All right , welcome to VarmVlog . And I'm here today with the host of when Does Politics , and we're going to be talking about the strange realignment of virtues and orientations in the left-right world and how it became muddled and your thesis in a series of recent videos I think there's three of them , but there will be three of them . One is on the development of the Russian Social Democratic Party into Bolshevik .
C. Derick VarnSo , and particularly you and I have a complicated view of Ploekhanov . I think ultimately he's kind of a villain , but I think some of the things he said about what they wanted to do in socialism were correct , and that leads me into this weird way of trying to parse what actually happened with Ploekhanov . So on one hand , I think he's right that the kind of socialism that the Marxists were promoting and Russia coming from Germany , would have required a lot of development . It could have been bypassed if they had joined up with the West and the West one , the Western Marxists and anarchists and whatever one . But because they didn't and because he was skeptical of even trying , ploekhanov ends up like pushing this hyper-Boujouin developmentalism . Ultimately , after the revolution in Germany , fails Ploekhanov's fear that you'd have really authoritarian bourgeois development through a form of state capitalism . He called it like ink and yeah , whatever .
DanielYeah , that happens For the reasons he said it would happen . It's one of those little prophetic passages , like Bakunin's stuff .
C. Derick VarnYeah , oh , he predicted it .
DanielSaying Bakunin's right is going to make Marxists real mad , you know whatever , a lot of Bakunin is trash , but there's that I like some Bakunin . A lot of it's trash , but there's that passage , of course , that he talked about . The people are going to beat them , the people with the people stick , and all that .
C. Derick VarnOh , yeah , well , this is the thing . Yeah , this is the thing I was thinking about because I've been obsessed recently with the history of Maoism . If you think that USSR is blatantly contradictory , looking at what's going on in the 60s and 70s in China , where , on one hand , china is developing , actually trying to do things in a particular program that no socialist countries actually tried to do , like labor tokens , balancing out rural and urban development , etc . And while everyone always talks about the great decreases of poverty under Deng , if you actually look at Chinese developments of increased and less effectivecy , rural education , etc . It actually comes from the Cultural Revolution period and right before and right after and it's just ignored .
C. Derick VarnHowever , at the same time , china is doing shit like helping Cambodia try to get revenge on Vietnam and trying to pop up the Khmer Rouge with the aid of the United States . China takes a soft like , doesn't cut chili out after the Pinochet coup and actually is nice to Pinochet until he dies . Why ? Why ? Just to piss off the Soviets . And if you actually look at like three worlds theory in in 70s Chinese theoretical conceptions and by that time you're like what does this have to do with Marxism anyway ?
C. Derick VarnBut they put people think oh , the first world is the capitalist world and the second world is the , the , the Soviet bloc , and then the third world is the United Line movement . That's not what it actually says . That's how people revised it in the 80s . What it said at the time is the first world is the USSR and the United States and the USSR is actually the bigger enemy . Now it's really funny . Now , because you have all these Marxist linens is like we have to defend , you know , the USSR and Stalin , but we also need to defend Deng and actually existing socialism and China and Cuba etc and I have a soft spot for Cuba .
DanielBut local democracy in Cuba is better than it is in Canada and the US , so they got something .
C. Derick VarnBut the this idea that , like , we have to defend the Soviet Union when I'm like , but you're citing works and documents that were actually more aimed at critiquing the Soviet Union . They even were aimed at critiquing the capitalist world .
DanielPeople are always screaming on my comments . I made this . My new episode was just about equity , language and identity politics and somehow I get all these Stalinists screaming at me in the comments and they're telling me they're always like oh well , it's always because of capitalist encirclement and they had to become authoritarian because they're always being attacked . You know , every regular , every non-Martianist land in the socialist state failed and was crushed , and I was like , yeah , crushed by the USSR . If you make the list of all the attempts at actual socialism made by states , some of them were put down by the US , like Chile especially , but every other one was put down by the USSR . Georgia , whatever . Hungary , anarchist Spain sort of you could say , was put down by the USSR . Czechoslovakia , come on , anyways .
C. Derick VarnYeah well , the encirclement thesis is also interesting when you remember that in the 70s you're literally having Marxist-Leninist , other Marxist-Leninist and countries that were previously engaged with biting the US , and that those battles are actually just as bloodier , bloodier and lead to resentment to this day . Like why is there tensions between China and Vietnam even now ? Like because on paper , slightly market liberalized communist economies ? Why are they so hostile to each other ? Why is Vietnam now totally willing to appeal to the US all the time to kind of deal with itself in claims made by China over the South China Sea , which is something that I have noticed for a long time ? It's not because this is an ideological battle between communists and capitalists .
DanielThey're just fighting them off , the Chinese imperialism , western imperialism , as a kind of balance .
C. Derick VarnRight . I mean it's interesting . And also the idea that China isn't totally integrated into the capitalist world is interesting to me . Yes , actually it's become slightly less so in the past 10 years . It's done a lot of development in Africa and it has been more responsible and less imperialistic than the West . Absolutely true , but it's an awfully low standard .
DanielYeah , look , I don't know , I still have that basic Noam Chomsky stuff . The way when I look at these countries and it's just the people who love , who are defending Maoism and Marxist-Leninism , want to be they don't like things the way they are because that's the sort of downwardly mobile upper middle class and they want to be the new ruling class in one of those states . That's how they see themselves , so they're willing to defend . Part of it is just desperation , feeling like there's no hope to get out of the system we are and that those systems . There was a change . They were successful in the fact , in the sense that they established an alternative type of political system . So there's that .
DanielBut there's also like I want to be the new elite . I see myself in those shoes , I see myself as that and that's it . They're just going to defend anything that sound does . There's always an excuse . It might as well be QAnon theory or Flatter theory or Lizard people theory . It's religious , it's just . I want to be that new elite . That's it and that's why it's so popular . Shockingly , I was actually surprised by this , but on apparently an Ivy League academia now , maoism and Marxist-Leninism have made a huge comeback , just like they've made sort of everywhere . People are really into that and that makes perfect sense . Like those are the people who want to be in the Communist Party elite and who want every excuse to suppress freedom of speech and freedom of everything else , because we don't need freedom of speech when I'm in charge , because I do everything great , either like the caricatures of communism that you'll hear from Jordan Peterson , that those people are that .
C. Derick VarnWell , this leads to part of my theory on the great confusion and liberal anti-communism . I call it the great confusion because , even though socialism in the Aup teens became slightly more popular in America , where like 40% would talk about it and like 6% of people would be like , well , we can have a socialist candidate or whatever , that's declined recently and I've been pointing this out that , like , positive views of socialism in the United States have actually declined , not precipitously . What's interesting is during the same time period , popularity of capitalism has declined even more , which makes perfect sense . Yeah , but that should scare people because if socialism is not popular and capitalism is not popular , the other options historically are all you know . They're like monarchism fascism .
DanielBut that's what we're seeing is because and this is why I started my whole series in the first place right is you have that identity politics stuff , the liberal phony identity politics stuff that people work , ordinary people , correctly perceive as a threat and an attack on them , and so they're afraid and they think , oh , that's the left because Fox News says it's the left . So I must be on the right . You know , normal apolitical people , not like total nerds like us , who are totally , you know , reading everything and understand what all these words mean , ordinary people think , oh , the stuff that scares me and that doesn't let me talk and think through my ideas , that's the left . So I don't like the left , I must be on the right . The guy who's fighting those people that are scaring me is Donald Trump . So I must like Donald Trump and he must be defending me . Rhonda Santis must be defending me . And then you have these guys like Chris Rufo , who speak well and speak to those kind of fears and it just legitimizes the whole thing .
DanielAnd now you have so many people and I see this in Canada people who never would have supported a right wing candidate in their lives , would never even considered it , are like voting for the conservative party voting for Donald Trump or Pierre Poirier in Canada , who's like an intellectual non . He's the real deal , like like Donald Trump is a dumb , dumb and a disaster and just a giant baby . Thankfully he was too incompetent to do anything real . Well , pierre Poirier is the intellectual version of Donald Trump . That that is the nightmare scenario , and he's people like him because he knows how to speak to those fears . And so I want people to realize like no , you're , that's not both of these things , that's that's that . Liberal shit is not the left , it's the liberal right , you know , and the conservative shit is conservative right . They're both right wing politics aimed at dividing and dominating the working class , and left is something else , you know .
DanielI think this is actually an important thing to think for communism , that that fake communism was a right wing ideology draped in red flags , draped in the words of socialism , just like this liberal fake stuff is just right wing race politics , draped in the language of intersectionality and anti racism , and you know , women's rights , etc .
C. Derick VarnWell , so I want to talk about what we'll get into to both of that a little bit
. I mean , we talked to , talked with the kind of cautionary teller , poconoff , and one of the things you discovered that I did not even know is so there's the infamous vericirc letters , which where Marx actually posits another way out for Russian development based off the commune and not because it , like the idea is well , capitalism had to happen somewhere , but you don't necessarily have to go through it . So , like um , and he said he doesn't . He actually suppresses those letters himself , but they're really . Yes , um , he doesn't send them because he keeps on rewriting what he oh , yeah , yeah , yeah right , he sent her the most timid he writes .
DanielOh , and also I just I mean , your audience is super knowledgeable in a case . There's people who are less knowledgeable . Pleconoff was one of the early Marxist socialists in Russia who he was very much against the peasantry and wanted this industrial type of socialism and he suppressed Marxist writings about how there might be a peasant road to socialism , basically . And but what he did that was excellent is that he really predicted that if you try to have socialism , the kind of urban socialism that he wanted in a peasant country , you're just going to have some horrible dictatorship that's not worth the name socialism . And he predicted that and that's exactly what happened , for the reasons that he predicted . So sorry .
C. Derick VarnYeah , yeah , I think this is actually really important . One of the things that I've got I've seen all these defenses of Deng out of Marxist-Leninist malice . I used to kind of admire malice because , like malism 20 years ago meant you hated China , believe it or not , and not because I think people should hate China , but like there was this , it used to mean you rejected the Dengist reforms , right , and , and I don't think people know how liberalizing the Dengist reforms were , and liberalizing here in the bad sense . He cut back on rural schooling significantly . He cut back on any form of socialized healthcare , particularly for the rural areas .
C. Derick VarnYou saw a restoration of urban privilege and elite . Actually , in a lot of ways , the he actually encouraged denouncing the restification period as a period of anti-intellectualism , which wasn't true . What ? What they were trying to do with rustification was to take skills of urban areas and spread them out amongst the countryside by placing those people there . Right , the end of barefoot doctors led to a stalling in life expectancy . So life expectancy in China , despite whatever you think happened in the Cold War Revolution and the violence of it , was rising precipitously and it stalls out for 15 years after the Dengist reforms . What you start seeing is China develops a Gini coefficient higher than the West for a long time . It only came down around 2014 to like above Europe , but below US levels . Because , why ? Because Xi actually was a so 2000 and 12 .
DanielI mean there's more labor activity . In the last 10 years there's been crazy labor riots yeah .
C. Derick VarnYou're right , there have been . The most intense period of labor activity actually was a little over 10 years ago . It was 11 years ago , but there was also there was that . Plus there was stuff going on in the countryside . There was all kinds of like .
DanielThe Deng Institute . The policy where basically rural people are surfs like where they're trapped in their area and they can't leave that under Mao before him .
C. Derick VarnSo the Huqao system was developed under Mao , but the idea that it was used to quote , stop the development of a lump in Pluritary in the cities , that is , that the change in its use was under Deng . And another thing done , good , Well . Well , yeah , there was all kinds of like speech , them announcements and all kinds of crazy stuff in the cultural revolution . Nothing got quite by it . Technically and formally , you have freedom of speech in China Right . Deng officially reverses that . Okay .
DanielSo Stalin officially had freedom of speech too . Right Soviet Constitution . It's awesome . Any social democratic state would be proud of that beautiful Constitution .
C. Derick VarnWell , this is why you know one of the things I've noticed about MLs if they're often right about what the state said they were doing although I mean my favorite one , though , about the Soviet constitutions in the 1930s they literally put something in that Marx said you should never do in critique of the growth of the program formally in the Constitution itself , but that's a kind of fun one , but what ?
Danielwas it exactly , do you remember ?
C. Derick VarnOh , it was something about labor producing value and and what is it it was . It was you were entitled to the work you put in and like this direct way , that was what he critiqued in Lassau , like it's just straight off . Yeah , in the Constitution , the . But in general , like the Soviet Constitution was not bad . There was a division of powers . I mean , we forget like the Soviet Union had a president that wasn't Stalin , but you remember his name .
C. Derick VarnYeah like it's , it's a and that's because party control was so thorough . Now , in addition to the things that I think that we're kind of like the original developmental sense , like not acknowledging the problems with the German Revolution , failing , not helping or trying to heal the division with the social Democrats , in fact what you see increasingly , starting with the 1918 program in the I think it's the 21 conditions of drawing the common term , which , which splits every communist socialist party on the planet , automatically causes split because the there's like these requirements to regularly purge people and whatnot ?
DanielWell , that's the but , that's the USSR , that that .
C. Derick VarnYes , it is , it actually is for that purpose .
DanielBasically , like they , just at that point , they were just like okay , the common term has to be , completely , has to be a tool of our imperialism . Basically , at this point , has to serve our needs , because we are the revolution and we are socialism , like that's what .
C. Derick VarnRight , and , and what was interesting about that is , of course , they were going to get a privilege here at the table being the first revolution that actually , like yeah , popped off and didn't turn bourgeois like , say , the Mexican Revolution did , but they kept on using it as a way to insinuate , to insinuate their fallen policy . And it wasn't just Stalin and Zenoviev was awful about this stuff , I mean .
DanielI developing that idea as well , like , while he was still functioning properly , that he , that was his idea .
C. Derick VarnAnd then you get like the Soviet Union being unable to tell which side of a debate they should be siding on . So like Karl Radik , who's associated with the left opposition like and his purge , but he ends up like at one point praising a bunch of like these German socialists who are proto Nazis . So like they're either intervening in context they don't entirely understand and they cause a lot of these socialist parties to split . I mean the Socialist Party of America , which was a shit show in a lot of ways but , as I like the point out , voted the right way in World War One . That complete , that splits , it goes into the Communist Party .
C. Derick VarnThe Communist Party like , weirdly , during third periodism actually ends up being useful because they take an anti racist response , because they reject any collaboration with bourgeois parties .
C. Derick VarnBut the moment it becomes politically inconvenient after 1936 , and then and then definitely when they reverse the Molotov-Ribbentrop pack , when Hitler attacks in the early 40s , you see this shift to suppressing like this , this multiracial coalition that they've been building while also trying to support the black community , as like a , as like a bulwark of the ability to like break up the US , basically , and it leads them into these bizarro contradictions where they're telling black people to suppress themselves so that they can stay in , stay in the state and stay in league with Democrats , who have a large minority , who are active segregationist and proto neoliberals . And what's even funnier about that to me is is that had happened before , like so when William Jennings Bryant gives up on the populist party and enters the Democratic party in the late 19th , early 20th century , that's even harder to justify because at that time you are entering effectively the right wing party of the United States . The Democrats were not at all the party of the more progressive in the bourgeoisie , so like that starts that trend , but there was that .
DanielI mean they were closer to the populist than the Republicans were at that period ?
C. Derick VarnNo , in that sort of racist .
DanielThey were the racist party . They were the racist party , but they were also the I forget I'm mixed up with the time periods , but they were more . You know , if you weren't going to vote populist , you were going to vote Democrat , not Republican .
C. Derick VarnDepends on where you're at . So they were . They represented from like my kind of strict , more strict Marxist class analysis . They represented the P bourgeoisie , the remains of the planter class , basically everybody who wasn't the big bourgeoisie . The big industrialists , right , and in this time period you could argue the big industrialists were the more progressive powers for like what they actually wanted . But right , because it wasn't like that .
C. Derick VarnThe Democrats wanted a lot of social programs or whatever they would just , but what that led to was this kind of like the interesting thing about the parties in the United States they're both bourgeois parties but , like the Democrats have always been a weird collection of different interest groups that have never been totally coherent , right , yeah , and the Republicans tend to be productive industry and big industrial industry and also Petty , petty bourgeoisie who want low taxes . What's been interesting in the last 30 years as far as like where the class space of these classes go , is the the big industrialists that were tied to the , to the Republican party , pretty much lost the battle in like capital development after the 1970s and the Democrats become more aligned with like corporate rentierism , so I would say like urban finance and and tech capital and stuff like that .
