The Red Thread: A History of Socialist Tradition, Part 2

Part Two of the conversation with C. Derick Varn, host of Varn Vlog. The episode looks at the socialist movement from the 1960s to the present.

Click the image to listen and read along on our website.

**On Tuesday evening, C. Derick Varn will join us AGAIN for Macro ‘n Chill, our weekly community gathering. While listening to this episode, we will have the opportunity to ask questions and engage in discussion about Part Two. June 17th, 8 pm ET/5 pm PT Click HERE to register

The second half of Steve’s conversation with Derick Varn goes into the history of the socialist movement from the 1960s to the present.

Derick traces some of the current factionalism back to the ideological battles between Trotsky and Stalin covered in Part One of this series. This includes the debates on ‘socialism in one country’ versus international socialism. He covers further divisions within Trotskyism, the Red Scare’s successful suppression of the CPUSA, and the formation of the Black Panthers. He describes the rise of Maoism, its influence on student movements in the West, and further ideological splits.

Steve and Derick emphasize that historical developments are always connected to the material conditions of their time. Even the Bernie Sanders movement. They talk of the struggles intrinsic to past and present socialist organizations and reflect on the modern implications of these ideologies and the challenges of organizing under current capitalist conditions.

“In the ‘Eighteenth Brumaire,’ Marx talks about how all great revolutions play-act a revolutionary moment of the past. So, for him… he talked about the English Civil War and the Bible, and the French Revolution, and the Roman Empire. 

“We are stuck LARPing the past because we don’t know what the future is.”

C. Derick Varn is a poet, teacher, and political theorist. He is the host of Varn Vlog. He was a reader at Zer0 books from 2015 to 2021. He spent most of the 2010s outside the U.S. in the Republic of Korea, Mexico, and Egypt. He is the author of the poetry collections, Apocalyptics and Liberation and All the Bright Etcetera.

Find all his links at https://allmylinks.com/dionysuseatsyou

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FULL TRANSCRIPT with EXTRAS

Steve Grumbine:
00:00:42

Hi folks, this is Steve from Macro N Cheese bringing you Part Two of my conversation with C. Derick Varn. Last week in Part One we talked about the genealogy of leftist factions.

We looked at history from pre-Communist Manifesto anarchism to modern socialism and at key figures like Marx, Bakunin and Trotsky. Part Two of our discussion starts with a breakdown of the various factions within Trotskyism and Marxist-Leninist movements.

Narrator:
00:01:14

If you enjoyed the Red Thread Part One, welcome back. You are in for lots more socialist history and loads of “Varnecdotes”. You will not be disappointed. Thanks again for patronizing our podcast.

We appreciate your support.

Here’s a quick recap of some of the Part One highlights full of historical facts detailing the underpinnings of socialist thought, laying the groundwork and drawing up the blueprint for generations of revolutionaries to come. From Trotsky to Kautsky this has truly been a PhD-level history lesson untainted by Western imperialist propaganda. We touched on the timeless Trotsky-versus-Stalin beef.

Derick Varn:
00:01:53

Trotsky and Stalin were kind of two different kind of leaders that Lenin really seemed to invest in.

Narrator:
00:02:02

Specifically how these two brilliant men empowered by and occasionally drawing the ire of Papa Lenin himself envisioned significantly different ideological architecture to build successful revolution.

And emphasizing the importance of the “socialism in one country” versus “international socialism” debate.

Derick Varn:
00:02:20

We can see here that the socialism-one-country debate is a big deal.

And it’s because it doesn’t really get settled until Lenin’s dead, because the period that it comes up, 1919 to 1922, is in some ways one of the most violent periods of non-explicit wartime in European history.

Narrator:
00:02:42

We revealed the true bearer of the Red Terror.

Derick Varn:
00:02:46

The Red Terror had been brutal. In fact, Lenin encouraged it, but he also had to put a stop to it.

And Lenin did put a stop to it in 1921 because they had gone too far in basically terrorizing peasants. Now if you think it was Stalin doing that, you’d be wrong. The person who led and justified the Red Terror to Kautsky was Trotsky.

Narrator:
00:03:09

There’s been a plethora of difficult names to pronounce and many splinters of Communist thought have been denounced. Yet we still need to clarify the most efficient path for the bourgeoisie to be balanced.

So strap in, buckle down and get ready yet again to paint the town red.

Steve Grumbine:
00:03:26

What follows is the conclusion of my interview with C. Derick Varn.

Derick Varn:
00:03:32

All right, so to go into this crazy history a little more. So you have some defectors from Trotskyism in America early on. Then you have a bunch of major breaks.

There are the orthodox Trotskyists, which are the SWP, the American Socialist Workers Party, and then there is the Spartacist League who were even more orthodox. They were Soviet defensists, but they kind of split over a bunch of stuff, actually.

But the big thing was the American SWP being soft on Cuba, although there was also debates about people who condemn Cuba even more, calling Cuba “state capitalist.” Okay. Then there were the other splits and there’s a ton of them and I’m not going to go through all of them.

But the big ones were third campism, which was you should oppose both capitalism and Marxist-Leninism and support the organized working class as a third camp. That was associated with Hal Draper and it had two different theories backing up.

One was bureaucratic collectivism, which was the idea that the bureaucracy had taken over the Soviet Union and really existed as a separate class from the workers at this point. And then state capitalism, which was the position of primarily the British Trotskyist Tony Cliff. And he got that from Left Communists.

I’ve mentioned the Left Communists briefly, but I don’t want to go into all that because that gets really confusing.

But basically that the Soviet Union was just a capitalist state engaging in state capitalism because Lenin had mentioned in one article in the 1910s [Oh my God.]

Maybe there’s two articles, but it doesn’t come up a lot, that if you didn’t have a democratic bourgeois revolution first you might have to go through a state capitalist period.

And these ultra leftists took that in the New Economic Policy, which was a thing advocated by[Nikolai] Bukharin to keep the peasants in, which reintroduced some elements of a market economy to the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, after the Civil War and the Red Terror made the Soviet Union really a capitalist state, but instead of private capitalists, the state itself was a capitalist. Now I don’t like this theory.

I’ve never liked this theory, partly because the various different theorists of state capitalism don’t agree on what element of capitalism the Soviet Union had. But nonetheless, I will say the state capitalist people, they’re really soft on NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization].

Steve Grumbine:
00:05:55

Yes.

Derick Varn:
00:05:57

Really, really soft on NATO. And they still are.

And unfortunately they are the dominant form of Trotskyism in the United States because it was imported in from Britain when the SWP kind of collapsed in the 1980s. The other SWP, the SWP UK, not the SWP US. I really do wish these people would come up with more diverse names.

Steve Grumbine:
00:06:19

I feel like I’m watching a Monty Python movie.

Derick Varn:
00:06:21

Yeah, it is that bad. That Monty Python movie is actually making fun of this.

Steve Grumbine:
00:06:28

Um, that’s great. This is so wonderful. Keep going.

