcome to New Books Network.
- [02:21]
Dr. Jasper Burns
Thanks, it's good to be here.
- [02:24]
Morteza Hajizadev
Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself, talk about your field of expertise. You teach in the Department of English by the same time, of course, critical theory is popular with most English teachers. Talk about your background in this field and also more importantly, there are lots and lots of books on the idea of revolution these days. How did the idea of this book come about and how do you look at this topic differently from other existing books on this topic?
- [02:54]
Dr. Jasper Burns
I see, yeah, that's a good question. Well, my training is in literary criticism, history and Theory, But I don't really claim any expertise on the subject of revolution. I think in some ways, the concept of expertise is in some ways foreign to the approach of this book, which emerged through processes of collective study, for example, reading groups. But also it is in many ways a summary of the conclusions and results of the vast history of communist struggle. So, you know, I don't really feel like this is in some way a book that demonstrates my particular expertise. It's more like I am a bard offering a new version of some of the stories that have been sung already. At the same time, I do have my own particular questions that I'm investigating. I mean, I'm a student of Marxism and anarchism and communism, and I consider myself a Marxist, a communist and an anarchist, most importantly, a communist. And I'm also a student of revolutionary history. And this is something that I've been interested in for a very long time. And my interest in it comes from my participation in social movements. I don't think I've participated in anything that was quite the revolution. But the things that I have participated in and the things that I've watched unfold in history have led me to question, you know, what a revolution would look like in our time. And that has sent me back to kind of study past revolutions and in particular, ideas about those revolutions.
- [04:59]
Morteza Hajizadev
And before we go any further, I just do like to kind of tell our listeners that we do have another podcast video on New Books Network. So I do strongly recommend to listen to that. That was about poetry and. Poetry and revolution. It was an article, if I'm not mistaken, in the Cambridge Book and into March. Yeah, yeah.
- [05:19]
Dr. Jasper Burns
Yes. And there I would claim some expertise. That is my field of expertise, as it were. But I think that one should be skeptical of those who claim expertise when it comes to the question of revolution. We are likely to all be wrong in the end when it comes to such matters.
- [05:43]
Morteza Hajizadev
So let's talk about some of the ideas. This book, to be honest, the title really attracted my attention. The Future of Revolution. And also the kind of, let's say, the temporal scope of the book. So you talk about communist prospects, but it starts from Paris Commune all the way to George Floyd Uprising. So you look at different revolutions in this time period. I'm interested to know what inspired you to trace this kind of long arc of revolutionary history, starting from Paris, coming all the way to George Floyd Uprising, which I don't know if you can call it a revolution or not, but it's a difficult question, as you've kind of alluded to, anyhow.
- [06:26]
Dr. Jasper Burns
Right, that's it. That's. That's a helpful question. I mean, I think the first thing I would say is that by some measures or from some perspectives, this would be a rather restricted arc. Right. I don't talk about, for example, the French Revolution, which is an enormously important revolution. If we're going to talk about the history of revolutions, another way of framing the temporal scope, as you call it, or the arc is that it's revolution since 1848, or maybe you could say since Marx, since Marx's time. And I think that what Marx says about The Revolution of 1848 is true, is that it's the first revolution in which the working class emerges as an independent actor. And only after do we have really distinctly working class or proletarian revolutions. Probably the Paris Commune is one of the first. So I'm particularly concerned with revolutions in modern capitalism and revolutions that unfold in, you know, in conditions that are to some degree capitalist, in which there is a kind of, you know, proletarian protagonist. And The Revolutions of 1848 and earlier are a little bit more complicated. Right. Capitalism had not kind of fully emerged at that point. And really, you know, I'm interested in thinking about how the understanding of revolution unfolds across all of these different revolutions. You know, from the Paris Commune to the Russian Revolution of 1905, and from there to the German and Russian revolutions, from there to the Spanish Civil War. And then looking at the 1960s and 1970s, a lot happens. I mean, this is in some sense the most kind of exciting period for the development of various concepts of revolution. And there's a lot that I leave out and a lot of examples that I don't consider. But so we can think that sort of the concept and the vision of revolution, the future of revolution, as it were, and there's a kind of double meaning in the concept of the future of revolution insofar as every revolution has its own future. So I'm concerned with the particular futures of, say, 1871 or 1905 or 19, but I'm also concerned with what a 21st century revolution would look like. But there's a development in the sense of what revolution might mean and what it could be, especially from 1871 up until 1960, up until the 1960s. Another reason why I pick the examples I do is that I'm not just telling a story about revolutions. I'm not just doing capital age history. I'm also doing an intellectual history. So as I talk about these revolutions I'm also talking about particular theorists who either were participants or were closely proximate to these revolutions, beginning with Marx and his own remarks on the Paris Commune. And so part of the logic of the sequences I do consider is that they link together through this intellectual history. And there's a way in which the revolutions are not just in dialogue with each other in the language of their actual events, but also through the mediation of these different communist theories and people thinking about revolution and what it meant and what it might mean on the basis of these kinds of experiences and.
- [10:05]
Morteza Hajizadev
Yeah, and some of these revolutions that you discuss in the book, there are lots of examples. Of course, they do have some commonalities as well, which will get to talk about some of them to me. One thing that was quite interesting is that in these examples there's always moments when all these practices, they create new political possibilities
- [10:25]
Dr. Jasper Burns
sort of.
- [10:26]
Morteza Hajizadev
I don't know if we can say that they were dollog with one another, but there's always a new political possibility, even despite the fact that that revolution may not achieve the aims or the goals that it had. And one of the key parts of the book that I'm really interested in to know more about is the idea of Workers Council. And that's something you discuss a lot in the book. It's one of your central claims that the Workers Council was a revolutionary form. It has enduring relevance. I'm keen to know what makes it so central to. First of all, in the book you talk about communist prospects, I guess in the United States it's a very dangerous thing days to call yourself a communist with all the misconceptions about it. But anyway, what. What is meant by a communist? Very briefly, of course, let's say for the un. Un. Uninitiated, what is a communist prospect and what is a Workers Council? What makes it so important, so central to a communist prospect? And why is it so. Still, why is it so relevant? There are too many questions in this, I guess.
