BONUS EP: Radio War Nerd EP #563 — Democracy & Doom, feat. Joe Costello

Astra Taylor did recently write a good book on the subject this guy is going on about - Democracy might not exist (but we'll still miss it when it's gone). She goes over its history and its failings (like do we really have a democracy if so many people aren't allowed to vote). I like to connect it to Michael Hudson's work on Babylonian god kings. Democracy eventually leads to rule by the rich and the collapse of the state (through the population getting mired in debts to the rich and not being able to do necessary labour for the state). Only the sacred authority of a god king can push through regular debt cancelations and level the playing field. In the present day, that means it's really only authoritarian governments that can push through projects that challenge capital. I don't think China's efforts to build renewables and useful infrastructure would have been as successful if it had a Western-style democracy. For proof, look at where those democracies are on renewables and useful infrastructure.

FWIW there was a time when putting apes and chimps on book covers really did increase sales. https://screenrant.com/dc-comics-history-gorillas-apes-covers-silver-age/

Maybe im just not smart enough to get what he's saying but this sounds very much like yet another reinvention of concepts marx and marxists wrote about by someone claiming that they actually didn't. Theres a few wild claims this episode but what is really crazy to me is that he says these are things that noone has ever THOUGHT ABOUT. I could just not get what he's saying but it truly sounds like someone who refuses to honestly engage with marxist thought and so has to reinvent the wheel in a way that obscures more than it reveals.

Listened to this episode then the thomas frank one... RE public banks- to my knowledge the only public bank in the United States is the state Bank of North Dakota created by the North Dakota Non Partisan league which was an offshoot of the populist movement before it evolved into the states Democratic Party affiliate. I really like that idea for mamdani. He needs to do something different. I'm in Chicago and our "lefty" mayor Brandon Johnson has failed to reverse austerity in any serious way. If zohran doesn't swing for the fences I fear the same for him- it'll just be a question of do I make cuts to public transportation or to housing assistance

This discussion is especially interesting in light of Starmer's plan to abolish jury trials for most crimes in the U.K.

I just think it’s really wild to imply that Rome and Greece were more democratic than the Soviet Union. And that labor actually *creates* the class divide by identifying and organizing around the class divide. Really really extremely anti-materialist lol

In 1776, there were longstanding republics in Switzerland and the Netherlands. Britain had many republican features including court systems and institutional rights the American rebels invoked. These states looked back on a long history of republican and city-state forms in Italy and central Europe. None of these were really democracies as most of us might define the term but neither was the republic that emerged out of the 1787 US constitution. The American form of rule was not sui generis, born only of its own volition, and its precedents were not all back in classical antiquity.

Check out "The Net-The Unibomber, LSD and the Internet" That guy knew technology was Politics. Very interesting documentary and I want to say Larry Sommers is interviewed in it as well.

I really liked this episode. I knew Joe's comments RE labor vs the managerial class would ruffle some feathers, and boy was i right lol. I would love to have Joe back on to talk about Tanzania and Nigeria. And of course, get well soon, John. I miss ya a bunch. Mark, you've done a great job flying solo for this stretch.

Like if you are going to talk about democratic thinkers and discredit Marxism, please do your research. "What will be the course of this revolution? Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat. Direct in England, where the proletarians are already a majority of the people..." Literally Engels.

His idea that self dividing into labor and management weakens labor is like if you are playing football and one team knows they are a team and playing football and the other people dont realize they are playing nor that they should be on acting as a team, and somehow that disconnected group realizing that makes them weaker. Management knows its management vs labor, it’s already divided. Pretending that isnt the case is shortsighted at best, and contributes to the continued domination of labor by management.