Derick Varn:
00:06:32

But the SWP UK really grew in the alter globalization movement and started branching back out because there was a representative of the international socialist tendency, which was their international in the United States going back to Hal Draper. And they really took advantage of the alter globalization movement in the 90s. And they also had a pretty big publication apparatus behind them.

So Haymarket Books, parts of New Left Review, all those things, they were kind of loosely affiliated with that tendency.

My big thing about Tony Cliff is he seems to have become oddly enamored of state capitalism to condemn the USSR during the Vietnam War, which I must admit, even though there is no evidence he was part of like the British security apparatus, seems pretty suspect to me. I don’t know. I feel like there’s a clear good side on that one. But nonetheless.

Then there were the Soviet Defencists, which I mean, the Orthodox Trotskyists, the Spartacist League, the World Workers Party by Sam Marcy [Sam Ballan], the SWP US. So they were critical of the Soviet Union.

They would call it a “deformed worker state,” but they said that we had to stand up and defend it against imperialist and capitalist aggression, no matter what, even if we didn’t like the party running it. So they were more forgiving of the Soviet Union. One branch of that group, Sam Marcy supported Khrushchev and rolling the tanks to Hungary and to Prague.

One of the codes for quote, “Marxist-Leninists” is to call them “tankies.” But one of the funny things about that is that’s a reference to rolling the tanks into Hungary and the Hungarian insurrection.

What I find funny about that is there are Trotskyists, Sam Marcy, who supported rolling the tanks in. And there are even a few Maoists–arguably Marxist-Leninists and thus Stalinists– who opposed it.

Mao himself didn’t, but there were a few Maoist groups who did. So that’s fun.

Steve Grumbine:
00:08:35

The contradictions keep coming.

Derick Varn:
00:08:37

Yeah. This is why, when you ask me, “Why do I identify with any of these people?” And the answer is, “Not really.” I mean, I respect all these founders.

Well, most of these founders. But the longer you go on, the weirder this stuff gets. Because divisions in Trotskyism are all about what you think the Soviet Union was.

Which kind of makes it wild that they come back as a major tendency in the United States after 1992. Because really after 1992, a lot of the stuff that the Trotskyists hated each other over, was over.

So the Trotskyists split among the third campists, the orthodox Trotskyists. Then there’s this thing called “Pabloism“, which is kind of like the Trotskyist version of Third Worldism.

Its key idea was to turn to mass parties as opposed to like tendencies and counter internationals to start a separate Fourth International. All the Fourth Internationals are Trotskyist, and there’s more than one of them, which is also super confusing.

I think there’s like six or seven Fourth Internationals. [Wow] Super great. But they really supported the national liberation movements of the 1950s.

So they kind of mirror, although for different ideological reasons, Third Worldists.

One of the things I find fascinating, the way I kind of describe this, in short, is the divisions in both the capitalist and communist worlds in the 50s, 60s and 70s actually caused splits among Trotskyist or Leninist, and Marxist-Leninist or Stalinist, to the point that you have Trotskyist groups that agree in policy, although not in theory, more with Marxist-Lenin groups who disagree with each other in policy, but not in theory more than they do Trotskyist groups.

Steve Grumbine:
00:10:20

Wow.

Derick Varn:
00:10:21

Which is wild, but it’s definitely true. And the other thing that happens is by the time you get to the Sino-Soviet Split in the 60s, communists are killing each other en masse.

Now there have been mass purges of Trotskyists in Asia that were very violent. I don’t want to play that down.

But the Communist group that Marxist-Leninists killed the most was different kinds of Marxist-Leninists in wars between communist nation states in the 1960s. And that is why you get this weird popularity. In America from the 60s forward, there’s a CPUSA. The CPUSA is kind of old hat, frankly.

It’s associated with both Stalin and Khrushchev. And COINTELPRO encourages Maoist factions, and we know COINTELPRO did this. This is not me being conspiratorial, this is declassified…to air their grievances and thus cause a split in the CPUSA. One of those splits became the [Black] Panthers.

Well, the Panthers kind of grew up independently, but people out of the CPUSA who left the CPUSA became the Panthers early on. There’s also members attached to Pan-Africanism who are attached to the Panthers.

Panthers are kind of not easily said to be a CPUSA split, but the Revolutionary Communist Party and unfortunately, when I was talking about people with too many of the same names, this one’s going to come up all over the place. And both Maoist, [Enver] Hoxha-ist, and Trotskyists have parties that use the name. It’s real fun.

But the Revolutionary Communist Party now associated with Bob Avakian also emerges from this time period after a group split off from the CPUSA and moves into opposing the CPUSA. So I do need to mention briefly the factions of Marxist-Leninism.

And I don’t have time to go through all of these and what all their specific differences are, but I just want to emphasize there are this many factions. So this is one of the reasons why this is really hard to talk about.

Steve Grumbine:
00:12:10

Sure.

Derick Varn:
00:12:11

The factions of Marxist-Leninism include: Anti-Revisionist Marxist-Leninism, Khrushchevite Marxist-Leninism, Brezhnevite Marxist-Leninism, Gorbachev Marxist-Leninism.

They also include Ho Chi Minh Thought, Mao Zedong Thought, Marxist-Leninism Maoism, Marxist-Leninism Internationalist Maoism, Maoist Third Worldism, Socialism with Chinese characteristics, Dengism [Deng Xiaoping Theory], Xi-ism [Xi Jinping Thought], Khmer Rouge Thought, Shining Path and Gonzaloism. So if you didn’t notice, I mentioned four different forms of Maoism.

The one that is predominant today is either Dengism or Xi-ism, because Xi [Jinping] obviously runs the country.

Deng is the person who established the [People’s Republic of China] PRC’s current constitution in 1982, opened up production to the West, but cracked down on theoretical influence of the West simultaneously. But historically speaking, Maoists in the West actually took a hostile stance to the Soviet Union and even took a hostile stance to China after 1982.

Steve Grumbine:
00:13:14

Wow.

Derick Varn:
00:13:15

So Maoism and Trotskyism, because of their influence on the student movement and because the CPUSA was kind of decimated in the 1950s. To put it in perspective, in 1946, after the end of World War II, the CPUSA had 80,000 members roughly, between 70 and 80,000.

According to various records that I found, by 1953 they had 5,000 members.

Steve Grumbine:
00:13:41

Oh, wow.

Derick Varn:
00:13:42

Right? That party was decimated by the Red Scare. Most of the people didn’t die, but they denounced themselves. They fled to Europe.

And then when they started to recover in the late 50s, the beginnings of the Sino-Soviet split, split the party again. And they really weren’t that involved in the New Left when the New Left emerged in the middle of the 60s out of the civil rights movement.

So the CPUSA was kind of left behind. It played a major role in the civil rights movement and in maintaining black culture.

