Which one do you want to start with,

Chris? To lay it out, I'm talking about my engagement as a public intellectual.

as fraught as that category is.

And of course, there's a fifth zone of engagement, we might say, which is my academic teaching.

But in terms of being a public intellectual, because academia is really private, the classroom is a private space.

It's not a public space.

But, you know, starting with Platypus, I was brought into the public sphere in a different way than I had been in the public sphere, let's say, as an artist.

Now, why did you decide not to use a pseudonym? What changed your mind on that?

And

I think that that was a symptom.

And it was a kind of a twofold symptom.

One was that you can kind of get endlessly tangled up in volume one and all the implications of volume one.

And also there's a resistance to getting to the point at the end of volume three.

And you can also get bogged down in a very different way in volume two, about, you know, accumulation.

You know, so it's, I think it's production, accumulation, circulation, those are the three volumes, basically.

The kind of Islamophobia that you would encounter that I encountered was with family members and people argued with them.

Right.

Um, so that was one thing I had you watch that I thought was on point and, you know, recent.

And, uh, the other was, um, Vivek Chibber giving a talk last year at a celebration of the 15th anniversary of Jacobin magazine, and th- but they just published it recently.

They might have published it at the time, but they at least republished it recently, but I don't think that I had seen it before.

And so, uh, I thought it was, um, again appropriate, on point.

Uh, I think that one reason why they might have republished it is that he was talking about Zohram Mamdani, but before he had been elected mayor.

Hmm

And i- in it, she stages a debate with someone, who I'm forgetting his name now, who, who argues that in socialism, like beyond capitalism, we would still need laws and rights, and she's upholding the more utopian vision of u- socialism or really communism being beyond the need for law and rights.

Here we go.

Great.

All right, so let's just read this.

many prognoses of dialectical theory have a contradictory relationship to one another some simply did not fulfill themselves certain theoretical analytical categories have led meanwhile to aporias which can only be thought out of the world with the most with the utmost artifice it's a little bit of a clunky translation other predictions originally closely associated with the former have been resoundingly confirmed even those who do not reduce the meaning of a theory to its prognoses would not hesitate to ascribe the claim of the dialectical one as partly true and partly false.

These divergences require for their part theoretical explanation.

Though one cannot speak of a proletarian class consciousness in the leading industrial countries does not necessarily refute, in contrast to the prevailing opinion, the existence of classes.

Class was determined by the position to the means of production, not by the consciousness of its members.

Just a second here.

What are you really targeting here? And what are you what is the case you're trying to make?

Okay, so, you know, it's a two-part article.

It's got a lengthy postscript on the millennial DSA.

And I do think that that's why the PMC discourse is back in the air now, because of the success of the DSA in electing certain states in primary elections this year.

And I think that the PMC question is a source of a great deal of angst for the millennial left.

And That to me, you know, I've never been particularly sympathetic to the PMC concept even, nor have I ever been particularly sympathetic to elite theory, but it's very much in the consciousness of the millennial left.

in a way that was not true, I don't think, the same way for the baby boomers or for my generation, for Gen X. I think that even though the PMC concept comes out of the 60s, it comes in the 70s, but it really comes out of the 60s.

like you have like a bunch of different little communist parties with FBI agents and like 12

Mm-hmm.

And you know, what we were talking about with Sudabeh on The Sublation Show was he was saying that you can't really track changes in society 'cause it changes too fast and it's technological, whereas the changes in the state in politics are easier to track, and therefore, they're where we have to focus our attention.

And, you know, again, I feel like, well, that's very straightforward and therefore extremely plausible in comparison to a dialectical view of, you know, a recursive contradictory form of historical development where we're regressing but we're still moving forward in terms of capitalism.

You know, like that, because again, what people want from like a scientific approach is like an objective explanation.

And, you know, what about the subjective factor? What about the political factor? And who is the subject here? So that's what I bring up.

I'm, you know, I just bring up, look, the reason that elite theory is so plausible is that the subject is the elite.

The working class is not a subject now.

Mm-hmm.

... what even is it?

Okay.

So about 10 years ago, before Bernie and before Trump, I woke up on New Year's Day 2015, and I said, "My New Year's resolution is that I'm gonna start a socialist party." And because I thought Hillary Clinton would be the next president, I thought the left would go to sleep.

I thought there was already objectively an open field, but I thought subjectively there'd also be an open field.

And there had been enough of a head of steam generated by the millennial left that I knew that people wanted something to do.

And at that point, I had been doing Platypus for almost 10 years.

And I also felt like, okay, Platypus had this kind of ideological effect on the left, mostly negative in character in the sense that people decided that they wanted to do Marxism, but any way but Platypus, you know? And but in fact, uh, it, it hadn't had the generative effect that I had hoped, even though there were some moves in that direction.

Mm-hmm.

it's,

can you think of a political or social movement that doesn't have legislative reform or change in administrative policy or demands on the state at all, let alone running for office.

Can you imagine an activity that doesn't have that as its framework or aim? But I think that people hear it as social activity.

Yeah, social activity is great, but that's not what we're talking about.

That's not the point.

The point is not like getting offline and meeting in real life.

I mean, it is that, but that's not the point.

You

Right.

And so I think it's wrong to just put it in these terms like peace or war.

I think it's political negotiation.

It's what Pete Hegseth calls negotiating with bombs.

And I think that Trump sees it in those terms.

He sees military as just one lever of negotiating.

You know, and so up to and including, you know, killing the people that he's negotiating with.

Okay.

So let

me let me explain the context for this.

So Tony Tesso, who actually is a participant in the campaign for a socialist party, wrote a critique.

of my dismantling of Rock Hill.

And that's been submitted for publication in the Platypus Review.

And then my piece will come.

But these manuscripts exist now.

Here's another

Mm-hmm.

Um, and, uh, I think that, you know, looking at it that way, you know, millions dying, uh, that's a victory, I guess that's a victory.

I, you know, for the communists, I guess.

But I think in 2026 we have to wonder about these things, and really it's long-term.

So even the Iraq War, did the US lose in Iraq? Did it win in Iraq? Did it, you know, prevail but, you know, at a too high a cost, and how do we measure that cost? And did it cut its losses but still come out essentially, you know, victorious? Um, you know, neutralizing Iraq as a, as a rogue actor and, you know, bring about some kind of rough democracy in Iraq, and meaning some kind of representation of the Shia and the Kurds.

Mm-hmm.

So she's the attorney general, and therefore nominal head of the FBI, um, you know, in some grand sense.

And, you know, I think of things like Ruby Ridge and Waco, Texas, you know, the Branch Davidians.

Yeah.

Oh, for me.

Um, okay.

So obviously I don't think that about Platypus, because, um, I think the controversy around Platypus started very early on when ...

You know, the main activity that we do is host the conversation on the death of the left.

So we did start out saying the left is dead, long live the left.

The left being dead at a practical political level, but also at a intellectual level, as a result of being dead at a practical political level.

I'll