DanielThat's , that's whole stupid globalist versus nationalist crap . Like the Republicans to be aligned with industries that are more local based , national based , that still have some non-siscary labor in the US but are have a lot of their operations centered in the US , while the Democrats tend to be the ones who are more global in operation yeah , us and all that stuff , and that's where a lot of those cultural differences come from and that's where you have that hate . It's . It's perverted into this mess up globalist versus nationalist narrative , which is just again two kinds of right wings fighting each other .
C. Derick VarnYeah , absolutely , and this is one thing I've been pushing for understanding , like I'm . Like the American left is tailing two different forms of right wing reaction and they have two . They have two different class spaces , but they're both capitalist . And what is interesting right now is there's been some subtle changes , like I've been pointing out , like , for example , what kept a lot of the quote red states unquote together was military Keynesianism , which was like all this investment in the military that went into people . That manifests as a poverty draft . But it also manifested like all these manufacturing jobs to support military contractors and whatnot and people to service and help those cities .
C. Derick VarnThat kept a lot of the southern cities and actually functional after deindustrialization In around 2005 , 2006, . From the beginning of drone road fare that all dries up . The whole left behind feeling of like ex-urban and rural America gets exacerbated dramatically by the end of that backdoor military social programs that have been holding everything together . Then , on top of that , deindustrialization hollows out the upper Midwest and finishes off the South was never super industrialized as something that I think people don't entirely understand , but finishes off the South , which also means that it's like thoroughly in this petite bourgeois orientation and in these areas . I was actually just reading Marx and Engels like talking about how mad they were when the Socialist Party like back tariffs for protection in Germany , which I don't think people realize how big . They were opposed to that because I thought it was a beard internationalism .
DanielBut once you get back to the Zasalitz . Do you want to say that again ? We should get back to the Zasalitz better when you Sorry , we're going all the way around .
C. Derick VarnSo Satchelist's letter though .
DanielLet me just explain quickly what it is . One of Plekhanov's disciples they were the core Marxist group in Russia writes to Marx and basically is asking him about Plekhanov's idea , like , basically because you had the populist socialists in Russia who believed in some kind of agrarian road to socialism and you had the Marxists , and she was asking him what he thought , basically both of those positions . So the popular socialist position was well , we don't need to industrialize or we don't need to go through capitalism in Russia because we have this peasant commune . The peasants already are sort of commune in their orientation and their organization . We just need to overthrow the government so that that communism can express itself , and then they can federate and join and have some kind of . We can industrialize slowly but basically have some kind of socialist society rooted in the agricultural communism that exists at that time . Or like Plekhanov insists and what became ? The Mensheviks insist and basically the Bolsheviks too , more or less that well , no , we have to industrialize First . You can't have any sort of communism based on peasants . Peasants are too backwards . You can't have any kind of communism or socialism without heavy industrialization . So we have to just give up on the peasants entirely and maybe even support their being uprooted in that process of proletarianization , because that's what's going to get us a communism in the end .
Surprisingly , previously Marx had advocated that sort of the peasants are doomed to be destroyed , the peasants are backwards forced , the peasants are petit bourgeois .
DanielBut he had started to change his mind around that time because he started to do , he learned Russian and started to do research about a lot of heavy statistical books about Russia at that time which had been coming out and he had a friend in Russia who was feeding him all the stuff and he changed his mind .
DanielBasically , in his private notes he seemed to have really changed his mind about that and thought that not only was it possible to have socialism based on the peasant commune , but that there's a better chance of socialism emerging in a country like Russia that is economically backwards and not industrialized , than there is a bit emerging in the West which is in his earlier works or his big works , capital , for example . He was certain that you could only have socialism in the most industrialized country . So he was expecting socialism to come in Germany , england , netherlands , but not in a place like Russia . But by the end of his life he was thinking well , maybe Russia didn't have the better chance of socialism than the West , and in this letter to Zasus . But somehow he was very conservative about advertising this change of thought . He was very insecure about it , maybe because he was embarrassed that he had changed his mind , because he had been such a dick about it when he was young , a poster .
C. Derick VarnI mean as part of the Bakunin Marx debates is like we can't deal with the peasantry .
DanielYeah , I think he was embarrassed to change his opinions on that and also maybe he just wasn't certain . But whatever it is , so he writes , he responds , so she's asking what's what , who's right ? And Marx at first he writes four drafts and they get progressively and progressively less enthusiastic about the possibilities of peasant socialism . And the one and it starts out like as four , four pages , and then the last one is just like half a page basically , where he says oh yeah , there sort of are some hopes of that , but we probably have to have a revolution first in the West and the Tsarism has to be overthrown . And it's kind of ambiguous and not super enthusiastic . But what's interesting is the previous drafts where he's much more enthusiastic .
DanielAnd what's even more , interesting is a lot of his private notes where he's even more enthusiastic about it .
C. Derick VarnYeah , yeah , well , there's . There's correspondence from Ingalls to , to Vera says , or like to , and one of the interesting things that I think that I discovered recently is Ingalls decides after Marx's death to publish those letters , but then , as you found out , they're suppressed in Russia by Plakhanov , who's afraid of the idea because apparently he wasn't . Marx wasn't the only person to have this idea . Concurrently , there are different people in Russia who were , who were attached to the Narod Nikki , which kind of being a national .
DanielHe was basically adopting their position , more or less like they had those ideas before Marx basically , and he hopped on , I would say hopped on that train , but he , yeah , he kind of acknowledged their position against the Marxist who I mean ?
C. Derick Varnyeah , what's interesting about that is , you see some of that in Lenin . So Lenin's , for example , decoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry as opposed to just the proletariat . But it is very clear in Lenin that he thinks the peasantry play a subordinate role and he's only keeping them in because he has to .
DanielLenin never got to read these notes and letters about for Marx because Plakhanov suppressed it and also Ingalls wasn't very excited . I'm curious to hear tell me more about this .
C. Derick VarnIngalls was not excited about it .
DanielNo , he didn't like either .
C. Derick VarnIngalls . Ingalls thought it was kind of a mistake and I mean , if you look at what Lenin comes up with when , when they do try the revolution and Russia , it is sort of initially what Marx was arguing for , like yes , the peasant communes would be useful , but they can use materials in cooperation from socialists in the West to get the material stuff that they need .
DanielI think I mean Lenin adopted Trotsky's idea , basically , and their idea was different , because they did not think that you could build socialism on the peasant commune unless , except , basically , if there was communist revolution in the West and then you could afford all the technology and techniques and kind of this . Yeah , that they thought it was entirely based on that , which is not what Marx thought . And then they oh fuck , I lost my train of thought , but they , they , and never mind , Sorry , go on .
C. Derick VarnWell , I mean Marx's answer .
DanielSorry .
DanielWhat I meant was what Lenin did that was smarter than the other Marxists at the time and Trotsky also did was that they realized that well , there's this revolutionary potential in the peasants , in the sense that they hate the government , they hate Zaraism more than anybody , and we need to acknowledge that and we need to work with that and use that .
DanielBut we can't let them lead the show because there's no revolutionary , there's no real revolutionary potential there . Only the proletariat has revolutionary potential . So we can harness that energy and sort of ride it like a surfboard To get to where we want to go , but we always have to keep them under our reins , which I think with this fatal mistake which ended up destroying the revolution and , incidentally , we should talk about it too . I still need to read more about this to really consolidate this , but I'm getting the feeling that the reason that the Communist Revolution's failed , one of the big reasons that communism because you had this wave of revolutions , you know , after World War One , all across Western Europe , communist revolutions from an Ireland , you know , all the way to Germany and Hungary and the East . I think one of the big reasons those failed is because Lenin's party essentially went to war against the peasants early on before the NEP .
DanielI think that , yeah , that's the first red carer , yeah that news got to the West , and the peasants in the West were like we don't want any of this shit , like they .
DanielBasically , a lot of the peasants in the West are especially not in the West but in the Eastern , especially in the Eastern countries which became the Eastern bloc , but at that time they were . They were not like Hungary , you know , and also Germany . They were very open to a lot of the socialist ideals and they were developing . They had socialist parties or not party , but they had peasant parties that were developing ideas that were similar to peasant socialism in Russia , as it had been developing , but they were so grossed out by the actions of the Bolsheviks and then , of course , later Stalin , that they became big anti-communists and end up aligning with the fascists in a lot of cases . And I think that if you had had them on board , or at least feeling more neutral about it that you would have had , though , a lot of those communist revolutions would have succeeded in the West . I think , ironically , the Bolsheviks fucked up communism in the West . Which fucked up communism . My pushback to that is the rush , as the Mexican revolution , because their you have .
C. Derick VarnYou have what we would consider like Magonist fighting , fighting Zapatistas to support a bourgeois government , of which actually , ironically , the Zapatistas eventually get what they want , which is land reform , and the Magonist don't get anything . So I don't just think it's the Soviet Union . I think that's an overly simple explanation . I think one of the things you have to do is to get the Soviet Union to . That's an overly simple explanation . I think one of the things you have to deal with is , like one Marx based his idea of the peasantry almost entirely off the peasantry in France until the very end of his life , because that was his only real experience of it outside of Germany and he hadn't been in Germany for you know ever and there really wasn't that much of a peasantry left in England like that . So there's that .
C. Derick VarnIf you've ever read like the kind of hyper , like the ultra leftist who kind of rejected the workers moving around in notes , they actually do point out that , like almost all the revolutions we saw even in the late 20th century were peasants , revolutions for national liberation , which then get liquidated into a national developmental regime that does more or less undo the peasantry . The peasantry then divides there between developmentalist and anti-communist almost immediately , which of course actually then confirms the communist saying well , there were always reactionary in the first place . Which you have this feedback loop that goes back and forth , and back and forth , and back and forth . In some ways it's a harder question to deal with now because it's like , well , there's not . I mean there's still . You know , there's still peasants in the world , but in raw number , lots of them , but as a percentage of the population , oh yeah it's not .
DanielYeah , I wouldn't . I'm not talking about this stuff like sort of as to say , okay , we have to have the peasant wrote to socialism today . It's just because I really want the creeping Stalinism and Leninism especially Stalinism , but even Leninism today , I think , is dangerous and I want we need to just look at the big mistakes they made and how they shot themselves in the foot and painted themselves into a corner . You know , like you know more I read about Lenin . I'm like , okay , these weren't bad guys . You know , they weren't necessarily evil people , but they painted themselves in a corner because they had some stupid ideas . And then they became bad people because they were cornered . And that's what happens to you . You want to survive so well , I'd rather enslave all these people than get killed . So that's where you end up going with that .
DanielWell yeah , I want the little people today who are worshiping those people to realize like no , there's a , you know they're . There are the example of what's going to happen to you if you do this the wrong way , like they did . Let's look at the
other ways . And I'm not saying that the peasant wrote to socialism isn't the way to go today , but the principles of that peasant wrote to socialism are well , where's the majority of the population at ? What do they need and don't we need to have them on our side if we're going to have anything that's resembling socialism ? So today you have to convince the people that exist to your side .
C. Derick VarnYou can't just take over and have some horrible dictatorship , whether you know my , my , my first thing on we're talking about this to Marxist is like , while I'm not a populist in any , in any stretch of the imagination , I do , and I'll tell you why a bit later but I do think that the idea of an insurrection and then and then just imposing your real through an insurrection , and that being the means of which you have proletarian , whatever , an established pollinic tarant higher , has three problems and I'll just state them right out . One you recreate a lot of the functions that you abolish to maintain the productive forces and you don't , because you're under stress both internally and externally . You will justify this , but that gets into a cul-de-sac that you can't get out of and they're worse than they were before .
DanielYou're right , the militarization of labor in the Soviet Union was worse than it was under capitalism before . Almost yeah , in some way .
C. Derick VarnTwo you have to . The only way to keep a lot of these groups on board with the revolution is that you can't , so you have to . The natural instincts is to try to terrorize them . Three the problem with that , not just from like the humanistic problem of like murdering thousands of people , but the other problem with that is that it exhausts society in general . Like that level of violence for that long exhausts society and creates counter , creates people who just want stability and wants it through any means necessary because they're tired of the violence .
C. Derick VarnAnd what you find interesting about Lenin , lenin's writings are all over the place , but if you want , like a kind of rough draft for the Yizovchina , and the one thing I'll say about the Yizovchina , which is the purges , is that it's not just Stalin , because the one thing that you see open up during this time period is all these social conflicts that have been buried , that don't even aren't about class . Well , now we have a means to get revenge and that opens up . And then you have Stalin going like well , we need a quote of , I mean literally , he had quotas of like find this many counter-revolutionaries . And so people start settling other kinds of social and ethnic and whatever broad is .
DanielEvery time there's an opportunity for it and you even see it today with some council culture stuff . They're like oh , I can use this as an excuse to get my ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend or whatever . And if you read , I think it's Alexander Berkman , emma Goldman's boyfriend . They both write accounts of their time in the early Russian Revolution and Berkman is pointing out they're having these trials at the time and he'd witnessed literal trials where he saw afterwards the main witness for the prosecution was saying oh yeah , he was my ex , he cheated on me . That's why I said all this stuff , like that stuff is there as soon as you have the chance to do it , as soon as you have Kangaroo courts , that's what you get in them .
C. Derick VarnRight , so , and of course , then anti-communist will seize on this to point out well , one , you're not really abolishing class , so you just lied about equity in the first place , and I don't think that was necessarily Lennon's point . I mean , you and I both , my reading of Lennon is like very complicated , but I do think you have to . One of the things they have very frustrated people when they talk about Lennon , though , is they you just talk about what he wrote , but you don't talk about what he did .
DanielDid . That's the thing .
C. Derick VarnYeah , like , and you . One of the things that I've noticed that a lot of communists do not want to talk about , it's not the purges . They'll talk about that , although you have these Marxist liners . They're like they didn't do it , but if they did do it , they did it . It was right . Be like if you read , like people who cite Grover-Fur .
DanielYeah , that's everybody now it's like God . I can't even I can't tell you how many people I know have just sucked into this stuff .
C. Derick VarnGrover-Fur's arguments are all arguments . Every one of them is an argument from ignorance . Like we can't 100% prove that this happened , the enemies of communists like it . Therefore , we're just going to assume , even though we can't prove the opposite , that it's false and therefore it was a lie . Therefore , trust the propaganda released by the Soviet Union , except when it's inconvenient . And then when it's inconvenient , such as later propaganda , later rebellions , later archive work revealed by the Soviet Union itself , we're not going to accept it then , because they were bad historical nihilists .
Just the idea that oh fuck , what's the guy's name ? You know ? Trotsky , the three , oh God , trotsky , stalin , Bukharn , bukharn , yeah , just the idea that Bukharn was like some kind of fascist sympathize , like that's the most insane thing that you could ever imagine . If you know the history of Bukharn , whatever you think about him , he always went with the party line , no matter what . Like he was the party guy . First he might have completely disagreed with the position , but then he really believed in following the party line . And the idea that somehow this guy is a secret fascist , whatever he participated in every good and bad thing that the party ever did , like it's absolutely insane . You can't . That's just enough . Just knowing that . And then seeing Groverford justify oh yeah , yeah , he was totally guilty . Yeah , it's bonkers .
C. Derick VarnYou can't you know , yeah , I mean there's been other things where I've caught Groverford just misattributing things . For example , he attributes to Trotsky something said by the Italian Communist Bordega , where Bordega , in the common turn , who's the last man who stand up to Stalin directly and walk away from him . And so while I don't love Bordega's theory , that's impressive . But because Bordega calls Stalin the great digger of the revolution , it wasn't Trotsky , yeah , and he calls it . He calls him that to his face in a common turn meeting and then walks out and then they marginalize him .
DanielYou interviewed a Bordega guy like a million years ago I think I did an episode and the guy was like yeah .
C. Derick VarnYeah , there's a couple of Bordegas in my circle . The problem that you have with Bordegas is , their answer is like , as a , it's actually probably even more authoritarian . Yeah .
DanielThe worker is more than the . It's like what is your theology ? This is not left communism . Yeah , they're like I don't know what this is .
