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Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Moving Beyond the Debates On the Professional Managerial Class with Foppe De Haan
Curious about how the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) fits into today's leftist strategy debates? Join us as Dutch socialist Foppe De Haan takes us through his personal journey within the Dutch Socialist Party, his discontent with its approach to identity politics, and the transformative influence of Bernie Sanders' campaign. Fapa offers a critical perspective on integrating identity politics into leftist strategies, a topic that is both contentious and crucial in today's political climate.
We also delve into the intellectual history and ongoing discussions about the PMC, referencing influential thinkers like Christopher Lash, Adolph Reed, the Ehrenreichs, and others. Critiques of Catherine Lou's "Virtue Hoarders" and explorations of class dynamics through the lens of Eric Olin Wright's distinctions between oppression and domination add depth to our conversation. This episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking a nuanced understanding of class dynamics and the role of the PMC in contemporary capitalism. Don't miss out on this thought-provoking discussion!
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Host: C. Derick Varn
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Hello and welcome to Varm Blog. And today I'm with Fapa Dehan, a Dutch leftist and socialist who has recently written an article for Cosmonaut Magazine on the PMC debates and how we should address them. Discourse with Pappa over there on Blue Sky, where we pretend it's not Twitter totally. And I read this article and it actually addresses some of my concerns with both the people who posit the PMC as a distinct class and with the people who say that we should just totally ignore roughly the trends that the PMC is attempting and we can talk into this debate, because on one hand, pmc discourse is ubiquitous. On the other hand, it actually seems to be something that we either accept without question or something that we reject without complication, and that's not a great way to handle this debate. So why did you venture into this at all?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, there's a couple reasons. Actually, I come, or I've been active in the Dutch left for about a decade now, after becoming politically interested because of the 2008 crisis and then only finding out in 2012 that the Dutch Socialist Party was at least explicitly anti-neoliberal, and so I joined the party, hoping that I'd find like-minded comrades. That turned out to be a bit of a disappointment the first eight years or so, because the party doesn't function very well and they keep all of the members isolated in the branches. We have very little contact between the branches and stuff. But yeah, I saw, within that party at least, that there was a big issue with on, on the one hand actually at the in in the first instance, just the party not being able to deal with any identity politics related stuff. Uh, they were just, but they prefer to ignore it in the usual way of usually economistic way actually, and, um, in the usual way, in the usual economistic way actually, and that wasn't really working very well. At the same time, you have, I guess, a kind of anti-woke tendency in the party leadership. That was soft anti-woke at the time. Uh, that was soft anti-woke at the time and it's getting worse, but still kind of. Uh, they're, they're still doing stuff for for people of color. Just they don't really like to talk about it that way. Um, and they so that the membership is overwhelmingly white. But there are some migrants in it who are active. They're just usually frustrated because they're not really dealing with any stuff that relates to their minority, background or ethnic, their integration within society, society. But yeah, so that was a puzzle for me to see how to convince the party and just leftists to take the identity politics stuff seriously, but in a different way.
Speaker 2:And then in 2016, 17, I was a bit bored because of my isolation and I didn't really know any communists at the time. So I was following the Bernie campaign and also just following American politics generally, and I was familiar with the Black Agenda Report, which report which of course has its critique of the, the black misleadership class as well. Um, and then thomas frank's book uh, listen, the wall came out and that interested me as well, because he traces how the the party was kind of hijacked by the. The party was kind of hijacked by the up-and-coming Yuppie class or Yuppie cohort, but also showing how they were constantly kicking unions in the face or spiting them. Clinton, of course, did as well.
Speaker 2:And so that, I guess, was the first time I encountered the PMC as a I wasn't really sure what to call it, but just as a distinct social group within the left who was trying to be active in left or liberal spaces but not really acknowledging that they weren't, and at the same time, the left just not really knowing how to deal with that. And only afterwards, because of the what was it? The N plus one article that rebooted the interest in the PMC debates, and then the Dissent magazine also had an article about it. So that's actually the first time that I encountered the actual left or the new left's attempts to deal with that social group when it was coming up. And then I saw, just online anyway, that this seemed to touch a nerve because of the I guess, I guess Millennial and Zoomer lefties online trying to deal with why all of the old people who were calling themselves progressives were so antithetical to Bernie and his campaign, and so they seem to me to glom onto the PMC notion as a way, as a shorthand way, to explain that. But yeah, I couldn't really integrate that into Marxism and Marxist theory at the time, so that was a puzzle.
