August 9, 2024 • 29 mins
Mia and James attempt to explain why Tim Walz consistently deployed state violence against protesters by taking a journey back through the history of the welfare state.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Nikoda Here podcast. And once again I have
forgotten to write an intro for I'm your host bia
along with these chains.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
I mean, it's great to be here. Intro on.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Yeah, and this interless episode is I think the first
episode that well, can I promise this is the first
episode that was recorded after we learned that Tim Wallas
was going to be the vice presidential nominee, defeating the
sexual assault guy and then the other sexual assault guy
who probably covered up on murder.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Yeah, don't slack on it. Also coming up a murdered
ant me.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Yeah, that was a truly impressive, truly impressive sort of
set of candidates that party elite were choosing from.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
It's still somewhat surprising that they didn't like fumble. I
mean that they will still fumble.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
We have months to go, but that's true. Yeah, I mean,
to be fair, I think, oh god, we figured out
this guy covered up murder. Is probably the kind of
thing that like even the Dems like dog shit opposition
research people were like, hmm, okay, we shouldn't run that guy.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that tweeting about his murder cover up.
Let's leave this one.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah, that's Shapiro out of Pennsylvania, who is one of
the other candidates, by the way, Yeah sucks shit, But
you know, so the guy we ended up with a
sort of folksy Midwestern actually I think it was just
a defensive coordinator or whatever, the defensive coach for his
football team. He's a very sort of folksy guy. We're
gonna get more into him next week. But the thing
(01:35):
that I wanted to sort of start our discussion about
the vice presidential candidates with is attempting to reconcile something
that I've seen a lot of discussion about sort of
I don't know, kind of confusion to some extent about
about how do you actually make sense of the sort
of two halves of Tim Walls's record, right which, on
the one hand, he's signing a bunch of distrively progressive,
(01:58):
sort of welfared legislation being the governor of Minnesota, including
things like universal free school lunch. I said it was
lunch of breakfast. I don't remember. It was both. It
was both, yeah, yeah, And you know the on the
one hand, you have this sort of sparkling record, and
then on the other hand, you have you know, him
puling in the National Guard and deploying it to suppress
the uprising in twenty twenty, which, lest we forget, started
(02:21):
in Minnesota. Yeah, that's where the third Precinct burned, and
also using the police to sort of like horribly brutalize
protesters against Line three, which is an oil pipeline through
a bunch of indigenous land that probably I don't know,
we're probably two years out from like an unbelievably horrific
oil spill coming out of it that everyone's gonna go,
how can we possibly have predicted this? It only had
(02:41):
spilled a million times before, et cetera, et cetera, and
that walls like rammed through and had people who were
resisting it like horribly beaten by a cop. So how
do you sort of reconcile these two halves of this
guy's record? And there's like a local politics explanation which
(03:01):
I see bandied about a lot, which is true to
some extent, And that explanation is that he's not really
a progressive and he's mostly kind of a moderate who
she's going along with a pro fairly progressive Minnesota legislature
as getting credit for just like signing bills. And that's
kind of true. But it's also I think ultimately a
cop out because we are on year about one hundred
(03:24):
and forty of the welfare state, and this shit keeps
happening every single time. And what's really sort of at
stake here analytically is that the relationship between the welfare
state and violence is significantly deeper than the record of
one guy. And so today what we're going to be
doing is not really talking about Tim Willson much. What
(03:46):
we're going to be doing is we're going to be
going back through some of the history of social democracy
and trying to understand how it became entangled with the
sort of use of force with police violence, because I
think there's a story there that's been completely buried by
the tidal wave of just like I don't know whatever
walls takes, and you know, I think presidential elections are
(04:07):
something that has a tendency to just destroy everyone's analytical
capacity for like two years. So yes, let's resist that
and go do something interesting. Yeah, okay, Yeah, So I
think the place to start with this is this is
a place that we start, I think not infrequent amount
on this show, or at least I do. And that's
the sort of original debates from you know, about the
(04:29):
eighteen thirties through roughly the eighteen seventies early eighteen eighties
when it changes about what socialism was going to be.
There's always been to some extent, like a bunch of
different kind of understandings of it, but something that you know,
what you'd call the sort of left wing of the Democrats,
which is like everyone at that point, right, and the
anarchists kind of agree about. And basicthing that Marx agrees
(04:51):
about with sort of the anarchists at the time is
that socialism is you know, it's the free association of producers, right,
you know, it is the work class abolishing itself, but
then also like being the people who directly run the
new society that's sort of brought about by this thing
without sort of the stage or sort of political mediation,
et cetera, et cetera. And even you know, people like
Angles who are like arch statists, right, like Angles, you know,
(05:15):
uses the theoretical justification for like every time a socialist
picks up a machine gun to shoot someone, and that
works for the state, Like that's Angles's justification for But
even he's talking about how like one day the state
will be like put on a shelf in a museum
and people will walk past and look at it and
then like walk by it because it's like it's a
tool of a bybegone era that nobody needs anymore. And
(05:36):
in this period, it's very clear that socialism is we're
just directly controlling the mesa production and it's directly democratically
managing their lives. But this becomes less clear as the
eighteen hundreds go on. Something that David Grayer points out,
and I think I've quoted this on the show before,
but it's important here. While this is sort of going on, right,
(05:58):
there's two kinds of breds in the development of the
state and the development of sort of socialist idiology. One
is a move in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties.
Socialists start watching states build railroads and this drives them
completely nuts. It just obliterates their brains. It's like this
and the Post Office just like absolutely nuke their brains.
(06:20):
And they start going, Okay, hold on, but what if
instead of workers directly managing in their affairs and having
you know, workers coordinating like the production of society, what
if instead the state did that? And socialism was literally
when the state did things, and this is something that
like even Angles is like pretty hostile to in the
sense that like he's a status to some extent, but
he also is very wary of doing things like calling
(06:42):
state on enterprises socialism, right because like, well, no, obviously
that's not necessarily true, because like you could just have
capitalists state owned enterprises like lots of places US and
includingly importantly sort of Bismarck's Germany in this period, which
we will come back to in a second.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Yeah, and lots of the places that people on Twitter
think are socialist paradise Is today.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Yeah, are just these sooe like state on enterprise hell hooles.