C. Derick VarnYeah , early Bordega is really advocating that all the countries need to be equal in the common turn , and that's actually something I totally agree with . Yeah , but later Bordega is like talking about how , like any democracy at all is a concession to like bourgeois tropes and we need organic centralism which is run not even by like a political dictator like Stalin , it's run by like engineers , like we basically need to put the parties engineers in absolute control .
DanielTwo steps away from courtesy .
C. Derick VarnYeah . So you know which which ? It's interesting because it leads to this weird development where you have because and Bordega considered themselves like , oh , leninist , who was more Leninist than Lenin ? Like this is like . His theory was like well , I'm just doing what Lenin does , but he wasn't consistent . I'm going to be consistent about it . He didn't have the balls to go all the way yeah Right . And so what you ?
Danielknow , like Lenin in the last years of his life basically not recanted but regretted the results of everything he did . Like he's like oh shit , we need to . We need more democracy in the party Somehow . Gee , you know .
C. Derick VarnYeah , but you know it goes to show that , like he doesn't undo the faction ban in 1921 . If people want to know , why is socialists split all the time ? That's why , because with the faction ban if you have a disagreement you have to leave . Yeah , and . And he justified the faction ban as a condition of the civil war and also like to suppress the SRs .
DanielBut then when the civil war is done , that's the whole thing with all the Lenin stuff . Even if you look at what they said and not what they did , there's clues in there that there's something wrong . Because when the you know , if you talked to a lot of Leninists today , oh , like well , they had to do militarization of labor because of the civil war and all the chaos , yeah , but there's nothing . When Lenin and Trotsky start advocating for all that stuff , they never say , oh well , obviously , socialism is worker control of industry and this is just some temporary , the emergency measure that we have to do because industries in such a state of collapse . And you know , I'm sorry workers , you know , but don't worry , you're going to be in the driver's seat soon , when this stuff is all settled . They don't say any of that . They're just like .
DanielWorkers love discipline , they love to get whipped in the ass , they love to have be told what to do and to you know where he'd have be punished if they looked the wrong way . So , yeah , you can . It's basically as Marx would have predicted once you become the boss , you start to think like the boss , like you know I've seen it happen Like people who are tenants their whole lives and hate landlords , all of a sudden inherit money , buy a property and become vicious . You know psychotic landlords hating tenants . It's like that's what happens .
C. Derick VarnThis is why Marx is actually right to stress it class , not class origins . Like he doesn't focus on your class origin at all , like , marx is always like your class is what you do , is what you are right now . And there's a shift
. And communism , and this is even more pronounced in China , where , like , class origins become the predominant thing . So , were you born a worker or were you born into the bourgeoisie ? It matters not at all what you do now . In fact , the racialization of class , yeah , and in fact this is criticized during the in the 50s , during the like the thousand flowers period , like , and then , of course , marx , marx , mao , porgy was all those people and the anti-rightist campaigns later , because it's like well , I don't like the fact that you pointed out that we have a caste system , yeah , and so this is , you know , I keep on pointing out , and one of the things that I think you're right about basically , by the 1950s , just to tie this all together , you've had this situation in the Soviet Union . There's no attempt to pull out to the rest . The popular fronts have all helped the liberal governments and the capitalist governments . They haven't really helped the socialist ones , and so you see this switch to anti-imperialism , which is a good , but it becomes the primary focus and developmentalism , which I think is interesting , because a lot of people cite Bacarne for this .
C. Derick VarnBacarne's the person who comes up with socialism in one country , which is a fatal mistake , and you're right . I think one thing we can critique Bacarne for is Bacarne believed in party discipline , even when he thought the party was wrong . Yeah , but Bacarne's reason for the NEP and for allowing for some market elements was not because he thought that there needed to be some kind of market socialism . He actually was explicitly kind of against that . He was originally on the left faction , to the left of Trotsky , even though he gets associated with the right opposition later . He thought that you had to keep the peasants involved without killing them , because it would lead to a social collapse and all this social chaos . And well , after Bacarne has gone and after Kirav is murdered , what happens ? Like it's exactly what he said you end up having , like Jesus , dekulagozation campaigns . You end up doing stuff like that the counter massacre .
DanielYeah , but that's Stalin instigating all that stuff , the . I mean , I remember Lenin's original theory and I think that this one he went back to sort of in the NEP was well , we have this big before he sort of adopted Trotsky's theory . His theory for a few years was well , we have this totally peasant country , but they're ready to revolt , but there's two pretty bourgeois . So what we need to do is we need to take over the country as a junior coalition partner . It's going to be a government of the peasantry and proletariat , revolutionary dictatorship of the peasantry and proletariat . We're going to be the junior partner , coalition partner in the government and basically over the course of like 50 , he called it the American model over the course of 50 years you're going to have peasant , bourgeois capitalism develop on its own and create a class system where you know the market's going to do its thing and you're going to have a smaller , smaller number of richer and richer people and then a big mass of proletarian agricultural workers and once that proletarian layer gets big enough , then we'll have our natural constituency for a proletarian revolution and then we'll have the revolution . And I think they kind of went back to that in the NEP , which is one of the shitty things is that the Lenin was basing his whole idea on that .
DanielThe commune was finished , the commune was being wiped out and there was no potential for that peasant communism . And what he didn't realize is that the commune prevented that class structure from developing in , like there was markets , but the market didn't have the same effect that it would have on an individualized system because it had a communized system . So there were mechanisms within the commune to prevent wealth inequality from getting worse . It could only last one generation at a time . Basically , we get redistributed in this weird way by re-dividing up the lands . So anyways , I think , yeah , that was his basic idea , but it was wrong . It was based on incorrect understanding of how the market works in the communist environment , in the communized peasant environment . And , if I correct it , the NEP was based on let's just do that , let's let that happen . We're going to keep the peasants under control of the party and we're going to police them . But then it's a bit like what China is doing , except on this mass industrial scale . But Russia was doing that on the sort of peasant scale .
C. Derick VarnYeah , I mean Dung's citation , for what he does is actually Bukharan and early and very late Stalin . So it's like Stalin from the end of the NEP , as he was managing it with Bukharan , to Stalin in 1951 , when he writes economic problems of the Soviet Union , but he skips , and also so do most Marxist-Leninists now 1932 through 1945 .
DanielYep Stalin undid it . The peasant commune managed to last through everything , and then Stalin killed it . It's amazing . He killed the communism that existed in the Soviet Union .
C. Derick VarnWhich then leads to the Kulag revolt , which were real , but the thing is they happened because of what he did .
DanielThe thing about the NEP is that it allowed all this class of middlemen who were these hated . It's complicated with the Kulaks , because the Kulaks kind of barely existed in pre-revolutionary Russia but they existed more in post-revolutionary Russia because the party , the way that they structured things , allowed that sort of middleman to get really rich , whereas the system before didn't . There was a small number of , there were a small , a tiny number of people Like the whole . The Stalin's whole idea is that there's this class of peasants who are just getting rich on the backs of everyone else . And that wasn't really true . It was these small middlemen that weren't really peasants . But the NEP really made that much worse . Basically , and that was sort of the plan they wanted to create that class antagonism within the peasantry . They didn't want the peasantry , they were afraid of the peasantry becoming a united front against the Bolsheviks . Basically .
C. Derick VarnRight , I think . And they had reasons to think they would , because traditionally , while the peasantry was pretty revolutionary , it was aligned with the SRs and the Narodnyki .
DanielTotally . I mean , that's what they were logically afraid of , which was probably true that the peasants would eventually get sick of them and say we don't need these motherfuckers .
C. Derick VarnAnd then what I think is interesting in the Dung case is that's on steroids and Dung's reform so they do recite it as the goal and why they pivot from worker peasant co-op communes where really were . There were barely any markets , there was labor tokens given , you could exchange hours for skilled work , but you all had to do some Interesting yeah .
DanielIn pre-revolutionary Russia you had the cooperative , which was the nexus point between the country and the city . So I don't say I don't know the details of how it worked , but there was some kind of system where they would exchange goods in some kind of cooperative manner between the city and between the country . But when they did the NEP they had suppressed those cooperatives as a locus of potential opposition to the Bolsheviks . And then what happened is you just had these middlemen just profiteering off of everything . So they became this hated and rejected class that was actually a symbol of a hated symbol of the Bolsheviks .
C. Derick Varnironically , this little capitalist middleman class , Right , and so there was a lot of anger directed at them . But that becomes a justification for the peasant suppression in the 1930s . Yeah , exactly , beautiful , yeah . And I think what's interesting about that is when I say this is on the steroids in the Dung period . I mean , I still point out to people when they're like , well , china controls its capitalist . I'm like , yes , but also it has more billionaires in the United States . I realize that it doesn't per capita , but it's hard for me to justify any country having a large number of billionaires , particularly if that country is ostentatbly communist .
DanielYeah , Like Well , I mean , you know their justification right . They're like well , we couldn't become a real socialist state because we're too agricultural . Marx was right , we need to mass industrialize . But we're going to do what Lenin , trotsky said is we're going to mass industrialize , or Stalin . Basically , we're just going to mass industrialize under the guiding wisdom of the party to make sure that the proletariat is always in control and it never gets out of hand . And even now they have socialism by 25th . You know how in the Soviet Union they're like well , we're going to reach socialism by 1980 . Or we're going to reach socialism . They're always pushing it ahead 20 years . Well , they do the same thing in Russia . Now socialism is supposed to happen in 2050 or 2030 . No , it must be 2050 . And then we're going to move from there onto and eventually they're supposed to expropriate all the billionaires , expropriate all that stuff , and it's going to be real communism one day . They don't emphasize it too much , but that's still the official .
C. Derick VarnRight . This is the other thing that I always point out . When people are like , oh , we have to defend socialist China because it's socialist , and I'm like they don't even say that .
DanielYeah , like they're not even Exactly . They're not there yet , they're just we're preparing the ground , so they're basically we're having managed capitalism so that we can have socialism in the future as per Marx , 1867 or whatever .
C. Derick VarnAnd that is as Lynn and Siri in the 20s , which is , we have to do state capitalism to undo the fact that we didn't join up with the West and we didn't go through a capitalist period . So now we have to do it ourselves .
DanielWe have to do it ourselves , and that's what communism is all over the world Like . That's why only poor countries go communist , because it's just an alternative way of industrializing without being under Western exploitation , imperialism .
C. Derick VarnI mean , and frankly , if your options are , yeah , the Soviet development regime are the one offered to you by the World Bank , I'd also choose a . Soviet one .
DanielWell , that's why yeah , that's why you can't shit on Cuba and Vietnam the way you can shit on the USSR and China , Like you're like . Yeah , well , they escaped imperialism and the suffering that they're going through is more of a result of the imperialist attacks on them , and they're economically sanctioned off from the world than anything else . That probably you know . Yeah , I'd rather be somebody in Cuba than somebody in the Dominican Republic or whatever .
C. Derick VarnAbsolutely Like and I guess . But you know , one of the things that I've seen recently , with the exception of like we don't like , when Marxists , linus , they don't do this with like Norway , which I find funny because I'm like , oh so you're not going to mention the Social Democratic countries in Europe , even though and they're kind of right to in some ways , because we've , like those , have been neoliberalized to .
DanielThey're still like . They started from such a stronger point that , yeah , they've been in Europe for 20 years , but they're still like .
C. Derick VarnWay better than the US .
DanielYeah , then Canada ever was or the US ever was . So they are degraded . Neoliberal state is like is like Star Trek paradise , compared to even Canada and its Haiti in the 80s Right .
C. Derick VarnWell , this is one of the things that I point out to people . When I'm talking about this , I'm like , look , you know , I talked to people from Sweden and Norway all the time and they tell me how bad it is now , and you had a really good episode with this guy talking about social democracy in Sweden . Yeah , yeah , but at the same time , when I tell them what it's like in America , they're shocked .
DanielYeah , yeah , it's like you don't understand . Like dude , I remember that I had this friend in when I was in university . His unit , like Norway , was paying him not just his tuition to go to school but they're paying his living expenses as travel . Like they're giving like $30,000 a year to go study in Montreal , Like you know it wasn't it was .
C. Derick Varnthey were even paying for it out of country . That's crazy , yeah .
DanielHe's going to study and , yeah , he's probably paying triple the tuition I was right , because he's from out of town and so the Norwegian government was paying for everything which makes sense , like when you're giving a student money . Like I have friends who are like oh yeah , I got a scholarship to go to the school for $60,000 and I can't even go because I can't afford to live , you know . Like yeah .
C. Derick VarnSo I guess you know we've kind of been in this cul-de-sac of what happened . But I think what you're right about is there's this shift where both sides kind of agree liberty and quality are separated during the Cold War , like you can have one or you can have the other , but you can't have both and we're both going to argue that .
DanielYeah , yeah , that's it , yeah , like . So what I talked about a few times in my show . Yeah , in class , you know , from the French Revolution , from before the French Revolution until basically the Russian Revolution , the idea of liberty and equality . It's so against our nature , like we're so indoctrinated the opposite way . But liberty and quality have to go together
. If you don't have equality both political equality , but also economic equality you're just going to be dominated by the people who have more money than you and more power than you and they're going to tell you what to do all day . And that's not equality , that's serfdom , that's , you know , servitude , whatever you call it , you know it's the whole thing .
DanielAdam Smith understood that contracts and markets are great between equal parties . But as soon as the parties aren't equal , it's not a contract , it's an excuse for servitude . It's just , you're just codifying the power imbalance and making sure that it stays that way for as long as the contract lasts . It's your disadvantage . The person who has less bargaining power is giving away all their obligations and getting very little benefits , and the person with all the bargaining power is getting all the benefits and giving away very little obligations . That's what contracts are . So , yeah , liberally and equality were the same thing , they were fundamental to each other .
DanielAll of a sudden , after the Cold War , russia is like okay , we don't want to talk about liberty anymore because that makes us look really bad , because we have no more liberty . But we're going to talk about equality . But equality is material equality , equality between nations , you know anti-imperialism , anti-colonialism and relative material equality . So you know , the Soviet Union in the 80s still had the Gini coefficient , was like similar to Scandinavia at its peak . You know , right , and that's what they focused on . And hey , if you're in the third world , that's a great , I'll take that right , right , alternatives , right .
DanielBut the US is like yeah , yeah , yeah , that's the choice . You either have liberty with no equality , and that's just freedom . Freedom is at the price of equality . Or you have equality , meaning equality of economics they don't even think about political equality and where that doesn't exist . And so you'll have security , but that security comes at the cost of your liberty , and that's the choice you have . And Soviet Union and the US both agreed yeah , yeah , that's the choice you have , you know . But our choice is better . It's better to have security , and the US is no , it's better to have freedom , and it's just this . Oh well , what can you do ? You know , the life sucks , no matter what you do . Better to be under my thumb or my thumb .
C. Derick VarnI mean , what is funny about this ? And I say funny kind of sad . I do think they're in both , because people are going to really know my Soviet sympathies when I say who I actually like in the Soviet Union , but it's Khrushchev , and Khrushchev the most . And then I don't hate Gorby actually , oh yeah .
DanielYou know Khrushchev less , but Gorbachev , yeah , he was trying his best , I don't know . You know well my little bit naive and I don't think he understood exactly how fucked up the country was . So he made mistakes , but he , yeah , he was trying to do the right thing .
C. Derick VarnWell , gorby's in Khrushchev is interesting , because why do you think the sacred speech is partly to absolve himself ?
DanielYeah , oh , all that stuff that Stalin did , it was all Stalin , it was all Stalin .
C. Derick VarnYeah , Wasn't the rest of us at all , except for Beria who we were going to . And Beria , To be fair , I mean , we talk about you , you're off . Demon monster Marx is leaning us . Will admit the use of was a monster . Beria was worse .
DanielThere was worse than Stalin . He was just like a fucking demon . It's like you can barely get a guy like that bad .
C. Derick VarnWhat's also funny is his plans as far as like for Stalin were just as much market liberalization as you saw in the Khrushchev . So like that's it yeah .
DanielHe saw himself that after Stalin that he would be the hero of anti Stalinism . That was his plan . After he's finished being a pedophile and rape , he thought he would be the hero of anti Stalinism afterward .