It played a major role in the trade union until all the trade unionists affiliated with the CPUSA were purged in the early 50s, good old Taft-Hartley [Act] allowed Eisenhower to mandate that. But by the 60s it was a shell of itself and most of its membership was about 10 to 15 years older than most of the leftists around them.

And the Sino-Soviet split really exacerbated this problem. And like I said, it is true that the CIA and FBI encouraged people.

A lot of the people they encouraged were not members of the CIA and FBI themselves. But COINTELPRO did encourage people through informants and basically spooks, to exacerbate things that caused the CPUSA to split up even further. So while it would have been natural for the CPUSA to benefit from the national liberation movements of the 60s, it really kind of didn’t.

Because between COINTELPRO in our country, and the Sino-Soviet split in the Communist bloc, I shouldn’t say the Soviet bloc, the Marxist-Leninists were dividing up into a ton of groups themselves. And to get to Maoism and where this is so complicated and even saying what Maoism is is really difficult.

So what are some Maoist things that are different from Marxist-Leninism? Okay, so some things that are similar: Still democratic centralists. Still have a vanguard party.

They believe in a mass line which includes at first the proletariat and the peasant. Then by the time Mao comes up with the idea of “New Democracy“, it also includes the non-comprador.

So nationalist and anti-imperialist elements of the bourgeoisie and parts of the petit bourgeoisie. That’s what New Democracy means. That’s why there’s five stars on the Chinese flag.

Even other Marxist-Leninists like Hoxha and Albania criticized Mao for this. Some Maoists criticizes Mao for this. Okay, so that’s one difference. Then there’s also the Greater Contradiction theory.

Now I will say all Third International Forward Communists are anti-imperialist. And most Second International forward, not all, but most Second International forward Socialists were anti-imperialist until after World War II.

But Maoism has a specific theory of anti-imperialism that is different from traditional Marxist-Leninism and from Trotskyism. It still comes up. It came up. It was voted on in the CPUSA Congress, I think, last year, all right? And they voted it down.

But there’s an idea of the Greater Contradiction. So Mao thought that imperialism was a bigger problem than capitalism.

Now Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky would all say imperialism as we know it is a result of capitalism. Mao flipped the order. Okay, so you fight Imperialism first, then you fight capitalism after imperialism is defeated. And that justifies class coalition.

Now, some people have pointed out that there are kind of two factions in the Chinese Communist Party before Mao really became the leader.

And one faction, ironically, has a theory that unfortunately was shared by the fascists, and that is the idea of a proletarian nation, that an imperialized nation is actually all proletariat because it’s a proletariat to other nations. That is the idea. And unfortunately, it was developed in China separately from the fascists.

But it is an ideology that was in the Chinese Communist Party. It was represented by Li Dazhao, who formed the party. And then the other faction in the Chinese Communist Party was Chen Duxiu (I think, I’m bad at Mandarin) who gets denounced as a Trotskyist. But he actually kind of held to the idea that you need to develop productive forces.

And after he got kicked out and called a Trotskyist in 1929, he actually became one. But he’s actually one of the people who recruited Mao into the party.

One of the things that makes the early history of the Chinese Communist Party and its relationship to Marxist-Leninism so difficult is the Chinese Communist Party wasn’t picked to represent China in the Comintern. The Kuomintang was, the KMT, the bourgeois party, because Sun Yat-sen was a united frontist, basically himself, and he was a socialist.

But he also thought they needed to develop capitalist forces. And this becomes a real problem. And this is actually one of the things Trotsky throws at Stalin.

But this is a real problem for the Communist Party because the right wing of the Kuomintang massacres them and starts a civil war. [Jesus Christ.] So that is what starts the tension between the USSR and Chinese Communist Party.

But ironically, Mao, once the crucial secrecy happens, Mao actually claims that one, Stalin was 80% good, 20% bad, or 70% good, 30% bad.

It’s something like that which ironically, Deng says about Mao himself, and that they do have critiques of Stalin, even though they also say they’re the only true heirs of Stalin, which is part of why things really go crazy after the Sino-Soviet split happens. But then Maoist ideology keeps training. So the next thing that happens is this thing associated with the Left of Mao.

People that were later denounced as ultra-leftist, not just the Gang of Four, but also a General called Lin Biao, which was Third Worldism. Now, Third Worldism got redeveloped in the West in the 80s. So Third Worldism today is actually a different ideology from Third Worldism in China in the 60s.

But it was the idea that the First World was the United States and the USSR together, the Second World was Europe, and the Third World was the Non-Aligned Movement, the underdeveloped world, India, Southeast Asian countries, et cetera. Now you can already see kind of a glaring problem with this. What are you doing associated in the USSR with the United States?

And one of the things that makes for me talking about the Sino-Soviet split so hard is in the early period I side with the Chinese, but when you get to the 60s and 70s, they’re doing stuff like protecting [Augusto] Pinochet.

Steve Grumbine:
00:20:25

Oh, wow.

Derick Varn:
00:20:26

Just to piss off the Soviet Union and cooperating with the US doing backdoor stuff to support the Khmer Rouge to fight the Vietnamese. Now, I don’t want to make the Vietnamese sound totally innocent.

They did some pretty horrible stuff to ethnic Chinese people in Vietnam as a response to this.

I don’t want to make anyone sound like they’re super clean, but this is what I meant by ML’s (Marxist-Leninists) were killing Marxist-Leninists in way larger numbers than they ever killed Trotskyists. Because Cambodia goes to war with Vietnam and that also means by auxiliary, China and Russia are proxy fighting through this.

And to make it worse, China and Russia almost go to war twice during the Sino-Soviet split. Doesn’t happen. It does happen with India, it doesn’t happen with China, but it almost happens.

Steve Grumbine:
00:21:15

Wow.

Derick Varn:
00:21:16

So it makes talking about this very contentious because these ideas trickle down into the West and Western Maoism gets kind of strange, particularly in France, but also in the United States. One, it’s very popular mostly with students, to be quite frank, in France and in the US. Maoism is pretty influential on campuses.

It’s pretty influential in the various splits in the New Left. But these were not people at that time period who were largely in unions.

A lot of them came out of the SDS, the Students for Democratic Society and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, just like a lot of Trotskyists did.

This is in that time period where a downplaying or even an abandonment of class amongst even Communists in the West. And the Sino-Soviet split was used as a justification for that. Now, did these people actually know that much about the reality of the Sino-Soviet split? Not really.

Even people like [Noam] Chomsky are famously called on getting stuff like, you know, Chomsky was really soft on the Khmer Rouge and there are even Communists today who really call him out on that. And that’s from the late 60s and 70s where he did that. And then there’s the Cultural Revolution and the Collective Period.

Now, my unpopular opinion is a Cultural Revolution actually is forestalled a civil war. But like the purges, which I haven’t talked a lot about because it’s super complicated, but like, the purges got out of hand real fast.

There was a lot of ethnic killings because they were associated with classes. There was a ton of death.