We've i talked about this extensively with China elsewhere. And
this sort of like shifts the conception of what people
think socialism is and you get these more sort of
reformist trends in sort of socialist circles. You get your
cot Skis, your burn Steams, people who think that like,
you don't need a revolution. You can sort of just
(07:21):
like you can vote your way into the state owning
property and that will somehow achieve socialism, or you can
sort of like stabilize capitalism and make it not bad anymore. Now,
that's what's happening on the socialist side. So there's this
sort of project of like autonomous workers control over everything,
right that that had been the original socialist project is
(07:41):
being eaten away on one hand from its own parties.
But then on the other hand, as sort of David
Gerrer points out, the capitalist class realizes that all of
these sort of autonomous institutions that the working class is building,
like your unions and your giant political parties have their
own sort of welfare system. The state realizes that you
can replicate these and use it as like a direct
(08:02):
buy off to stop these people from revolting. I'm going
to read a passage from David Graeber's Utopia of Rules ottovon.
Bismarck's reaction to socialist electoral success in eighteen seventy eight
was twofold on the one hand, banned the Socialist party,
trade unions, and leftist newspapers on the other, while when
this proved ineffective, socialist candidates continued to run and win
(08:22):
as independents to create a top down alternative to the
free schools, workers associations, friendly societies, libraries, theaters, and the
large process of building socialism from below. This took the
form of a program of social insurance for unemployment, health
and disability, etc.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Etc.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Free education, pensions, and so forth. Much of it watered
down versions of policies that have been part of the
socialist platform, but in every case carefully purged of any
democratic participatory element. In private, at least, he was utterly
candid about describing these efforts to buy out working class
loyalties day as conservative nationalist project. When le regimes later
(09:00):
did take power, the template had already been established, and
almost invariably they took the same top down approach, incorporating
locally organized clinics, libraries, mutual banking initiatives, workers education centers,
and the like into the administrative structure of the state.
So there's two interesting things here. One is that the
(09:22):
developments of the things that are going to become the
body welfare state. This is implemented not by you know,
all these sort of policies that we're talking about Walls doing. Now,
these were originally implemented not by the left, but very
deliberately by Auto von Bismarck. Like the arched late nineteen
th early twenty century conservative the guy who was literally
responsible for the foundation of Germany. Right, Like, that's that's
(09:43):
his project. He is the guy who creates the nation
of Germany and thus will forever live in infamy. Is
one of the most evil people in human history. The
line directly from him to Hitler is incredibly straight. But
the second part of this is what social democratic politics
turns into, right, which is the this effort to sort
of centralize all of the sort of autonomous institutions that
(10:05):
the working classic constructure and to centralize all of that
activity into the state. Right. You know, this is like
having your sort of clinics be state run, having your
libraries be state run, having your like mutual banking things, like,
all of these things that had been independent institutions are
folded into the state.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Project.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
By folding these things into the state, Graver's interested in
the extent to which they become deuocratized and the Serb
democratic elements vanish entirely. I am less interested in that here,
and I am more interested in the extent to which
it ties all of these things to state violence. Now, James,
do you know what else is tied to state violence?
That was a master stroke me. Matt did not have
(10:45):
that one written down, came up on the cuff.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Absolutely fantastic. Please tell me me what is connected today?
Speaker 1 (10:51):
It is the products and services that support this podcast.
We are back. So we've gotten into sort of how
these things that used to be mutual aid, right, these
are these sort of programs that were developed by working
class institutions to support each other, where we're sort of
(11:13):
folded into the state. And now we have to get
into the reverse of this process, which is how violence
was folded into social democracy in the eighteen hundreds. And
this is something I think is kind of well known
among the extremely nerd left, but I don't know if
it's very well known outside of that. But in the
late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, everyone who is
(11:35):
like a Marxist in any stripe is a social Democrat.
And this is true equally of reformists like Burnstein and
also people like Lenin right, like the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks,
both are splits from like the Social Democratic Labor Party
is it social Labor Party was I forget the actual
name of the Party of the Swift, but it was
a social democratic party of like Russia. Right. This is
the thing that all of the communists and all the
(11:56):
socialists like split from these sort of social democracy things,
which means that inherently, and this is something that you
can see reflected in the ways that they come to
power and in the ways that they sort of govern
len It is communism and social democracy are both just
two variants of the same thing, and you can see
this most clearly either ways they come to power the
way they embark on this project of centralizing power, violence, production,
(12:19):
and the organization of society into the state. Both of
them take power by machine gunning their enemies and the
left with the newfound power of the state. Alongside this
sort of Russian revolution, there is the German Revolution, and
the German Revolution is defeated when the Social Democratic Party
of Germany, which had been the party of angles right
like Marx like write stuff about their platform like this
(12:41):
is the premier social democratic party in the world. They
take power by stopping the revolution, slaughtering the communists and
using the sort of proto fascist freikorps to like just
kill them all. This is how Rose Luxembourg is killed.
So the first social democratic government to come to power
in Europe, since I guess technically there was about two
(13:01):
months in eighteen forty eight when there were also Democrats
in France, but that lasted very very brief amount of time.
