WEBVTT 00:00:05.969 --> 00:00:08.238 Yeah, good question! 00:00:08.676 --> 00:00:11.913 Forest in Factory is a text I wrote with my friend Phil Neal, 00:00:12.381 --> 00:00:15.785 published originally on the Endnotes blog, 00:00:15.785 --> 00:00:18.922 and our intent with writing this 00:00:18.922 --> 00:00:22.459 is because we we found a lot of contemporary attempts 00:00:22.459 --> 00:00:27.999 to speculate about the communist future to be unsatisfactory. 00:00:27.999 --> 00:00:32.304 And our biggest complaint was the way 00:00:32.571 --> 00:00:35.374 that systems of production are conceived of 00:00:35.374 --> 00:00:39.212 or more importantly, not conceived of at all, completely ignored. 00:00:39.827 --> 00:00:43.065 And so a big chunk at the beginning of the text is 00:00:43.284 --> 00:00:47.088 discussing this notion of utopia and what it means 00:00:47.121 --> 00:00:49.824 to think about the future, and more importantly, 00:00:49.824 --> 00:00:51.393 how to think about the future 00:00:51.393 --> 00:00:53.762 in such a way that has a political relevance to today. 00:00:53.762 --> 00:00:55.074 And so 00:00:56.621 --> 00:00:59.369 throughout the history of Marxism specifically, 00:00:59.496 --> 00:01:02.740 there's this kind of tension about, 00:01:03.207 --> 00:01:06.577 kind of like I've said many times during this interview, 00:01:06.778 --> 00:01:11.183 we can't really predict the details of the future of communist struggle 00:01:11.183 --> 00:01:15.121 or communist society because it's so contextual. 00:01:16.022 --> 00:01:20.494 And so there on the one hand, you have on one extreme 00:01:20.527 --> 00:01:23.531 people who say: There's no point in speculating. 00:01:23.564 --> 00:01:26.234 Our horizon of thought should not extend beyond just 00:01:26.234 --> 00:01:28.336 that which is immediately in front of us. 00:01:28.414 --> 00:01:31.710 And that's the only thing we're really equipped to think rigorously about. 00:01:31.787 --> 00:01:33.289 And we should just focus on that. 00:01:33.445 --> 00:01:36.914 And then eventually we will iteratively build towards those things in the future. 00:01:36.988 --> 00:01:38.050 That's one extreme. 00:01:38.113 --> 00:01:43.269 And on the other extreme, there are people who assert that we can, 00:01:43.503 --> 00:01:48.727 we need to fancifully imagine, what we want in the future, 00:01:48.727 --> 00:01:52.305 and that can inspire everybody today 00:01:52.398 --> 00:01:55.602 to work towards that particular imagined future. 00:01:55.680 --> 00:02:00.240 And this future should reflect our needs and wants as we imagine them today. 00:02:01.375 --> 00:02:04.156 And out of those two extremes, 00:02:05.680 --> 00:02:09.585 the point we try making in "Forerst and Factory" is that they both are 00:02:09.618 --> 00:02:11.477 right and wrong in their own ways. 00:02:13.134 --> 00:02:15.000 we actually have a foreword. 00:02:15.124 --> 00:02:16.893 - the French translation is coming out soon 00:02:16.893 --> 00:02:18.528 and we wrote a new foreword, 00:02:18.528 --> 00:02:21.265 which we'll be publishing in English around the same time 00:02:21.265 --> 00:02:22.600 when the French edition comes out 00:02:22.600 --> 00:02:24.506 that goes into detail about this more, 00:02:24.615 --> 00:02:29.141 but the thing is, you can't ever separate out 00:02:29.141 --> 00:02:33.412 the utopian, imaginative dimension of 00:02:33.980 --> 00:02:38.051 communism specifically, but emancipatory politics in general. 00:02:38.085 --> 00:02:42.757 You can't separate that from its more grounded, rigorous 00:02:43.090 --> 00:02:46.761 strategic and tactical kind of approach, an approach 00:02:46.870 --> 00:02:49.907 that we and many Marxists before us, called scientific. 00:02:50.766 --> 00:02:53.636 And so the scientific and utopian dimensions are, 00:02:53.636 --> 00:02:56.206 they both play off each other. 00:02:56.206 --> 00:02:59.576 The utopian dimension, its shortcoming 00:02:59.731 --> 00:03:03.581 is when it does not have enough fidelity 00:03:03.581 --> 00:03:06.818 to the world that we live in today, to be able to trace out 00:03:07.552 --> 00:03:11.624 how the world of today might be transformed. 00:03:12.813 --> 00:03:15.683 It's tricky, because you want to imagine a world 00:03:15.762 --> 00:03:17.931 that is fundamentally different than the world 00:03:18.003 --> 00:03:20.134 we have today, because otherwise, what's the point? 