But one of the things that makes the Cultural Revolution really different from the purges is that it wasn’t like the secret police abducting political enemies. It was people battling each other in the street or committing suicide after they got struggle-sessioned.

And one of the things I point out is like, Soviet life expectancy, for a variety of reasons, stalled during the purges and during the interwar period in general. And like I said, it’s not just because of Stalin’s leadership. There’s a variety of things going on there.

Although their economic production was pretty astounding, actually. During the Cultural Revolution, as bloody as it got, life expectancy continued to rise in China. So the idea that it was like everybody killing everybody else, and it was all led by Mao personally, there just isn’t a lot of evidence for that.

And also, Mao critiqued Stalin for killing too many of the old Bolsheviks. Like they imprisoned Liu Shaoqi, and he may or may not have had Lin Biao killed, but Mao was at odds with Deng Xiaoping.

He didn’t kill him, he just sent him to the countryside. So Mao played basically again, three basic factions off of each other. There was the Gang of Four and the Left.

There was the Center, usually associated with Zhou Enlai and with a group of people called the Nothingness. And they’re often forgotten because they are actually the people who took charge when The Gang of Four is purged in 1978.

But they’re so not important that we just automatically think that it was Deng who did that, because Deng is rehabilitated by that group, but he actually doesn’t come to power until 1981. So there’s kind of a debate in factions in China.

One thing I don’t like that’s happening in online discourse right now from people, I think misunderstanding Domenico Losurdo‘s book is they’ll say stuff like, “Oh, the capitalist rotor accusation.” And all these, like, anti-PRC Maoists are all product of the CIA. If you know the history, there may have been CIA involvement in America.

CIA is involved in everything, particularly in the 50s and 60s.

Steve Grumbine:
00:24:50

Right.

Derick Varn:
00:24:51

But the divisions actually do come out of China, and Mao was kind of trying to figure out how to make it work, particularly once the Sino-Soviet split meant that he also didn’t have anyone to join up with. But then neither did the Soviet Union.

I mean, if you think about it, if the Soviet Union and the PRC had played their cards better, that whole block that they imagined was going to happen with Germany would have happened there.

[Yeah] But it doesn’t happen because frankly, I think the cultural chauvinism of some of the Russians and some miscalculations on the part of the Comintern [Communist International] led to some real resentment that boiled over. And when Mao came to power, he really did not get along with Nikita Khrushchev.

And he really did, to put it another way, he did resent the USSR not really treating them as an equal once they had their revolution. Because if you go back to what Stalin said about “Only really large countries can do the socialism-in-one-country thing.”

Well, he’s got a point that China’s a really large country. [Right.] It’s a multi-ethnic country. There’s no reason to treat them like they are not at least potential equals.

But Maoism itself kind of splits in the 70s and 80s outside of China. This is not in China. A bunch of new Maoist ideologies developed.

The first one kind of is in France, it’s called Mao-spontex and it’s kind of a mixture of Maoism and anarchism. And it’s like if you watch French neorealist cinema from the 70s and the 60s, when they’re showing Maoists, that’s what they’re showing.

Those are also some of the Maoists who sided with the university protesters in 1968, in May ’68.

But in Latin America there was people who held to Mao Zedong thought, who thought the differences in Maoism and traditional Marxist-Leninism was unique to underdeveloped countries, specifically in Asia. And that in Asia you should do what Mao said. But in capitalist countries, even in Latin America, you should do what Stalin said.

That was Mao Zedong thought. It was like this is what’s for the underdeveloped world, for the semi-developed world, for the go do the Soviet path. That was their stance.

But then there were other people, the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist who said “No, Mao’s revisions of the mass line New Democracy should apply to all communist movements. And then that split around the Third Worldist movement.

And then when Deng rehabilitated Bukharin, which he did do, there were market socialist-friendly people who glommed onto that and thought that that’s where, particularly in Europe, where the Marxist-Leninist parties could go because also there’s a new ideology that I haven’t mentioned yet that developed as kind of a hybrid of social democracy with Marxist-Leninism called Eurocommunism.

And that was the big debate in the communist parties in Europe is whether or not you were faithful to the USSR, you became a Eurocommunist, or you sided with one of the forms of Maoism. And then 1992 happened and everything got even weirder. So are you a Stalinist? Which kind? And what does that mean? Are you a Trotskyist? Which kind?

I don’t tend to call people that. In fact, I don’t general call people Stalinist or Trotskyist period.

I try to call them by what party they belong to or what tendency they belong belong to, because there’s so many differences. But those aren’t easy answers and people say, “Oh, that’s a cop-out position.”

But I’m here to tell you that all these people won big and all these people screwed up. And I would even go back to say that’s true even with Marx.

Like Marx, for example in the 1850s thought the Revolution was inevitable because the impoverishment of the proletariat in France and that the revolution was going to pop off in England and France and it was going to be because of immiseration. Later Marx doesn’t believe that. All right? And that’s a reasonable belief probably in 1851, but it’s not a reasonable belief by 1860.

So none of these people have a consistent ideology. And then there are post versions of all this too. Just like there’s postmodernism, there’s post-Maoism, that’s [Alain] Badiou.

These are more academic trends though, to be quite honest. Sure, there’s post-Maoism. There’s post-Trotskyism, which is not so much an academic trend, that is the Marxist humanist on one side and the platypus affiliated society on another. They come out of Trotskyist traditions. Actually there’s another form of post-Trotskyism that probably they will get mad that I mentioned this.

But the Marxist-Leninist group, the Party for Socialism and Liberation is a split from the World Workers Party and they claim to be ideological descendants of Sam Marcy, even though they are defenders of Marxist-Leninism or even defenders of Stalin and Mao for sure. They have a Trotskyist origin if you trace the party that they split from.

So they’re effectively Marxist-Leninist post-Trotskyist [interesting.] Which doesn’t make a lot of sense until you know their history.

Steve Grumbine:
00:30:03

Jesus Christ, man. You realize you are the guru. I’m coming to Varn to see Derick Varn every time I need to understand something like this.

Because for me, like, honestly, I remember and this is a slight deviation from what we’re talking about, but I think you’ll appreciate this. I was a little boy. I was in Cub Scouts, and the Cub Scout troop was sponsored by St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. And so we were expected to attend.

And I’m not a Catholic. I’m none of that. And I had no idea what I was doing. And I have to go to Mass, and everybody was doing all these different things.

And I went to reach for the bread, and the lady goes, “Oh, no, you’re not a Catholic.” And I will never forget that. It was like, I don’t even know why I’m here. What am I doing? Why am I here? You know?

And I was just a little boy, and my parents clearly didn’t know what the hell was going on, God rest their souls. But it was a weirdest experience and it stuck with me.

And those kinds of barriers, those kinds of exclusionary barriers, there’s high entry points to being part of the clan, right? I think people want to be part of something. I think that desire to be part of something is as great as any ideological split.

Because most people I talk to, they’re about a meme away from being a communist. They’re using framing, they’re using words that clearly are not part of modern society.