Speaker 2:And then, after 2019, I became a member of the Communist Platform, which is, which was in the Socialist Party at the time, but just hiding underground because the Socialist Party doesn't allow factions or anything of the sort. So they were trying to organize the left within the party and in the youth party as well, and so I also came into contact with McNair's work and, yeah, that got me in contact with communists, which was nice, uh. But also, uh, read revolutionary strategy and I, while I really like the book and think it very useful, I find it very frustrating that in that, uh, there's only like one reference to identity political issues and how they interface with left strategy, and I mean, the book isn't really about that, because it's just a high-level, conceptual way of dealing with leftist strategy. Of course. But, yeah, it just struck me that here too, there was way too little said about how to integrate this positively.
Speaker 2:So, finally, I just decided to write something myself to get a debate going, and I don't know, I mean I don't know if I'm right, but I hope I wrote something that's clear enough on my own assumptions, but it just can serve as a useful starting point to actually talk about this as Marxists and to take identity politics. On one hand, because I think it's very much related to the PMC debates, and why that isn't being addressed or, if it is, is being addressed in a really bad way, by encouraging workerist bullshit, like saying that the industrial proletariat is the only part of the working class that can be organized and everybody else should just follow their lead. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And what for me, if you take the stance that we have to build our political subjects solely off the quote industrial proletariat and by that you mean productive factory workers and then you take out management and logistics from from that um you're dealing with? Yeah, they're talking to anybody left yeah, I mean like you're dealing with like eight percent of the population or something like it's, it's, it's, it's more than agriculture, uh, in the united states, but not a lot more um yeah, and then that I mean back in.
Speaker 2:In the early 1900s, 10 of the population would have been enough if you could have organized them as well, maybe to get uh, to get somewhere, especially in the, in the context we were facing then, with actual scarcity and actual food delivery problems and everything but now with energy abundance and no real revolutionary pressures, at least in the rich countries. It's just a recipe for disaster to only focus on the industrial part, and it's also just not enough, because you need everybody else as well.
Speaker 1:Well, it's also just to me, focusing on the industrial workers alone is like focusing, like I mentioned, agriculture. It'd be like focusing on agriculture and the 20th century. It's like it might work in the beginning, but you're in a declining sector of the market and one that's been largely I mean automated, and we've known about the automation shrinking the industrial proletariat since we started being concerned about the industrial proletariat. So it's um it not? It's not something that even should surprise us in many ways. I I was interested in in your discussions most cogent I think explanation of what they meant by it. Christopher Lash and Adolph Reed both played with the idea in the same time period and Adolph, kind of like the Ehrenreichsikes, thought it out in those debates after the Bernie campaign. But what I find interesting is the way Lou, catherine Lou and that group has taken it. It frankly ends up sounding like a and forgive me if you don't know the reference but like a David Brooks column from the 90s. You know, like if you've read Bobo's in Paradise, like I could take Virtue Hoarders and Bobo's in Paradise. In a lot of ways they're almost the same book, and what frustrates me about Lou's book in particular is that it actually is hitting on something interesting, but she doesn't actually do any of the work to really flesh out what she means. And like, pmc for her is a floating signifier. That means pretty much anyone with an education and anyone who does blue collar work, um, and also just all liberals, like all together. And okay, that's a problem because it's not just it's workerist, but it's also like it doesn't even know what a worker is. So on one hand, it is workerist as it treats the working class as an identity, um in and of itself and um, and the other thing is that, weirdly, it's also it has a. It has a shadow narrative that mcnair you talk a lot about mcnair's review of it and we'll come back to that in a minute but, uh, a shadow narrative that, like mcnair's version of it only kind of picks up on and that is like lou is really mad at the PMC, but she also like does think there was a heroic period for them, whatever she means by it, and it's very unclear, particularly now, because in her recent discussions and writing she's got PMC existing all the way back in like the 17th century. So it's just like okay, now I don't know what you mean by this, this class.
Speaker 1:It seemed to me when I was reading the stuff out of the kind of Ehrenreich, lash, reed, coterie, and for people who don't know, those people aren't associated together today, but they tried to start a party together in the late 1960s. They tried to start a party together in the late 1960s that they were knowingly trying to address, actually something that came up in the 1940s around James Burnham and Friedrich Pollack separately the administrative class thesis and the managerial class thesis, class thesis and the managerial class thesis and what Ehrenreich pretty much did was synthesize them and then come up with an explanation. Now, one of the things that's always fascinated me about our discussions about this today is that if you read the John and Barbara Ehrenreichight book, the conditions for that class are are grouping our social category. I kind of think I do think it's a valid social category. By the way, I don't think it's a class in the marxist sense we can go back to that but I think it could be.