00:03:20.165 --> 00:03:21.821 What do we what are we working towards, 00:03:21.868 --> 00:03:25.087 if the future is really just today, but arranged slightly differently? 00:03:25.352 --> 00:03:29.305 But you have to be careful to ensure that the future that you're describing is not 00:03:30.179 --> 00:03:32.909 that it is, in fact, realistic. 00:03:32.987 --> 00:03:35.051 And realistic, of course, is kind of a loaded term. 00:03:35.051 --> 00:03:37.354 What what makes something realistic versus not realistic? 00:03:37.456 --> 00:03:40.524 And so that's kind of where the scientific dimension comes in. 00:03:40.558 --> 00:03:45.697 You have to form a model, which for Marxism is 00:03:45.775 --> 00:03:49.780 this critique of political economy, of how does the world today work? 00:03:50.002 --> 00:03:52.505 And what don't we like about this world? 00:03:52.505 --> 00:03:56.176 How does that relate to our model of how the world works? 00:03:56.316 --> 00:03:59.179 And therefore, if we want to get rid of 00:03:59.313 --> 00:04:03.618 these aspects of society we don't like, and fill it with something else, 00:04:03.618 --> 00:04:06.755 how does that play into the model of how today works? 00:04:06.822 --> 00:04:08.212 And what does that imply for 00:04:08.353 --> 00:04:10.660 how all of that may change? 00:04:10.726 --> 00:04:13.897 And so the trick is... 00:04:14.316 --> 00:04:16.685 ...you need to be able to 00:04:17.891 --> 00:04:20.227 articulate a vision for a future. 00:04:20.571 --> 00:04:23.250 And you need to have a bit of utopianism. 00:04:23.541 --> 00:04:27.172 Because for any kind of emancipatory politics, 00:04:27.246 --> 00:04:30.839 there is the necessity for a 00:04:32.671 --> 00:04:34.406 emotive, ethical, 00:04:34.454 --> 00:04:36.855 in some cases spiritual dimension, 00:04:37.057 --> 00:04:40.762 that transcends the mere 00:04:41.261 --> 00:04:45.065 the limited purview of a purely rigorous scientific inquiry. 00:04:45.300 --> 00:04:49.004 And nobody gets into radical politics 00:04:49.004 --> 00:04:51.407 because they just read too many economic stats. 00:04:51.407 --> 00:04:52.642 And then they're like: Aha! 00:04:52.642 --> 00:04:56.046 - It's that for many people, 00:04:56.079 --> 00:04:59.047 but also a longing for a better world! 00:04:59.099 --> 00:05:00.159 This world sucks, 00:05:01.817 --> 00:05:04.923 but more importantly: it could be so much better. 00:05:04.923 --> 00:05:08.294 And we can articulate the reasons why it could be so much better. 00:05:08.294 --> 00:05:09.462 It's totally possible. 00:05:09.462 --> 00:05:13.033 But the fact that it isn't, - we have to then be able to articulate 00:05:13.400 --> 00:05:15.335 what that better world would look like in a way 00:05:15.335 --> 00:05:17.835 that is actually reachable from today and so, 00:05:17.917 --> 00:05:21.388 in "Forest and Factory" we take as our primary object of inquiry 00:05:21.843 --> 00:05:25.756 the industrial systems of production that make our current world what it is. 00:05:25.913 --> 00:05:29.852 We we articulate this minimal program 00:05:29.852 --> 00:05:32.405 of what communism would have to be. 00:05:32.468 --> 00:05:34.468 It would have to be this proliferation 00:05:34.546 --> 00:05:37.230 of deliberative forms throughout society. 00:05:37.285 --> 00:05:40.530 In short that means people would have to be able to 00:05:40.698 --> 00:05:43.802 meaningfully participate in decision making about the things that affect them. 00:05:43.802 --> 00:05:46.805 And of course, that looks very different at different scales. 00:05:47.072 --> 00:05:51.644 But also it would be an abolition of the value form in capitalism, 00:05:51.737 --> 00:05:55.709 which also by extension, means and abolition of markets and money. 00:05:56.050 --> 00:05:57.418 It also means a, 00:06:01.289 --> 00:06:02.611 for lack of a better term, 00:06:02.642 --> 00:06:04.563 non domination. 00:06:04.705 --> 00:06:07.072 Communism would be a classless society. 00:06:07.096 --> 00:06:10.800 You therefore have to get rid of the material basis for class and ensure that, 00:06:10.900 --> 00:06:12.936 the material conditions of society, 00:06:12.936 --> 00:06:16.774 do not always threaten to reproduce new forms of class domination. 00:06:16.969 --> 00:06:19.875 And so if you take this as a minimal guiding principle 00:06:19.953 --> 00:06:21.297 of what communism could be, 00:06:21.360 --> 00:06:23.937 there's like a million different ways that that could look. 00:06:24.049 --> 00:06:26.919 Some of them very realistic, some of them very unrealistic. 