C. Derick VarnYeah , basically Khrushchev beat him out of his game , but Khrushchev really was interested in , like I . Actually this is very similar to the time period I'm talking about in China , where in the Cultural Revolution you have a lot of real interesting innovations and attempt for things . You don't have that so much in the in Khrushchev's Russia . But Khrushchev really is trying to like stabilize food production , not suppress people as badly . But what he starts getting into is he lends into Russian chauvinism a little bit more consistently than Stalin , because Stalin was all over the place on when he was like pro minority groups and when he was pro greater Russian chauvinism . It varies and it's not consistent in time period either .
DanielLike whatever works at this moment to get the job done .
C. Derick VarnYeah , basically there was a . There was a biographer of Stalin , not cock in a new one , who basically said look , I mean he was , he believed what he said , he actually was a devoted Bolshevik , it wasn't cynical and he had the personality of a corporate CEO , sociopath and yeah , and I think that's actually pretty accurate for what I can tell from reading him . I'm like no , he , I don't , I don't think he was ever . Like , if Stalin fooled anyone , it was himself .
DanielBut yeah , so yeah , that was in the two . The two when they opened the archives the nineties and the 20 , not 2009 or something . Yeah , the researchers , especially the anti-communist researchers , were shocked Like , oh my God , these , the Politburo is 100% sincere and all they're thinking about is how do we make socialism , how do we make social ? They're not just a cynical ruling elite . They're seriously thinking about how you make socialism , which is how ruling elites all do the best ruling elites , the most cynical Catholic popes and emperors . They're seriously believing that they're the most religious person in the world . They just religion is just a reflection of your class . You know . Your ideology is just a reflection of your class position . It's just a bunch of justifications for it in many ways , not just , but yeah .
C. Derick VarnSo you know , I think that gets us into , you know , this period post 1992 , because you have this , what I like to call the great confusion . Where you can like . There's some socialist regimes still around , but two of them don't look socialist anymore . One of them is struggling but kind of maintaining , you know , on an island in the Atlantic , and then there's a DPRK , which even even a Hanukkah the head of the GDR the DDR , depending on whether or not you say it in German or in English who was like I don't know why we consider those guys communist . That was Hanukkah , like the head of the East German government was like I don't understand why , why we consider the North Koreans communist .
DanielEven North Korea has , I think , dropped the pretense they stopped . They don't talk . They're talking way more about Juche or whatever than they are about socialism and Marx and anything like that anymore .
C. Derick VarnIn the end of the Kim Jong-un period they dropped a lot of the references to Marxism and the Constitution . And Juche is interesting because its focus is on autarchy , like we're completely self-reliant . And then the coalition of three classes , which is the bourgeois I mean not the bourgeois , the bourgeois is not part of that coalition . The intellectual , the peasants , yeah it's the intellectual , the peasants and the .
DanielThey have a pen , they're thinking of a hammer , a sickle and a pen . That's their symbol .
C. Derick VarnYeah , but what is interesting about that ? By saying the intellectual in there and you also realize that they're , yeah , the intellectual people corrupt me on that all the time that you see that on the flag , right that you have to remind yourself that the intellectual in Confucian societies were a ruling class . They were not just a class . They're not even like professional workers . Now they were basically .
DanielYeah , no , the explicit ruling elite .
C. Derick VarnYeah , they're not the , so to put it in like .
DanielWe are the rightful elite because we have the Confucian education and we've gone through the ranks and passed the tests .
C. Derick VarnRight , they're meritocratic lords as opposed to blood lords , but they are that . They're basically scholar lords , scholar gentry . When you have that on your flag , you're basically admitting that like well , we got rid of the king and we got rid of the imperialists , but we're incorporating the ruling era style of aristocracy into our class structure and the pen is in the middle of both of it .
DanielThe other ones right yeah right . It's not there for a reason .
C. Derick VarnSo it's one of these things where I'm like , yeah , plus , you know , they're the only communist society that has like like burpharadity leadership , the faradity .
DanielYeah , no , it's such a joke . There's no question . If they don't even bother having , let's have a fake election to see if . Oh yeah , so you know the next guy in the , he just won because he was the best . It's like nope , he's just the leader now , because leaders beget great leaders .
C. Derick VarnRight and so like when I I've been reading some more recent Marxist-Leninist adjut prop and they like they basically equate Cuba and the DPRK and Bolivia and Venezuela as all the same kind of society and I'm like that's nuts .
DanielYeah , bolivia is a dictatorship of the proletariat , but Venezuela is this . I was like what are you talking about ?
C. Derick VarnWhat Right ? It's just wild , the contortions that you have to do to it's communist and it's just like what are you ?
DanielIt's like we're engaging with . You're just destroying your own mind , like you know , when you have you ever been to ? At one point I had a friend who was like serious drug addict and we went to what's the meetings for people who are like related ?
C. Derick Varnto .
DanielNarcotics , narcan , no , the Al-Anon . You're not an alcoholic , but your friends are , so you're going to . How do I deal with the ?
C. Derick VarnNarcotics Anonymous no it's called Al-Anon .
DanielAnyways , there's one oh the Ally one .
C. Derick VarnYeah , yeah , Al-Anon yeah .
DanielBut they basically tell you , don't try to get in the head of the person , to communicate with them , like they're just crazy and you're going to become crazy if you try to understand what they're thinking . Just tell them how it is , like whatever you know , like one of the things is just never get in the head of the suicidal person , don't get in the head of the alcoholic person , because you can't , because it's craziness and you're just going to become crazy thinking about it . And that's what I often think when I start going down these rabbit holes , reading with a Marxist limit , and it's certain and he was thinking like okay , forget it , I can't , my brain's going to explode . I try to , you know , understand this . Yeah .
C. Derick VarnWell , what I find interesting is how the categories don't mean anything Like one of the things I've seen recently is the shift to multi-polarity talk , which I don't find like
. Multipolarism as expressed in imperial British geopolitics is where it comes from , by the way . It doesn't come from anywhere near . Yes , that's its own original origin . It's a 19th and early 20th century geopolitical strategy in the British Empire . It gets revived interestingly and kind of Marxistly by world system theorists who talk about the need for , ironically , for the developing world to decouple from the developed world , to develop its own independence , which again sounds a lot like this video is a Zoblik letter , right , but that's where it kind of comes back into Marxist discourse . They look at like well , there's this imperialist discourse , let's look at that .
C. Derick VarnMy point about it is like multi-polarity says nothing , absolutely nothing at all about power relationships beyond who's the dominant hegemon , by the way ?
C. Derick VarnSay the dominant hegemon because one of the things that multi-polarity is not claiming , for example , that they're going to stop the US's Monroe doctrine to destroy US regional hegemony , because if they claim that that's going to immediately lead to nuclear war , and they know it , that's where multi-polarity comes from .
C. Derick VarnNow , fine , as a descriptor of the way states interact . That's true , and there may be some more space for various proletariats to work in that if there's multiple people to play off of . But one of the things that you see what people do when they do this is they started quoting proletariat to the nation in which they're in , as if that nation is the representative of whatever class , which is never true , and there's only two groups of people who ever claimed it . I'm not saying to say that they're the same , but these are where they come from in Marxist theory , the Italian Marxist-Cynicalists who become the left wing of fascism , and the Mussolini picks up this rhetoric they pick up proletarian nation and concurrently and separately it's not related Premalist leaders of the faction of the Communist Party that encourage them to align with the Kuomintang , which also Stalin encouraged him to do .
C. Derick VarnThey start talking about the need for national development and they start talking about China as a proletarian nation .
DanielBut you see that same conflation of categories , which is what we're talking about when we're talking about stop talking about race and start talking about class . Is that same idea ? Because you're just conflating . That's the way that an elite disguises itself within a greater polity in order to hide its antagonism to the same classes below it inside that polity . The Lenin was really . You'd see that a lot with the Bolsheviks , before even the revolution . He would always talk about the proletariat will do this , the proletariat will do that , but he's literally talking about the Bolshevik party . In his mind and in the minds of all the leadership of the Bolsheviks , they are the proletariat , even though half of them weren't proletarians in any way , shape or form . They just saw themselves well , we're the proletarian party , so we are the proletariat . And that's that confusion that you see in every elite who's trying to piggyback on somebody else .
C. Derick VarnWell this goes back to . There's a rhetorical strategy that I've always been fascinated with that goes back into Hegel . Actually , it's the class in itself and the class for itself . The class in itself is a sociological reality of the class . The class for itself is what the class does when it is conscious of a situation in acts and unison . However , there's a lot of Marxists who talk about . We don't need to discuss the class in itself at all . Right , the class for itself is the only thing we're interested in , and we can speak to that because of the objective , scientific truth of Marxism or Marxism-Leninism or whatever .
DanielThe intellectual becomes part of the proletariat just by wanting to ally with it . Basically .
C. Derick VarnRight , Marx does talk about that . There are debates between Marx and Blankey about well , if intellectuals see themselves as part of their future in the proletariat , they can join them . But what's really interesting is Ingalls makes it very clear that they can't lead them . They can give them skills , they can help , but they cannot lead .
DanielIt's funny that Marx and Ingalls saying that , and you don't see that in any of their followers . They just don't believe it because it makes no sense in the modern context , because there's no labor movement , there's no big labor movement , there's no socialist labor movement , there's no socialist movement . That's the whole lesson of the Russian Revolution . You have to as an intellectual class . You have all these advantages . You are , in a sense , have that natural tendency to lead the ideology of everything , to map out the different alternatives and possibilities . But if you are leading this , this train is bound for hell . There's no way that you can lead this . You have to be jumping on the bandwagon of the movement of the actual people , the actual majority of the population , and then helping them accomplish the goals that they want to accomplish , telling them well , I don't like this , I think it should be like this , but you can't be in charge of everything , because then you are just creating your own dictatorship , because that's how humans operate .
C. Derick VarnYeah , Well , that does lead to the fundamental paradox and this was pointed out by the right-winger James Brennan Money , who was becoming a right-winger and wasn't totally one yet that the leadership of the revolutionary movements have never come from the same class that what they're claiming to represent . He eventually uses that insight to pick up Italian elite theory . So basically , Rabelle , Michel and all these people , who either were liberals that moved towards proto-fascist and fascist positions , are former socialists who moved to proto-fascist positions . Yeah .
DanielWell , natural progression of that .
C. Derick VarnRight when they're like , okay , well , you know we can't really get rid of classes , so maybe we can run it for the betterment of the people in a corporate situation . Corporate means all the classes just get along , yeah . And how do we do that ? Well , you know , then we do what Marx criticized in France , which is , like you start relying on a Bonaparte figure to get all these classes in line because it's an authoritarian figure , it can hold everything together , Yep , and the critique of that is well , yeah , but then usually the system falls apart , like you have political chaos after Bonaparte , for like in France , for like 100 years .
DanielLike it's , I mean , or the critique is just that that's not what you want . Like the class system sucks to begin with , and that's the I mean . If you're a socialist , right , the whole point of socialism is , if the majority is not leading this , then it's not socialism , then it's something else right ?
C. Derick VarnYeah , but even if you give up on socialism . I mean , my point is like , like these people were socialists , they give up . They think there's no way for us to do this because of this iron law oligarchy . If we just have like a Bonaparte figure , we can kind of control them . And this is where my critique of populism it doesn't work on its own terms , right , Right doesn't work on its own terms . This is where my critique of populism comes in . Okay , yeah yeah .
C. Derick VarnMost populists end up being not actual populists , but what they end up doing is promoting a counter elite that speaks for the people but does not necessarily have their interest and that's what makes it a fake populism , though , at the end of the day , right . Well , I don't know . I mean what is fake and what is real . I think what like to make it about fakeness makes it about intention . Michael Linde .
DanielYou just have to define what it means . You know to say like socialism is worker control of industry . Well then you can judge what's going on . This is a fake socialist , because they're not actually promoting worker control of industry .
C. Derick VarnBut what is populism ? What ?
Danielis populism ? I don't know . Yeah , you have to define it and then you can judge whether it's fake or not .
C. Derick VarnYeah , I mean , because what is populism ? That isn't corporatism in the old Europeans , and switch was like the classes are getting along and you're doing stuff for the people , which does not necessarily mean abolishing hierarchy . It just means getting people what they want . However , that's not the reason why socialism I mean you think socialism is a mess . Populism has egalitarian populist tendencies , and then Bonaparte is populist tendencies , and that's , that's not new , like it's not like there's just right and left wing populism . It's not just like a post Trump thing .
C. Derick VarnYeah yeah , that's been around for as long as socialism has been around , honestly .
DanielBut isn't that a way of harnessing populist energies towards right wing ends ? Because that's what we see that now , and that's what Bonaparte was doing . So you're based . I don't know . A lot of this stuff is grabbing conservative personality tendencies and liberal ones and using them for the same ends in a way I don't know .
C. Derick VarnWell , this is something that we talked about with Arnold , that , like we have to admit that one of the confusions of our current ideology is confusing temperament with ideological content , exactly .
DanielIt's huge , huge , and that's what that's . What I really want to focus on is liberal , and I think we talked about . Liberal and conservative are dispositions , and it's really interesting in our evolutionary past where I think this comes from , like Evo doing evolutionary psychology , in the Paleolithic , when we were evolving into humans , the climate was shifting radically every couple of generations to every few generations , so it could be every 40 years , every 200 years . You're having radical shifts . So during the period where the climate is stable , conservatism makes sense because we want to keep following the life ways of our ancestors , because it works . But you always and it's a bell curve distribution of conservative versus liberal tendencies and what they track with is openness and closeness to new experience . So if you're and it's a bell curve distribution , so most people are in the middle and then you have these small wings who are on the radical opposite ends , and what I think that does is in times when things are stable , people will tend to keep things as they are . But when the climate has changed , when the old way of life isn't good anymore , you always have that radical group of people who go like no , no , no , we want to do something different , we've got to do something different . There's crazy Polynesian sailors who went out and spread out all across Polynesia . What kind of crazy maniac does that ? Well , that's crazy in normal , stable times , but in other times that's the right thing to do and that's how humans survive . So we have this bell curve , distribution of openness versus closeness to experience .
And in the past , like 100 years ago in the populist movement or in the socialist movement , you had conservative dispositioned , socialist and communist and liberal dispositioned , socialist and communist . What I think has happened is because of the PR industry and the advertising industry in politics they basically the parties have sort of morphed into message like how do we message to liberal minded people and conservative minded people ? And they found the sort of messages that resonate both with them and so the Republican party . Then that's why you have this crazy like what every election in the US is ? Like fucking 50 , 50 , 50 , 50, .
DanielIt's ridiculous . And I think it's because you just have this messaging of here's how we message the people with conservative dispositions , here's how we message the people with liberal dispositions and liberals of the Democrats and the conservatives of the Republicans . But it doesn't have to be that way and there's sort of policies attached to that , but it doesn't need to be that way . You can have a and you see this , with this weird compact , like these weird , like you know that there's that guy , so what's his name ? He just- .
C. Derick VarnRob , and Murray actually interviewed him . Oh , you interviewed him . Oh , okay , I gotta check that out , yeah his new book .
DanielIt's like I'm hearing him talking about his new book , which I think he's not out yet , but I really want to read it . I'm like this guy's like almost a socialist . He's almost talking communism here , like he hasn't abandoned the market , but he's just a conservative disposition person who is coming to the conclusion that quasi socialism is the way to go . So this is where and there's a huge sentiment there's a huge chunk of people like again , 50% of the population tends towards conservatism , 50% tends towards liberalism . But that's not a political content . That is personality disposition , openness versus closeness to experience . But I'd say a majority of people have left-wing ideas of how , what kind of policies they want . And you see it , in Canada , 60% of conservative voters would raise their own taxes to better fund the healthcare system .