- [11:39]
Dr. Jasper Burns
That's a great question. I'll start with the question about communist prospect. Yeah, the communist prospect is basically that idea of the future particular to a revolution insofar as that future is communist. Right. So it's the way that these revolutions saw themselves as possibly moving forward towards communism. Right. And I think that that is. We can. We can think about there being the emergence of a kind of communist prospect, even going back to the French Revolution or earlier, looking at kind of mediev. Peasant revolts. I'm not saying that it didn't exist before, but there's a way in which the communist prospect really stabilizes after 1848 and appears, you know, quite, quite visibly and remarkably in. In the Paris Commune, which was in some ways a model of how communism might unfold. And that's the particular interesting thing about the Commune. And this is true of Workers Councils. I'll get. I'll get to them eventually where the. The Commune was both, is both an actual thing and a kind of prospect or potentiality that is merely emergent in that thing. Marx points this out that basically the Commune is this thoroughly expansive form and it didn't get a chance to expand and settle and consolidate, but the Commune seemed to promise something like Communism emerging and unfolding from it. And I think it's important to think about what that looked like and also what limits the work of the vision of communism apropos the Paris Commune. So we can think about what emerges is both the actual Commune and within it something that we call the Commune form. This is a term that Kristin Ross uses and Marx uses it too. But I think it's an interesting way to think about it because the Commune form is a sort of potentiality located in any particular Commune. And that's one of the reasons why the Commune has had such wide resonance and why it is the basis for the Workers Council. So the Workers Councils that emerge later are kind of an attempt to elaborate upon the Commune form quite explicitly. And so I sort of think of the Workers Councils as a further restriction of the Commune form. So what is the Commune form as Marx describes it? Broadly, what was really distinct about the Paris Commune and what Marx thought was the form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of man. I mean, that's a big claim that there's something about the Paris Commune that is a form not just for that moment, but for every future moment. So what is it? And it's really this idea of. Of delegation that emerges and a kind of supervision from below that is, that is a distinct part of the Commune form where there are these ideas that everyone is involved in decision making. Right? So the Commune is plenary in the sense that everybody who is a part of the Commune and some people are excluded from it because they're enemies of the Commune or whatnot, is included in this decision making process. Right. So there's a way in which it's kind of rooted in the structures of daily life of Parisian people, of the Parisian working class. But then, you know, so that's the. One of the first things of the Commune is that it has to Involve not everybody, almost everybody. And it has to be something that it could expand to kind of marginally include everyone. So it has to be a massive form or structure, right? It has to be able to. It has to be inclusive in this way, but in order to be functional and practical, it also has to not just include, but allow for people to coordinate and coordinate across, you know, geographic and social distance when they aren't all present in the same place. And I think what Marx, you know, implicit in Marx's analysis is that any organization of communism would require some form of delegation like this, simply because that's the only way in which everybody can participate. And so he, you know, the commune had particular ideas about how this delegation would occur. But unlike in democracy, right, where you're electing a representative that makes decisions before you, these are mandated, specific and revocable delegates. There's this kind of retraction that is always there. So they're only, they're only put forward insofar as they hold up very specific intentions and they have a responsibility to check back in. And this is more or less the idea of workers councils builds upon this notion of revocable, mandated and also rotating delegates. The thing is that nobody does that. Nobody is a delegate for all time, because that would introduce some kind of class distinction between people who are coordinating it and those who are not. And the other thing is the kind of basic. This is something Mark says, the basic function of the basic duties that these people are responsible for need to be simplified to such a degree that really anybody, any workman could perform them. And that means this expertise is required, but expertise is advisory. And so there's part of the commune form is this need to kind of make decisions transparent and tractable people so they can understand what's at stake and what's going on and so that people can have some power over the decisions that matter in their lives. So I mean, that's. I'm much more specific in the book, but that's basically the commune form. Where the councils differ, though, is that you can already maybe hear that one of the problems with the. The Commune is it wasn't exactly clear who belonged to the commun or not. And even though many of the people who were involved in the Commune movement were working class militants, the structures, these delegation structures really weren't, kind of weren't organizing the working class as workers. Their penetration into the workplace was very, very limited. And really the only place where this structure operated was within the military. Right. So it wasn't able to really, I Mean the idea was that maybe eventually would have reorganized the economy in order to produce communism. But this is where the councils are much more specific because they emerge from this massive strike movement, right. In 1871, the majority of participants weren't really proletarians. Even a lot of them were artisans. They own their means of production. And the working class movement in France was dominated by people who tended to work with artisans. And that was their idea of communism, was a kind of communism of artisans. But by 1905, capitalism had developed quite a bit. And these revolutions tend to unfold as the consequence of a mass strike out of the emergence of this kind of mass process of unionization and workers organization. And so the workers councils really had a much better idea of who belonged to the workers councils or who belonged to the communists or were. And they restricted it to people who had some connection to the workplace. That didn't mean you had to have be working there right then. But you had to show in some circumstances, or ideally for some people who are partisans of the councils, you had to show some evidence that you were a worker, had work, that you were proletarian in some way. So, you know, if you wanted to participate in your, in the German revolution, in your local council, if they were very strict, then you would have to show like a work card or something like that. And people. And, and, and so the councils emerged in the German revolution, but they were sort of inconsistent, right? And, and their rules of inclusion weren't so transparent as sometimes anybody was allowed to participate. Like some of the councils formed out of the mass strike where people took over their workplaces and you know, and, and then elected from the shop floor. But sometimes it unfolded that because the German revolution emerged as the consequence of this kind of mutiny within the navy, there were these revolutionary marines who were going all over Germany and they would show up in town and they would say, okay, it's time to elect the councils. And sometimes they would just kind of, you know, pick whoever was there. So you would get, you know, the ex mayor or, you know, the town bookkeeper or some journalists or some party members, right? And then that doesn't maybe sound so bad. But the problem was is that eventually when those councils got together and decided whether they were really revolutionary organizations that wanted to do communism or not, or whether they were electors to a constituent assembly, which is what they decided to become, it was largely because of all these people who weren't working class, you know, proletarians involved in the councils and in the delegate decision maker making. And so this is kind of unfolding while the revolution is still going on. You know, there's a. A period of a few years where you're still in the midst of the German revolution. There's this kind of partial reconsolidation of power. But many people thought it was still possible for another wave to come up until about 1923. So from 1918 to 1923. And so that's when the idea of council communism, the idea of the council, the kind of revolutionary strategy emerges. And the first thing that the council Communists, many of them associated with the kpd, the first thing they put forward is we have to really make sure that these councils are proletarian and that we don't have a bunch of these bourgeois, you know, journalists and podcasters and professors in, in our, in our Workers Council. You know, Max Weber was in his. Was a member of his Workers Council. You probably don't want Max Weber in your Workers Council. And, you know, but, but where they were strict, for example, in, in Berlin, Rosa Luxembourg and Carl Liebnik were not allowed to be a part of their councils because they weren't workers. And they, of course, agreed with that. And so there's an attempt to kind of rigorously found the councils in this idea around the idea of proletarian inclusion by history of work. And that makes a lot of sense in this particular moment in German society. If you're in the heavy industrial region of the Ruhr, this is a pretty good measure to separate, you know, friends from enemies, as it were. One of the things I argue is that even though we probably need something like a commune or council now, in revolutions, this would no longer really make sense just because so many people who are proletarians don't really have steady access to work, don't identify with their work, and the workplaces that they're involved with are going to be of marginal utility to the revolution in some cases, not in all cases. But it's not as if. It's not like in this heavy industrial region where, you know, you either work for the big coal plant or the big steel factory or some of the thing that was making something useful that you certainly wanted to expropriate and collectivize. So we can get a. We can get into that a little bit more later. But that's, you know, that's. So this is one of the biggest kind of moves is from the work, the commune to the Workers Council. In some ways, the Workers Council is like the most. The most refined form of this vision of communism, but it needs to be adapted to our era. And it really, you know, it depends on what you mean by council. I'm advocating a very broad notion of delegation. We don't have to choose the particular mechanisms that the Germans chose in 1918. And in fact, they weren't clear about these mechanisms at all. That was one of the problems, is that they had this idea of forming councils, but when the time came to do it, they didn't really have clear plans about how that would work. And they ended up, that ended up, you know, really being a huge liability because they didn't have clear rules about how delegates would be selected or whatever. And that was to the benefit of the majority social democrats and to the people who wanted the movement to reconstitute, you know, bourgeois republic. And this is how the Weimar Republic is born is through the kind of the blood of the councils and essentially through the crushing of the councils, both through legal mechanisms and then through outright suppression. That's a lot.