We see, So the first time they come to power
is in Germany. And in Germany they come to power
in this blood bath that you know, sort of destroys
like the rest of this like armed left and attempting
to centralize politics and military power in the hands of
(13:22):
the state. This is how they defeat the revolutionary movements
in Russia. Basically the same process happens. Right, There's the
first Revolution, which is the February Revolution nine seventeen, and
then the Bolsheviks take power in the Second Revolution, and
the moment the Bolsheviks take power, they spend basically the
entire rest of the Russian Revolution in the Russian Civil
War just straight up slaughtering every single other left wing
(13:43):
faction in the entirety of Russia, which ends in sort
of the Massacre. And oh yeah, oh yeah, they tell
a lot of Ukrainian leftists they are killing anarchists from
like Azerbaijan to like fucking Spain, like.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
A prominent appearance in Spain killing anarchist in May nineteen
thirty seven.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Yeah, in the sort of immediate Russian context. Right. This
is solidified by the massacre at Kronstat where the Bolsheviks
sealed there sort of opposition to any kind of like
autonomous working class. Right. For the Bolsheviks, the working class
is going to be directly subordinated to the Bolshevik Party
and to that platform, and any dvashu or any attempt
to sort of like manage yourself like autonomously is just
(14:22):
going to be stamped out, right, And Lenin's attempt to
do this is going to be sort of like followed
by Stalin doing this even more. Yeah. And so what
you have here, right, what collective ownership is in social democracy,
And this is true of both the German social Democrats,
who are what we think of social democrats today, right,
they're sort of like electoralists, they're like capitalists, and also
(14:44):
the Bolsheviks. What collective ownership is is the state owns things,
and if you try to do anything about this, they
shoot you. So this is sort of the origin of
like these two forms of social democracy. There's also sort
of more liberal forms of this. Right. FDR does not
conceive of himself as a social democrat like he thinks
of himself as a liberal when the American liberal tradition
(15:07):
is a bizarre one. But you know, we actually talked
about this in my episode about the time that Wizards
of the Coast, the creators of Magic the Gathering deployed
the Pikertons against the guy for revealing what was in
a magic product too early.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Amazing. I think it also has some route I think
in like this kind of I mean the examples that
I'm most familiar with the British like post eighteen thirty
two Reform Act, right, like of like this paternal state benevolence. Right,
they all line the same thing, right, which is state
trying to buy off co opt resistance and doing so
(15:47):
in a way that like it's carrot and stick.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
I guess, yeah, there's elements of this in Leninism too, right,
Like Lenin's like great theoretical contribution to whatever is. When
Lenin talks about like trade union consciousness, people bring this
up a lot because like, yeah, like there is obviously
issues with just like all of your organizing being you
make a trade union and then your trade union becomes
the afl CIO and tries to actually not he tries
to successfully overthrows Allende and installs Pinochet right like there's
(16:12):
a thing there. But when Lenin is talking about trade
union consciousness, the thing that Lenin believes is that they
need like middle class petite bourgeois, like fucking theorists to
come in and teach them what socialism is. And this
is an explicit part of their theory, right, And this
is that same sort of paternalism that they have to
be like led, even the sort of vanguard working class
needs to be led by these like theorists who I
(16:35):
don't know, emerge from like Lenin's friend group in exile
in Switzerland do whatever, and FDR's sort of policy works.
I think it's not really understood how similar FDR's stuff
is to like how the New Deal is seen at
the time, even by people like outside of the country,
(16:56):
as compared to like the others from massive social people
say he places as opposed to sort of Soviet communism
or even like fascism like Nehru. The guy who is
going to become like the founding Prime Minister of India
has this whole thing in like nineteen forty one, where's
look at the New Deal and he's going this is
either going to produce communism or fascism. So, like the
New Deal is a fundamental rewriting of the American social contract.
(17:19):
And a big part of it is he's doing the
same thing that the social democrats are trying to do,
which is that he's trying to centralize everything into the state.
He's trying to centralize partially this is welfare benefits, right,
He's trying to centralize like unions very specifically into the state.
And he's also trying to centralize violence into this state.
Because before this, the US, I mean we've talked about
(17:39):
sort of Blair Mountain on behind the Bachelor's before, right,
Like there are just open wars between the like literally
capitalist armies and sort of union armies, armies formed by
labor unions, not like the union army. Like you need
to clarify this.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Yeah, yeah, the great anti capitalist of the union army.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
And a big part of what FDR is like running
on like part of his platform is like, Okay, we
need to end this like era of gun thugs, right,
Like we can't have these fucking like robber barons running
around with their private armies killing people. And like, yeah,
that's obviously good, right, But his solution to this is, again,
we're going to centralize all of the violence into the police,
and unfortunately for sort of the rest of us. Right,
(18:16):
if you're going to maintain like a capitalist system, somebody
has to be pulling the triggers, and that's now the
police instead of these sort of like private armies. And
the other part about this bargain is that the unions
also have to basically disband their armies. Right, because the
miners are Blurbountain, right, they have like seventeen thousand guys,
like all of them have rifles. They will go out
and they will fight. They have machine guns, like they
(18:37):
have cannons.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Yeah, and it's FDR who begins the gun control in
the US with the National Firearms Act of nineteen thirty four. Right,
Like they talk a lot about prohibition are of violence, right,
but what happens at Black Mountain is why you have
the NFA.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yeah, and so what you have it's the same process,
the process of sort of turning mutual aid into state programs. Right.
Walls is very explicitly doing this, right. I saw people
talking about how like, oh, he's achieved the dream of
the Black Panthers, like free breakfast program by like making
it into the state, and it's like, no, you don't understand.
The reason the panthers were doing that was to build
the roots of an autonomous society. The reason the state
(19:14):
is doing that is so that you don't fucking revolt
and you don't do twenty twenty again.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yeah, these are different things.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Yeah, and this is something that as the US welfare
state cycles through, you get various versions of this. There
is another version of this that is the products and
services that support this podcast by centralizing all of your
money into their pockets and the music of the higher
security guards. We're back. So the Great Society was just
(19:49):
Johnson's sort of like big We're gonna end poverty thing.
You know, he's doing the Vietnam War at the same time,
so you know, those are the sort of domestic kind
of returns. The stuff in the central station of state
violence is now being projected out and in the US
it's always happening, right. The US fundamentally is a project
of colonial expansion, going from fucking one coast to the other,
killing everyone in your path and seizing their land. And
(20:12):
the contradiction of this right the fact that like the
people who nominally want sort of welfare state also normally
are like revolted at the fact that they're burning millions
of people alive, and like Vietnam, Cabodia and Laos, Like,
this contradiction is kind of what terrors a part of
social democractic politics and what replaces it is. You know,
like if social democracy is a carrot and a stick, right,
(20:35):
neoliberalism is just the stick. It's just more prisons and
hit you with the thing instead of this sort of
like more genteel process of while we're still hitting you
with the stick. But also here are these handouts if
you don't like oppose us. Yeah, so we've talked about
these examples. I want to kind of move into some
more modern examples of this because I think everything I've
been saying is old, right, but this stuff is still
(20:58):
happening today in the social democracies that exist, right. Like
one of the biggest examples of this is there's two
kinds of social democracies that people point to, depending on
where in the political spectrum they are. One is like
the Nordic countries, right. And this never worked on me
because one of my foundational experiences, like as an activist,
when I was like a little baby at fifteen year
old in twenty thirteen was talking to someone who had
(21:20):
a mounted cavalry charge done against them by the Swedish
police because they were doing an anti fascist action and
they got trampled by fucking horses because that's what the
state is. And you know, so like that's like kind
of on the one hand, but the thing that we're
seeing right now is, you know, the remains of the
welfare state being paired with this incredible, like rabid anti
(21:42):
immigrant violence, right, and this is the thing you see
in place like France too, right, where you still sort
of have the welfare state. It's also this unbelievable violence
against sort of non white people and anyone who's trying
to like enter the country. Yeah, I think it's was
it Sweden or was it Denmark that had these laws
were like they would like seize the property if any
immigrant who came into the country.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Jesus, I don't remember that. I know more people who
have migrated to Sweden. I think it might have been anymore.