DanielWhy are you voting conservative ? Because the messaging system has fried your brains right , like that's what's going on , because you hate the liberals and you're afraid of the cancer . Culture is going to get you fired for questioning some this or that stupid thing . You know , like one of that women who was on the Star Wars who got . That doesn't mean that's like that woman . You know the woman , gina Karana , who got fired from the Mandalorian . Do you watch Star Wars ? Yeah , so you know what she got fired for and I'm Jewish , so fuck you , I can say this . She said , oh well , the way that she's tweeted some dumb anti-mask stuff and anti-vax stuff and whatever , whatever , I don't care about that . And then she hated the backlash . She said , oh well , being a Republican today is like being a Jew in Nazi Germany , and before they executed all the Jews , they demonized them so that when they executed them , nobody cared or whatever . And I'm like , yeah , that's dumbass , but it's not anti-Semitism , it's just dumbass . And she got fucking fired saying something that my own Jewish relatives who live in Florida and Texas and are they're immigrants from Morocco and they've become Republicans over time because whatever it fried their brains , because they're whatever reasons we won't get into , but they think like that that's something that would make sense to them . And you're firing her for anti-Semitism like fuck you . You're telling half the country that if you think out loud , you're not allowed to debate , you're not allowed to discuss , you can't change your mind unless you're allowed to say the wrong thing so that someone can correct you , and all that . You can't learn anything better . You're gonna get fired . So these people are terrified of the liberals and the left and all this stuff , and then they go hardcore for Trump .
DanielIt happens . I see it in universities too . Some of my friends who are teachers are like . You have these two , three students in every class who interrupt every lecture to say that this is racist , this is sexist , this is racist , this is sexist and accusing all the teacher being racist and the students of being racist . And what you have is 95% of the students being like oh my God , I hate these people . If they ever get any power , I'm gonna get fired at my job . And then they become secret Republicans it's awful or Pierre Poilier supporters or whatever .
C. Derick VarnYeah , this is interesting because you see this in the current debates around , like which party is the party of the poor ? I got in trouble with Carl Bajer about this because I told him he claimed that the Democrats were the party of the working class and I'm like they are the party of the minority , of the urban poor alone that vote .
DanielBut the majority of the poor people don't vote . That's the thing , exactly Because they don't fucking vote .
C. Derick VarnAnd then they're like well , the majority of people make over $100,000 a year , vote Republican . And I'm like yes , but what you're not pointing out is the majority of people who make over $250,000 a year vote Democrat . Yeah .
DanielAnd actually surpassed now the Republicans on average income , which is horrifying .
C. Derick VarnRight , which which just tells you that , like most of this doesn't seem to have that much meaning .
DanielNo , Well , it's just what I think it's . My theory is just that messaging they figured out how to message to the conservative minded person or you know , it's not that clean . It's also the person who's raised in the area , who has these kind of cultural signifiers and whatever , versus the liberal minded person , and that's just . We've just divided on this weird evolutionary line which is just dividing , conquer politics . You have two right wings . You have the liberal right wing who uses racial politics in the guise of anti racism , but it's actually pretty racist and it appeals to those instincts . And then you have the conservative politics which use racial politics in the straight up racist way . That's very clear and obvious . You know , it's like a bit in Israel .
DanielA lot of you talk to Palestinians and oftentimes they're like yeah , well , we'd rather have Netanyahu than whatever the liberal guy is at the time . You know , because the liberals are such complete hypocrites . They're talking about equality , they talk about Palestinian rights , but they're just doing the same fucking bloody thing . I'd rather have the straight up racist guy in power so the whole world can see how evil they are versus this fucking pseudo stuff . And I think a lot of that . You know .
DanielThe quote unquote anti racism , because it's not anti racist , it's racist . You know that , like white supremacy memo , have you seen that that's racist against black people ? With the white fragility stuff is racist against black people ? You're not . You're training people to become racist against black people with white fragility trainings . You're training even a well intentioned person who wants to be anti racist . You're becoming so scared of any of a black person walks in the room with you and you're so scared of being evil or doing the wrong thing that your cortisol shoots up and that's your . It's like your doggy training someone to have a bad emotional response to the presence of brown people . That's racism . That's what that fucking training is doing , making you .
C. Derick VarnI guess that nightmare , I guess you know we've been kind of all over the place today . One thing that I'd like to to maybe . Yeah , to pivot towards is your , your focus on the fact that people have , uh , that there's been this movement amongst liberal elites to claim that , um , one , that talking about class politics is actually a backdoor way to do race politics is pro white uh , which would sort , of my view , are in that affirmative action decision .
DanielSo do my . Your was basically arguing against class based admissions to universities because she's saying well , class is just a proxy for race . So why don't we just talk about the real thing , like that's how fried everybody's minds are in that ? You know from that milieu .
C. Derick VarnRight .
I mean , I remember reading that . I actually read that between so mayor and and Clarence Thomas and I was like , oh my God , it's like . It's like . It's like if this is , if this is a battle of elites we have , we are totally fucked Like because intersectionality taken the wrong .
DanielIt's weird . The intersectionality is always taken the wrong way , Like they talk about class , but it's just a slogan . It's not real yet yeah .
C. Derick VarnWell , class is a proxy for lay for as it is . It's not that that race , because of historical conditions , is is is a proxy for class , which actually I think is somewhat true . I mean , I think race is not simply that , but it does develop in that context .
DanielAnd it's more than that . It's , it's our .
C. Derick VarnWe have impulses , but it was yeah , yeah , but I'm like cause it , like dealing with like xenophobia and bigotry would probably still be around , but the the um , this , focus on it . One thing that Abraham X Kendi did , uh that I thought was super damaging is that there had been a tendency on the left over the past , uh , say 40 , 50 years , to finally split up racism not just from like legally defined bigotry , but also like implicit bias and systemic racism and stuff like that . And what Kendi does is it's starting proposition is you know those distinctions , you know how those are different things ? Well , they're not different things , cause they're all racism and we should talk about them interchangeably with the same word , because even worse is oh sorry , go on , yeah , no , no , go ahead .
DanielSo you know , when I was younger , the word racism and for everyone who went to school before 2010 , basically almost anyone the word racism just meant the attitude of racism , the belief that there are different races and some are better than others , that you know xenophobia , basically what we call discrimination , but after 2010 , they changed it to racism is prejudice plus power . It's the system of racial hierarchies , and they muddled , they confused in one term , what used to call systemic racism right , and what you call the attitude of racism . And the people who did this were these white anti-racist activists who were running seminars on racism , like these anti-racist seminars , and they found that the white people were super annoying because they're just like well , what about when black people hey , white people , that's racism too , isn't it ? And they're like well , you're missing the point . So their solution to this problem was not to just explain why it's different , but they just like no , racism is only white people can be racist , because racism is a structure , but it's also a feeling , and that creates such garbage because when you go talk to somebody and you say , well , black people can't be racist , they're like what are you talking about . That doesn't make any sense , because racism is a feeling , oh no , it's the system of oppression . You know , I'm Jewish , so if I'm in Israel I can be racist , but then if I go to Saudi Arabia I can't be racist . You're talking to this person for 45 minutes trying to explain this term that they thought they understood and just like what are you talking about ? You're not doing anybody any favors , you're just creating chaos and confusion . And then there's the tendency it's very seductive to say , oh , I can't be racist because racism just applies to the dominant group . And but the normal person who listens to that is going to think like , oh , you can't be racist because you're better than me , because you're a special , different being than I am . And that's what all this crap is sort of doing inadvertently is essentializing different racial groups . Like you can never understand a black person , you can never understand a woman . If you're a man , you can never understand this and that Everybody is so completely . It's like biological racism without the biology , you know , it's like this crazy ass essentialist bonkers and it's not helping , like you know .
DanielAnd the word white privilege what that describes is a very important concept . If a black person and a white person who are equal socioeconomically . The black person has more disadvantages , extra disadvantages that the white person doesn't have . But the word privilege means that you have something that you don't deserve . I got a legacy admission to a university because that's a privilege . I get free tickets to see the Rolling Stones because my dad is their manager . That's a privilege . And a privilege implies that you have something that you don't deserve , that should be taken away from you . So when you say white privilege to a poor white person , they instinctively feel like you want to take away something from them , and so that's the worst word to . It's like a word designed to create racial conflict instead of creating the racial solidarity that you want to create .
C. Derick VarnI mean , we have seen this come up like explicitly , and recently when they were talking , when there was this whole discussion about scabbing for relatively elite professors who were of color , yeah , and they started talking about well , privilege , blah , blah , blah . And this is one of the few times where , like , even the Academy was like fuck you , like this is ridiculous .
DanielThey're arguing that it's a privilege to be able not to scab .
C. Derick VarnRight yeah .
DanielSo I was like Some people paid $2,000 to go to this conference and well , they can't not go .
C. Derick VarnSo so I was like , okay , this is where we're at , but but the I mean , for in a way it's like , well , thank God , because this is saying the cry apart loud . He used to talk about this . You know , all the time I was like , look , if you look at the there's there's a couple places where you look at rhetoric shifts that are actually kind of telling .
C. Derick VarnSo when privilege discourse was first introduced , it was about white skin privilege and it was talking about white skin privilege and underprivileged people in right In comparison to underprivileged people like poor , poor black people right so , like for white people , that's what they're right well , and then the well , and then this gets flattened out in in education pedagogy by Peggy McGlenn talk into the invisible knapsack privilege essay , which is a terrible essay because one of the one of the things that it assumes is a lot of things that she calls white are specifically for white upper middle class people like oh right , yeah , it's like they do this all the time yeah , and I'm like .
C. Derick VarnSo you universalize your own class experience as what it means to be white and you've also extended that to all white people that's that white supremacy memo , all the stuff they describe .
DanielIt's just poor people versus white rich people like that's that whole memo . Come being on time . Yeah , it being on time is if you come from certain socioeconomic class where you have a job , they have to be on every day , versus somebody who is a peasant or doesn't have a job , like that's , you don't have to be on time . Fuck you .
C. Derick VarnYeah you know , I saw that now , which , like I actually saw the beginnings of that 15 years ago , and I was like , oh , some of these traits that they're calling white , these are , these are clearly economic traits , and they're economic traits that don't exist amongst all white people . Yeah , or they ?
Danielall but racism in healthcare , and there's racism in healthcare , but then you see this list of things . I'm like that's just poor people , that's every poor person gets treated this way , like none of most of these
. There are some things that are specific to black people which are important to talk about , but you're just conflate , you're turning everything into race war where it doesn't have to be yeah , yeah , there's things there .
C. Derick VarnThere are things that where , like , people assume that , like , black people are somehow more robust and have less pain , and stuff like that . So there's like , yeah , like that , and that to me is like , well , okay , that's clearly racist and we can talk about that , but you are quoting all these other things to race . What I find fascinating about this and what , when I really became convinced that A O L Freed had a point I like , was that when I started seeing that black poverty yeah has been largely unmoved in the last 30 years and , in fact , it got worse in 2007 and never recovered .
C. Derick VarnYeah , and that there is a pretty extreme racial wealth gap , even among the the like lower middle class , but it is entirely . The entire bit of it is explained if you look at the numbers by home ownership . Yeah , and home ownership stats yeah , because of red lining , which means that also inheritance .
DanielIt's just the fact of inheritance . Black people couldn't own property for so long , so they just don't have as much inheritance . If you're a professional class black person , you're like a first-generation homeowner or not , are you ? They're not a homeowner at all all right , because it's too expensive and you just never got into that class . Your parents didn't hand you the even the middle class people .
C. Derick VarnYou buy your home because your parents gave you of inheritance right , yeah , so , and so there's a glass floor for certain kinds of right people and there's not a glass floor for buying people . That's absolutely true . But that gets extended to all white people as if all and I'm not saying this pity the poor white guy , but like there's a whole lot of white people who don't have been inheritance from property because they either came over late or they never had it in the first place . They were lower class , like farm workers and shit or whatever .
DanielThere's always some , there's . Everyone has a different route to being poor and dispossessed .
C. Derick VarnIt's just that most black people , american descendants of slave , all have the same route , right and and I think we have to deal with that , and this is why I'm not like , I'm one of these people . We can't throw anti-racism out of our of our point because it is real , but equating it in this equity way , yeah , what that has done , okay . So one of the things about affirmative action , for example , because I was one of these people who was like , well , it's not gonna change anything and you're like what ? I might not , it's not gonna change anything because a lot of the diversity kosha right now in in so much that it's being met . It's being met by children of generational black wealth , of which they're , which is small , but it does exist yeah in immigrants yeah , that's the thing is Nigerian immigrants , ghanaian immigrants , jamaican immigrants are just getting all the benefits .
DanielLike 40 40 percent is at Harvard . In 2018 , harvard finally achieved racial proportionality for black people . At least 15% of the Americas is black . 15% of freshmen were black , but 44% of those were from Nigeria and people who never been slaves . Like right , it's like that's nice , it's like I guess it's good because it's good . Well , look , elite institutions , just elite education , just reproduces elites . That's the whole point of Harvard . Right , so they're like okay , well , let's have a rainbow of elites , because maybe they'll rule more justly or just legitimizes the elite . But the whole point , you want to get rid of those damn institutions in the first place . Right , like that's . Those infiductions are bad to begin with . Their mission is not good , even if they're good . You know you might get a good education there in various ways . Right ?
C. Derick Varnyeah , well , this is there . This is my whole point about . Well then and it's funny because even some , like I have seen some non-socialist liberals even recently admit this is they were like , okay , well , we didn't actually fix conditions for black people in a way which they ever could compete beyond affirmative action , and affirmative action wasn't used to primarily help poor black people either . So we really have failed . And if you look at like , like , the plight of inner city schools in America , you know and this is despite , this is this is not actually a money issue . We throw tons of money at this , but it's , it's the way it is managed and run . Where you just see like , well , these schools are have been hollowed out , and any progressive and this is one of the things that's made conservatism more popular is these elites implementing progressive reforms such as , like , say , restorative justice are in schools .
DanielYou know , restorative justice has meant not , I mean , I know what it means in Canada . It's interesting , it's based on a Native American . You know you forced the guy who did something bad to you to go fix it , you know some some people you're , you're lawn .
DanielInstead of putting them in jail , they go and fix your lawn and fix your house and see the damage they've done and learn something and make a connection with the person that they've harmed . And it's pretty good . Even works for terrible crimes to an extent it's . It's but yeah , but so .
C. Derick VarnI am . I am pro , I'm not . I was about to say I'm pro restorative justice . And it's interesting because , like it's indigenous , but also like my dudes , even fucking Vikings had this fucking like . Like it's , like it's human yeah , yeah , communal societies . That's what they do . Because they don't have the , they don't want to devote resources to prisons .
DanielThat's a lot of resources and bonkers when you think of how much it costs to keep someone in prison versus giving them the stuff that would have de-incentivized them from doing crimes in the first place .
C. Derick VarnYeah , it's bonkers from the standpoint of all of society , but actually think it's perfectly rational for a standpoint of the bourgeoisie , because ? Because they will lose power over the general population if they don't have it .
DanielWell , it's like why it's illegal to go fish through the garbage of McDonald's because that will harm McDonald's ability to sell sandwiches . Because I'll go fucking , I'll go get take from the guy . Why would night , you know not ? Well , I'll go fucking from the garbage if it's there . Right , it's just it's antithetical .
C. Derick VarnCapitalism requires , you know , all of these injustices to function so you know , this focus on equity has been a way to like change nothing . I mean like and by equity .
DanielJust so people understand we , when Ibrahim X candy and everybody else in Kamala Harris talks about equity , what they just mean is correct racial proportions . So when Ibrahim X handy , he talks about , well you know , inequity , inequity . What's inequity ? Inequity is when you know 40% of homeowners of white people are homeowners , but only 10% of black people are homeowners . Equity would be a 15 if 40% of white people are homeowners and 14 percent 40% of black people are homeowners . But the flip side of that is , if you think well , 25% of homeless people are black , but only 15% of homeless people of Americans are black . Therefore , it should be 15% . But that just means that you , to make that things equitable , you just and you need to put more Chinese people and more white people and more Jewish people into homelessness . That doesn't fix the problem is homelessness . You know , it's like if the slavery abolitionists had said well , the problem with slavery is that it's a hundred percent black instead of 15% black and 65% white and 30% Latino . Like that's . It's bonkers and that's why .
DanielThat's why Ibrahim can , he gets to go speak at Amazon and he gets a genius grant and he gets all this stuff is because there's zero threat in there as radical as the language sounds of what he's saying . There's zero threat in there to the ruling classes . It's perfect . You can pretend to be for social justice and do absolutely nothing to help anybody , except for you shuffle around some people so you'll benefit . You know , and I don't want to . In a way , I I feel bad sometimes shitting on affirmative action because there are people who are cool , good people who got to go to Harvard yeah , they're upper middle class or their middle class , but hey , they got a great experience . I don't take that away from you , you know . I'm not saying that . Oh no , you don't deserve you should take away you know it's .