Speaker 1:This is one of the interesting things like there is a way in which, if things continue to develop in a certain way, the pmc could distinguish itself as a separate class because of its weird relationship to the state, but Lou just doesn't get into these questions. Interestingly enough, christian Parenti kind of does and he has a, but it was like a one-off paragraph where he noted that one of the things about the current PMC is that they're both state-depend dependent, but they've moved from being technically petite bourgeois professionals who own their own businesses and means of production to basically labor aristocratic sections that are wage dependent. They don't even get paid in stock options, but they're highly, highly compensated and have some indirect but strong relationship to the state. Uh, so like a highly subsidized areas of the uh, of the economy. Now, uh, you didn't mention that in your piece, but I wanted to talk about, like, okay, um, what do you think the PMC is and why did you find McNair's attempt to address Lou so unsatisfactory, even if you agreed with a lot of what McNair said about Lou?
Speaker 2:Yeah well, what I try to do in my own article? Yeah well, what I try to do in my own article in large part is just to create a kind of methodological framework and get the PMC out of it as a group that has broadly the same relationship towards other workers or towards citizens or towards students, where there's a relationship of either domination, slash, control or exploitation and the exploitation doesn't have to be in terms of being able to privatize surplus value or something, but also like if you're a manager or your tenure professor who gets in large grants, then you are allowed to claim all the work that all the people do for you as part of what you do for in discussions with your own management or about how you are compensated or how.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like so yeah, so you seem to hint at something that I've thought a lot about. I read an Eric Olin Wright's second to last book, maybe his last book, understanding Class I think it was his second to last book. He actually teases apart oppression and domination as a way of talking about something like the PMC Cause he's like well, we can see that this antagonism isn't really the primary exploitation you see in capital, which is still bourgeois, versus proletariat, um, and that dynamic is still going on. But that dynamic is not the way most people experience class, like, uh, you don't hate your owner of your business, you hate your boss, because you know your boss is actually dominating your life, whereas the owner is so far removed and hidden structurally that you probably have no idea like who they are. Even um, and now, unless you work for, um, a small, petite, bourgeois kind of firm where there's a clear, singular owner or a clear CEO with majority stock options that's not public traded, you don't really know who your exploiter is, and I think we do have to talk about that, and I think you know.
Speaker 1:I was thinking about why so much of the function of pmc is usually talked about when two specific parts of it. But you know, part of the problem with pmc is like, as we, as you discussed in your paper, is that it's both something we can actually define as clearly growing, but also something that's the singular vector that defines. It is actually really hard to pin down because it's not wage labor, it's not even education exactly, although that tends to be the way people divide it up. And that is how Aaron Reich initially divided it up, because almost all the people with degrees when she wrote the book with John did end up in either management or in cultural production in a way that gave them power. And that's led for when people talk about the PMC, when Lou's talking about the PMC, she's talking about liberals and college professors pretty much the other managers woke. Hr is a problem, but the rest of managerial culture she actually has remarkably little to say about. And that is interesting to me because I think you know Aaron Reich's late work talks about a division within this itself.
Speaker 1:But one thing that I started thinking about was was when you look at the paradigmatic example of pmc and, like I said, we've talked about hr, we'll get to that in a minute and, uh, academia.
Speaker 1:Well, academia is bizarre, uh, as a capitalist formation because it's a.
Speaker 1:It's a feudal institution, effectively that was allowed, for reasons during the Cold War that aren't entirely clear, to be run as kind of a guild co-op that then had realities forced upon it upon trying to compete in the market.
Speaker 1:But has this core of these original structures that were set up to run this like collective education, departmental fiefdoms that were relatively democratic, within those fiefdoms that creates a clear worker elite. I mean when I say a clear worker elite, like most tenure professors, for example, spend most of their time doing research, which is a clear worker elite. I mean when I say a clear worker elite, like most tenure professors, for example, spend most of their time doing research, which is a lot of work, don't get me wrong, but they do that to get grant money. But they also claim the work of tons of students, basically, and put their name out, particularly in the sciences, like you're constantly having postdocs, do the research and writing for you, for some tenured professor to claim, and then they also get a very light teaching load in Europe and America, sometimes as small as like 1-1.
