Shad is talking about his life prior to his hit album in 2009 — Bush was still president, and Shad felt alienated from American politics. Canada sent troops to Iraq, and Shad indicates that he had no interest in joining that mission.

Today Barack Obama is president — like Shad, the son of African immigrants to North America. Doubtless Shad can see something of himself in the President, though it is unclear if Obama being in office has satisfied his objections to the Iraq War.

And more subtle wordplay: from “rocking” to “Rawkus” to “Roc-a-fella” (a diamond is also a rock) — and now Iraq.

Shad continues the basketball theme he began with a reference to James Harden, comparing his trash-talking to an offensive foul (specifically, a “charge”) in basketball.

In this context, “Let it burn” means something like “let’s move on”, but here it introduces the next set of lines referencing growing marijuana.

Another extremely witty sequence.

Shad is giving us part of his biography — unsure of his chances of succeeding in the music business, he undertook (unspecified) graduate studies at the University of Texas. He jokes about swinging schizophrenically from writing self-aggrandizing rap boasts to the (humbling) experience of studying and test-taking.

But the way that Shad relates his personal story is extremely clever. First, he uses the fact that he went to Texas to play on “Texas Hold ‘Em” Poker (“hedging bets…hold them”), suggesting fancifully that he was winning Rolexes and fancy cars in the process.

At the same time, Shad is joking about the well-known tendency of 1990s gangster rappers to rhyme “Texas”, “Lexus”, and “Rolexes” — Biggie’s Warning is a paradigmatic example. Shad is above these sorts of clichés, which is part of how we know that he’s joking.

One point Marx never wavered on was that capitalism was inherently self-destructive, since competition would gradually lead to large monopolies and the impoverishment of the masses, so that the ultimate triumph of communism was assured.

Conrad plainly has no sympathy for Yundt’s psychotic nihilism, which dreams of regenerative violence in a register that would make George Sorel blush.

Marx frequently critiqued “utopian socialists” like Fourier and Owens for wasting time and energy attempting to “realize” mini-utopian communities in the middle of the capitalist world, predicting that such experiments would always be doomed to failure. To wish for a more just social order, without engaging in politics to fight for it, was the hallmark of the merely “moralistic” socialism that Marx despised.

Here Michaelis is more or less faithful to his master, though of course because of condensation and vulgarization the subtlety of the original thought is lost.

Michaelis recites a hodgepodge of Marxist themes and ideas, slightly vulgarized, all of which would have formed a familiar part of soapbox socialist oratory in fin de siècle London.

First, we learn that men make history—that is, it is not something imposed on them by a divine plan. This is a key tenet of Enlightenment thought, shared by many of Marx’s precursors in the eighteenth century.

Second, we learn that men make history as material actors—history is not something that develops merely through the development and collision of opposing ideas. Rather, history develops through the collision of concrete social forces. Marx developed this move, early on, in his critique of Hegel, who (in the Philosophy of History and other texts) did subscribe to something like the primacy of ideas in history.

Third, we learn that different modes of production are the motors of history—different modes of production form different ways of life, and history is the story of the progressive rise and fall of these conditions of life. All history—even if it looks like religious conflict or wars between nations—is ultimately driven by the internal contradictions in these ways of life and modes of production. This sort of determinism was not invented by Marx, but was given its sharpest articulation in Marx/Engels' (never published) German Ideology of 1845.

Fourth, we learn that capitalism has produced socialism and anarchism. In Marx’s dialectical theory of history, each system of social production eventually produces its opposite, which replaces it. Capitalism, by gradually impoverishing the masses and at the same time revealing the limitless potential of human invention, will eventually produce Communism. This thought is given its most famous expression in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. Of course the thought that capitalism “creates” communism and anarchism is given an ironic twist in The Secret Agent, which suggests that capitalists are actively funding and encouraging the most violent and extreme expressions of these dissenting ideologies.

Finally, we learn that it is a mistake to waste too much time guessing what the future will “look like” once capitalism has been transcended. This is the keynote of one of Marx’s last major texts, his 1872 Critique of the Gotha Program.

Again, whenever Vladimir is exasperated the mask slips, and his Oriental (that is, despotic) soul is revealed.

The point here isn’t just that Vladimir is an expert mimic, or a highly intelligent cosmopolitan (though he is both of those things). The point is that Vladimir represents Europe’s cosmopolitan ruling class, whose true face, per Conrad, is Russian despotism.