C. Derick VarnThe whole system is wrong to begin with yeah , no , my thing about affirmative action is it it did diversify a professional manager class and the first diversification was actually white women and then and then also white passing immigrants . Italians , my ancestors , actually , as part of your ancestors , is a part of the great off-white hard yeah , my Jewish people and slobs in my case , and Scottish people like they still had anti-Jewish quotas when my dad went to school .
DanielLike he got in despite the quota and he was also an immigrant , for like he was the wrong kind of Jew that's not supposed to get in , but he was lucky he had good grades , yeah yeah , they didn't realize he was a dirty Sephardic June . Yeah , exactly like I couldn't ask him how's he Jews but in actually it actually worked for him because he's from a Francophone country and so they're trying to get more Francophones in . So they're like , okay , you know , yeah , I mean I come from .
C. Derick VarnI come from a rarity a Scotch Irish family that married into a Slavic , a Slavic Sephardic family in the south already crazy , weird in itself and who are poor , like , like , like the Sephardic Jews , a lot of them .
DanielBut yeah , they came here pretty poor , like me . Know , my uncle , my daddy's , got to walk to school for an hour and a half . First , like you know and we're known , was my uncle had to walk to work an hour and a half every day , right , because there's you couldn't afford the bus , you know , and they had to get all these jet . There's a lot of good Jewish charities . That's how they got to go to school and stuff .
DanielEven though you know , and essentially my dad talks about his family , he's like , okay , so there's different Jews went from when they left Morocco . They went to primarily France , canada and the US , mostly Los Angeles , but also other places . And he said that if you look at his own family , like brothers and sisters and cousins , the cousins who went to France , all doctors , the people who went to Canada , all like less teachers , you know , my , my uncle's an engineer , my dad's a school teacher , so , okay , middle class , but like in the middle middle class , not the other , and then in the States , like couldn't finish , afford to finish school , couldn't afford to go to school , or luckily , one woman got a bachelor's degree , you know , and and she had some kind of government job like it's so you so just see the the effects of the the class systems in each country yeah , I think that's it .
C. Derick VarnThat was fascinating about that with Sephardic Jews in America is the first . The first wave of Jewish immigrants to the United States were actually Sephard to who left Spain , went to , went to Britain when they relaxed the British yeah , the first Jews were Sephardic in Canada .
C. Derick VarnThe oldest synagogue in Canada , which is a Montreal , was this , a Sephardic synagogue established in like 17 something yeah , so the Swarovski and my family was a mixture of these old Sephardic Jews who came over , like , actually , with the founding of the country , and then a second wave that came over in the early 20th century .
C. Derick VarnThere was that . They both interesting , like you're right , they both came through France and they they got together but they were basically farmworkers . I mean like so , and we had some people get into government education during the GI Bill for serving in World War two and become like doctors and stuff . But most of the people stayed poor and they married into and then eventually would a lot of them converted to Catholicism , are to like mainline Protestant Christianity because they married into Scotch Irish families to normalize . So that's my ancestry and , interestingly , it's my Jewish part that has ties to this so far . This is what the irony of like we've talked about this before but like I have ties to Montreal , nova Scotia , louisiana and Georgia because my Jewish part of my family traveled with French people . They were always like hanging out with the Acadians and they were hanging out with the Acadians .
DanielSo I have the right to Portuguese citizenship because my grandmother's family has a Portuguese last name and it was a company , but they're yet .
C. Derick VarnOh yeah , because there's that whole Portuguese thing and it's been fought in the EU forever , where they're like if you're , if you're a Sephardic Jew , we'll recognize you as a citizen for right of return going all the way back to 1492 . And my family doesn't have the right last names and I can't document it , but I'll leave that crazy .
DanielI actually applied for it and they don't tell you this , which is super annoying because I went through this whole process . I had to get a letter from the rabbi , I had to show the documentation , which is rough for people of my grandparents age . But I found the documentation and I applied and it was supposed to be a 200 euro fee or something like that , and I was like , okay , I scraped that together and then you have to get it approved by the Jewish organization of one of the Portuguese cities of Porto and they're like okay , now you have to give us a thousand dollars . I was like what , why are you telling me this at the end of the fucking process ? So I couldn't afford it and I just never did it , but I always I wanted anyway . As soon as I have some money to blow , I want to do that .
C. Derick VarnThis is the way to get an EU passport , yeah exactly , you totally need a passport
.
DanielIt could be useful . Who knows what's gonna happen in the next year With my country and major country . Yeah , that's real For the water resources , yeah .
C. Derick VarnYeah , my favorite , my favorite thing is like Canadians being paranoid about that , and I'm , you know . I have Canadian friends and some Canadian family and I'm always like , well , you should be .
DanielI remember when they were talking about a lot of the free trade stuff . They're just like oh yeah , basically we're opening the door for US to colonize all of our water resources and if there's ever droughts we won't be able to , it'll be like the Irish potato famine all over again , where we won't have access to our own water , but you guys will .
C. Derick VarnI mean , if you're lucky we'll just conquer you and make you Americans . But like , yeah , exactly . But dark humor aside , where there's like this perverse way in which , through American post neoliberalism , we finished the war of 1812 in our favor , 300 year revenge began with NAFTA . No , um , so , uh , it's the one thing I worry about right now is I , like you , feel like I look at a left , that all parts of it and I do mean all parts of it have picked up different right-wing ideologies . So not , like you know , everyone hates that like the mecha communist , patriot , mega communist , patriotic , socialist amendment .
Danielbut I think they hate it because they're saying the quiet .
C. Derick VarnWhat ? Oh it's this , we it's . It's a mostly online thing . It's incredibly popular online , but it has no institutions where they're like we need to be socialists to support Donald Trump and we need to support Russia , and they're all but national Bolsheviks . Basically , yeah , yeah . And what I find interesting about them is they're also , like the entire world's , already communist because you have social goods . Seriously , some of them make this argument .
DanielYou need to be American to think like that , like , oh what , you got a free COVID test .
C. Derick VarnWhat's interesting is this leadership actually does come from recent immigrants to the United States , like it's not from people who are okay , yeah , it's , it's . It's a different , it's an interesting different . It's a it appeals . It's made to appeal to like very alienated , like people who came under the burning campaign , got burnt by liberal culture . You know , yeah , there's lots of PMC talk , anti-pmc talking , that in it , but I think a lot of people hate it , says a lot of the quiet parts out loud .
C. Derick VarnYeah , like , yeah , we we have given up on on anything like true class abolition . We just want like a ruler who's going to be like nice to the working class . We we have given up on . So what's interesting about , about the Maghreb communists , is they're they're both like , they're not racial chauvinists and that way they're not like national bolsterics , but they are like , well , you know these , these Trump ist right Republicans . They really represent the working class's actual ideology and I'm like , no , they don't . But uh , in some ways like the feel , the fear of talking about stuff yeah , so we need to tail them on cultural war stuff .
C. Derick VarnBut I'm like could work a lot .
DanielI don't know . Most working class people I know either don't care about culture stuff that much or kind of open minded about it .
C. Derick VarnEven if they might have some conservative leanings , they're like whatever it doesn't , it's not me , I don't care yeah the rigidness of cultural and racial politics seems to be a middle class phenomenon , yeah , and and yes , like that in carrot , that does mean that it does take up part of the upper end of the working class , but like one of the things I used to talk about to to people that I saw in my family . I had some pretty horribly racist working class people in my family , but what I always saw an interesting in them is that they worked with black people all the time and they were constantly making exceptions to their racism . Right , whereas which is not to say it is okay , like I'm not saying it at all but whereas I would work with upper middle class white people who said all the right things but they would be afraid to come to my neighborhood because it was like 40 of color yeah , yeah , they're .
DanielThey tend to be afraid of anyone who's working class , because the only note the thing is what I figured out , or what I think is middle class culture , especially upper middle class culture , is predicated on purging yourself of all those things about you that are working class , like incorrect grammar , dressing a certain way , holding yourself a certain way . Like everything you're doing is signaling that you're not you know what I mean . Like everything you're doing is signaling that you are appropriately cultured , and every so many things that a working class person does is like a direct check . It's everything you're not supposed to do as a upper middle class person . So they're kind of like petrified , like they don't know what to do with you . You know they're like scared of you . You know what ?
C. Derick VarnI mean . No , I not just know what you mean , I think about it in myself . So when I , when I got it , when I , when I got educated and tried and moved up the from a you know like blue color labor into like white color labor , I rejected for a long time any signs of my working class origins in myself , so much so that my accent is different , like I have a normalized accent , my dad , they used to roll their Rs .
DanielEveryone in Morocco rolled their Rs and you'd see that the people like my dad , who had a middle class existence , doesn't stop rolling , as he consciously stopped rolling his Rs when he came and also anyways , in Morocco . But then I have other more working class parts of that family who still roll their Rs . You know it's that . It's a total class identification thing .
C. Derick VarnYeah , and this is one of the things where I do , or I am sort of like well , marxist , you need to repair , but I do , because we don't talk about like this cultural habitat stuff and the way you show and signal culture and that's you know . You know that my feeling about parts of the PM thesis is , but that part is real . So there's this there . There's this way in which a lot of downwardly mobile proletarian Christian Prenti , actually wrote something about this and compact , compacts , a mess it's not .
C. Derick VarnI don't endorse those politics at all , but he wrote he wrote something that I think was actually quite true that you have a lot of formally working class in the blue collar sense , people who are wage laborers and being proletarianized but who are fighting tooth and nail not to be re-identified with the class they come from .
C. Derick VarnYeah , and also , even though their objective interests are often in the same places as what would be good for blue collar workers , not always there are some difference , like yeah , like while I'm like like why I'm for the complete revitalization of student debt and making college different , like the over focus on that is like a very like well , that's because it affects younger people and and a strata of , like the precarious middle class more . Yeah , um , there is a sense where , like I mean , frankly , people like me who do not want to fall back into their , to their , their origins and a lot of their origins , frankly , were traumatic like growing up for it is not good for you like , um , buddy comes from like the total poor , poorest class of Quebec society and you hear him talk about his family or whatever and he says , like fucking PTSD , just talking about what they would eat , what they do like .
DanielIt's fucking hilarious hearing him talk about it , but
you get disturbed .
C. Derick VarnYou're like fuck and you know right , and so it took in my case it took me actively trying and it's a struggle to not be like everything where I come from is gross and bad is because yeah yeah , because and I'm gonna embrace this , this upper class lifestyle , the the in .
C. Derick VarnI will totally admit it informs my taste . It does inform my taste . But one of the things is that I have really realized in the past 10 years is the elites are easier to idolize when you don't know them right , but once you do , you're just like , well , fuck this and my dad is like that too .
DanielExactly , he gets along better with the poor person than with the rich , or the way that they . Yeah , you like the refinement , you like the ease of life or the confidence that they hold themselves with , but then you're like everything underneath . That is like the lizard people . It's disgusting . It's like maggots rotting the eating .
C. Derick VarnYeah , it's just like it's a thousand , it's like , it's like .
DanielOh , four generations of nepo , baby decadence and there's nothing left like my friend was a lawyer and he went from kebek to british columbia and he hates it there . Because he said in kebek if you're , you know , because the only people that afford you know , I do especially kind of a lot .
DanielThat's for basically poor people . But if most lawyers your clientele is going to be the rich people , right , the only people who are going to afford you . And in kebek , if you're rich , you probably became rich . You probably had to start your own company or do some . Even if you're generationally rich , you usually had to do something to get or maintain that wealth . But in brish columbia you're like seventh generation rich person , he said they have that sense of entitlement that rich people have , but none of the competence and ability to do anything you know . So you give them homework and they don't do it and then they get mad at you for these looks like awful yeah , no , I well , I should be very careful on how I say this .
C. Derick VarnAs I used I teach , I now teach in a public school system that , and particularly where I'm at , I actually teach a wad class strata as well as a fairly broad race strata , although I teach mostly latin and pacific islanders . As far as people color , um . But one of the things I pointed out is like I can tell the difference and the different kinds of wealthy people , both upper middle class and true wealthy , um , because the generationally wealthy people are entitled but they don't do shit . And when I don't would like say which people in the developing world I mean , I'm saying rich people , I mean mega rich people , like the true , true one percent of one percent . I , I , I worked for them for a little while and they didn't tolerate crap from their kids . But like these , a lot of these families who are rich off of land speculation or recent investments , they totally do like they that's all about . Like we're gonna try to get whatever game , whatever advantage we can . These kids don't have to do anything .
DanielWe get mad when you monsters , yeah , and and so I don't want to make it sound like , oh , there's different kinds of rich people , but they're kind of , are like sure , there's the ones who have to do stuff , and you know , and there's the ones who don't have to do stuff , or there's the ones who have to do stuff that's complicated and requires discipline . And then there's the landlords who who , like I , fight landlords for a living right , and you see , you know , if you start a business , you have to have some brains in your head to start that business and to maintain that business and to deal with all the things you have to deal with . But to be a landlord the biggest fucking imbecile can be a landlord all you have to be is a thug and know how to bully people and just get more . Get you , use your equity to get more , buy more apartments and bully more tenants . Like it's I've never seen .
DanielI'm shocked at how fucking stupid some of these people are . Like and they're zillionaires . Like you can't even wipe your own ass . I I guess I can't tell the confidentiality , but people who oh , my god , the guy's gonna anyways , I can't tell the story .
DanielYeah , yeah , I get you , but like somebody who's gonna destroy them was gonna destroy themselves publicly because they're too dumb to pay a tenant some money that they're owed and that they deserve . You know and like , and they're gonna humiliate themselves in a court and they're gonna have a published decision about them , calling them a fraudster , calling them in this , that , but they still couldn't do it . They couldn't stop themselves like they can't .
C. Derick VarnYou know , it's like too dumb to me the difference in and this really shows up in the difference in our , in our millionaires , um , and our billionaires , trillionaires , whatever the fuck they are , uh , in the united states , um . So , for example , uh , there are these awful robber barons of the 19th century , but they were fairly smart and they should not .
C. Derick VarnYeah , they did yeah , they did something and a lot of them didn't actually come from like very like it's that first generation of settler colonial wealth . You actually can come from nothing . Yeah , um , they're brutal people , but they there was a brutal intelligence to them . You didn't deal with someone like warren buffett , who is smart but jenteal he's , he's done a lot of investments , it's not ostentatious . Uh , then you get to people like and then , and then bill gates , then you get to zuck and bezos and musk and and these are people who most of their wealth even comes from like government subsidies keeping them up and rent and just total rent seeking behavior for their entire career , and you're like , at best these people are idiots , avants who are good at one thing and there's some evidence that they're not even , that they're not even good at that .
DanielThey just got lucky right and they were good at screwing their partner over who did all the work right .
C. Derick VarnBut so you're just like you're just looking at this and I'm like I feel like I've seen my like , like the elites of this country get worse and worse and worse and then you , you , you sort of go . Well , I get why these people are like would side , be like you know , okay , like you pick a nepo baby like donald trump , but he's less of a nepo baby than some of these people .
DanielHonestly , oh yeah , like bezos and gates , like at least they did so they did something well , bezos is an interesting is an interesting transition . Like jared , bushner , who , just like , inherited this monstrous landlord empire , uses this horrible brute yeah well , but you're right about the difference between kinds of renties .
C. Derick VarnEven so , like , what trump is is a landlord yeah , um and what um , but he's kind of tied into productive in industry and land values and what a lot of these other people are people who valued off of government speculation and government contracts , um , and so what you see in both of them is a decadence um that you like . If I look at like , I don't want to like idealize prior periods of capitalism because they were just as brutal but they were different , like it's . It's very , it's very hard to imagine um , um like , for example , the brahman wealth that led to f dr right doing what we see must doing , and then the only real opposition . You can see them under these brutal , like localish , basically landlord thugs , uh , and and in a lot of small towns in the united states those people dominate the local economy at a local level like um , and and . So you see this fight between the elon mus of the world and basically the trumps . Well , not the mus so much anymore , but like the bezos of the world and the trumps of the world , and I'm sorry , in a way , like they're both thug as nepo babies , but the there's a vitality to one of them that is more appealing to a certain kind of person than there is to this , like you know . Oh well , this person has , like , made money off of rent seeking behavior their entire life , but they've done it in a very like , genteel but sneaky way .