Speaker 1:That's one class a semester, um yeah, they can buy it off yeah some of their ground money right and they can buy it off, yeah, whereas uh, adjuncts, who sometimes are making per hour, sometimes less than minimum wage, um, um, and they are technically contract workers, so they're not entitled. And in the United States and this is not how it works in Europe but they're technically contract workers, which means that they are not entitled to normal hourly labor protections and they make the departments function. So the actual professors that most undergrads will deal with Are going be graduate student assistants or adjuncts for the most part, until they get into their higher level classes and actually get access to a professor. That's a totally exploitative labor system, both in the sense that everyone is being exploited to generate profits for the university, even in, even in obstinately nonprofit universities, uh, but also because the top end of the labor uh pool in that system is so dependent on both the work of other people and often claiming credit for what they do, um, and they get compensated thusly, um, now, compensation for professors is often not as high as katherine lu seems to just to think it is, which I think is interesting because she's running from california, um, but nonetheless, um, I think, uh, you pick up on on this, where you got frustrated with McNair a little bit, because McNair kind of does grant that this is happening. He doesn't just do the workerist thing where he's like, oh no, you know, we just need to focus on pure class antagonism. But he talks about this as an illustration of capitalism in decline.
Speaker 1:Uh, robert brenner does that too, like his political, his neo-feudal thesis, which seems to have evolved into something else. I think he's calling it political capitalism now, a dealing rally, which is slightly different than neo-feudalism. But he thinks that, like, capitalism has somehow fundamentally changed. Uh, because profit rates are so low that uh, government, uh fiat currency is basically floating parts of the of the economy. Um, so he's basically like saying, like mmt is correct, but but it's because capitalism's in decline and it won't work forever. I think that's what he's implying. He's actually not incredibly clear about this. You seem to think that saying that the PMC illustrates capitalism is in decline may not be the best way to understand it. So why do you feel that way?
Speaker 2:yeah, I I guess this relates to what you mentioned earlier about Christian parenti and one what he was pointing to, the, the PMC, because it's such a vague term and because we aren't really being very, very scientific about defining it and applying it to people.
Speaker 2:It encompasses both very poor workers like adjuncts, and, at the at the other end, like high-end or top government functionaries and university tenured professors. It becomes a kind of a useless term, but I mean I don't think it is. So how to explain this? I guess the other thing that I mean, if I just go to what I find frustrating about how McNair is using it, what McNair is also just not taking seriously that these other forms of exploitation both I mean they both still matter historically and they aren't going away, but there's also just new forms developing courtesy of how capitalist societies have matured to make use of a much bigger state and to create this whole regulatory bureaucracy that they then to to police people's lives and and also to is my suspicion anyway, to just favor large capitalist corporations because of the, because of how the, the regulatory pressure favors large corporations over small and medium enterprises, because they are just much more able to carry the overhead costs involved with compliance and stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that I mean, on one hand, like we're seeing an expansion of stuff that Bukharin first wrote about when he started writing about monopoly, his version of monopoly capital, which is different than the Suizid version of monopoly capital. But I think this trend of the capitalist using more and more of the state and and before I can already feel the heterodox non-Marxist coming at us like, well, capitalism has always used the state. Yes, we know what we're seeing is more and more of the state and that there's a deeper interpenetration of the bourgeoisie and government elites than before, and I think that's been true since World War II. I mean, like I do think James Burnham for all his faults and being like I don't agree with everything in the managerial revolution, I think he's basically using fascist class analysis and hiding it for American technocrats, and that's James Burnham who I think did that. But it was clear enough that also the Frankfurt School came up with it, baron and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital for all I disagree with they came up with it. There was something very real that people were responding to about the integration of state and capital and the integration of things like public private partnerships, public private market spaces, um being expanded, etc.
Speaker 1:Um, and one of the things that your analysis gets to that I find interesting.
Speaker 1:You know, in in a society that abuses the shit out of Gramsci, so much so that, like I actually thought I hated Gramsci because of Gramscians and I went back and read Gramsci and read the history of the Italian Communist Party and I was like, oh, I don't hate him, I hate the people who used his work. But nonetheless, I have found it interesting that so few people talk about class hegemony and class cultural hegemony in the discussion of the PMC. And then when you brought it up, I was like duh, wow, that's obvious. Like duh, wow, that's, that's like obvious. So these are one of the one of their functions. You know, whatever this subcategory, uh, the social grouping is one of its functions, seems to be um, related to hegemony, but I think in a I think your paper actually gives us it's not in a one to one or clear way that they can just establish cultural hegemony. That's not really what they do. So how do you think hegemony helps you understand what, like gives you an in to understanding what the PMC may actually be getting at?