I'm not familiar.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Yeah, they're also part of the sort of broader like
European border project, which is unbelievably violent, and you're getting
this with walls too, Right, he's signing on to sort
of Kamala Harris's like fucking terrifying fascist border violence. And
that's again because like all of this project is tied
in with state centralizations. Well, okay, so what happens when
you centralize the state. The answer is it starts enforcing
its borders. Yeah, in order to sort of like create
(22:33):
underclasses of incredibly dispossessed and incredibly battered and brutalized people
who can be splitted for labor.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
Yeah, like people who are insecure with respect to the state, right,
so they can be ye by the state or by capitalism.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
This important the state. Yeah, and you know, obviously, like
the US is sort of one of the global pioneers,
but like the norder, social democracies are also really sort
of part and parcel of the system. The other things
I want to turn to here is is Latin American
social democracies, because I talked about this at length in
the Brazil episodes. Right, Brazilian social democracy Lula's like first term, right,
(23:11):
has simultaneously this massive sort of push and social spending
and then also enormous like a budget increases for the military.
There's this incredible unbelievable spike in police violence, like rate
of police killings is way worse than the US. Yeah,
and this is true, and like fucking all of these places,
right Like, this is truly how the crew worked in
twenty twenty was because the Bolivian government kept just like
(23:32):
handing money to the police over and over again, and
the police like did a cue against them.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Right.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
This is also true in Venezuela, which is like unbelievable
rates of police killing like terrifying.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Oh yes, I was there after the revolution, but I
saw some of this happening, right, the revolution going from
spontaneity and work is controlled on people's control to a
degree to like being cot which happens in almost every
revolution that we've seen. Yeah, right, it begins with the
people and then it becomes co opted by the state.
It's whild to see like the equipment and weapons of
(24:02):
their police on one hand, and then the poverty of
yeah folks that they are policing on the other.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
And then this has also been Omlo's thing in Mexico, right, like,
even though he came in on the like hugs not
Bullets campaign, which for something comprehensible reasons, you still see
like the fucking Washington Post writing about Omlo talking about
how he was doing like hugs not bullets, Like she
never she there was not a single day where he
implemented that shit. She came in and immediately was like, Hey,
the army, do you want control of even more of
(24:28):
the country.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Yeah, Like, it was very funny when Omla came in,
right and he was doing get like hugs not bullets
the English translation. And then simultaneously I was getting press
releases being like, we have deployed several thousand more troops
to the Tijuana area, come to the parade, and I
was like, good, no, look are they huggers? They send
in their tactico cut.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Lula does this exact same thing in Haiti where he
goes to Haiti and he plays soccer with these kids
and he says, we will show them another way. And
then just like in the back route are all the
armored vehicles from the resilient occupation of Haiti.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
It's just like, well, oh my god, this showing them something.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Think yeah. And so the tie between this absorption of
socialist politics into the state, you know, and this sort
of centralization and increasing of state violence is something that
continues to today. And you know, we're now kind of
in the last decades, probably too strong, but roughly decade
we're kind of seeing social democrats like who want to
(25:22):
break out of this in the form of the kind
of like moderate abolitionists. So these are the people who are,
you know, whose thing is like, Okay, we're going to
defund the police and we're going to like reallocate their
resources to like funding welfare programs. And this is like,
obviously this would be good. But if you know anything
about what happened after twenty twenty, none of this stuff
(25:43):
ever happened, right, No one ever defunded the police, right,
Like there was no sort of movement.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
We defunded the libraries.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
And yeah, but even on a fundamental level, like, I
don't believe that this can work. And the reason I
don't believe that this can work is because in order
to have a state that functions, you need an apparat
of violence it can inflict on its subjects. I'm going
to turn here, Oh, this is a joke. You're probably
not going to get.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
No, I'm going to turn here to feigned political philosopher
Brennan Lee Bulligan. Quote. Laws are threats made by the
dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It's just
a promise of violence as an act in the police
are basically an occupying army. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Is I'm aware of this, dude. He plays a ton
yes dragons on the internet.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
Occasionally he says something that's right. And you know, the
important thing about this is that, you know, without without
the thread of violence behind it, right, laws are just suggestions.
You can't have a state without an apparatus of violence.
You can't stay in power without one. And this has
always been the sort of central contradiction of soci democracy. Right.
In order for Walls to have his sort of like
(26:48):
pretty sparkling programs, he needs to have the cops to
destroy you if you attempt to do anything different. And
this is what twenty twenty was, right. Twenty twenty was
was the most serious uprising in the US, like the
most serious like challenge the authority of the sort of
drychnically anti black like settler American state, right, and it
was something that promised something different and even in you know,
(27:12):
and that meant that everyone, whether you were a fucking
like hardline fascist or you know, you were Tim Walls, Right,
your one goal was to smash it and was to
deploy state violent. The state violence you had in your hands,
which in this case was a National Guard, was to
send them in to make sure that these people never
fucking burden their police station again. And that's what happens.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
It's like obviously, like the ability to have I've been
thinking about this a lot because I've been writing a
book and I'm really trying to get it finished, so
I've been writing it a lot. And like when a conflict,
be it one within a country or between countries, stops
being between states or about what the state should do,
and stops being about weather the state should be, then
(27:56):
we see the entire state system like pivoting on all
its suggesting morals right and just being like, no, we
cannot allow this to happen. And I think we've seen
that domestically to a degree in the US.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
Right.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
But like the state can't abolish itself, state won't abolish itself.