C. Derick VarnAnd you could , you all of a sudden see all these other , like you can see the lizard people stereotype , the , the , the , uh , the , the way that anti-semitism works . I mean , like you see all these things sneak in , because you're like , oh , okay , I get , I get how this is breaking down , because this person looks like , well , you know , they're a brutal madbill baby who didn't earn shit , but at least they can boss people around , whereas these other people's , like , how do they get money ? Like we don't even know how they got money . Like , and you can also see on the right and sometimes even on the left I think people underestimate this how this leads to destructive conspiracy , theorizing , because it's just like , oh , yeah , I don't know how those people got rich . Yeah , like , um , they , they don't seem competent , they don't seem strong , they're not even good bullies .
DanielI don't know how they got rich yeah , and you're so far from that world that you can't understand how it actually works . So you have to be go .
C. Derick VarnYou know this lizard people or whatever it is because that's the only thing that can make sense right , because you don't like the idea that these people got rich off of government contracts and rent seeking , like surviving off of the interest of the money that other people before them have earned , that they're not even , they don't even need to make new money , like they don't need to produce anything to maintain their wealth . And you just , and you just sort of realize like , oh , this is
the problem . And then all of a sudden , something clicked in my mind and this is one of the many reasons why I quit being being uh kind of paleo conservative is when I realized that , like okay , maybe it was real that those first robber baron people really did work up from nothing , but what they did , it no one else could like it was in time , that was , there was a gap .
DanielThey happened to be the one that filled in that gap and they had some abilities that won them that position versus somebody else . But that's it , it's done . Yeah , that's . That position is not available anymore right and it's like so .
C. Derick VarnSo you have a heroic one period and that's the period you're going to focus on forever , because it's the only time that looks like this could possibly be fair , right , yeah , and um , and that's something that I think right now in america . Um , if you're talking about that on class terms , it does look like the only people talking about now are like these josh holly's or so robin marie's or whatever , and some of them , I think , are more sincere in their socialistic beliefs than others yeah , well , so robin rami , seems .
DanielHe seems serious about what he's talking about . Josh holly's , believe him for a second . Marco rubio , like these guys just figured out . Oh , this shit is popular . It's like when camala harris was advocating for universal healthcare and the donors who were literally going to her uh , from the pharmaceutical industry going to her , you know donor parties were telling reporters yeah , this is just bullshit . I know this isn't real right right .
C. Derick Varnso I mean and they proved that they didn't mean it like how , how it's not just how few uh , democratic promise reforms that we heard during the trump era didn't happen , it's also like how little of the Trump policies did they even reverse ? Yeah , like our immigration regime is actually worse . Our tariff wars with China are worse .
DanielWell that's like a Stephen Harper the conservative guy basically put the death spike into Canadian healthcare and then Trudeau gets . It's so interesting , it's so sad how Trudeau got elected . There's going to be the Social Democratic guy that there's a . It's called NDP , it's basically a Social Democratic Party . They were ahead , but Harper the conservative had been in power for like 10 years and people were just sick of him and they were going to vote for an alternative and it looked like for the first time the prime minister of Canada was going to be a Social Democratic Party at the NDP . This guy , Tom Mulcair , who's like a light Social Democrat , but whatever , he was there , it was like the first time I ever voted for an MP who got elected and so he sadly support . He criticized . In Quebec they had this racist law which prohibits people from wearing any religious symbols in government service . So , like a woman with a hijab couldn't be a teacher potentially , but you could still wear . They still had a giant cross in the National Assembly , Like that was , yeah , very French of them .
DanielThat was okay . But if you wore a Jewish star or a kippah or a hijab , that wasn't okay . It was just directed at Muslims because there was like an anti-Muslim panic for like a couple of years . So he criticized that All of a sudden . His popular in Quebec tanks . And then they're like , oh , the rest of Canada who still , like Mulcair , the Social Democrat guy , were like , oh , he might not win against Harper . So we're just all going to vote for Trudeau because he's still so . They just All of a sudden all the polls just shifted towards Trudeau because of that . And Trudeau gets elected . He doesn't touch , he's letting the healthcare die . India didn't really cover what's going on . So he's just like , yeah , these guys get elected , they do fucking nothing to change anything . All the Harper policies still there . He put some rainbow stuff on there . It's nicer about women , nicer about gays , nicer about trans , and that's it .
C. Derick VarnThe healthcare system is going to die Right , and on our side , what we have is actually the right has actually progressed further at the state level than it did under Trump , which is oh yeah , obama era like the Republicans took over all the states , basically . And during this Biden era , florida is the most extreme example of it . But even places like New Hampshire are doing stuff that you're like whoa . It's pretty clear that you're building up . Try to recliminize LGBT stuff altogether .
DanielThey're just like .
C. Derick Varnit's crazy , oh God yeah , and Florida , you started seeing neo-Confederate stuff being pandered to and we're going to defund federal holidays like Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Day because fuck those guys . It's like wow and it doesn't have a lot of comport over national politics . Admittedly , that's not a track . We're seeing this with the scientists . It's not attractive to the majority of the country .
DanielBut it is affecting millions of people in there .
C. Derick VarnBut , yeah , there's tons of people in these states and one of the interesting things that I've pointed out .
DanielOkay , so Georgia , I forget when there's no class politics Like that's what you're left with .
C. Derick VarnRight , georgia , which is a quote , purple state right . The same reactionaries that ran it when I was there run it now . It just now sends moderate Democrats to the Senate and it may sometimes give its electoral vote college back to Democrats , but locally there's almost been no change in local politics at all , but it's also like it's just a scapegoating .
DanielWho are you going to scapegoat ? You're either going to scapegoat the gay people or black people , Mexican immigrants or , on the other side , you're going to scapegoat the white people who vote for those parties . Like , oh , you know , trump is a scapegoat . I mean , he's doing the bad thing . The white working class supposedly supports Trump . They're the scapegoat . Everything is a scapegoat . There's no class politics . There's nothing going to help anybody . Let's just blame some group that we can shit on .
C. Derick VarnRight , I mean , this is one of the things that I pointed out to people way back in the day , I'm like . So the average Republican voter makes over $100,000 a year and under $250,000 a year , which means that they're kind of a party of the upper , of the lower upper middle class . Are the truly ?
DanielThey're the rich people in the poor areas , right .
C. Derick VarnAnd yes , they wear . They wear a Camboy boots and drive a pickup truck . But that pickup truck is effectively a luxury car . That's over $100,000 retail and those cowboy boots cost $200 . Yeah , like they have the affectation of working class people but and they are more relatable for that reason but working class people can't afford that shit .
DanielYeah . One of the interesting things about today is how the signifiers of class have completely melted and you'll have . Elon Musk has the same habits and styles and tastes as somebody works at McDonald's Like that's incredibly new . That's really .
C. Derick VarnYeah , the early people going to see Marvel movies , it's like .
DanielIt's like you know you get the FDR and his accent and his demeanor compared to you know Trump or whatever , who thinks exactly like my uncles in Florida , like that's why they like him , because he , you know , he has the same affect or the same whatever . Yeah , I have some family related Moroccan Jewish circles . Basically everyone's your family , because it's kind of this weird and weird circle . You just call everyone your uncle , even if they're not really related to you . But there's this family that One of them is a union organizer he started as a college union organizer and the other one's some finance guy and the finance guy is mega , mega , mega rich .
DanielAnd the union organizer guy is like middle class and the middle class guy loves to wear the most expensive fancy clothes all the time . He wants the best shirt , he wants a car Like he loves that stuff . He likes obsessed with like status markers , whereas the super , super rich guy is like driving a quiet Honda , like there's like the whole the mega rich now have this sort of obsession with not looking rich . It's this weird thing , but yeah .
C. Derick VarnIn fact , it's now like now , wearing a tracksuit to work actually indicates that you're the boss . Why ? Because you're the only one who can get a little bit Right . But actually this is something that I've been pointing out to people for a while , and it seems progressive at first , but it's actually kind of not . So it used to be . You could learn the codes of Like we talk about this Now . This has pernicious effects . Talk about how , like I suppressed all of my class coding for being like working class white kid from the South , that's all suppressed now , including the way I talk . However , it doesn't matter anymore . Part of that , I think , is the internet , because , like , but like the whole cultural capital , it seems like the elites have more or less just given up on that . Like we no longer even going to try to do that .
DanielI just think it's homogenization , because mass media exists where it didn't used to exist . I think the beats are good . It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor . You're going to like the Beatles . You like rap music , you're going to like it , whether you're rich or poor Right so , and it's impossible to cordon off access . Yeah , like before you , to go to the orchestra cost $100 and only rich people could go do it . Now it's like everyone could listen to everything .
C. Derick VarnTune in the NPR , get on Spotify , so it doesn't signify anything anymore and so these taste markers are all mixed up . But that can be highly like confusing .
DanielThere's little little symbols , though , that they have their own little markers . They're just very discreet , you wouldn't , notice it , but that's it .
C. Derick VarnYeah , I was about to say there are still small things you'll see . Yeah , but one of the interesting things about the pandemic , for example , is the growth of luxury good sales to people in the United States who make under $40,000 a year .
DanielReally .
C. Derick VarnYeah , it's massively in growth . Part of it is a lot of these poor people see it as an investment . Okay , like they think they can resell it .
DanielWhat are they buying ?
C. Derick VarnDesigner bags , designer shoes . The other thing is and this was pointing out to someone is these stats . You are indicating that you have status because this is being shared through , like these trends are being shared on like TikTok . So if you want to try to get into what you think is the code for the circles of the wish , you're going to buy these things , but they don't actually carry status with them anymore .
C. Derick VarnIf you're trying to get ahead and you're like , well , I need to look rich so I can try to get a job , I should look the part . You can't say for a housing where that's not reachable . All the other ways of accumulating wealth seem to closed off to you . It's actually not totally irrational to do this . You'll get your David Brooks of the world . Be like oh see those poor people . They're so stupid .
C. Derick VarnBut that is what's kind of happening . It's drying up because a lot of that even with the credit , a lot of that money was based off of cheap credit and then it was also based off of people not having to pay back student loans . So it's actually been soldering down . But I think that's interesting because I think you're right now One of the things that I have gotten
. I've seen people getting real trouble in academia for saying but it's like , don't you realize that diversity statement is a show of class , because the right correctly , you need to have had a ton of leisure time that you devoted solely to specific kinds of political activism , that you have to know from correct circles which ones they are . And you can fake it too if you know the code words . But to learn the code words requires you to have access to power and wealth .
DanielWell , that's exactly like having to dress the right way , because if you dress like a flashy pimp , that's the wrong way and you have to know the discrete . You know people who go to fancy universities can't get a job afterwards . They go to like the finance school , you know , and if they're not hanging out in the right clubs and in the right associations , once they go get a job , the boss can tell immediately that you're not one of them . Because you're wearing a wrist expensive shoe but it's a square toad shoe and you're not supposed to wear a square toad shoe . You have to wear this year . You're wearing a round toad shoe . Square toad shoes was two years ago .
DanielOh , you're wearing an expensive watch , but you're wearing a watch that's one grade ahead of what you're supposed to be wearing . You're supposed to be wearing this expensive watch that's $1,000 less than that one . Like there's all these rules that you can only learn by being in that milieu . I never thought of the diversity statements as that . I just thought of that as like a signifier of submission to authority . Like I am going to do . It's like the discipline mind's thesis . It's just like I'm going to do whatever you tell me to do . So here's my proof of obedience , right .
C. Derick VarnWell , one of the things I will tell you . In the United States , and you probably know this , but economic diversity amongst students has declined dramatically in the last decade .
DanielOh , I didn't even know .
C. Derick VarnSo one of the things and the two trends that back that and this is what's fucked up , man , progressives are supporting these trends is the focus on diversity as the primary means of proving your thing , and thus personal statements and diversity statements are crucial to the admissions process and the removal of standardized tests , which why they have racial and ethnic biases and they do . What people don't realize are they ignore . Is actual teacher giving grades have more racial , ethnic biases ? Yeah , yeah , and it also makes it more .
DanielIt makes you depend more on the interview and on the letter and all that stuff which people hire tutors to learn how to write those letters . They hire you know all the other stuff is cultural signifiers or that you paid somebody to get you that stuff done to look good on your CV or whatever .
C. Derick VarnYeah , which means all these informal systems of wealth actually are more important now , not less .
DanielYeah , I didn't realize that that tank the amount of poor people in schools , and it was it had that effect already . Yeah , it's .
C. Derick VarnWell , there's a bunch of reasons . A lot of the poor , a lot of poor people also just no longer . They're no longer even applying . But like , for example , if you're a lower middle class kid and you come to me and ask me how to get into college , I literally can't tell you . No one knows .
C. Derick VarnReally yeah , Because it's like because all the like there's been such a move away from like well , we're going to have these score cut offs , we're going to have it's all like nebulous . But you know what it's fucking funny is it still lines up to like what's your zip code Right and do you know the right people ? But now this is expressed in like well , we're going to have diversity statements , etc . And the one thing I point out is getting rid of affirmative action isn't going to get rid of any of that . These are all things that , unless you start court telling Freedom of Association and Freedom of Speech explicitly , it's going to be very hard . But you've been pushing to remove these admittedly problematic , like standardized assessments and stuff , because they're racially biased and they are , but you've been replacing them with something that's actually more bias and not just racially bias .
DanielIt's extremely class bias which makes it racially biased , by accident or by history .
C. Derick VarnYeah , yeah . So it's just like . But then again , if you're like one of these fairly rich people of color who benefited from this focus on equity , then you have no , there's no incentive for you to really do much about it .
DanielOf course you love that stuff . You know you're very , very attached to it and you think , like so do my heart that class is just a proxy for race . Because you're so indoctrinated with race essentialism race , race , race , race , race , race that you think class is a proxy for race , which is baffling to me that somebody at that level of education and power thinks that class is a proxy for race , and apparently Ibrahim X Gendi thinks that too . I told I think we talked about before the show one of people commented on my video that they went to an Ibrahim X Gendi lecture and asked Ibrahim X Gendi well , how does your policies and your proposed policies help the working class ? And Ibrahim X Gendi apparently said , according to this commenter , oh , the working class is just code for a dog whistle for white people and forget it next .
C. Derick VarnRight , which is why , for example , according to his policy guys on how to side of the policy is racist or anti-racist , even if it would objectively help more black people than white people , if it's not coded to before that reason .
DanielThat reason he thinks it's bad he thinks it's bad . Yeah , although he's like he just put out an article . I feel like that critique must have reached him somehow , because he just put out an article saying the white , the working class , is not white . Yeah , which really like how are you ? You're the one saying this . Which is like duh the good article . That's interesting , but like yeah .
I mean the weird thing about X Gendi . I mean we've been shitting on him a lot , one of the things about him that if I'm fascinating . For example , he actually critiqued the power plus privilege in his first book . Yeah , he talks about that in Stam from the beginning , that it's not a great . What did he replace it with ? He replaces it with something worse . Like he replaces it with like all kinds of racism are the same because of their effects , because whether it's bigotry or systemic racism or whatever it looks like it's not leads to worse outcomes for black people .
C. Derick VarnTherefore they're effectively the same . But it's not because racism is power plus privilege , it's just . We only care about consequences .
DanielWe only care about the results . We only care about the results . We only care about the people Right .
C. Derick VarnExcept , except this is the point that we were just saying except when , like the results are , I'm doing this thing , that I'm not doing for anti-racist reasons .
DanielOn the basis of the class , even though it helps black people more . That's somehow because we're not talking about race where we should be talking about race .
C. Derick VarnRight , and so that that then intention matters there .
DanielThat gives away . But that gives away the the , the real motive , right ? He just wants you to think about race , like that's all that is . He just wants you to think about race . You want to see to talk everything about race . Think about race . Never think about anything else . Only think about other things as a function of race , which is how you would think if you were rich , right ?
C. Derick VarnI mean , and I've talked about , I've actually talked about it for like 10 years . I was like , okay , think about it this way . If you're an upper middle class black person , what's the only real social inhibition to your life , right ? If you , particularly if you're a man , well , it's going to be identity struggles , it's going to be your race and your gender . And and if you're a poor black person , well , yeah , you still have the problems of race and gender , but you have a lot of other problems .