00:06:26.919 --> 00:06:30.123 But how to know what's realistic and unrealistic for us? 00:06:30.123 --> 00:06:32.618 We chart it based on, 00:06:33.093 --> 00:06:35.596 how those different types of schemas 00:06:35.649 --> 00:06:37.698 relate to the question of production. 00:06:37.992 --> 00:06:39.508 And so 00:06:40.034 --> 00:06:42.604 we take the freeing of time 00:06:42.604 --> 00:06:47.443 as a kind of central mechanism by which a future communist society 00:06:47.477 --> 00:06:49.352 would be able to guarantee 00:06:49.651 --> 00:06:53.711 theses different social arrangements that I just described, 00:06:53.758 --> 00:06:55.286 these minimal conditions. 00:06:55.617 --> 00:06:58.423 And in order to have this kind of freeing of time, 00:06:58.456 --> 00:07:02.561 you need to rely a lot on the manufacturing capacity 00:07:02.561 --> 00:07:07.396 that capitalism has created, both now and as a possibility for in the future. 00:07:07.600 --> 00:07:11.905 But you have to fundamentally restructure that productive capacity 00:07:12.072 --> 00:07:15.609 such that it does not serve the interests of the capitalist class, 00:07:15.776 --> 00:07:18.404 or just the accumulation of value, more abstractly. 00:07:18.513 --> 00:07:22.284 It has to serve these means and ends 00:07:22.284 --> 00:07:25.821 that are determined collectively through these systems of deliberation, 00:07:25.821 --> 00:07:28.438 where people can meaningfully participate in deciding: 00:07:28.500 --> 00:07:31.985 What is important, why is it important, and how are we going to do it? 00:07:32.094 --> 00:07:34.433 And we're going to collectively arrive at a decision on: 00:07:34.464 --> 00:07:37.300 We're gonna make these things, and we're gonna make them this way, 00:07:37.362 --> 00:07:39.425 and we're gonna distribute them to these people. 00:07:39.487 --> 00:07:41.518 That's how we're gonna do it. 00:07:41.581 --> 00:07:47.080 But, how you get there and how how that's gonna look 00:07:47.113 --> 00:07:50.851 and where you break down different divisions of labor, 00:07:51.451 --> 00:07:54.054 That's all something that you have to pay, 00:07:54.054 --> 00:07:58.593 you have to really balance the tension between thinking carefully about 00:07:59.761 --> 00:08:02.998 the technical material constraints 00:08:03.786 --> 00:08:08.304 and simultaneously being able to truly be different than the world we have today. 00:08:08.598 --> 00:08:12.009 And so Forest and Factory is an attempt to thread that needle 00:08:12.009 --> 00:08:16.280 and to kind of navigate that tension and find a way to 00:08:17.882 --> 00:08:20.118 kind of surpass that tension and show: Hey 00:08:20.118 --> 00:08:23.172 this is the tension, but it's a generative tension. 00:08:23.255 --> 00:08:25.985 It's a tension that constantly generates good ideas, 00:08:26.078 --> 00:08:29.485 and you just need to be able to focus on the right things in order to 00:08:29.578 --> 00:08:32.232 constructively generate ideas from that. 00:08:39.776 --> 00:08:42.678 It's important for the 00:08:42.812 --> 00:08:45.081 it's important for a couple different dimensions. 00:08:45.081 --> 00:08:48.084 There's there's a persuasive part of it. 00:08:48.618 --> 00:08:52.056 There's a lot of people, I think, who are very disillusioned 00:08:52.118 --> 00:08:56.437 with capitalist society, but they don't have any kind of 00:08:56.682 --> 00:08:59.052 sympathy for communism because they don't see it 00:08:59.131 --> 00:09:03.502 as being possible, or their understanding of what communism is is 00:09:04.454 --> 00:09:05.605 just simply 00:09:05.605 --> 00:09:08.608 not one that actually, that we would agree with here 00:09:08.742 --> 00:09:11.712 in this discussion, or that would actually be better. 00:09:11.979 --> 00:09:14.382 Or they think that for whatever reason, capitalism 00:09:14.515 --> 00:09:15.882 is just as good as it gets, 00:09:15.960 --> 00:09:19.221 as terrible as it is, at least we don't live in something even worse. 