Speaker 2:Well, I guess my sense of what unites the PMC or people with PMC-ish functions is in large part just a notion that they're contributing to the maintenance of class society and they want to do some part in maintaining that. But they don't have either the the option, because of where they're placed and how reliant they are on the existence of the state and also of large corporations who employ them for their own, for their own role, to exist in the first place, but also because of because of how they are trained, or because of how the, the school system trains you to think about bourgeois society, uh, and just the, the liberal, um, yeah, liberal constitutionalism. I guess, to put put it briefly, that they can see a positive role for them that also allows them to have their own little fiefdom or their own place in it, where they can distinguish themselves from other parts of the class that they've been taught and that they look down on and or exploit and or use as part of their institutional role.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's what frustrated me about McNair, because if you say, okay, class society and I mean that doesn't just frustrate me about McNair, but about the, I guess, the long history of what communists have been doing since Marx's time, or at least since the 1910s it's just focusing on achieving state power via the notion that you can just build a movement and then take over this, the state apparatus, and then you can institute socialism, social communism, with that small vanguard or, and, and so everything was put to building a party strong enough for, in the right place, to do that.
Speaker 2:But we've seen, I mean, that in the 20th century that really only worked in two big states and a few smaller ones. But overall it's just been a failure because the movement was too small and also just not united enough and far too easy to play a part to manage to take power in the healthier and more robust economies. And that is because capitalism isn't the only enemy is. Capitalism isn't the only enemy. There's also all these other forms of class rules, slash, class exploitation that still exist within capitalist societies that we have to take seriously as a movement and deal with them to unite the class and build a robust enough movement that it won't be split apart again along other lines at some future point again.
Speaker 1:Well, I think one of the things that's interesting that I teased, knowing now you telling me why you wrote this, because it's clearer now that I know that, that you know you're trying to illustrate that the capital, you know, the capital, um bourgeois proletariat dynamic, is the driving class antagonism, but it's not the only one and it's never been the only one. And, um, and I think we also just have to deal with the fact that there are antagonisms within the classes. And so, to get into, you know you're talking about identity politics. So the standard critique when people invoke the PMC as identity politics is a weapon of the PMC to keep the class divided, blah, blah, blah. And look, I think there's some truth to that. But the idea that then if you just uh, you know, abandon liberal, um identity politics, that just doing basic workerism will get you uh, uh, to to overcome the contradictions that led to those ethnic tensions and whatnot in the first place, seems to ignore that.
Speaker 1:Like what was the biggest debate of 20th century Marxism, and that's the national question which? What is that but an attempt to deal with one of the identities? Um, marxism, and that's the national question which? What is that but an attempt to deal with one of the identities. And the other big question was the family and gender questions. Like in the early in the 19th 20th century, those were the biggest selling socialist books. So it seems to me that we've always been, we've always realized it's a problem, because any of these nation antagonisms could become a class antagonism. And from the orientation of communism, which is not just to create a cool anti-capitalist society that doesn't just have capital, we have to remember that the goal was initially and it's clear in marx and engels to get rid of classes, not just to put one in charge. Yes, we do think the dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary, but the idea is there are no classes. What we have seen, I think, with the focus on the state, is that and I think McNair is aware of this it comes up a little bit in his discussions of legal power and stuff, particularly on the one area where he's not an orthodox Marxist, where he critiques Marx for not seeing stuff clearly there.
Speaker 1:It's that we do have to deal with these differences and antagonisms in a real way and abolish them, and that requires dealing with the fact that most of what we do once we touch the state, is create a counter PMC in a way I don't like the term PMC for them.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think nomenclature is actually probably the correct term. But that's what you create a set of bureaucrats who, while they don't on paper own the means of production, they have so much control over the means of production they are effectively owners because you've also removed in most of these socialist states the ability for these people to contest within socialist movements because you have faction bands and whatnot. So you have basically the only way to control both the general population and the nomenklatura is terror, and that was the second international critique of the Bolsheviks is that they were a minority revolution, and minority revolutions always can only work with terror. That's how they work. In fact, the appeals there was that's how the bourgeoisie tried to control everybody is basically terror. So why would we expect anything different from a, from a minoritarian government, even if the minority carrying government is in charge of a legitimate revolution Like I'd say history has proven them right on that point.
Speaker 2:I mean it could have gone somewhat differently if they, if they'd removed the faction ban, although I mean, yeah, it's just hard to say, given I mean yeah, it's just hard to say, given who were in power and in control of the party bureaucracy at the time. Already there wasn't enough of internal resistance that was organized to really prevent what happened.