- [24:17]
Morteza Hajizadev
But there was a lot to unpack there. Yeah.
- [24:20]
Dr. Jasper Burns
Hopefully that's helpful for your readers.
- [24:22]
Morteza Hajizadev
Yes. Yeah. And you know, the whole idea is
- [24:25]
Dr. Jasper Burns
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- [26:10]
Morteza Hajizadev
Dream team.
- [26:12]
Dr. Jasper Burns
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- [26:26]
Morteza Hajizadev
Yeah, and the whole idea is to provide an overview of some of the content of the book. Hopefully to encourage them to read some of the. Read more about some of those concepts in the book. I myself really interested in that idea of a workers council because that seems to have more to me at least I could be wrong. I'm happy to stand corrected. But to me it seems that it has more potential for organizing in 21st century, given all the economic, let's say, disenchantment that a lot of people are suffering from. And they're definitely calling out for change. Now, whether it's revolution in some parts of the world or major restructuring of political organ parties in another part, it's a different question. But I'm interested to know what lessons we can learn from major revolutionary movements or moments. Let's say that you discuss in your book. You talk about Paris Commune in 1871. And as we said earlier, some of them did not really succeed to achieve all their goals. Paris Commune partly felt because it was very geographically confined to specific year. And you talk about Germany, 1918. Again, the German councils were kind of neutralized. You talk about Russian revolution, but again those councils in Soviet Russia were kind of seized by the state apparatus. So given the successes or the failures they had, what do these episodes teach us about the possibilities and at the same time limitations of revolutionary change?
- [28:13]
Dr. Jasper Burns
That's a good question. And in the process of writing the book, I became clearer about these things. And I did write for the release of the book a kind of short set of theses which tries to derive some of my core points. I can try to walk you through them. So there's a few things that we learned from the history of revolution. The first one, and this is something that that had already been learned by the time Marx arrives on the scene. And this is that revolutions can only unfold to the extent that the armed power of the state is suspended or annulled in some way. And I think this is a point that most people would agree with, but they might want to kind of push back about a little bit. But it seems to me quite, quite obvious, if you want to, if your definition of revolution is expropriation of the means of production and their subordination to common production for common need, you can't do that if the police and the army are around because they will stop you. And that is just a sort of basic practical fact. And so that's the kind of thing that we can talk about is I speak of this as an eternal truth that is revealed by the revolutions of the past, French Revolution in 1848 and many others, in a sense that it will always be true as long as there is such a thing as class society and a revolution and a state, you know, and so it's something that's going to be true in the future too. And then we get to the kinds of things that emerge from 1871. And that has to do with these structures of inclusion and delegation. That's to say the revolution has to be massive. It has to be a revolution of the proletariat, right? Sometimes, you know, Marx gives very specific definition of the proletariat, but a vague one that I kind of like is the vast majority, right? I mean, that's that the vast majority of society has no interest in the continuation of capitalism, right? And the vast majority of society has no access to social wealth and is dependent upon selling their labor to reproduce themselves. And so a revolution must be a revolution of the vast majority. And so its structures have to be structures of the vast majority. Again, it sounds obvious, but you know, think about how many revolutions have just failed to completely even meet this, right? And they didn't have inclusive structures that brought in the vast majority. Or their definition of the vast majority was limited to just men or male workers or people who had employment as not the unemployed. So that's really important. But once you define that, then you have this problem which is how does everybody coordinate together? It's very easy if you want to say no. We have to have hierarchical leaders who make decisions for people. But if you're a communist, you know, that is to, to some extent anathema. And so you have to cap. You have to consider how, you know, the vast majority will make decisions. And what I argue is you need some structure of delegation. And, and you. So, so you. And then further, so you have to make sure that it's proletarian. You have these kind of structures of revival, mandated delegation. And this is a way of it becoming extensive, right? It's able to spread that way. The more coordination you have, the more capacity you have to expand in all kinds of ways, not just geographically, but across different sectors of society, and then to begin to reorganize them. And so then this comes to the last thing is that the revolution needs to be communist. And a lot of things that workers councils might do are not really communist and they're not necessarily revolutionary. And one of the problems is when the councils appear before the state power has been dissolved, they might end up in this process of negotiation with employers or the state. And that may be helpful or something, but that's a completely different strategic horizon. Revolution begins once you're no longer negotiating and you're immediately putting into place communist social relationship. And most of the revolutionary structures didn't get that far. They aspired to this, but either because they lacked the conditions of the breakdown of state power, or they were sort of unsure about how to. How to do expropriation and to organize communist production, a common production for commune need. They often didn't get that far. So it needs to be armed, power needs to collapse or be suspended. I mean, it's a process of degrees, right? The arm power doesn't go away all at once, and it probably won't go away completely for a very long time, right? There'll be these kind of reactionary elements that will continue to resist. But it's a process of degrees. And we could see those degrees unfolding even in pre revolutionary situations like the George Floyd uprising, where, for example, the police power collapsed in many cities and they weren't able to enforce property law. Of course, state power existed at another layer through the National Guard and the military. So it's a matter of degrees. But the point is that these communist structures need to come into place. And that means that one's goal has to be to create those structures, not to try to take power over the state or to negotiate through some process of transition. And this is where my strategic ideas really differ from a lot of people. So I think that those are more or less the things that they can learn from some of the revolutions. Then we have to think about, you know, what's happened since the 1960s. And we start to get into what I was talking about earlier, which is that it might not make sense today to locate these structures within the workplace. Let's say we have to take over the workplaces and expropriate them. But because the mark of proletarian identity is no longer really whether you're working or not, and because so many Workplaces may not be that useful. And also because struggles today tend to emerge not in production, but in the space of circulation, as my late friend Joshua Clover has pointed out so eloquently. For all those reasons, we may have councils that are not exactly workers councils. That's where the center or the locus of power is not exactly. So with the, the workers council in the German revolution, everything was centered on the workplace. But maybe what we need these days is something that's kind of, as I say, eccentric to production. It has to have one focus in production, but also a focus outside of it. And I think this is really just kind of in step with already the kinds of organizational forms we see emerging at the kind of neighborhood basis. And so the most important thing is that you're able to expropriate, so it has to enter into production, but it may not necessarily need to be centered on it. And so that's a distinction that I unfold by considering the revolution since 1968, where this becomes a problem. And it becomes a problem because a lot of the participants in 1968 were Die Hard council communists and they really thought that okay, now's the time to form the workers councils. But what happened is that workers councils really didn't form in that instance. And that raised a big question for people about the applicability of workers councils as such. At the same time, within that decade, you do see workers councils form in Portugal and Iran and elsewhere. So it's quite complex to try to think about the council, you know, after World War II. But that's more, that's more or less, that's more or less what we've learned. It's hard to, it's hard to answer that in a simple way. But I hope that answers the what we learn questions