They’re talking in terms that have absolutely zero to do with, dare I say, the material conditions of today. It’s almost like a Dungeons and Dragons game for politicos. And they’re like cosplaying early 19th century stuff.

You can almost see them wearing the clothing, and you can almost see them just putting on, like, an outfit to blend in, to fit in, to be part of something. Desperate for acceptance, desperate for camaraderie. And I appreciate that at some weird level, but for me, that’s the barrier. And I understand that, for me, anyway, I don’t see any hope in where we’re at in this current scenario. I don’t know how you get out of this.

And the thirst for truth and the thirst for knowledge keeps pushing me into places, but the barriers to each one. It’s kind of like learning the textbook of Spanish and talk it in front of people. And they’re like, “Dude, what dialect?”

Derick Varn:
00:32:31

Right?

Steve Grumbine:
00:32:32

And you’re like, “Oh, okay, never mind, forget it. I’m sorry.” I sound like an idiot, don’t I?

Intermission:
00:32:41

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website, realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

Derick Varn:
00:33:05

That latter is actually an experience I actually had when I was living in Mexico.

And I was like, “Oh, the version of Spanish that I was taught in school is made up.”

And by that, I’m not saying they aren’t real words, but like we got taught Latin American Spanish and it was like a smathering of different dialects kind of squished together with some American Chicano in there. And like nobody actually speaks that dialect. It’s kind of made up for school.

And I feel similarly about a lot of these ideologies because there’s historical reasons why to develop why they were that make sense once you learn them.

But the way they are fought today on the Internet and in the 70s and 80s and late 60s in college campuses is so far removed from those real work conditions, particularly in the capitalist core, that to me, it’s actually a sign of failure. And not just because they’re LARPing [Live Action Role-Playing]. I’ll tell you what I mean.

In [The 18th] de Brumaire [of Louis Boneparte], Marx talks about how all great revolutions kind of play act a kind of revolutionary moment of the past. So for him, he talked about the English civil war and the Bible and the French Revolution and the Roman Empire.

And to some degree, I kind of think that’s what we’re doing. Until we discover what’s going to be a proper way forward for us, we are stuck LARPing the past because we don’t know what the future is.

And the past is at least play actable and kind of sort of not really comprehensible. And I say kind of sort of not really, because most people tell themselves a mythic version of this history. Like when you go to research this stuff. And some of the stuff, I will admit, is slightly my interpretation because I had to read liberal sources, ideological sources, opposed ideological sources. I had to find translations to stuff from other languages.

And sometimes if it’s a language that I read, like German or even, you know, I have a basic understanding of Korean.

I had to go to the original source because even when you picked up with people from these historical traditions, they’re often small, obscure, and a lot of people who fell into them were very young. For most of the late 20th century, that was college students.

Today it’s people who are very online and also college students and activists. But I mean Marxist-Leninists that when you push them are council communists, that when you push them they’re 19. I’m not saying they’re not workers, but they’re probably not workers.

Steve Grumbine:
00:35:37

Right.

Derick Varn:
00:35:38

And I don’t blame anyone for that. That’s perfectly rational. And like Marx talks about that, that’s kind of how these things work.

Until you find something that actually works and it happens, the subjective and objective conditions, to use Lenin’s phrase about this line up, you’re stuck LARPing. And the thing I say about that is we’re all LARPing until we accidentally realize that we’re not. We don’t know when this is going to happen.

The one thing I will say about all this and why I got interested in modern monetary theory is I realized that while Marx does mention non-commodity and credit money, there is a truth to the fact that Marx did not really think about fiat currencies all that seriously because he didn’t think any state was powerful enough to enforce it in his lifetime. Whether or not he was right about that is kind of hard to say. But what is absolutely sure is that’s not true now.

There are definitely plenty of countries that can successfully enforce the fiat currency and thus exists under modern monetary conditions. Not even in the policies that modern monetary advocates will advocate for. I mean, just descriptively.

Steve Grumbine:
00:36:51

Sure.

Derick Varn:
00:36:52

Money is not necessarily a commodity anymore in and of itself. We don’t use commodity money almost anywhere except as a backstop for forex. It’s not used as a primary currency.

And when you do use it as a primary currency, it’s a problem.

But my critiques of modern monetary theory is not that it’s wrong, but that most mainstream modern monetary theorists do not evaluate class or production in a serious way. And that’s a problem too. Like in modern monetary theory, what’s the limit to inflation? It’s your productive capacity, right?

Steve Grumbine:
00:37:34

Yes.

Derick Varn:
00:37:35

You know, that’s a real problem. And how do you offset productive capacity? Well, can you be a forex currency or not? Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

And that rhymes with Marxism, but it is different. The other thing that Marxists didn’t really deal with and they couldn’t have until after World War II.

And that is the extent of the integration and the entire world economy between the state and capital in a way that was not true. I mean it’s never been that capital just existed outside of the state. I know better. Like I don’t believe that Adam Smith myth.

Marx may or may not have believed that. I’ve read almost everything I can get by Marx in English. And I still don’t really know if he believed that or not.

But it’s clear to me that Marxists and their theory of revolution is based on 19th century technology and 19th century assumptions about the state. And that only begins to change with Lenin.

Which is why even though I have critiques of Lenin too, I do not think a serious Marxist can just drop all the Lenin out, even though it’d make our life so much easier because it gets rid of the baggage of the Cold War and all the stuff I talked about today.

I didn’t even get into the Cold War and all this, but all the divisions that developed in Communism both intellectually on campuses and ideal in philosophy departments in Europe and in sectarian debates, both in the streets and between nation states, it would be nice and a lot of people have tried from the 1960s forward to kind of make that all go away. But the first person to predict the integration of the capitalist economy with the state and that it would have on geopolitics was Bukharin in his treatises on imperialism which Lenin combined with some non-Marxist theories by Hobson and the theory of monopoly capital by the social Democrat [Rudolf] Hilferding and created a new synthesis theory that he released in a very short speech/pamphlet called Imperialism the Highest, or if we translated the Russian more correctly, the *Latest* Stage of Capitalism.

Steve Grumbine:
00:39:51

You know, I gotta tell you, I got to read that a long time ago and it was kind of weird. Like I almost felt like I could be reading a newspaper today.

So much like in chapter nine, which is the one that stands out most to me, really, really stuck with me. I mean seeing finance capital and the way I could almost see the IMF predating upon giving these loans out.

And I saw all that in there and it really was very, very interesting. I’ll leave it at that.

Derick Varn:
00:40:19

Right. And what are the real tensions? And this goes back to Engels and Marxism is there’s two tendencies.

There’s a tendency called the theory of rate of profits to fall and a tendency called the monopolization of capital and the collectivization of profits. Right? So Engels talks about the efficiency needed of centralization leading to monopolies.

But monopolies are anti-competitive and that puts tensions on capital. But he also thinks that’s actually going to be a way that we socialize production in and of itself.

