video: two spaces by matthew remski
the original tiktok video is here
i really appreciate a lot of what remski has to say. while i'm not a committed marxist like he is i think a lot of his analysis is correct. and also useful. here's what he has to say about a second space in the video above. i've replicated the entire transcription here because i think the entire thing is worth reading:
So, I don't think my mental health would survive if I didn't live in two worlds, and this has been true for me since childhood. So I'm taking a break from dragging liberals today and the blowback, to describe something more personal about my process. And it comes out of interviewing Nora Loreto for Anti-Fascist Dad podcast, that'll be out in a few weeks.
If you're Canadian, you might know this independent leftist journalist who has a real skill for working in two worlds at the same time. So, Nora is a news cycle reporter engaging the daily churn, but she's also doing this five-volume project, Canada in Decline. And it starts with the dismantling of the social safety net in volume one, corporate capture in volume two, she's just filed number three on the resultant attacks on democracy, and is working on four and five on culture wars and the surveillance state.
And I pulled on my own experience too, as we talked about how book projects push back against the typical fragmentation of liberal capitalist media, which lurches from crisis to crisis in this breathless cycle of disconnected issues. But it's not just the book form. There's also the anchor of having a coherent analytical framework.
And so, the second world I live in, the world apart from posts, news stubs, and memes, and scrolling, and the fragmentations of the polycrisis, is the world of Marxist interpretation where there are no disconnected crises. And Nora said it's the same for her.
That world isn't finished or all empirically correct. It's not a panacea, and it's never clear how its promises will bind together us refugees of fragmentation, but it is a world apart, inspired by prophecy and then built and nurtured over 150 years by the faithful, like an ark on the flood of capitalist anarchy.
And you'll notice that I'm sounding a little bit religious. True. This reliance I have on hearing the new world breathing, as Arundhati Roy says, or 'we're in a time of monsters as a new world struggles to be born,' as Gramsci wrote shivering in a fascist prison—this feeling was carved into my mind growing up Catholic, when I felt something uncanny whenever I crossed over the threshold between the world and the church.
As a schoolboy, it was like going from notebooks of disconnected subjects to an hour of ancient ritual and storytelling. And while the church was full of bullshit and abuse, it offered another mode of being, and now I can't just live in one world.
But I have to mind the danger of spiritual bypassing in the fantasy of a world redeemed by either religion or Marxism. So, most of my time is spent in the content mines where I have to pick up each new shard of fascist wreckage for examination. But when I have the time to close all the windows and work on a book that might never happen, like a revolution in my lifetime, or walk through the neighborhood and feel how the labor and love of the people makes everything, a senseless world repairs.