- [36:20]
Morteza Hajizadev
when we're talking about the potentials of a worker's council. And I was again going back to what I said a bit earlier. There has been a lot of discontent, let's say, with the left in general, with unions. They seem to be negotiating to make some limited changes within the existing capitalism framework and really curtailing those new possibilities, those new political imaginations, let's say. And there has been always this tension historically between revolutionary self organization like councils, but also more established institutions like unions or labor parties or whatever name they have, the ones that are more on the left side, left of the political spectrum, historically speaking. How do you see these tensions playing out? And which I know that this is more or less a kind of subjective question, the second part, but which one do you think has more potential. Which one do you prefer or do you think can be more conducive to the needs of people in 21st century?
- [37:35]
Dr. Jasper Burns
I guess I'm going to be probably frustrating and say both in neither. And I'll tell you. I'll tell you why I say that. I do have a lot to say about parties and unions because this is a big aspect of the story of council communism. Council Communists are historically opposed to all parties and unions. But it's a little bit more complicated because we have to be specific about what we mean when we say a party or a union. That's to say some council Communists had a party, but they had a very different idea of the party than, say, Bolsheviks did or Chotskyists or social democrats. So we have to be clear about what kind of parties we're talking about, and we also have to be clear about what kind of unions we're talking about. There's a lot of different unions. And one thing that becomes important in the story I tell is the difference between what we might call broadly social democratic unions as they emerged largely in northern Europe and Germany, and the tradition of syndicalism and particularly revolutionary syndicalism that you see in Italy and in Spain and the Mediterranean. Unions had a much more revolutionary idea of what a union was for. And so we have to kind of think about them separately. There are issues with that, too. But when the Council Communists emerged, I consider this one person, Yanapell. He's a big part of my story. And he was a representative the kpd, the Council Communist kind of group that went to Moscow to speak to the members of the Comintern who were going to eject the KPD from participation in the Communist International. You know, based on some stuff that happened in 1921. It's Carl Radek who's kind of reading the expulsionary measures. If you know anything about Carl Radek. It's kind of dramatic and exciting. But, you know, basically what he goes there and he says, look, he says, you know, we're in a moment where the workers movement is different and that's transformed and you guys have. Haven't kept up. And he says, this is the situation as it's been in Germany, in Northern Europe. We built the biggest working class movement in the world. And this is true. I mean, German social democracy was probably as big as social democracy has ever gotten or will ever get, right? I mean, it was because of the unique nature of German industrialization. It was a huge, massive force. But it developed, as Appel says, It selected particular kinds of organizers, whether union organizers or party leaders, who were really good at negotiating either with employers or with the state. And it succeeded in winning reforms for the German working class on that basis. And it built power. The problem was, as Appel points out, is that when it kind of came time for those leaders who were very good at negotiating with power and working with employers or the state, when it came time for those people to become revolutionaries, they were very bad at that because their entire orientation was not towards revolution. It was towards accommodation and compromise and building slow, gradual power. And so basically the situation that Appel says they find themselves in is a situation in which a totally new type of leader and a totally new type of party is, is needed. And for them it was about neither choosing the party nor the union. Because the problem was the division between party and union that assumed this division between the economic and the political. So for them, the Workers Council and there's some other aspects to this, it sort of brings together the political and the economic. So it's neither union nor party, but by combining both and aiming towards the reorganization of the workplace and the abolition of the state, it can kind of do both things. And basically, I think the argument is that if you get caught into either a political organization or an economic organization, you can't be revolutionary, right? Because you can't orient yourself towards superseding the division between economics and politics. And that distinction only matters in a kind of pre revolutionary, non revolutionary moment. And so the idea is that we need different kinds of workers organizations and different kinds of parties, and we need them to be oriented towards the formation of something like councils. And the idea was that the entire development of the workers movement had not been towards forming those kinds of organizations, and the entire leadership was not oriented to that. And I think that's definitely true of whatever you think about the labor movement today. It's certainly not a revolutionary labor movement. It is not oriented towards a revolutionary supersession of capital. It's oriented towards, at best, negotiating with employers, if you're lucky. And because of the weakness of labor now, I mean, most of what unions do is sort of negotiate the gradual irrelevance of the working class and sort of fight for fewer concessions. Right? Most union struggles are essentially, especially if you look at, in the long term, with inflation and the general kind of devaluation of labor, they're defensive struggles at best. And so I'm not saying people shouldn't organize in their workplaces, nor that workplace organization won't be a part of important revolution. But unions that we have them are clearly not up to the task of making revolution. They may be important in other ways. And again, this is not to say anything about workplace organizations. We have to say, what kinds of workplace organizations are we oriented towards? But workplace organizations that respect the kind of bounds of legality imposed by the state, especially in the US where it's so limited what you can do as a worker. And the whole structure of collective bargaining is designed to really rule out all kinds of political action, including between different groups of workers. It's really, you know, it's really hard to imagine how on that basis you could make them revolutionary. And this doesn't have to do with the independent sentiments of the participants. This is one of the things I want to point out is that this is not. I mean, this is something that's part of the organizational logic. The participants might themselves be, you know, have revolutionary ambitions, but the organization they're a part of has no capacity of realizing that. And even people who are part of organizations who have revolutionary intentions find that the organizations are often kind of inertial and they can't react quickly enough to the tempo of revolution. And that's because they build organizations that were oriented to do something else. So the strong version of the argument, and this is something no one wants to hear, is that organizations built in capitalism to function in capitalism are not going to be revolutionary organizations except through some kind of transition transformation, which is usually a shattering of a rupture. No one wants to hear that because they really like the idea that they're patiently building in the shadows the future revolutionary organization. But that's never how it happens, and it's not likely to be how it happens in the future, as unfortunate as that means. I don't say that as to recommend nihilism. I participated in my union, and I like my union because I want more money and it protects me against the vicissitudes of capitalism. So, you know, that's the best. That's the best I can put it. I'm sorry. Out to any listeners who, I guess a lot of people. No one goes to Hanks for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He he asks copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs and help him see if he can afford it. Copilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now Hanks has a line out the door Hank makes the pizza, co pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more@m365copilot.com work this episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate see. According to Indeed data, Sponsored jobs have four times more applicants than non sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. K Pop Demon Hunters, Haja Boy's Breakfast Meal and Hunt Trick's Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day. It is an honor to share. No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really, stop.