Because in a way, in a very perverse way actually, the bourgeoisie has actually figured out how to socialize gains in the joint stock company and Engels saw that. Hilferding thought you could use that basically to just take them over democratically by the state after they were capitalized. And Lenin follows him up to that point and says, “No, they’ll never allow that. And this is going to lead to capitalists fighting each other.”

Now there was another theory by Kautsky called ultra-imperialism where he didn’t see the capitalists fighting each other because their capital was so integrated. And that was clearly wrong in 1917.

But weirdly, if you look at the Fordist period, Kautsky was kind of right, but he’s not right now. We are back in, you know, a multipolar world, which could be a good thing. I don’t want to say it’s necessarily a bad thing. I’m not one of these proponents of a unipolar world.

But all that means is there’s multiple civilizational states or great powers that are going to compete with each other with highly integrated economies.

And that world does look a lot more like what Lenin described in 1917 than the 1950s, where you had this unified unipolar capitalist world against a semi-unified unipolar communist world. So you had a bipolar world and not a multipolar world with two unified poles.

And today we have a lot more similarity to the 19th century in the way that things are and a lot more similarity to the precursors to World War I. That for example, is… I have critiques of the PRC and the Chinese Communist Party, but I’m a defencist on China.

By that I mean I defend it as having real socialists in it and really trying to, albeit imperfectly and often I even think suppressing other workers movements at times, but trying to maintain a broad populist (in the 19th century sense of that term) allegiance of the common people led by the proletariat and a party that’s made up largely of engineers and lawyers. But they aren’t billionaires.

Steve Grumbine:
00:43:02

Right.

Derick Varn:
00:43:03

And you know, I’ll defend that. Do I think it’s communism? No. Do I think they could be on the road to communism? Maybe.

I’m not going to just accept everything China does, but I’m willing to critically see that out. I don’t think that means you have to never criticize China, particularly during the Sino-Soviet split.

There’s stuff that China did that I have a hard time thinking was okay. If you’re any kind of communist, there’s some stuff that happened that’s hard to justify.

And it’s ironic because in some ways though, the Chinese during the collective period really did try to quickly do what Marx described in the Critique of the Gotha Program. I always mispronounce it. And even to the point of getting off of currency, which I don’t actually think was super smart, although a younger me did.

Steve Grumbine:
00:43:56

Sure, I can appreciate that. A lot of people think that way.

Derick Varn:
00:44:01

I do think you need a mediator of information. I don’t think, however, that the quote “free market”, whatever the hell that is, which I don’t think has ever actually existed.

Steve Grumbine:
00:44:10

It’s a unicorn, it’s fake.

Derick Varn:
00:44:12

Right. Kind of like market equilibrium, which would require the abolition of time. [Yes] So, so it’s not something I take seriously.

But I do think that none of these states are perfect. I don’t think we should sugarcoat that either.

I think if we try to downplay some of the atrocities that happened, we actually lose people because they will meet somebody who lived through this and had a bad experience. Not all of them are gusanos, for those of you who don’t know what that means, that’s Spanish for worm.

But it means people who fled Cuba, who are bourgeois, our upper middle class, who fled Cuba because they wanted to keep their privilege. Not all of them are gusanos.

There are people who I think have legitimate reasons for feeling the way they do, particularly in Vietnam and Cambodia, but in a lot of places. Nor do I think we can turn a blind eye to, you know, the Medvedev Forest massacre or the Yezhovshchina or what we call the purges.

But I also don’t think it was concocted in the evil mind of one man. Nor do I think that Stalin, for whatever I might fault him, was just a cynical actor.

And sometimes my critique of Stalin is that he wanted peace too much with the West and that was a compromise period. That’s not a critique you hear all that often. And a lot of people would be horrified by it. But. And he was preparing for war with the West.

The war he was preparing for in the 30s was not with Nazis. He knew he was going to have to fight the Nazis eventually. It wasn’t like he didn’t know that.

But he thought he was going to have to fight the British and French first. And he didn’t really know where the Americans were going to line up, but he suspected they’d probably line up with the British and French.

He was not expecting Hitler to not act rationally. Because you got to remember the Wehrmacht, the primary source of a lot of the steel after 1938 was the USSR. So them invading the USSR seemed insane.

And one thing I’ve often faulted Marxists for is thinking that their enemies are rational, because often they’re not. And we often get blindsided by that. And it has world historic consequences.

But, you know, my point is Stalin cannot be seen as just a scary myth or as a guy who just screwed up the Soviet Union, nor can he be seen as a unilateral hero. But neither can you do that with Trotsky or Bukharin or even Lenin himself. And you can’t even do it with Marx and Engels. They all made mistakes.

They’re human. Some of those mistakes cost the lives of hundreds of thousands or millions of people, and we shouldn’t forget that.

But to think that they set out to do that, I just have a hard time believing that. [Yeah] That’s my stance.

And that’s why I find this debate so frustrating, because it’s just like, can we stop talking about these mythic people and just look at the history for a second? And a lot of it’s ugly. A lot of it really is ugly. But do we think that the liberal order came about bloodlessly?

Steve Grumbine:
00:47:26

I don’t think any orthodoxy comes in bloodlessly.

Derick Varn:
00:47:30

No, it doesn’t, unfortunately. And I don’t want to sound like an apologist for any of this. I know what people accuse me of being.

But I don’t want to hear another debate about the Kronstadt massacre.

I don’t want to hear that the starvation of the Ukraine was some kind of intentional genocide measure, because, frankly, there isn’t a lot of evidence for it. There is evidence that Stalin screwed up and starved Ukrainian peasants en masse. There’s not any smoking gun that he ever intended to do it.

And until someone finds that, we shouldn’t speculate it. It’s bad enough that it happened. You don’t have to have it be intentional.

Similarly to the Great Leap Forward, which I’m not a totally Great Leap Forward truther, but I do think some of the more high estimations of death during that are overstated.

And the reason why I say that is because the stats that even most Western economists accept show that life expectancy went up in China even during the Great Leap Forward. So it’s hard for me to believe that a fifth of the population died. But again, I do think a ton of people died unnecessarily. There was starvation.

Steve Grumbine:
00:48:40

Sure.

You know, it’s interesting just from a layperson’s perspective and somebody who’s trying really hard to wrap their mind around all this stuff and going back to your and my first conversation where we talked about counter revolutions. There is always another side to things. Whenever you seize power, there is always another side looking to seize it back, to wipe away the gains.

And it’s easy to look back with a, you know, a critical eye of how you handled that.

But when you think about any gain being won by blood and you think about what it takes to maintain that gain, all these things, they’re beyond me, right? And I’m grateful they’re beyond me at some level. But I also am looking forward.

And I’m saying we’re facing a climate crisis, we are facing extreme inequality in a world where people really, truly believe, with their pork pie hats and their I voted signs that they’re voting away the oligarchy, that they’re going to somehow or another rid this world of these evildoers with a simple vote at the voting booth. And it’s so tooth fairy-like.