BTW, whatever happened to Postal Banking? Yes. Open a bank. This does tie into the Serbia protest episodes, especially the second one, and I’m just going to copy my comments from that post. These two episodes touched on something very critical. The right-wingers don't actually understand shit about fuck, including what a "high-trust society" actually is. Seeing the response from Japanese people to their claims, for example, elicits laughter. The point is, though, that one may call it gullibility or stupidity/ignorance or brainwashed by propaganda, or any other thing, but people actually believe the government and people in power. In the same way that polls don't matter when it comes to whether politicians do what people want or not, polls about trustworthiness or confidence in X institution or Alpha person or source is, it doesn't actually matter that no one has faith in Congress or the President or anything but the military (Which, of course, gives liberals a hard-on to see because they can always put their anti-democratic dreams and hopes on "Well, the people would accept a military coup and the military is on our side," which is what Hindenburg et al. also thought. But I digress.), but they love THEIR representatives and their institutions and their sources and overall the public, and especially the public that doesn't treat politics as a sport and generally give no fucks about the details of what those in power do, they still think that even if Fox News or CNN or the fucking Epoch Times is full of shit they are still Americans and they still have lines of demarcation and life, death, war, and so forth are being reported and acted upon legitimately. We are the far far outsiders who treat mainstream and elite institutions as being somewhat to fully corrupt and illegitimate. 90% of Americans don't buy that in any substantive way. Was it Borges or someone who said magical realism could only come from Latin America because there was a distinct and nearly universal divide between believing your lying eyes and believing what you have to say and do publicly. That is, basically Soviet hyper-normalization. Thanks to Adam Curtis for letting us in on this bon mot. In contrast, I've seen multiple judges and legal figures speak of protecting truth and democracy and so forth while being the preeminent figures of a profession that is fundamentally anti-democratic and plays fast and loose with facts and truth and freedom and liberty as a matter of course. They genuinely, with their whole hearts and minds, believe their own bullshit. Carlin described the U.S. as being the largest producer and distributor of bullshit. It's basically the only thing the U.S. makes and it makes more of it and the best quality bullshit in the world by far. And Americans are so good as making bullshit because Americans are the biggest consumers of bullshit. We believe. We communicate in stories. Flat-out that is why Clinton and Obama and Trump are the such immensely charismatic figures that they could personify Max Weber's charismatic authority all the way to the presidency in spite of being the most brazen and obvious backstabbing liars on Earth. They sell stories and they sell them well in exactly the way people want to hear (literally the same people in the cases of people who have voted for Obama then Trump or Clinton and Obama and Trump, and there are lots of those people. And chances are if they voted in 2000 and/or 20024, they voted for Bush). The point is that this is what a high-trust society is. And then look at a small country like Serbia and how many very obvious, direct, visceral betrayals by the state and elites it took for the people to react even to this level - which is still stuck at a loud minority that can't get anyone to do anything because everyone else is still indifferent. The EU states and affiliates are on an entirely other level of trust and simplicit belief in the legitimacy and integrity of the state and authorities. And then you have the U.S., which is on an even higher level of difference from EU trust than the EU citizens are compared to Serbians. And so on one hand, this is great. It means the genuine capacity for internal dissent and violence is impossibly low. Even the biggest dipshit you know who talks about insurrectionists or civil war knows there is not a chance in Hell of any conflict - physical, economic, legal, or anything other than shitposting online - occurring. Not now. Not in ten years. Not in fifty years. Barring a miracle, it cannot happen. The problem, however, is that it cannot happen absent a globally cataclysmic event. Trust that everything will stay the same is a necessity and people are vested in the belief that everything important will continue as before tomorrow and next week and next year and next century. To get into deep-ass nerd shit, the U.S. is so high-trust that public confidence is the true God-Emperor of the universe in a permanent form of belief/disbelief that keeps the the Warp (the global political and economic order) navigable and keeps Chaos from destroying everything. tl;dr: The reason Civil War was a comedy is because the actual conditions necessary for an American civil war would end most of the rest of the world and there would be massive foreign intervention (out of necessity to keep an internal U.S. conflict from literally ending the world) that wasn't even considered. Of course, that problem is something the CBS series Jericho actually covered obliquely, which is that no other country or group of countries has or has ever had the force projection capacity of the U.S., so other countries projecting force (even in humanitarian terms) would have to first build it. And if things in the U.S. became so bad that internal factions were exerting violent force towards each other, then that becomes a huge secondary story. Countries like Russia and China would want to develop that capacity out of self-interest and defense, but that itself is one of the things that would keep internal factions united to keep them from being able to do that. But the whole thing was a stupid allegory at best attempting to tell a story that, hey, war sucks for civilians. This could be you. But that is how insulated and well-off we are and will remain for a long time. There is no way to actually convince anyone incapable of a minimum amount of abstract thought of how to empathize because it's so genuinely unfeasible to reach such a breakdown of everything. It would require to genuinely give up something that is so ingrained it is probably more genuinely genetic than genetic memory or epigenetic or any of that horseshit.

LLM chatbots in the U.S. and China are great exemplars of the countries. First, China began its focus on using AI in the broadest sense to improve its capacity to manufacture things. The whole reason openAI exists is because the assumption was, “We can just buy the Chinese robots and products. We make the super-intelligence.” But once they got into the chat bot system with Deepseek kicking ass out of the gate, they don’t use one brain bug. They build specialized chatbots and layer them. Almost like socialist China understands the value of work and specialization and how systems work whether they are bots or individuals. Meanwhile, OpenAI and all American closed models follow the goal of X: be The Everything App. Monopoly. And you should take a fucking lesson from which country is doing better now and whose AI will be around in five years. Because it ain’t ours.