- [46:23]
Morteza Hajizadev
You can really feel the respect in this battle.
- [46:26]
Dr. Jasper Burns
Pick a meal to pick a side. Participate in McDonald's while supplies last.
- [46:32]
Morteza Hajizadev
I guess it is sad, but at the same time, it's unfortunately what's been happening. I myself, well, I'm a Labor supporter myself, but I've become very, very much. I live in Australia. I've become very, very much disillusioned with the labor government here, their stance towards ordinary people, working class people, and at the same time on international issues, which I find it deeply troubling and against my values as more or less a person who's a socialist. So I. Yeah, so I guess a lot of people share your pessimism, but at the same time, I guess they can. We cannot give up hope. And that's all we have to fight for. As you mentioned, you're still involved. We're trying to make changes anyway possible. But. Yeah, but. But we need to be able to come into terms with the realities that it. That is on the ground. Yeah, yeah. Another part of the book that, and I didn't know anything about it myself, that was the Theory of Communization. That's. I was unfamiliar with this myself, so I was really interested to know more about it and how I think it kind of developed after the famous revolution of May 68. And the idea is that communism must begin immediately within the revolutionary process, rather than after, let's say, the seizure of state power. What is that theory? What does it entail and how is it, let's say, different from traditional revolutionary strategy?
- [48:02]
Dr. Jasper Burns
It's a good Question. The term is debatable. It's a term of art that has been used by many quite sophisticated French writers. And none of whom exactly agree with each other. And I'm sure that if you asked any of them. They would disagree with me in some sophisticated manner. But the way I tell the story of communization. And this is, you know, just one of the ways of looking at it. But I think it's very important to its emergence. Is that it emerges from these people who were council communists of one sort. Or they had become attracted to the idea of the workers Council. There's a revival of interest in council communism in France. It was very. There's a revival all over the world. But it was particularly strong in France. Due to some, you know, unique conditions there. And there were many, you know, people who had studied the history of the German revolution. There was a situation international. They put the Workers Council at the center of their idea of communism. And their kind of blend of Marxism and anarchism. And that was a big part of the logic of May 68. There was also a big malice component in May 68. But even the Maoists were in some way influenced. By the kind of least tactical repertoire of the ultralft, as I call it. People who are interested in the. In the Workers Council. But as I said, you know, the workers Councils didn't emerge. So there's this movement that started with the students. And then it sped to the factories. But people shut down their factories and took them over. They weren't interested in forming councils. And that had a lot to do with the strength of the unions. And, you know, an unwillingness to kind of fight union leadership. But also a sense that the union. If it were just gonna. If it was just gonna come down to negotiating with the state or the employers. The best people to do that are the union. And so probably the absence of any immediate revolutionary horizon that didn't know. And one that, you know. And one that will, like, allow people to no longer be only workers. As their identity led to a kind of, you know, dissatisfaction with the idea of the workers council. That's in some ways the idea. And so then there's, you know, different ideas about how a revolution might unfold. One of the things I'm trying to point out is that if you. If you press communization theorists or if you really look at it. What they're arguing is not so different from council communism. They often make council communism into this spoil. So that. Such that, you know, council communism really isn't interested in superseding capitalism, just creating this form of self managed capitalism, which is totally not true. I mean, there may have been some versions of that that emerged. The real disagreement between council communism and communization is whether you sort of conceive of there's a way in which council communism, especially in the French case, some of the French interpreters, was very formalist to put a lot of emphasis on these forms. The communization people were really influenced by this person named Amadeo Bordega. And his way of looking at revolution was in some ways indifferent to form. It said that what matters is really the content of the revolution. So it'd be as if this discussion we were having, we said it doesn't matter commune or council, all that matters is this proletarian and this communist content. So form is indifferent. You just need to make sure that the revolution is proletarian and communist. But how do you do that? I argue that instead of choosing form or content, we need an idea that combines them and thinks of what we're dealing with here are questions of function. But so communism puts forward this idea of revolution that I like to, I call it adverbial. That's to say it's a process oriented theory of revolution. Revolution is the unfolding of these processes of making communism. And they begin immediately from the very beginning of the revolution. But one of the things that's complicated is that sometimes communization is thought of as kind of an immediate theory, right? We're going to make communism immediately. One day it's capitalism and then the next day it's communism. And that's true in a sense, that you begin building communism immediately, immediately try to do away with money and wages and state administration. But there's a recognition that this is a process of transition. I mean, once you abolish money, it's going to take some time to figure out how to do without it, for example. And that is not an immediate process. But the point is that you don't say, first we're going to take over the state and our unions and everything, and then we're going to do communism. Because the idea is that that process of delay is endless and the moment when you actually do communism will never arrive for a bunch of reasons. So communization is a theory of communism as a process that is immediately stateless and moneyless and classless, but that takes time to eventually kind of unfold and stabilize itself. And sometimes it's a very vague theory, it's because they're so afraid of forms, they're sometimes afraid to kind of specify using any language that resembles the everyday language we use to speak about capitalism. And it ends, you know, it can, and it can be almost kind of mystical in the way that it gets talked about. And there's, there's value to that. I try to be a little bit more practical and think about what are we really talking about, what really needs to happen in order to sort of organize, you know, organize society, you know, in a way where everybody has some role in the decisions that, that make sense for them. And you're not, you know, you, you don't need state power or the mechanisms of money or wages and where people are free to develop themselves. I think the idea of the good that we get from Marx is an idea of free development. So that's why I like the kind of process oriented thinking you find in communization theory, because I do think that, you know, for Marx, communism is not the, the end of history, but the end of prehistory. And it, it's opening the door to a kind of process of development and evolution which is potentially limitless. I mean, it might also be that people choose to, you know, keep things the same in some ways, but we don't really know. There are all kinds of communisms that might emerge and that might be consistent with each other at some broad level and consistent with our values. And so, you know, so I think that's a good way to think of it, especially for our era in which, you know, it's sort of impossible to think of a communist monoculture or a kind of, you know, super industrial state where everything is standardized and homogenized. And maybe some people like to fantasize about those things, but it seems pretty unlikely at this point.