That it requires, at least for me anyway, looking backwards at groups that did do something and then trying to look at the conditions today. And I’m no historical or dialectical materialist.

I’d like to try to learn more about it and be able to use more of that in understanding things and understanding contradictions and understanding who and what and when and where and why.

But one of the things that I’m noticing right here, right now, is that we are being killed, literally through climate crisis, killed through austerity, killed through a ruthless capitalist system and killed via military that just has decimated so much of life in the world as we know it that you’re left wondering, “Well, how do I fight back? What do I do? How can I organize?” And then you see people coming out and yes, it’s the online left.

I mean, you’ve seen the weird MAGA communism, you’ve seen all these other groups coming out of the woodworks, and they all swear they’re the way, the truth and the life, so help them God. And they’ve got their sycophants, they’ve got their meetings, they’ve got their propagandists and agitators and so forth.

But ultimately, at the end of the day, none of them is challenging capital, none of them is challenging the power dynamic.

And it’s hard to blame people in nascent movements, regardless of whether I think they’re full of shit or whether I think they’re like, totally legit.

But it’s hard for me to really judge them, knowing how much we’ve been dumbed down as a society, how we’ve been denied access to information, how we have been systematically uneducated, if you will, or filled with what I consider to be useless knowledge. I mean, I got an MBA and I had to unlearn almost every bit of economics I learned in that MBA. What I know now today I probably, and I say this without any kind of glee, I probably know more about macroeconomics today than many post-Keynesian economists know about macroeconomics today. For sure, most Marxists and most others like that, which is a weird thing to say.

We have just literally lost the ability to work through these issues and to see the world as it is so that we can actually address the real problems that are there. And the sugarcoating, the 1% kind of truthism of the duopoly in the United States and really a around the world.

It’s like people are searching and striving on one hand and then others are simply just going along as Borg and just moving like zombies through this. And it’s gotta be terrifying, right? I know it’s terrifying to me as a father.

So, you know, when you think about how does theory play into moving forward? How do these different schools of thought impact what we could do tomorrow or today for that matter?

What is a realistic, non LARPing expression of being an adult in this world? These are real questions, man. I don’t have a great philosophical background. I can’t use big words.

I mean, I can, but not in the way that you guys can, man. I mean, you guys make me feel like an idiot. And I know you’re not trying to, but my God, there’s so much to learn.

How in the world can society come together in any kind of meaningful way of solidarity when in reality they can’t even understand the board game Monopoly and migrate that over to how society works? They really are desperate to believe.

I mean, I look at scholars, people that I care greatly about, like Clara Mattei, who insists it’s federal tax dollars paying for these things. And I don’t know whether that’s propaganda or not, but it’s literally carrying Maggie Thatcher’s water for her out of the grave.

And I asked myself why people like Kshama Sawant are so addicted to using these kind of neoliberal tropes.

And I don’t ever have a good answer for it other than to say that the vast majority of people are completely deluded about money, completely deluded about history, and are divided by a million forms of cartoonism. [Yeah] I don’t know what to do with that.

Derick Varn:
00:54:08

Well, one. You know, I can tell you why Kshama Sawant does that. Trotsky believed in gold money and she believes it because Trotsky believed it.

And to be fair to Trotsky, gold was the predominant money form when he was young. It was already ending by the 1930s. But people tend to freeze the world they grew up in. I mean, I had to actively fight that in myself.

And for years, for years I went trying to figure out how to make the commodity and credit money assumptions of Capital volume 1 and 2 work in a modern economy. I really did sincerely tried to make it work. And I’ll be honest with you, I hated the post-Keynesians for a long time.

I assumed the MMTers were all Minskyites and thus post-Keynesians. And I hated you guys too.

And the realization of understanding power relationships, which I think is a more important part of Marxism and the development of currency and the relationships implied in those currency relationships meant that for me I had to drop some Marxist orthodoxy. I had no choice. It wasn’t because I wasn’t trying to be faithful to it. There’s other parts of Marxism that I actually like…

Is Hegelian methodology true? I don’t know. I have a lot of doubts actually.

And a lot of people who think of me as like the orthodox Marxist because I know all this stuff will be surprised for me to say that. I do have a few things to say about the other stuff you mentioned.

One, I have a lot of grace for LARPers, but I do think ultimately if they divide up everything you do, you kind of have to just be like, go away. Like. [Right.] What do you care about? Do you care about changing the world? Do you care about being right?

Or do you care about being faithful to some ideology that barely exists anymore?

I also think you meet people where they’re at and we have to admit the working class is divided not just because of ideological illusions or false consciousness, but because their interests are literally divided in the immediate term, like what’s good for the UAW and the American auto industry is not necessarily good for the stevedores union and the port workers.

And until we can organize politically in a way to change that, I see this as a critique of both Bernie and people who critique Bernie for not being, you know, working class enough. Bernieism will fail. Not even about Bernie. Now I do think Bernie makes this too personalistic.

He seems to think he’s some kind of special figure in history and I think we kind of didn’t help that in 2020 at minimum. I think he’s objectively sheep dogged a bunch of people. And I say objectively because I don’t care if he subjectively meant to do it or not.

To me, Bernie can mean everything he says sincerely. It kind of doesn’t matter at this point. It might have mattered in 2016. It doesn’t matter now.

But conversely, just talking about generic workers, I see a lot of people who complain about the PMC [professional managerial class]. I’m not going to get off on my critique of that concept, but let’s just say it’s legitimate.

But you know, the people complaining about it, you know what they are? PMC. Right? They’re projecting an image of the workers, too.

We have to get our ass in the same game as the people we want to help, because we’re going to be there anyway, regardless.

Steve Grumbine:
00:57:41

Yep.

Derick Varn:
00:57:42

How many people got fucked in this transition to this current Trump administration who didn’t think they were going to? Right?

Steve Grumbine:
00:57:48

Right. Yes.

Derick Varn:
00:57:49

That’s not the first time that’s happened. It’s one of a million.

So we have to be like, on one hand, what I’m asking is very hard because I’m asking for us to be extremely radical, particularly with groups and what groups we trust and don’t trust, and very forgiving of individuals who come around late. And sectarians have a hard time with the latter. They’re like, “Why were you ever wrong?” And I’m like, “We were all fucking wrong at one point.”

I knew I was. You and I were both blue collar conservatives at one point.

Steve Grumbine:
00:58:23

Yes, I. I was a Ron Paul guy. Let’s just keep it real, yo.

Derick Varn:
00:58:27

I was a Pat Buchanan guy in my early 20s. Seriously. I joined the Reform Party back when Trump tried to contest Buchanan for leadership of that. People don’t know that. People don’t know.

I mean, you talk about people don’t know this history. They don’t know modern American history. They don’t know what happened 20 years ago. You know, we live in the, like, eternal dictatorship of the now.

But I tell people, like, “yeah, Trump is really messed up, and there’s stuff that’s happening that’s unprecedented, but every individual thing Trump is doing separately has happened in the US before to a lesser degree.”

