Kevin Rudd

speaker

641 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 14 Jul

Kevin Rudd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Ezra Klein Show · What Xi Jinping Wants · 14 Jul 2026 podcast

The first is, I've read enough of Xi Jinping to conclude that he is a convinced Marxist dialectician.

What do I mean by that?

Because it's not a term that we bandy around at Starbucks much here in New York.

But it's important we understand how the other person thinks.

But more importantly, their methodology, their epistemology,

the way in which they reach conclusions about that which is real and that which is not, that which is true and that which is false.

But a dialectician, which sounds like a horrible word, comes from Hegel, the German philosopher, adopted by Marx and Engels.

And it is essentially a view of history that there are

two fundamental sets of forces changing historical developments over time.

One's called dialectical materialism and the second is called historical materialism.

So what the hell is that?

Dialectical materialism is a worldview by Marxists which says that

Change in society, the economy, and politics occurs between this constant push between progressive forces and reactionary forces, which they ultimately describe as the forces of the working class versus the capitalist class.

And ultimately, one pushes hard against the other, overturns the other, and creates a new synthesis, which ultimately is a communist state.

And so that's dialectical materialism.

That's true.

And through the agency of what they call class struggle or just struggle.

By the way, one of the things that Xi Jinping has rehabilitated as a term in China's political discourse today is struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle, a term which largely disappeared during the Deng, Zhang, and Hu period.

So bear with me for a moment.

This is turgid stuff, and I apologize to your listeners.

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