Speaker 1:I think so, yeah, yeah, I'm interested in in this. Uh, you were talking about the anti-woke stance of the of the dutch socialist party, and I was actually thinking like that's an interesting thing. I in so much that that's even if it's even if it's trying to reject an americanization of left politics I've heard this complaint a lot from Europeans. It actually, in many ways, still legitimizes the American approach because it's like you're reacting to it, so you're taking its framework as what you're positing yourself against, which in some ways, validates the framework.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's not just the Socialist Party doing that, it's also I mean that the right-wing parties in the Netherlands are quite internationalist as well. Leaving aside the issue of which American funders give Willers money and stuff like that, wilders is the current, or is the guy who has been in the Dutch politics for 20 years now, but he's currently leading the largest party in parliament and he's very, you know, just dog whistling and kicking immigrants that's his motto. But he's learned quite a lot from American politics as well. So it's just, it's not really something you can get around by fighting it, by denying it, by denying it.
Speaker 1:No, well, the. I've actually been thinking about this and I think it may be some. Maybe this is a common mystic of me, I won't lie, but it seems to be something about the development of capital orientation around states and state competition right now. That has led for the american right and the european right to look a lot more like each other, while seemingly, you know, having nothing to do with each other, and by that I mean like, uh, the american right of, like the aughts, the 90s, the 80s, the reagan coalition, um, that's pretty much dead now, and we have a kind of right populist coalition that, uh, picks up on cultural lines. That's not conservatives. Picking up on cultural lines is, of course, not new. That's the oldest. That's their number one playbook, honestly, honestly. But them not being tied to capital explicitly, that is new, and that seems to be something closer to a European style left.
Speaker 1:Also, I've just noted that Trump is a European populist figure in the sense of the kind of style that he comes out of. He reminds me of a lot more of like Bolesconis and that kind of figure than a prior American demagogue. All that said, there's also a sense in which that's easier because, you're right, the past 20 years is also Americanized. Most of the rest of the world's right wing, the Canadian right, looks a lot more like the US right. The Tories seem a lot more like the US Republicans than they used to.
Speaker 1:So it just seems like there's less of a distance between the American right and the European right, even though they are, you know, theoretically like yeah, there's obviously, there's backdoor money going around with funders and whatnot. There's always shenanigans like that, but the internationalism of the right doesn't it, because they're also dressing up as nationalists isn't obvious to a lot of people. Um, so there's that. But it also seems like uh, in europe it seems like the socialist parties have gone one of two ways. They've either gone anti-woke or they have picked up american style identity politics whole cloth and tried to apply it to european matters, which also doesn't really work, because we have different racial and ethnic and gender concerns than you. In some ways, concerns are probably similar, but racial, ethnic concerns are different. So even stuff about race, like how we define whiteness well, the American way, because we're a settler state, is necessarily going to be broad in a way that makes Europeans uncomfortable. That's part of how the settler state worked.
Speaker 2:Yeah, with the integration of the different, like the, the irish and the scottish the irish, the scottish, the dutch um italians the italians.
Speaker 1:Um, every now and then when you're reading, you know old 19th century authors and who are racist. You, you forget that, like oh yeah, they used to hate all the other Europeans too. Like you should forget. You're like stumbling upon HP Lovecraft complaining about the Dutch and you're just like what, who's got a problem with the Dutch? But yeah, it's an interesting thing, and I've been with you on this for a while.
Speaker 1:Way, way back when I wrote my response to Mark Fisher's Vampire Castle you know where I said like he was throwing the baby out with the bathwater because he was right there were this elite coterie of people who use identity politics as a weapon. They're clearly using it, you know, as a friend of mine says, to fight over the scraps of academia and whatnot, as it's being neoliberalized. That's true, but the idea that you could just go back to a worker identity as a valid identity, particularly once you've divorced it from your active class position and this was important for fisher too, fisher being british, and I think part of it's being british, but part of it was his orientation he thought your class origins were more important than your actual current class affiliate, like where you were in the economy. So you know that was the whole.
Speaker 2:Like is russell brand, working class debate and um yeah, lots of stalinist bullshit still floating around in the contemporary left, sadly yeah, well, I mean it's interesting, because I don't think that.
Speaker 1:Uh, let's talk about that because stalinism seems to be able to. Right now in america, we have a super woke stalinism and a super anti-woke stalinism seems to be able to. Right now in america we have a super woke stalinism and a super anti-woke stalinism, and they both exist and they're and they're both really annoying, honestly, but like, um, I mean, they don't have any like political power really, but they, you know, you encounter them on campuses, you definitely encounter them on the internet and uh, it's, it's wild to me because, like, ostensibly these people should have the same politics. Right, they're both marxist, leninist, uh, anti-revisionist, pre, you know, pre-52ers, um, and yet their understanding of what like the party should do about race and and and gender, whatnot, are diametrically opposed.