Steve Grumbine:
00:59:05

Right.

Derick Varn:
00:59:06

None of it’s totally new. These random deportations. Have you ever heard of Operation Wetback? Eisenhower did stuff like that. These. A lot of the powers.

The law that he’s using was made by Thomas Jefferson, one of the greatest betrayers of his own ideology.

And he’s also empowered to use that law in the way he’s doing, partly because of unitary executive theories from someone that even Trump hates. George W. Bush’s interpretation of the unitary executive as coming through Nixon. And no Democrat did a damn thing about any of that.

In fact, they often expanded those powers.

Steve Grumbine:
00:59:40

Yep.

Derick Varn:
00:59:41

Yeah.

Steve Grumbine:
00:59:42

You know, this is the stuff that makes me crazy, Right? Because I just keep thinking, as long as I keep bringing information to the table, and again, who am I, man? I’m nobody. Right?

But as long as I keep bringing information to the table and I keep searching, I keep striving, and I like to rattle cages sometimes just because I want people to pay attention. Because in a world of noise, it’s hard to get someone’s attention. Right? But at the same time, people are going to really be suffering here very soon.

If they’re not already suffering, they’re going to be suffering in very, very fast fashion. The idea here that Trump playing with China is not going to impact our shelves and impact our ability to eat and ability to do a lot of things is, I don’t even know what the right word for it is, but it’s pretty fucked up. [Yeah.] And it’s gonna bite all of us, I think, unfortunately. I’ll leave you with the last word here, man. Cause you’ve done so much.

It’s been two and a half hours, which is shocking. I love this.

And I know, because I can tell you had to cut millions of these ideas short, that you could have probably gone on for five hours with this, maybe more.

Derick Varn:
01:00:49

I could actually probably go on for like, 10 hours in a series of lectures on this. But I guess my, my point is absolutely on the world system, and I really, really wanted a detente with China.

Really deeply wanted a detente with China. I have been angry since the Obama administration started the pivot to Asia. And yes, it was Obama, wasn’t even Trump.

It’s been escalated each time since then. I don’t think we’re going to get that.

In fact, it seems like on most things, if things continue the way it looks right now, you’re getting the worst form of everything. And do I think Trumpism is going to ultimately win? No, I don’t. But the amount of damage they can do in the meantime is astounding.

A lot of people who’ve been depoliticized are going to care when we have crazy hyperinflation and we’ve done bad policies that make expanding manufacturing, which we already did in this country anyway, just it doesn’t employ that many people. I’ve tried to explain that a lot. Come back. It’s going to be brutal.

I think of a guy named Dmitri Orlov, who ended up being kind of a Russian far rightist, but he wrote a book before he went crazy called Understanding Collapse. And I don’t think it’s inevitable for us. He did. I don’t. But he did make a point that I lose sleep over every day. Neoliberalism in particular, but capitalism in general has hollowed out most of the non-state institutions. So we don’t have a social core when we start seeing things fall apart. We don’t even have the kind of institutions that the post-Soviets did.

And if you think things were bad, the deaths of despair in this, in Russia and in the Soviet bloc after the Soviets’ fall, they lost like a third of their male population to suicide and alcoholism. You know, life expectancies dropped dramatically. It was the only place in the world in the 1990s where that was happening.

Our life expectancy was dropping before Trump.

Steve Grumbine:
01:02:44

Yep.

Derick Varn:
01:02:45

So where do you think it’s going to go now? And a lot of people would think, “Oh, we can back this thing.” We’ll see if these electoralist fantasies will happen.

I mean, there’s a real possibility we don’t have an election in 2026. I don’t put that off the table.

I don’t put it off the table that even if Trump screws up that we still end up under military rule because who’s going to take over at that point? I don’t put it off the table that let’s say Trump does do everything normal.

We have elections like normal, then a Democrat does the same shit the Democrats have done for the past generation and a half. What do we get after Trump?

Steve Grumbine:
01:03:20

Tom Cotton.

Derick Varn:
01:03:21

Yeah.

Steve Grumbine:
01:03:22

J.D. Vance. Palantir.

Derick Varn:
01:03:26

Curtis Yarvin. Who knows? Trump is a demagogue who’s holding that coalition together.

When he goes away, they’ll fight each other, but when they’re done, what is likely to emerge is likely to be battle hardened and worse and God forbid, may actually be competent. So we need to wake up. I do think that means we gotta get over some stuff, these battles.

If I hear another fucking debate about Kronstadt Rebellion, like, yeah, it was horrible and yeah, it’s unclear what the right thing to do there was. But you know what? It’s also 110 years ago.

Steve Grumbine:
01:04:00

Get over it. Time to move on.

Derick Varn:
01:04:01

We need to forge our own world, not pretend we can forge the late 19th century, early 20th again. And that’s my last thought.

Steve Grumbine:
01:04:09

And dude, that was absolutely amazing. I’m giving you the applause because this was amazing.

I knew this was an episode that needed to happen and I knew that the right person to do it was you. And I hope from the bottom of my heart that you know how much I appreciate this.

Derick Varn:
01:04:26

All right.

Steve Grumbine:
01:04:27

This was huge, so thank you so much. With that why don’t you tell folks where we can find more of your work?

Because, I mean, I know I read at the beginning, but I think people need to hear more from you.

Derick Varn:
01:04:37

You can find me at Varn Vlog on YouTube, Patreon, and any free podcast aggregator, except for iHeartRadio. For some reason, I’m not on there, but everything else. And you can find Varn Blog now on Substack. It’s totally free. I don’t charge for it.

It’s an educational project. It’s free. I just put it on Substack because more people read Substack than other blogs.

Steve Grumbine:
01:04:57

We will be following you over there, my friend.

Derick Varn:
01:04:59

All right, thank you so much.

Steve Grumbine:
01:05:01

All right, folks, at the end of the day, to make progress, we can’t be big fish in small ponds. We need to come together. And I’m trying desperately to understand these things. And I’m nobody but in my pursuit, I’m very, very voracious.

And so I hope you appreciated this. I know I did. Real Progressives is a 501(c)3 nonprofit. We live and die on your donations.

If you find the content that we put out, you find the webinars that we do, and you find the other work that we do valuable, please consider becoming a monthly donor. We really need your help. I mean that wholeheartedly. We are not a big operation, but we desperately need your support.

You can find us at Real Progressives on Substack. You can find us at real progressives on YouTube. You can find us@realprogressives.org for our website. And by all means, come to Patreon.

That’s where most of our donations are. But you can also find our donation link at Substack and on our website. Please, please, please don’t assume someone else is doing it.

We really need your help with that. On behalf of my guest, C. Derick Varn, myself, Steve Grumbine, on behalf of the podcast Macro N Cheese, we are out of here.

End Credits:
01:06:26

Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by our volunteer team at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To become a donor please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com, or realprogressives.org.