The scene qua non of the state. Its ability to
lock you up, beat you up, or shoot you up
if you do what they don't want, and that will
always be the state as a matter. If it's got
like a hammer and sickle or like your based fucking
Vasha or Alassat or whatever, like the state will still
(28:28):
come and kill you if you become a threat to it.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Yeah, and that's the solution to what hopefully will be
the title of this episode. Why did Tim Walz call
the National Guard? And the answer is to make sure
that you're never going to be free.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
It could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
For more podcasts from.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com,
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources
for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at polzonemedia dot
com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
Welcome to Nikoda Here podcast. And once again I have
forgotten to write an intro for I'm your host bia
along with these chains.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
I mean, it's great to be here. Intro on.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Yeah, and this interless episode is I think the first
episode that well, can I promise this is the first
episode that was recorded after we learned that Tim Wallas
was going to be the vice presidential nominee, defeating the
sexual assault guy and then the other sexual assault guy
who probably covered up on murder.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Yeah, don't slack on it. Also coming up a murdered
ant me.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Yeah, that was a truly impressive, truly impressive sort of
set of candidates that party elite were choosing from.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
It's still somewhat surprising that they didn't like fumble. I
mean that they will still fumble.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
We have months to go, but that's true. Yeah, I mean,
to be fair, I think, oh god, we figured out
this guy covered up murder. Is probably the kind of
thing that like even the Dems like dog shit opposition
research people were like, hmm, okay, we shouldn't run that guy.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that tweeting about his murder cover up.
Let's leave this one.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah, that's Shapiro out of Pennsylvania, who is one of
the other candidates, by the way, Yeah sucks shit, But
you know, so the guy we ended up with a
sort of folksy Midwestern actually I think it was just
a defensive coordinator or whatever, the defensive coach for his
football team. He's a very sort of folksy guy. We're
gonna get more into him next week. But the thing
(01:35):
that I wanted to sort of start our discussion about
the vice presidential candidates with is attempting to reconcile something
that I've seen a lot of discussion about sort of
I don't know, kind of confusion to some extent about
about how do you actually make sense of the sort
of two halves of Tim Walls's record, right which, on
the one hand, he's signing a bunch of distrively progressive,
(01:58):
sort of welfared legislation being the governor of Minnesota, including
things like universal free school lunch. I said it was
lunch of breakfast. I don't remember. It was both. It
was both, yeah, yeah, And you know the on the
one hand, you have this sort of sparkling record, and
then on the other hand, you have you know, him
puling in the National Guard and deploying it to suppress
the uprising in twenty twenty, which, lest we forget, started
(02:21):
in Minnesota. Yeah, that's where the third Precinct burned, and
also using the police to sort of like horribly brutalize
protesters against Line three, which is an oil pipeline through
a bunch of indigenous land that probably I don't know,
we're probably two years out from like an unbelievably horrific
oil spill coming out of it that everyone's gonna go,
how can we possibly have predicted this? It only had
(02:41):
spilled a million times before, et cetera, et cetera, and
that walls like rammed through and had people who were
resisting it like horribly beaten by a cop. So how
do you sort of reconcile these two halves of this
guy's record? And there's like a local politics explanation which
(03:01):
I see bandied about a lot, which is true to
some extent, And that explanation is that he's not really
a progressive and he's mostly kind of a moderate who
she's going along with a pro fairly progressive Minnesota legislature
as getting credit for just like signing bills. And that's
kind of true. But it's also I think ultimately a
cop out because we are on year about one hundred
(03:24):
and forty of the welfare state, and this shit keeps
happening every single time. And what's really sort of at
stake here analytically is that the relationship between the welfare
state and violence is significantly deeper than the record of
one guy. And so today what we're going to be
doing is not really talking about Tim Willson much. What
(03:46):
we're going to be doing is we're going to be
going back through some of the history of social democracy
and trying to understand how it became entangled with the
sort of use of force with police violence, because I
think there's a story there that's been completely buried by
the tidal wave of just like I don't know whatever
walls takes, and you know, I think presidential elections are
(04:07):
something that has a tendency to just destroy everyone's analytical
capacity for like two years. So yes, let's resist that
and go do something interesting. Yeah, okay, Yeah, So I
think the place to start with this is this is
a place that we start, I think not infrequent amount
on this show, or at least I do. And that's
the sort of original debates from you know, about the
(04:29):
eighteen thirties through roughly the eighteen seventies early eighteen eighties
when it changes about what socialism was going to be.
There's always been to some extent, like a bunch of
different kind of understandings of it, but something that you know,
what you'd call the sort of left wing of the Democrats,
which is like everyone at that point, right, and the
anarchists kind of agree about. And basicthing that Marx agrees
(04:51):
about with sort of the anarchists at the time is
that socialism is you know, it's the free association of producers, right,
you know, it is the work class abolishing itself, but
then also like being the people who directly run the
new society that's sort of brought about by this thing
without sort of the stage or sort of political mediation,
et cetera, et cetera. And even you know, people like
Angles who are like arch statists, right, like Angles, you know,
(05:15):
uses the theoretical justification for like every time a socialist
picks up a machine gun to shoot someone, and that
works for the state, Like that's Angles's justification for But
even he's talking about how like one day the state
will be like put on a shelf in a museum
and people will walk past and look at it and
then like walk by it because it's like it's a
tool of a bybegone era that nobody needs anymore. And
(05:36):
in this period, it's very clear that socialism is we're
just directly controlling the mesa production and it's directly democratically
managing their lives. But this becomes less clear as the
eighteen hundreds go on. Something that David Grayer points out,
and I think I've quoted this on the show before,
but it's important here. While this is sort of going on, right,
(05:58):
there's two kinds of breds in the development of the
state and the development of sort of socialist idiology. One
is a move in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties.
Socialists start watching states build railroads and this drives them
completely nuts. It just obliterates their brains. It's like this
and the Post Office just like absolutely nuke their brains.
(06:20):
And they start going, Okay, hold on, but what if
instead of workers directly managing in their affairs and having
you know, workers coordinating like the production of society, what
if instead the state did that? And socialism was literally
when the state did things, and this is something that
like even Angles is like pretty hostile to in the
sense that like he's a status to some extent, but
he also is very wary of doing things like calling
(06:42):
state on enterprises socialism, right because like, well, no, obviously
that's not necessarily true, because like you could just have
capitalists state owned enterprises like lots of places US and
includingly importantly sort of Bismarck's Germany in this period, which
we will come back to in a second.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Yeah, and lots of the places that people on Twitter
think are socialist paradise Is today.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Yeah, are just these sooe like state on enterprise hell hooles.