DanielYeah , you can't get an apartment because you're black . You can't get a job because you're like . Those things are much more important than , oh , somebody said where are you from ? It's , it's , you know . Oh , I hate that . That's what . That's a bug of mine . Yeah , like there , there's this interesting article I posted in my video about oh you know , even in upper middle class neighborhoods and wealthy neighborhoods , black people suffer from discrimination , and so it follows a I forget , it's a lawyer , I think , and his wife works in the defense department , and they're just like you know . People are looking at us like , oh , how did you get here ? Are you guys entertainers or you basketball players ? I'm like , yeah , that's really annoying to go through that , but that's not a big , huge political issue that this tearing America apart , right ? The political issue is the insane amount of poverty , the insane amount of inability to function in society because everything is in your way , right ?
C. Derick VarnI was actually thinking about . You know , james Baldwin , every , every . We're a triple light person's favorite anti-racist . But what I find interesting about Baldwin is even Baldwin talks about this . He's like , look , the bigot doesn't concern me . If you deal with the structural issues , like yeah , like that's their problem , like that's the thing . If they don't have power over policy or if there's not large divisions of wealth , then it's kind of just well , they're dicks and I can avoid them .
DanielIt's like what I said in my video . If you had a Star Trek world where there's replicators and there's no material conflicts , racism just becomes some asshole won't invite you to their party because they're a dick and you don't care that much because it doesn't stop you from having a life . It becomes a political issue when you cannot function in society because your skin color is causing you to be harassed by the police , causing you to not be able to get an apartment even though you can afford it , like all this crazy ass shit like that . The thing you know , because I'm looking at microaggression stuff and one thing that comes up a lot , and this is so American and I don't understand it . Maybe you could explain to me .
DanielWhen someone asks , oh , where are you from ? In where I am , which is a very Anglo-Marchel , is very immigrant , right . So when someone asks you , oh , where are you from , it's usually a compliment because it means oh , you're not just a McDonald's , exxonmobil , gas station , town roast beef eating Canadian person , you're from somewhere interesting . Tell me about yourself what you know . Oh , where are your parents from ? Where do you find you have an interesting story to tell me about who you are ? And people like to be asked that and like to talk about it usually , but in the States it's as if people how dare you assume that I'm not a McDonald's eating ExxonMobil small town person no , I'm from Kansas , that's where I'm from it gets so offended
by that . I don't understand .
C. Derick VarnI think it's actually because both in America that question is both valences . There actually is a little bit of what you're talking about , like oh , when you come from somewhere else , you must have worked your way here . That's impressive , yeah . But there's also a sense in which , like because there's so much nativism here , where it's like well , but you weren't born here From here , where are you really ?
Danielfrom .
C. Derick VarnYeah , where are you really from ?
DanielYeah .
C. Derick VarnI think part of that is because we have a . This is not that Canada is in full of fucking racial nightmares in its history , but , like in Back towns that were not on maps .
DanielRight , because the Underground Railroad black people escaped from the US go to Canada to freedom . Except the authorities were so racist that you'd have entire cities and towns that were majority black and they wouldn't put them on the map because , you know , never mind the genocidal abuse of the Native Americans in the school system and all that , yeah .
C. Derick VarnYeah , I'd rather say your first in indigenous people policies is like it was just as bad as ours .
DanielIt's even do you guys have residential schools ?
C. Derick VarnWe did , yeah , but not actually your residential schools . So our residential schools were a real thing , but they tended to be run by states , not the federal government , and they were like state coalitions with various church groups Mormon Catholic , et cetera and they were as brutal as yours . But they didn't go on for as long .
DanielSo yours lasted longer . Yeah , and this I mean . Anyways , you want to cry . You read this . I can't read that stuff . It's too picturing little kids in these situations , anyways , whatever .
C. Derick VarnYeah , I mean it's a horrible , it's a horrible thing that's genocide , like that's .
DanielYou're destroying a culture systematically on purpose to take their resources Like there's no other . You're just destroying people , anyways , and at the abuse level you know .
C. Derick VarnI remember getting a 20 years ago getting an argument with a conservative professor , even though I was not I did not consider myself a leftist at this time but he was talking about how , well you know , no one's had it as bad as the Jews , and I'm like , I don't know , I have Jewish ancestry . Don't read the comments . They're like Native American people have no) . There are like 2% of the population in this country that is , that is indigenous , and there's like 7% of us that are Jews . It's not that high , it's also like 2 or 3% , but I was just like , and we're not the original inhabitants of this land . So it seems to me that the difference is actually that the Native American genocide was more complete . You didn't succeed , but you came closer .
DanielI mean , a big part of the genocide was by accident , in the sense that it was just diseases that you had , which wiped out like 90% of the population to begin with . But if you like , you know my grandmother in the Holocaust , grandfather in the war and his , you know , his hometown was raised to the ground by the Nazis and the stories you know .
DanielThey wouldn't tell the stories because it's just too you know , it's crazy , like you know , but the stories that I've heard you cry , it's too brutal to understand the death and the destruction and the brutality that they were seeing and that you know anyways . But you read the Native American stories of the residential schools and it's the same fucking thing . You know there's no gas camp , but the child abuse , that's , that's a Holocaust like that's , yeah , the system . At the same thing . It's a systematic , intentional destruction of a population , whereas in the Jews was a physical extermination , but the Native Americans was a cultural extermination , but also we did a pretty good job of physical extermination here .
C. Derick VarnThere's , yeah , there's , but yeah anyways are like , yeah , are like there are none of the indigenous tribes of a newfoundland left none of them , but yeah , so well , that's the pressing now , but but , it's . It's interesting to me how much has been hidden encoding , because I'm like , okay , so now we say so . When I was a kid , we said African Americans and now we say BIPOC , which is particularly strange , but well you're going back to colored people , which was the yeah , the old nomenclature .
C. Derick VarnBut now we're going back to where we privilege certain colored people over others and they think so it's black . Yeah , then , indigenous , then ? People of color ?
Danieland it's terrible because I hate this stuff . But when I see younger people it's kind of like postmodernist gibberish . I absolutely hate postmodern gibberish . I think it's destroying everybody's minds . But then when I meet someone like who's first language is in English and they came as a student and just learned the way they learned in English was in postmodernist gibberish , and then you see them talk , they're actually , they use it in a very genuine way that doesn't have all that demented , obscure , anti-stint tension and you're like okay , I guess this is okay . It's the same thing with all the language that I hate . There's a certain generation of people who are inculcated in that language that they're okay . They mean you know it's like you take a religion like Christianity . It could be the religion of crusades or it could be the religion of vow , of poverty , just depends who's who's taking it .
C. Derick VarnBut yeah , no , I'm with you , what like I don't think . I don't think this rhetoric won't matter , frankly , I mean , it just doesn't matter one way or the other . This is why I don't get all like I dislike it , because it because with with stuff like BIPOC , I'm like okay , so you are trying , like you're trying to signal a privileging of certain kinds of people of color over others , for reasons that I think even make sense , but in doing so , what you're doing is actually okay . You , let's say , you wanted to make a multiracial , anti-racist coalition , but by you know , and there , yes , there is anti-blackness in and community and other communities of color , which I know you don't want to call racism because that would mess up your whole team .
DanielThat would be fine , that everybody's human , which we don't want . We're the same species , which we can't have .
DanielSo now we have to make it purely about anti-black bias , but not , but it's anyway , if you have a hierarchy in your rate in your coalition , you're defeating the coalition . Like a coalition is , by its nature , solidaristic , so when you are privileging some people over others , it's inherently corrosive to the coalition . I think that's all this liberal shit and all these acronyms and all this , everything . That's what that is . It's like me , me , me , me , my , I need attention , I need attention . It's like well , no , right now we're fighting together , so you don't need it . The whole point is that you don't need attention right now . Your time is gonna come , you know . When something comes up , then we'll talk about you when it's relevant , but we're fighting together on this issue , you know .
C. Derick VarnAnd that's , that's the irony of the way intersectionality is coming to be used . I mean , that's not its origins . I mean its origins is like critical legal theory and understanding like , well , sometimes discrimination is because you're both a woman and black .
DanielBut it's been used to hyper silo everybody into these many categories . But I'm actually gonna do a little bonus episode about Kimberly Crenshaw's intersectionality the article when she introduces intersectionality , because I think she talks about class later on in her career in a bit of a clumsy way , but she's if you see what she's doing , she's doing something that makes sense . She's talking about , like anti-discrimination law , you know , would protect women and protect black people . But black women were , were being particularly affected by these layoffs and by the union seniority rules for historical reasons . So when there were layoffs , the black women just all completely got laid off , but as black women they had no protection and the courts ruled well , women aren't being discriminated against , black people aren't being discriminated against , and that's what the anti-discrimination legislation says . There's no category of black women and we can't just open a Pandora's box of every micro identity because that could . There's , you know , everyone's just gonna invent new identities to to make themselves and you know a hundred percent majority has been fired . So we can't do that . So she's saying no , we do have to focus on these , you know , hybrid identities , because it's important . And then you're oppressed , not just as a woman , not just as a black person as a black woman and that all sort of makes sense .
DanielBut then when you're like , wait a second ,
what that ? If that lawsuit would have succeeded , it would have abolished seniority rules in the United States . And guess what ? Seniority rules are the way that you fight discrimination and racism in a workplace . It's the pillar of any union contract . Because if you're not laying people off by seniority , then you're laying people off according to WIM , which means how much you kiss the boss's ass , or if the boss is racist , then he'll fire you for being racist .
DanielAnd the unfortunate thing is , in that period of time because it was just shortly after like 15 years after the civil rights movement and a few years into the women's rights movement black women got the short end of the stick for those historical reasons . But a few 10 years later they would be the ones who'd be the most protected by the seniority clauses . So basically , she was advocating for it , not on purpose , you know . The same way , even kendy isn't advocating for more white people to be homeless on purpose , but he is advocating for that without knowing it . She was advocating for destroying unions all across america and the people who were bringing that lawsuit were inadvertently doing that . And I wonder who funded that lawsuit . But that's what happens when you ignore class .
C. Derick VarnYou know I mean abraham , as kendy has actually done , that has actually said similar things , like explicitly and like what ?
Danielwhat do you mean ? What do you say like ?
C. Derick Varnum . He says that we should not have anti-discrimination rules at all so that we can discriminate positively to remudiate past injustice which I discrimination is . Anyways , yeah , we're going yeah , so so I'm like okay , so , so . But how do you deal with like ? Do you think , just because people won't like discriminate against people like black people , that they aren't going to discriminate against ? I don't know . Yeah , sexual minority groups are that ? Sexual minority groups can't be racist if we like , like this is , and if you allow positive discrimination without some kind of clear reason .
DanielWell , guess what ? Who guess who's going to be the beneficiary of that within 10 years ? White people . They're just going to positively find excuses to benefit . You know , that's what . That's what you need , that legislation , so you don't have that right .
C. Derick VarnI mean I always tell the story of uh dsa chapter that I watched once it hit a ginda quarter problem . They had gone literally through all the women in the organization , putting them in the leadership to maintain their , their quota , and they were burning them out because they were putting them in the leadership immediately as soon as they're not ready , and they're not ready , yeah , to meet their quota . And then when they couldn't , they literally didn't have none of the women would run , and because it already been burnt out , and so they then started flirting with it . I'm serious having straight cisgender men declare themselves non-binary because it's a policy of non-questioning so they could be the gender quota . No stop , where were you ? Conversation that I saw which ?
Danielwhich dsa chapter is this ? Or you my ?
C. Derick Varnlocal one . I'll just leave it at that . Oh , come on now . I will also say that they didn't end up doing that . Um , but that was the . That was a proposed answer until until , frankly , a woman was like . That completely disputes the fear of the law . If that's what you're doing , and I'm like and also what you're doing there .
DanielYou know the whole gender critical , like terphy . You're just giving them up . You're telling them that , yes , everything that you ever say is correct , like that's literally what you're freaking out about , right , and you know that whole movement . It's weird . It's like some traumatized I think there's a lot of traumatized people in that movement and they have like a kernel of sense in there but it's just like taken to crazy extremes . But now you're telling that your worst nightmare , your fantasy , paranoid nightmare vision , ptsd vision of what you're screaming about is here it is . This is worse than anything you guys are even talking about .
C. Derick VarnThis is holy shit I mean , and the thing is this like in general and in general society , that doesn't happen . That's like this is a , this is a um a bubble of like a micro bubble , but it is funny because there isn't which a way in which , like you've created , you have two . Actually you have two contradictory policies where you need gender quotas , but you also want to say that gender identity doesn't matter doesn't exist , it doesn't matter , right ?
C. Derick Varnso you need , so you have , and so those policies are in direct contradiction to each other . Yeah , and don't get me started on . Yeah , um , and ? And then when you throw all the women in your organization , regardless of whether they're cis or trans , and burn them out because you threw them in early to meet your quotas , and you have a 60 percent male organization and instead of making your organization more attractive to women , um , you think that just putting them in , having them reflected in leadership , will fix the problem . Well , and you've burnt out all your female quadres in a local area already yeah well then , what do you got left ?
C. Derick Varnand it's going to lead to all kinds of shenanigans . I don't know that this has ever happened , but the fact that it was discussed and allowed in the bylaws was storm . I was just like what but ?
Danielbut never mind that insane proposal which is of caricature movie uh , you know daily wire plus nightmare scenario proportions . It is also . What you're telling me before is just that they burnt out all their women by shoving them into leader positions that they probably didn't want and weren't ready for . Like that's not , you're not helping women by doing that . That's not good . And well , no , you have women and I bet what happens with that is you have women who are not ready . They don't like what they're , what's happening , they're not good at what they're doing , just because they don't have experience . And then you have an excuse for people to say , oh look , women can't run an organization , you know like . Well , like that's you're just right so .
DanielSo a lot of people respond to this right here and they take this back and they , when they become conservatives or post leftist or whatever they're just like , well , look at that , yeah , and you know like I said , that's the equity stuff , that's a lot and that's that's a legacy of post modernism , like , again , the post post modernism is like every perversion of good ideas , you take something good and you turn it into kaka once it goes into the elite system , right ? So the idea is like categories are not real , they're invented where they're not entirely real . We need to be skeptical of categories . We need to think about them , not take them for granted becomes like all it turns into which is a good observation . And categories can reproduce power , higher fees . That we don't like good observation . So let's focus , let's pay attention to our categories .
DanielNo , instead , it's like throw away all the categories . Nothing means anything , but we still want them to mean something for some , you know , because this has some advantage for , like , it's chaos , it's nonsense , and it becomes that kind of uh , you know how many , how many lights ? You know there are three , how many fingers ? Three fingers , right , there's three fingers . Like that sort of soviet torture stuff . Like that's , it's all , that's , it's all related . Like and it's .
DanielIt is profoundly right-wing stuff , it is hierarchical stuff , it is authoritarian indoctrination , it is just if it happens to be disguised in the language of racial justice , social justice , feminism , uh , or communism in the sense of you know , in the maus it's , that's the , that's the .
DanielThe challenge of being on the left today is making it clear that being on the left is not all this shit that's pretending to be on the left . We need to be able to distinguish between somebody who's on the left and somebody who is on the right , disguised in left-wing costumes . You know and it's , but it's . Listen to what they say and what . Listen to what they do and not what they say , you know . And we need to have definition of what left means for that to be coherent , because now left is just means what people who pretend to be on the left or people with you know , people who declare to be themselves on the left . You can't just left , can't just be what people declare themselves as , because then every crazy person who thinks they're not they're napoleon , is napoleon and that's not . You
can't . No words have to mean something .
C. Derick VarnLet's figure out what we want them to mean and go from there well , thank you so much for coming on , but what can people check out your work ?
Danieloh , uh , what is politics ? Is my youtube channel ? Uh , I'm just like , because it's such a generic word , the way you can find it is podfollow , like podcast , podfollowcom . Slash werbs , w o r b ? S . Be like bernie , and if you're on a desktop , that'll open the youtube channel . If you're on a um mobile device , it'll open up your podcast app and I recommend the video versions , if you have time , to like look at them , because all the jokes and there's so much content that's there that you won't get in the audio versions , um , and also , if it's like youtube , slash what is politics ? 69 , I think you can get them that way and that's about it all right , thank you so much .
C. Derick VarnGreat to talk to you . Great talk to you too .