A key thing about participatory democracy is that it *necessarily requires the work day to organize around it, rather than forcing everyone to organize their lives around the work day. So once again we have to ask how we get out of this cancerous relationship we have with work today. FFS, Keynes even predicted we would have a 20 hour workday thanks to technology, but the guys with the money proved him wrong.

As juries go, the jury of last resort in the UK is the House of Lords. Good luck justifying that bunch of inbred cretins as a democratic process. But I’m annoyed. I couldn’t give less of a fuck to hear any more about Athens and Rome. I want to hear about tribal groups, soviets, whatever PRC does in their system that seems prettt reasonable, etc. I want to know how effective was mob rule when it comes to ascension or succession matters such as the emperor shifting patterns of Roman Constantinople. David Graeber’s book, The Dawn of Everything, lays a lot of the philosophical groundwork for enlightenment and liberalism and individualism at the feet of native Americans’ influence on European colonizers. The system is broken, assuming it ever worked. No shit. So what else is out there?

Thanks Mark and Joe for an interesting episode. It would be great to have someone discuss settler-colonialism and land expropriation as part of US republicanism and populism (and race). For example, I am re-reading Ned Blackhawk's Rediscovery of America, especially on the Paxton Boys (1763). This could be a great RWN episode, on the Paxton Boys, race, land and the roots of r/w populism in the US. I bet John would like this as well.

I'm gonna actually write out what he says to try and hand-wave away the salvery issue: "It’s one of those things with America, that especially the cultural left people were always trying to denigrate - America was never really a democracy: you know, Rome, Athens, the other Greeks, both slave societies. Slavery was not an invention of America either. And so, I’ve heard people say, well, Athens really wasn’t a democracy because it had slavery. You’re gonna say that? You know nothing." I guess according to Joe's logic, we could in fact bring back true democracy and reinstitute slavery at the same time.

please have him back on to talk more about Nigeria and Tanzania

Interesting episode and always good to hear some heterodox thinking on political economy. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before but you guys must must must check out 'Capital as Power' by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan. It's an odd one to wrap your head around but when it clicks it's revelatory. They're very academic in their writing and affect, Blair Fix (one of their students) is a little more accessible. They're also fans of Celine's writing!

Picking Joe Biden as his VP is why I never voted for Obama (I don’t remember the last time I voted for president in a general election). Demobilizing OFA the day after the election was the mic drop on him being a fraud.

Marxism doesn't divide people into classes, it illuminates the class divisions that would exist regardless (and which the ruling classes were perfectly aware of all along). That's like saying "physics chops the universe into tiny little atoms!" And "dictatorship of the proletariat" isn't some kind of anti-democratic slogan, what he meant was that those who work should *democratically* control the means of production. If they literally made someone into a dictator, then they would stop being proletariat and start being the new ruling class, which defeats the whole point (this is why the Russian and Chinese revolutions ultimately failed).

*Anecdotal side-note* to Mark’s comment about his return from Russia and observing how Americans take money for granted. I studied in Russia as an undergraduate (2007) and while walking and talking with one of my local classmates I asked her what she thought about Americans. And she simply said “money”. At the time I was slightly offended, as I thought of myself as a poor college student subsidizing my existence and experience with student loans. After thinking about this interaction for nearly 20 years, I finally understand. And a sadness stirs…

Maybe a little dark, but sometimes I get the feeling what we’re beginning to witness is a great culling of the herd. Slow walking us into Mark’s catastrophe, which of course will only impact the herd/poor. As James Madison said “The primary function of government is to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority of the poor.” Both the opulent and poor have grown in great numbers since Madison’s proclamation over 200 years ago. And as resources become more scarce, the appetites of the opulent are more insatiable than ever. Perhaps “they” have decided in order to continue their protection a great number of “us” must go.

More obi wan episodes!!

“Lisa Khan” flubheads are losing their minds right now

When Mark , half jokingly, said that he was praying for a catastrophe, that reminded me that it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But that isn’t new. That was the Old Testament or Yahweh's way of dealing with humanity's excess and lack of piety. However, the New Testament presented another, fundamentally different method: through the crucifixion of Jesus and the good news of the gospel, the human community was offered a path away from murder and destruction and toward forgiveness. This path requires a non-negotiable commitment to resist evil without becoming the evil we oppose—a method to break the cycle and not become those who oppress you. Yet, it seems the political left often fails to reach this insight. I wonder if this is due to mistakenly siding with Marx's view that religion is the opium of the masses. By adopting this framework, they dismiss the very transformative ethic that provides the method for true, non-violent liberation, leaving them trapped in a cycle of opposition that merely mirrors the oppression it seeks to overthrow.

Citizens United was a dang coup !

I think knowledge as power is a better definition of technology.

I miss John so much. I would donate all of my health to him if there was a way