Speaker 1:Um, one of the funny things about that is, frankly, the, the anti-woke right-wing ones. Uh, they're more actually consistent with stalin policies, but, uh, but, as I pointed out to people you know, the more I've studied stalin, the more I'm like he wasn't consistent on like russification, or uh pro or uh progressive or regressive views of gender. He actually was all like one of the things you realize about the soviet union from like 1928 to like 1952. They're all over the place on these questions. Why?
Speaker 2:it. It's very reactive, yeah, it seems to me, and that's, I guess I don't know but maybe that's part of why ML-ism is so popular, because you don't really need to know anything about the history and about historically taken positions. You can just do it by God, and that's, I think, what informs most of the newly, the new communist, the new new communist movement, the new communist the new, new communist movement.
Speaker 2:Because we just don't know the history. So people pick up a few phrases and they might know, like that, the CPUSA was actually trying to organize black workers, or they might not. They might have a large trans contingent. Might have a large trans contingent. So, because of that, because they still want to be MLs, they then feel, ok, we have to incorporate this. And so they go woke, or at least they're pro-trans and other parts don't, because they're trad something or they want that.
Speaker 1:I mean the the polls, uh, were more where I'm, they were split, but um well, I think this is interesting, because I think this does relate to this pmc question a little bit, because a lot of people who pick up, who go down the anti woke line, are trying to signal that they're different from these liberal professional managerial types Right, but they're signaling it by. Often, as I pointed out, they're not even picking up like Soviet talking points from the 1940s. What they're actually doing is picking up like straight up nationalist talking points from, from Russia now, and and then, like draping a red flag over it. Um, or they are, uh, this weird like stalinist, uh, pro-christian stuff that I've seen recently. That's wild, like it's just like, uh, mega communism is another one and, and, as I pointed out to people like, these things happen in cycles on the left, like Browderism, uh, patriotic socialism. That's not, that's not a?
Speaker 1:A a new phenomenon, um, uh, it's one that was condemned by Lenin, but the Soviet Union had no problem turning it on and off depending on the period, right, like, and you're right when, when all you're trying to do is like counter really bad American anti-communism by just like basically flipping it on its head, you don't really have to know anything about the Soviet Union or Stalin or China, what the Sino-Soviet split was actually about or who started. I mean, you know, one of the great ironies of the Sino-Soviet split is, even though Mao wants to keep the Stalin, it's really Stalin's decisions that led to everything that facilitated the Sino-Soviet split happening in the first place. So, like you know, way more than Khrushchev, even though we have to, you know, have Khrushchev take the blame, but let's be honest, most of the worst decisions that affected the Chinese Communist Party was during the Stalin period, and particularly in the 1920s. I mean, it was just bad. So I think that pretty much, uh, uh, you know, leads to this I found it interesting that mcnair seems to imply that, uh, that lou is a crypto malice and malice are tending to like he.
Speaker 1:He seems to imply that Maoists tend to make up new social positions to justify new opinions. That's something implicit in his critique. He might even say it. What do you make of that? What do you think the relationship is to Maoism here, if any at all?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I found that part. I seem to recall that he's written another essay about it, about the influence of Maoism on the development of identity politics in the US. That addresses that directly, but I never really found that very convincing. For the same reason, I guess.
Speaker 1:Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, what I, what I, no, no.
Speaker 1:I was thinking about the reason why I didn't find it convincing. My friend, alex Asher Day, who came on the show many years ago, is a kind of anarchist China scholar, but they pointed out to me that if you look at, uh, what, what is really going on there? The? Yeah, there is some Maoist influence on the language, but basically the kind of national developmental left, uh. Uh, the US version didn't so much come out of Maoism as it adopted Maoist language cynically, because it was already heading in similar directions as far as national developmentalism and the idea of a more interventionist state. But that also you got rid of Fordism and this and the other. So I think this is interesting to me.
Speaker 1:So ultimately you decide that, like in your piece, that, yeah, the PMC is a problematic, too broad concept. That's not particularly clear. But if we ignore the questions it brings up, we are ignoring a wide variety of domination in other potential places for class domination to form that isn't necessarily capitalist and that, if we actually mean the, if we are actually communists in the sense that our goal is a classless society at the end of all this, um, we can't allow that to happen like um, and clearly you know, both in your article and, as you said today, you think that it did happen, like, basically you know, we didn't uh, even when the the uh proletariat, bourgeois antagonism was temporarily dealt with in the socialist uh societies and I say temporarily because most of them have re-established these are our relations at some point, but, um, that they never got anywhere near the ability to say that you were even beginning towards a classless society. In fact, class divisions just became more opaque.