We've i talked about this extensively with China elsewhere. And
this sort of like shifts the conception of what people
think socialism is and you get these more sort of
reformist trends in sort of socialist circles. You get your
cot Skis, your burn Steams, people who think that like,
you don't need a revolution. You can sort of just
(07:21):
like you can vote your way into the state owning
property and that will somehow achieve socialism, or you can
sort of like stabilize capitalism and make it not bad anymore. Now,
that's what's happening on the socialist side. So there's this
sort of project of like autonomous workers control over everything,
right that that had been the original socialist project is
(07:41):
being eaten away on one hand from its own parties.
But then on the other hand, as sort of David
Gerrer points out, the capitalist class realizes that all of
these sort of autonomous institutions that the working class is building,
like your unions and your giant political parties have their
own sort of welfare system. The state realizes that you
can replicate these and use it as like a direct
(08:02):
buy off to stop these people from revolting. I'm going
to read a passage from David Graeber's Utopia of Rules ottovon.
Bismarck's reaction to socialist electoral success in eighteen seventy eight
was twofold on the one hand, banned the Socialist party,
trade unions, and leftist newspapers on the other, while when
this proved ineffective, socialist candidates continued to run and win
(08:22):
as independents to create a top down alternative to the
free schools, workers associations, friendly societies, libraries, theaters, and the
large process of building socialism from below. This took the
form of a program of social insurance for unemployment, health
and disability, etc.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Etc.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Free education, pensions, and so forth. Much of it watered
down versions of policies that have been part of the
socialist platform, but in every case carefully purged of any
democratic participatory element. In private, at least, he was utterly
candid about describing these efforts to buy out working class
loyalties day as conservative nationalist project. When le regimes later
(09:00):
did take power, the template had already been established, and
almost invariably they took the same top down approach, incorporating
locally organized clinics, libraries, mutual banking initiatives, workers education centers,
and the like into the administrative structure of the state.
So there's two interesting things here. One is that the
(09:22):
developments of the things that are going to become the
body welfare state. This is implemented not by you know,
all these sort of policies that we're talking about Walls doing. Now,
these were originally implemented not by the left, but very
deliberately by Auto von Bismarck. Like the arched late nineteen
th early twenty century conservative the guy who was literally
responsible for the foundation of Germany. Right, Like, that's that's
(09:43):
his project. He is the guy who creates the nation
of Germany and thus will forever live in infamy. Is
one of the most evil people in human history. The
line directly from him to Hitler is incredibly straight. But
the second part of this is what social democratic politics
turns into, right, which is the this effort to sort
of centralize all of the sort of autonomous institutions that
(10:05):
the working classic constructure and to centralize all of that
activity into the state. Right. You know, this is like
having your sort of clinics be state run, having your
libraries be state run, having your like mutual banking things, like,
all of these things that had been independent institutions are
folded into the state.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Project.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
By folding these things into the state, Graver's interested in
the extent to which they become deuocratized and the Serb
democratic elements vanish entirely. I am less interested in that here,
and I am more interested in the extent to which
it ties all of these things to state violence. Now, James,
do you know what else is tied to state violence?
That was a master stroke me. Matt did not have
(10:45):
that one written down, came up on the cuff.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Absolutely fantastic. Please tell me me what is connected today?
Speaker 1 (10:51):
It is the products and services that support this podcast.
We are back. So we've gotten into sort of how
these things that used to be mutual aid, right, these
are these sort of programs that were developed by working
class institutions to support each other, where we're sort of
(11:13):
folded into the state. And now we have to get
into the reverse of this process, which is how violence
was folded into social democracy in the eighteen hundreds. And
this is something I think is kind of well known
among the extremely nerd left, but I don't know if
it's very well known outside of that. But in the
late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, everyone who is
(11:35):
like a Marxist in any stripe is a social Democrat.
And this is true equally of reformists like Burnstein and
also people like Lenin right, like the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks,
both are splits from like the Social Democratic Labor Party
is it social Labor Party was I forget the actual
name of the Party of the Swift, but it was
a social democratic party of like Russia. Right. This is
the thing that all of the communists and all the
(11:56):
socialists like split from these sort of social democracy things,
which means that inherently, and this is something that you
can see reflected in the ways that they come to
power and in the ways that they sort of govern
len It is communism and social democracy are both just
two variants of the same thing, and you can see
this most clearly either ways they come to power the
way they embark on this project of centralizing power, violence, production,
(12:19):
and the organization of society into the state. Both of
them take power by machine gunning their enemies and the
left with the newfound power of the state. Alongside this
sort of Russian revolution, there is the German Revolution, and
the German Revolution is defeated when the Social Democratic Party
of Germany, which had been the party of angles right
like Marx like write stuff about their platform like this
(12:41):
is the premier social democratic party in the world. They
take power by stopping the revolution, slaughtering the communists and
using the sort of proto fascist freikorps to like just
kill them all. This is how Rose Luxembourg is killed.
So the first social democratic government to come to power
in Europe, since I guess technically there was about two
(13:01):
months in eighteen forty eight when there were also Democrats
in France, but that lasted very very brief amount of time.