- [55:14]
Morteza Hajizadev
Let me go to the title of the book, the Future of Revolution. So we don't want to talk all about what happened in the past, but we've established, let's say, lessons learned and how they may help us today. But speaking about future revolutions, part of your argument is that future revolutionary forms are completely different or substantially different from 19th, 20th century workers movements. It requires new organizational forms. Nowadays people don't want or don't, let's say, seize a factory. They're out there in the streets, in the neighborhoods. There have been lots of uprisings, such as George Floyd, that is in uprisings. Lebanon, Sudan, Hong Kong, Iran. They involve Oregon with the war happened that is happening between Israel and Palestine. There were lots of protests all over the world. In Italy, for example, there was major logistic disruptions. There were blockades and There were a lot of, let's say, communal form of organizations that were outside that traditional workers councils or factory settings. So I'm interested to know what do you think future revolution movements look like and what do they need? What kind of organizational form do they need to be to be successful?
- [56:34]
Dr. Jasper Burns
Yeah, well, that is the, that is the million dollar question or the, the moneyless, classless, stateless question, as it were. And if I had that answer, you know, I would just be out, you know, I would be, I would be in the, you know, in the, the central plaza on my campus just soapboxing and telling everybody about the, the good news that I've discovered. I mean, that's, this is why I don't claim expertise is because I don't have an answer. And I think that, that whatever forms emerge, they're going to emerge from proletarian experimentation. Right. And the most important thing we can do as communists is to pay attention to what people are doing. Because the new tactic or the new organizational structure form is likely not to be something you think up in your head, but that somebody figured out somewhere else just because there's a lot of us. And that's the benefit, is that there are so many people who hate capitalism and are brave enough to struggle against it. But there's something that I can't say. I mean, there's this possibility of the emergence of the new. And I think we just constantly have to be looking out for that. And I want to be humble, admit that I don't know what that looks like. At the same time, I do think that the things that we see and that we've seen in the last 20 years, they all kind of point towards something like a commune or a council. My argument is that these forms of community organization and the forms of organization you see in there spring and the movement of the squares and more recently in the struggle against. The genocide in Gaza and Ayis in the United States, that all of these things are sort of seeking these structures. And I don't know what it would be like when it finds the solution because there are probably many ways to solve this problem in many ways not to, and they're going to be in some way local. So we, you know, for example, I'll say that it's been very inspiring. My book ends with the George Floyd uprising, you know, in Minneapolis. And it's been quite inspiring and quite surprising to see what's happened in the city of Minneapolis, you know, this year and the resistance to ICE and CBP that you've seen in the streets of Minneapolis. And it's quite extraordinary that this minor American city is such a flashpoint in the2020s. And I don't have any insights into why that is. I mean, I have some ideas, but Minnesota needs to tell us this story. But maybe they'll be on your show at some point. But what did we see there? We saw this incredible, really quite sophisticated forms of organization against ice. The formation of neighborhood groups, different kinds of block by block organization coordination, using sophisticated technology to kind of map and track and trace ice vehicles. And probably, I don't know, tens of thousands of people participate in this. Regular soccer moms and all kinds of regular people. I don't think it's a revolutionary struggle. And so for the horizon of the struggle isn't really revolutionary in that. Like, you know, it's a struggle against ICE rather than the police in general. And, you know, we probably accept in some ways a return to the status quo anti. Even if many people in the movement don't want that. But I think that the forms of organization, you know, that you see the emergence of these structures, that in other instances, if it really were about. If there were some much more massive breakdown of state power, not just of ice, but all policing, you could see those kinds of structures becoming functional and revolutionary. I don't think they're adequate already, but I think maybe we start to see people building some of what that might look like. And I see that you. You see that in every struggle, right, People are trying to form these organizational forms, and there's a lot of similarity in the kinds of things that they hit on, right? In Minnesota, they're gathering in the middle of the blocks to block ice from going through their streets. Well, this is sort of what the Giles Jean did in France when they gathered in these roundabouts and they call it a filterable blockade, right? They only let through. They let the neighbors through, but they don't let them, the police through. And this was also something that the Julie Jaunes did. So this is an example of a tactic. Do I think that that's immediate with communism? No, but I think that it's an example of people in struggles figuring these things out. And they're the experts, right? It's the movement. I'm not. I'm not an expert. I can't. I can't come up with these new ideas. I wish I could. So I think we need to pay attention to that. And I think it's really. And I think that, you know, there is. There is inspiration if we. If we look for it even as, as grim as the world is right now. And it is indeed very, very grim. You know, I think that we, we just, you know, that's my big thing is I, you know, we have to pay attention, right? And this is where we get into what I talk about at the end of my book with inquiry is one of the most important things we can do if we accept that we aren't going to have any answers, is to pay attention to what other people are doing and try to share that information, you know, and that's what I'm, that's what I'm doing. Right. And in some ways that's what this book is, is an attempt to share and broadcast what I feel is meaningful and useful about all of these, you know, struggles over the last 150 years. But at a more limited level, just, you know, sharing these ideas, giving presentations and trying to, you know, disseminate this militant knowledge is one of the best things that we can do. I don't think it's the only thing, but I think it's really, I think it's really important.