00:09:20.456 --> 00:09:23.125 I hope that that's not the case. 00:09:23.125 --> 00:09:24.960 I hope that a better future is possible, 00:09:25.085 --> 00:09:28.265 but sometimes people need to be convinced of that. 00:09:28.429 --> 00:09:33.164 Part of that is just having a good, persuasive model 00:09:33.237 --> 00:09:34.806 of what the future may look like. 00:09:34.806 --> 00:09:38.477 But a lot of that persuasion happens in conjunction with, 00:09:39.144 --> 00:09:42.315 the formation of a political subjectivity around them, wherein 00:09:43.015 --> 00:09:45.585 the capacity to actually assert your needs 00:09:45.585 --> 00:09:49.456 against the society that's dominating you, actually looks to be possible. 00:09:49.811 --> 00:09:53.194 And so it's when revolutionary politics 00:09:53.194 --> 00:09:56.331 or even just like class struggle politics takes material root 00:09:56.464 --> 00:10:00.102 in the forms of possibility that people have in their lives, 00:10:00.264 --> 00:10:03.139 that is when these kind of persuasive arguments about: 00:10:03.172 --> 00:10:06.843 Hey, what if we instead of using markets and money to decide where things go, 00:10:06.877 --> 00:10:09.847 what if we had this other mechanism instead? 00:10:09.847 --> 00:10:12.683 If I just tell you that in a bar, it's like: Okay, so? 00:10:12.792 --> 00:10:17.055 But if you're two people on a picket line and one person says it to the other 00:10:17.055 --> 00:10:18.056 and you say like, 00:10:18.056 --> 00:10:21.994 hey, it relates to us being on this picket line for reasons X, Y, and Z, 00:10:23.262 --> 00:10:25.765 that's a much more persuasive argument. 00:10:26.784 --> 00:10:28.597 And from that, 00:10:28.737 --> 00:10:31.878 having having clarity around where you're going... 00:10:32.039 --> 00:10:35.810 In the moment right now, it's really mostly just kind of an aspirational thing. 00:10:35.844 --> 00:10:38.914 It's mostly it's more emotional than anything. 00:10:39.815 --> 00:10:43.384 But, you know, if things continue on the trend they're on 00:10:43.525 --> 00:10:46.490 and we get these increasingly ratcheted up forms 00:10:46.523 --> 00:10:49.794 of communist organization and class struggle generates these forms 00:10:49.794 --> 00:10:52.797 of proletarian power that did not exist before. 00:10:52.864 --> 00:10:57.536 Eventually these kind of questions of utopian, 00:10:57.536 --> 00:11:01.741 fanciful imagining actually start taking a real strategic dimension. 00:11:01.774 --> 00:11:05.579 You know, at some point people very well may have the power to decide, like: Hey, 00:11:07.247 --> 00:11:11.652 instead of letting ICE come and kidnap all our friends and neighbors, 00:11:11.686 --> 00:11:15.724 what if we had a way to collectively stop them? 00:11:16.725 --> 00:11:20.213 And that obviously has a very direct 00:11:20.276 --> 00:11:24.100 relevance to emancipatory politics, to communist politics, 00:11:24.167 --> 00:11:28.922 which is a society where something like ICE would never exist in the first place. 00:11:29.340 --> 00:11:32.644 And so the point is to 00:11:37.182 --> 00:11:40.152 have as much of that 00:11:40.486 --> 00:11:42.822 ethical, moral, spiritual, 00:11:42.822 --> 00:11:45.792 emotive, aspirational, 00:11:47.861 --> 00:11:49.397 inspiring 00:11:49.397 --> 00:11:54.202 content to your utopian vision as possible to catalyze the continued development 00:11:54.202 --> 00:11:58.174 of this political subjectivity, such that that goes 00:11:58.174 --> 00:12:01.177 from being a purely emotive 00:12:01.344 --> 00:12:05.282 line of persuasion, to actually having strategic significance. 00:12:05.629 --> 00:12:08.352 And because you can actually 00:12:08.352 --> 00:12:11.356 look at a number of historical revolutionary junctures. 00:12:12.223 --> 00:12:14.192 Jacob Blumenfeld had a really good piece recently 00:12:14.192 --> 00:12:18.497 about the revolutionary confusion of the Bavarian Socialist Republic. 00:12:18.531 --> 00:12:23.503 I believe it was, where there was just a lack of like critical, 00:12:23.537 --> 00:12:26.407 good, solid strategic thinking about 00:12:26.407 --> 00:12:28.680 what are we gonna do when we have the power 00:12:28.742 --> 00:12:31.289 to actually make meaningful decisions over our lives? 00:12:31.383 --> 00:12:34.781 And if you don't have a good understanding of what your program is 00:12:34.859 --> 00:12:37.929 if you just say: I want it to be not as bad. 00:12:37.991 --> 00:12:40.957 If I want to stop the things that are bad now, that's half the equation. 00:12:41.050 --> 00:12:44.053 What about: What are you going to do instead? 00:12:44.339 --> 00:12:48.132 And you need to make sure you have that answered 00:12:48.132 --> 00:12:51.436 or at least answered enough by the time the question matters.