We see, So the first time they come to power
is in Germany. And in Germany they come to power
in this blood bath that you know, sort of destroys
like the rest of this like armed left and attempting
to centralize politics and military power in the hands of
(13:22):
the state. This is how they defeat the revolutionary movements
in Russia. Basically the same process happens. Right, There's the
first Revolution, which is the February Revolution nine seventeen, and
then the Bolsheviks take power in the Second Revolution, and
the moment the Bolsheviks take power, they spend basically the
entire rest of the Russian Revolution in the Russian Civil
War just straight up slaughtering every single other left wing
(13:43):
faction in the entirety of Russia, which ends in sort
of the Massacre. And oh yeah, oh yeah, they tell
a lot of Ukrainian leftists they are killing anarchists from
like Azerbaijan to like fucking Spain, like.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
A prominent appearance in Spain killing anarchist in May nineteen
thirty seven.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Yeah, in the sort of immediate Russian context. Right. This
is solidified by the massacre at Kronstat where the Bolsheviks
sealed there sort of opposition to any kind of like
autonomous working class. Right. For the Bolsheviks, the working class
is going to be directly subordinated to the Bolshevik Party
and to that platform, and any dvashu or any attempt
to sort of like manage yourself like autonomously is just
(14:22):
going to be stamped out, right, And Lenin's attempt to
do this is going to be sort of like followed
by Stalin doing this even more. Yeah. And so what
you have here, right, what collective ownership is in social democracy,
And this is true of both the German social Democrats,
who are what we think of social democrats today, right,
they're sort of like electoralists, they're like capitalists, and also
(14:44):
the Bolsheviks. What collective ownership is is the state owns things,
and if you try to do anything about this, they
shoot you. So this is sort of the origin of
like these two forms of social democracy. There's also sort
of more liberal forms of this. Right. FDR does not
conceive of himself as a social democrat like he thinks
of himself as a liberal when the American liberal tradition
(15:07):
is a bizarre one. But you know, we actually talked
about this in my episode about the time that Wizards
of the Coast, the creators of Magic the Gathering deployed
the Pikertons against the guy for revealing what was in
a magic product too early.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Amazing. I think it also has some route I think
in like this kind of I mean the examples that
I'm most familiar with the British like post eighteen thirty
two Reform Act, right, like of like this paternal state benevolence. Right,
they all line the same thing, right, which is state
trying to buy off co opt resistance and doing so
(15:47):
in a way that like it's carrot and stick.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
I guess, yeah, there's elements of this in Leninism too, right,
Like Lenin's like great theoretical contribution to whatever is. When
Lenin talks about like trade union consciousness, people bring this
up a lot because like, yeah, like there is obviously
issues with just like all of your organizing being you
make a trade union and then your trade union becomes
the afl CIO and tries to actually not he tries
to successfully overthrows Allende and installs Pinochet right like there's
(16:12):
a thing there. But when Lenin is talking about trade
union consciousness, the thing that Lenin believes is that they
need like middle class petite bourgeois, like fucking theorists to
come in and teach them what socialism is. And this
is an explicit part of their theory, right, And this
is that same sort of paternalism that they have to
be like led, even the sort of vanguard working class
needs to be led by these like theorists who I
(16:35):
don't know, emerge from like Lenin's friend group in exile
in Switzerland do whatever, and FDR's sort of policy works.
I think it's not really understood how similar FDR's stuff
is to like how the New Deal is seen at
the time, even by people like outside of the country,
(16:56):
as compared to like the others from massive social people
say he places as opposed to sort of Soviet communism
or even like fascism like Nehru. The guy who is
going to become like the founding Prime Minister of India
has this whole thing in like nineteen forty one, where's
look at the New Deal and he's going this is
either going to produce communism or fascism. So, like the
New Deal is a fundamental rewriting of the American social contract.
(17:19):
And a big part of it is he's doing the
same thing that the social democrats are trying to do,
which is that he's trying to centralize everything into the state.
He's trying to centralize partially this is welfare benefits, right,
He's trying to centralize like unions very specifically into the state.
And he's also trying to centralize violence into this state.
Because before this, the US, I mean we've talked about
(17:39):
sort of Blair Mountain on behind the Bachelor's before, right,
Like there are just open wars between the like literally
capitalist armies and sort of union armies, armies formed by
labor unions, not like the union army. Like you need
to clarify this.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Yeah, yeah, the great anti capitalist of the union army.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
And a big part of what FDR is like running
on like part of his platform is like, Okay, we
need to end this like era of gun thugs, right,
Like we can't have these fucking like robber barons running
around with their private armies killing people. And like, yeah,
that's obviously good, right, But his solution to this is, again,
we're going to centralize all of the violence into the police,
and unfortunately for sort of the rest of us. Right,
(18:16):
if you're going to maintain like a capitalist system, somebody
has to be pulling the triggers, and that's now the
police instead of these sort of like private armies. And
the other part about this bargain is that the unions
also have to basically disband their armies. Right, because the
miners are Blurbountain, right, they have like seventeen thousand guys,
like all of them have rifles. They will go out
and they will fight. They have machine guns, like they
(18:37):
have cannons.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Yeah, and it's FDR who begins the gun control in
the US with the National Firearms Act of nineteen thirty four. Right,
Like they talk a lot about prohibition are of violence, right,
but what happens at Black Mountain is why you have
the NFA.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yeah, and so what you have it's the same process,
the process of sort of turning mutual aid into state programs. Right.
Walls is very explicitly doing this, right. I saw people
talking about how like, oh, he's achieved the dream of
the Black Panthers, like free breakfast program by like making
it into the state, and it's like, no, you don't understand.
The reason the panthers were doing that was to build
the roots of an autonomous society. The reason the state
(19:14):
is doing that is so that you don't fucking revolt
and you don't do twenty twenty again.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yeah, these are different things.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Yeah, and this is something that as the US welfare
state cycles through, you get various versions of this. There
is another version of this that is the products and
services that support this podcast by centralizing all of your
money into their pockets and the music of the higher
security guards. We're back. So the Great Society was just
(19:49):
Johnson's sort of like big We're gonna end poverty thing.
You know, he's doing the Vietnam War at the same time,
so you know, those are the sort of domestic kind
of returns. The stuff in the central station of state
violence is now being projected out and in the US
it's always happening, right. The US fundamentally is a project
of colonial expansion, going from fucking one coast to the other,
killing everyone in your path and seizing their land. And
(20:12):
the contradiction of this right the fact that like the
people who nominally want sort of welfare state also normally
are like revolted at the fact that they're burning millions
of people alive, and like Vietnam, Cabodia and Laos, Like,
this contradiction is kind of what terrors a part of
social democractic politics and what replaces it is. You know,
like if social democracy is a carrot and a stick, right,
(20:35):
neoliberalism is just the stick. It's just more prisons and
hit you with the thing instead of this sort of
like more genteel process of while we're still hitting you
with the stick. But also here are these handouts if
you don't like oppose us. Yeah, so we've talked about
these examples. I want to kind of move into some
more modern examples of this because I think everything I've
been saying is old, right, but this stuff is still
(20:58):
happening today in the social democracies that exist, right. Like
one of the biggest examples of this is there's two
kinds of social democracies that people point to, depending on
where in the political spectrum they are. One is like
the Nordic countries, right. And this never worked on me
because one of my foundational experiences, like as an activist,
when I was like a little baby at fifteen year
old in twenty thirteen was talking to someone who had
(21:20):
a mounted cavalry charge done against them by the Swedish
police because they were doing an anti fascist action and
they got trampled by fucking horses because that's what the
state is. And you know, so like that's like kind
of on the one hand, but the thing that we're
seeing right now is, you know, the remains of the
welfare state being paired with this incredible, like rabid anti
(21:42):
immigrant violence, right, and this is the thing you see
in place like France too, right, where you still sort
of have the welfare state. It's also this unbelievable violence
against sort of non white people and anyone who's trying
to like enter the country. Yeah, I think it's was
it Sweden or was it Denmark that had these laws
were like they would like seize the property if any
immigrant who came into the country.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Jesus, I don't remember that. I know more people who
have migrated to Sweden. I think it might have been anymore.