- [62:30]
Morteza Hajizadev
Another part of the book that I enjoyed was the section that they discussed about the importance of correspondence and inquiry, the importance of production of knowledge from below for the workers and also by the workers. And a lot of criticism that is these days laid against the left is that they speak a kind of language that alienates ordinary working class people. It's only a few elites who have studied these ideas in university, can identify, can understand this. Whereas if you want to connect with the workers, you got to speak their language the same way they produce pamphlets back in the 18th or 19th century and they distributed those pamphlets in factories. I'm interested to know what you mean by inquiring correspondence and what shape or form it needs to have to be able to produce that knowledge and also connect with the working class people.
- [63:22]
Dr. Jasper Burns
Yeah, that's great. So my one contention I make in the book is that every revolution, insofar as we're talking about expropriation of the means of production, taking over the things that are owned by capitalists and using them to meet people's needs, there's some process of inquiry that corresponds to that expropriation at a very basic level, if you want to take stuff over, you need to know what it is and how it works. And, you know, sometimes that's pretty obvious, but with a lot of the things that you encounter in, you know, late capitalism, it's not so obvious. Right, it's not so obvious. What they are or how they work. And it's not so obvious. More importantly, how it could work. Because when we're talking about the construction of communism, we're probably not going to want to use things exactly as they are implemented here. We're going to want to transform them to meet new uses is and change the way that people live and work. So that means that, you know, any revolution is going to be also a process of inquiry, right? We need to take over the knowledge that corresponds to these means of production in order to take them over. And this has always been true, but I think it's more true today. The classical idea of revolution, and you see this in council communism, is that the workers themselves take over their workplaces and then they administer themselves. And that makes sense in a certain era in which the workers had all the knowledge that they needed to organize that workplace. And that was the case for a long time. But because of the reorganization of capitalism, that's just not the case in most workplaces. And because the processes of capitalism fit together in this really complex way through this kind of globalized logistical system, there's going to be a lot of open questions and a lot of knowledge, and we're going to need a kind of engineering perspective to be able to meet people's needs. So the revolution itself will be a process of gathering and distributing this information and using it to reorganize society. I don't think it can be that work of inquiry, can be the work of just a few elites. Because if you want to know where things are and what they are, that's not information that any one person has. So it requires a broad survey. It requires the people who know the stuff to be part of it, right? So in that sense, it has to be this vast inclusive process because you're going to have to kind of gather the information. So it's just. I like to give an example. If we were talking about, for example, housing, right, which is a big crisis here in California, as it is in many places, as rent becomes unaffordable, there's so much houselessness. You know, if there were a breakdown in state power today and we were able to start to organize things based on need, without money, we would want to put all these people who were homeless into houses, right? And we would want to know. So we want to know what houses are available because we don't want to just go like kicking families out of their homes or whatever, right? You have to know where there are houses that are available and what condition they're in. And what kinds of repairs they need. And if you're going to do that, you could. Could have just, you know, some. A few people going around. But the best thing to do would be to have the neighborhoods themselves making these assessments through collaborative processes, right? And then figuring out how to process and work with that information in order to make sure that people have houses. So there's. There's two levels. There's a level of inquiry and gathering. But one of the important things I heard for you was how do we make this information useful to people? Because a lot of it is just going to be gobbledygook, right? Intelligible only to specialists. And so that's where this idea of transparency, which I think is a key part of. It's probably not one of the things I didn't say when I was talking about the conclusions of the book. Communism must be, as I say, transparent and tractable, right? Its mechanisms have to be made comprehensible to everybody, and they have to be socially effective. And in order to do that, we go back to this thing that Mark said about the commune, which is that the work of government has to be simple enough that any workman can do it. And so we have to think about how we can simplify this information in order that people can use it to affect the conditions that affect them. And so that's the part where it's less about the collection of the information than about the processing of it. And it's more of a question of. It might be a question about design, it might be a question about mathematics and signs and how do you make things intelligible to people? There's a very interesting sideline to my book about this and the work that Otto Neurath did to try to kind of make an atlas of production. The basic idea was to come up with visual statistics that didn't require language that could make the way things worked comprehensible and enable kind of decision making in this broad, inclusive way. So that's a big. That's kind of where I want to go with this and what I want to be working on, on near future. But it's a big, you know, it's a big. It's a big process. And whatever we, you know, we can start this process of inquiry now, obviously, we can't really know what we will have needed to know, but we could start to kind of create the structure that would be. That could then gather the information. Like, we may not be able to fill out every unknown, but we can map out what we don't know in order to identify what things we would need to know in a future time, and we can start to gather what information we do have. Things are changing.
- [69:03]
Morteza Hajizadev
Right.
- [69:03]
Dr. Jasper Burns
If you went and did an assessment of housing here, you know, 10 years from now, that might not be useful to a revolution. Right. So in that case, it may not be useful. It may be useful to do that assessment if you felt it could help, you know, a housing struggle and immediate thing. But maybe it would be more useful to just talk in a broad level about what you would need to gather in such a situation. Right, right. And maybe do an sort of example of that data collection that isn't. It's just a kind of proof of process, but not necessarily kind of full working up of the information. And, you know, I don't think this is the most important thing that people can be doing, but I think it is. It is an important thing and, and people are already doing it. So again, when I'm not an expert, I'm basically just telling people what I've already noticed others doing. This, this kind of process of what I call technical inquiry is already happening. And, you know, it has a fairly long history, but I think it's picking up just because people recognize the same kinds of problems that I do. And, you know, it's something you can do that is communist in some way. And a lot of the activism and organizing that people find available to them just isn't. And I'm not saying that that's not valuable, but. But oftentimes when I meet activists and organizers, they sort of are lacking something particularly communist or they have some disappointment with the kind of limited horizons of their own work. Maybe they don't, but some people, if they do, then maybe this kind of thing would be helpful. And it also allows for people to talk about what they really mean when they say revolution. Oftentimes, you know, at least on the left, people I know don't really talk about this. Most people probably don't even believe in it. But there are people I've worked with for a really long time and we've never had this conversation because it just doesn't come up. And that's because it's not necessary at this point. But at a future point, it might be necessary to know what people really think about this and have some kind of. And, and share ideas about it and, you know, try to, you know, get, get people, you know, and work with to tell you whether they believe in revolution or whether they think something, you know, is possible or not, that that can be Helpful.
- [71:22]
Morteza Hajizadev
And one one final question is to bring all these ideas we discussed, let's say bring it in more, more into conversation with today's world. What's happening in 2020? You end the book with George Floyd uprising and also the crisis of state authority. And I think things have gotten even worse since then, given the political conflicts of the United States. And also other countries have been involved in and mass uprisings around the world as well, the rise of authoritarianism, global protests, economic stagnation. And you also argue that capitalism is also in a form of a long period of stagnation. I guess I'm kind of rambling, but I'm keen to know how do the themes you explore in the book help us understand all these issues and also give us. We have sort of touched upon this throughout the interview, but I'm trying to sum it all up and how they can better help people mobilize and organize to achieve their goals.