I'm not familiar.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Yeah, they're also part of the sort of broader like
European border project, which is unbelievably violent, and you're getting
this with walls too, Right, he's signing on to sort
of Kamala Harris's like fucking terrifying fascist border violence. And
that's again because like all of this project is tied
in with state centralizations. Well, okay, so what happens when
you centralize the state. The answer is it starts enforcing
its borders. Yeah, in order to sort of like create
(22:33):
underclasses of incredibly dispossessed and incredibly battered and brutalized people
who can be splitted for labor.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
Yeah, like people who are insecure with respect to the state, right,
so they can be ye by the state or by capitalism.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
This important the state. Yeah, and you know, obviously, like
the US is sort of one of the global pioneers,
but like the norder, social democracies are also really sort
of part and parcel of the system. The other things
I want to turn to here is is Latin American
social democracies, because I talked about this at length in
the Brazil episodes. Right, Brazilian social democracy Lula's like first term, right,
(23:11):
has simultaneously this massive sort of push and social spending
and then also enormous like a budget increases for the military.
There's this incredible unbelievable spike in police violence, like rate
of police killings is way worse than the US. Yeah,
and this is true, and like fucking all of these places,
right Like, this is truly how the crew worked in
twenty twenty was because the Bolivian government kept just like
(23:32):
handing money to the police over and over again, and
the police like did a cue against them.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Right.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
This is also true in Venezuela, which is like unbelievable
rates of police killing like terrifying.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Oh yes, I was there after the revolution, but I
saw some of this happening, right, the revolution going from
spontaneity and work is controlled on people's control to a
degree to like being cot which happens in almost every
revolution that we've seen. Yeah, right, it begins with the
people and then it becomes co opted by the state.
It's whild to see like the equipment and weapons of
(24:02):
their police on one hand, and then the poverty of
yeah folks that they are policing on the other.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
And then this has also been Omlo's thing in Mexico, right, like,
even though he came in on the like hugs not
Bullets campaign, which for something comprehensible reasons, you still see
like the fucking Washington Post writing about Omlo talking about
how he was doing like hugs not bullets, Like she
never she there was not a single day where he
implemented that shit. She came in and immediately was like, Hey,
the army, do you want control of even more of
(24:28):
the country.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Yeah, Like, it was very funny when Omla came in,
right and he was doing get like hugs not bullets
the English translation. And then simultaneously I was getting press
releases being like, we have deployed several thousand more troops
to the Tijuana area, come to the parade, and I
was like, good, no, look are they huggers? They send
in their tactico cut.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Lula does this exact same thing in Haiti where he
goes to Haiti and he plays soccer with these kids
and he says, we will show them another way. And
then just like in the back route are all the
armored vehicles from the resilient occupation of Haiti.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
It's just like, well, oh my god, this showing them something.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Think yeah. And so the tie between this absorption of
socialist politics into the state, you know, and this sort
of centralization and increasing of state violence is something that
continues to today. And you know, we're now kind of
in the last decades, probably too strong, but roughly decade
we're kind of seeing social democrats like who want to
(25:22):
break out of this in the form of the kind
of like moderate abolitionists. So these are the people who are,
you know, whose thing is like, Okay, we're going to
defund the police and we're going to like reallocate their
resources to like funding welfare programs. And this is like,
obviously this would be good. But if you know anything
about what happened after twenty twenty, none of this stuff
(25:43):
ever happened, right, No one ever defunded the police, right,
Like there was no sort of movement.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
We defunded the libraries.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
And yeah, but even on a fundamental level, like, I
don't believe that this can work. And the reason I
don't believe that this can work is because in order
to have a state that functions, you need an apparat
of violence it can inflict on its subjects. I'm going
to turn here, Oh, this is a joke. You're probably
not going to get.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
No, I'm going to turn here to feigned political philosopher
Brennan Lee Bulligan. Quote. Laws are threats made by the
dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It's just
a promise of violence as an act in the police
are basically an occupying army. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Is I'm aware of this, dude. He plays a ton
yes dragons on the internet.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
Occasionally he says something that's right. And you know, the
important thing about this is that, you know, without without
the thread of violence behind it, right, laws are just suggestions.
You can't have a state without an apparatus of violence.
You can't stay in power without one. And this has
always been the sort of central contradiction of soci democracy. Right.
In order for Walls to have his sort of like
(26:48):
pretty sparkling programs, he needs to have the cops to
destroy you if you attempt to do anything different. And
this is what twenty twenty was, right. Twenty twenty was
was the most serious uprising in the US, like the
most serious like challenge the authority of the sort of
drychnically anti black like settler American state, right, and it
was something that promised something different and even in you know,
(27:12):
and that meant that everyone, whether you were a fucking
like hardline fascist or you know, you were Tim Walls, Right,
your one goal was to smash it and was to
deploy state violent. The state violence you had in your hands,
which in this case was a National Guard, was to
send them in to make sure that these people never
fucking burden their police station again. And that's what happens.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
It's like obviously, like the ability to have I've been
thinking about this a lot because I've been writing a
book and I'm really trying to get it finished, so
I've been writing it a lot. And like when a conflict,
be it one within a country or between countries, stops
being between states or about what the state should do,
and stops being about weather the state should be, then
(27:56):
we see the entire state system like pivoting on all
its suggesting morals right and just being like, no, we
cannot allow this to happen. And I think we've seen
that domestically to a degree in the US.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
Right.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
But like the state can't abolish itself, state won't abolish itself.
The scene qua non of the state. Its ability to
lock you up, beat you up, or shoot you up
if you do what they don't want, and that will
always be the state as a matter. If it's got
like a hammer and sickle or like your based fucking
Vasha or Alassat or whatever, like the state will still
(28:28):
come and kill you if you become a threat to it.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Yeah, and that's the solution to what hopefully will be
the title of this episode. Why did Tim Walz call
the National Guard? And the answer is to make sure
that you're never going to be free.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
It could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
For more podcasts from.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com,
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources
for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at polzonemedia dot
com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
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Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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