- [72:28]
Dr. Jasper Burns
Some, some of those questions are really important questions that are sort of outside of the scope of the book, unfortunately. I mean, I examined the George Floyd uprising, but I examined it as an example of a kind of struggle you find in this moment in history. And so I sort of bracket a lot of the particularities of that struggle as something happening in the United States in this particular political context, in this particular historical moment, which are very interesting and I've written about in other places. It's, it's, you know, there's, there's, there's a lot happening and it's a very, feels like a very grand time in many ways. But I also think that what we're seeing is, for better or worse, the decline of the US Right. And Trump is just, you know, just wasting American power in Iran and everywhere. And this is a sort of rapid fire descent for the United States. It might have taken a little bit longer, but Trump is just accelerating the process. And so what that means is that the United States is becoming weaker. That's probably a really good thing for most of the world. Not that it will necessarily lead to emancipatory processes elsewhere. But all things being considered, the US Is a net negative for the world and its declining influence is probably a good thing. And then we have to think about the collapse of the American project and the fact that in some way some kind of breakdown of the United States, not just economically, but politically, seems in the cards. And I don't think that's necessarily going to be progressive and that's not the right term, but I don't think it will necessarily be revolutionary. There are lots of civil war scenarios, some of which are unlikely, which, you know, don't really seem to have any emancipatory prospect to them. But some, some might. Of course, we have to think, you know, the most emancipatory example we have in American history is the U. S Civil War in some respects. Right. And the kind of the, the general strike of the enslaved that WB Du Bois talks about. And so, you know, I, I, I think that basically what I'm, what, what I'm trying to get at is that, that revolutions occur in moments of breakdown of one sort or another. Economic crisis, natural disaster, war, and I'm not celebrating the suffering that comes with the collapse of the American empire, but it also may offer opportunities, whether in the United States or elsewhere, simply because the capacity, the armed power of the state is diminishing. There's still quite a bit of it, obviously, but it is contingent upon the economic power of the United States. And also war is changing. I think there's a whole kind of set of military questions here that I'm not by no means an expert in, but I think that what's happened in the last 10 years, it's horrifying to see what's happened with war, but just as a speculation, and this is really outside of the bounds of the book, but I think that whether you think about Ukraine and Russia or Gaza or you think about Iran now, you know, we, we seem to be confronting these kinds of unwinnable wars in which, you know, you could turn through every Russian 18 year old or you, you can, you know, kill almost every person in Gaza or you could nuke Tehran, but you're not going to win according to the objectives. And that also means that any notion of, you know, lawful warfare is out the window. Right? And that's why we see just the brutality and the new, you know, the new, the new barbarity of war. And it's, it's a terrifying, horrifying thing with escalation, pointless escalation, right, where it just, escalation doesn't go anywhere. And you know, I, and this is a technical question, has to do with drones and missiles and I mean other people are smarter than this. But I, you know, I'm not sure it's totally bad is what I'm saying is that I think that, you know, it just shows how limited, I mean what we're seeing right now, it's quite extraordinary the, the limited power of the, of the U.S. i mean it's horrible what they're doing and we don't want to underestimate the, the power, you know, but I saw that the Iranians shot down a, a American fighter jet today and, you know, and that they were offering $64,000 for the capture of a pilot. And I think that, you know, that just tells you what life is, what, how life is valued in, you know, in, in Iran compared to the US where the US have probably spent billions of dollars to recover those soldiers and he can't win against that. And I mean, everyone knows this and there is no strategic horizon for Trump. It's just a series of possibly terrifying escalations or a retreat that is just going to be a loss and everyone's going to know it and the rest of the world's going to know it. I mean, China now knows how to do the Strait of Taiwan. There's a, yeah, there's a playbook.
- [77:54]
Morteza Hajizadev
That's the temple.
- [77:55]
Dr. Jasper Burns
So, you know, I mean, I, I, this is really outside of the bounds of it. But I'm not, you know, I'm not, I'm not going to shed a tear for the collapse of American power. I'm also not going to say it's necessarily going to be emancipatory, but, so, you know, I don't know. And you know, we have the rise of the kind of global fascism and one thing that we have to think about is that many revolutions are emerged from a moment of anti fascism. But anti fascism has this kind of problem where anti fascist revolts often sort of stop short of communism. They, you know, some part of them just wants to kind of restore the balance of power and some part of it wants to go all the way. So antifascism is in some ways a kind of problem for revolutions in that, you know, it's often, it's often the thing that leads to their death or their kind of limit or their sort of halfway case. At least I go into this in the case of Spain. But it's also something you see, you know, emerging in the German revolution, which is arguably where anti fascism emerges. So, but of course people are going to resist, people are going to rise up. And, you know, you have to accept that. But there's a lot to think about, some of which I can't get it at in this book. I mean, this book is sort of looking at things from the perspective of eternity, right. And there's a very different perspective which kind of looks at things from the perspective of history and be more about kind of tendencies in the world system and development of capitalism and maybe that's the book I'm going to write next. And maybe that would be the place to start to consider some of this stuff because the book obviously leaves many questions unanswered. But it's also only a 65,000 word book. There's only so much I can do. I'm sure I could have I'm sure I could have done more if I had more resources. But
- [79:50]
Morteza Hajizadev
thank you very much. It was a fascinating book to read and there was a fascinating discussion and I special like you know how you were able to connect all the things. True that they were beside the scope of the book, but I guess they were quite relevant as well and I'm glad you talked about them towards the end as well. So I do like to thank you very much, Jasper and Burns for this wonderful book and also for your time to speak with us on New Books Network. And I do strongly recommend this book to our listeners. It's not one of those difficult books to understand the written on critical theory. I think most of the books by versa are very accessible and that's what it's meant to be for the public to read the future of revolutions Communist prospects from the Paris Commune to George Floyd Uprising. Thank you so much.
- [80:40]
Dr. Jasper Burns
Hope to be able to thank you again. Don't miss the Devil Wears Prada 2 in theaters. Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci are back. In light of the recent scandal, I'm here to restore your credibility.
- [81:04]
Morteza Hajizadev
I did not hire you and all
- [81:05]
Dr. Jasper Burns
I need to do is bide my time until you fail on May 1. Icons I'm going to make something of this job. Rain hit the bridges I burn Light my way forever. I just love my job. Get tickets now. The Devil Wears Prada 2 in theaters May 1, directed by David Frankel radio PG13 may be inappropriate for children under the third the 13th of.