Speaker 2:That, or my sense anyway, is that the position that Soviet Party officials had within Soviet society in terms of okay, they don't directly benefit from surplus value produced or whatever, but they still benefit from being able to have that position, they are still able to control others, and in that sense they're not that different from university maybe not professors, but one layer lower on that totem pole, or just government bureaucrats in bourgeois countries.
Speaker 2:So they were able to extract use values because of the position they held and because of the structural relationship they were in vis-a-vis other workers in those states, vis-a-vis other workers in those states, and structurally that's no different. I mean it is different, but it's the same kind of really, or it's similar to how, if you're a father in a society where women are forced back into the home and thus forced to become economically dependent on you, then you have power over them to force them to provide use values within the home for you, producing children for you, but also just taking care of you, taking care of the kids, raising the kids. That kind of relationship is also part of what makes class societies attractive to people, if you're able to hold the dominant position in the relationship anyway, or at least that doesn't have to be full-time for it to be appealing.
Speaker 2:So if you have this private domain in which you are the Lord in, some sense, then that can be enough for people to throw up their hands and say, okay, there there are parts of, there are forms of class society that I can live with, so I don't want to jettison the whole thing, even if I'm being exploited at work.
Speaker 1:For me, this gets into. You know, um, we mentioned this earlier. Um, that, yes, just because we realize that liberal identity politics does actually use a flattening out of class distinctions to to operate and to have, you know, basically to help elites of color, um, uh, I think that's a real enough thing. And yet the idea that if we just turn it off, it'll go away Now, some of this is is easy to to deal with. By that I mean like, oh, we all know that? Well, maybe we don't know, but it's pretty clear to me that if you fix the wealth gap in the United States by dealing with wealth, it would do more. Fix the wealth gap in the United States by dealing with wealth, it would do more um than uh, than any probably politically viable form of reparations would do for P, for for black people in the U S.
Speaker 1:However, uh, that is not the only thing that black people deal with in the U S that you still have to deal with, right?
Speaker 1:And I think, like the the class unity approach as a side note, one of the interesting things about the class unity approach is almost all the people who put it out don't meet their definition of working class, which I think is fascinating because so many of them are like against the pmc and I'm like, but you're a college professor, like this feels like inter, inter nesting class battles, honestly, uh. But it also seems to me that like it's a recipe for failure, in that it's kind of dishonest about why there are divisions amongst the working class in the first place. So you talk about, you know, the sexual division. I mean, the obvious one is like there's a real sense in which racism in the South uh, fought off the development of a U S labor movement, but partly because, like white workers, having someone to shit on was appealing, like you know, white workers having someone to shit on was appealing Because you're not at the bottom of the relational totem pole.
Speaker 2:And that's why it's actually important for the ruling classes to have new ethnic groups that get placed at the bottom of a totem pole every once in a while, so that there is still churn and there are still opportunities for people to feel better than others and for them to cynically use this to divide the working class.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you talk about this, about stuff that is substructural to class. You brought up women's work and I think it's interesting because I think you're in line with Ingalls there. I mean, ingalls talks about what the first class division is actually the division between, uh, men and women in agriculture, like that's his, like the that's the first class division is uh, is is a division imposed by gender in an agricultural society, like and, interestingly, for all that, ingles gets wrong in, you know, because he, not because he's dumb, but because he's operating off of like about science, yeah, yeah 19th century anthropology.
Speaker 1:You know there's a lot of. That's real bad that even though he's doing that interestingly, he kind of realizes some things just from logic that turned out to be true. And one of those things is like, yeah, agriculture really did uh increase, um, sexual division of labor and um, that really probably is, you know, the the first two. You know, I think the first two class divisions is soldier, everybody else, and then man, woman, like those are the first two.
Speaker 1:For me, like, when you look at the development of societies, it's like, okay, uh, who's in the armed forces and how you support them and how do you socially reproduce and how you maintain that, what power relations, whether or not they're relatively egalitarian or not, it decides the class society. And once you have agriculture, uh, the egalitarianism of both those things goes away. Um, and ingles kind of picks that up. I mean, mean, I think he's completely right about that, even if his reasons for getting there were based off of flawed anthropology. And I find it interesting that McNair then sees that as substructural to class, which I'm like how is it substructural? It seems like it's just structural to class. How is it a substructure?
Speaker 2:Because he's too focused on capitalism as the dominant thing, which it is, but that doesn't make other things not class. So that's kind of what I wanted to emphasize by writing this. There's just these other forms of class exploitation and domination that still matter. You can say okay, someone older, that's fine. I mean, I'd throw in that besides the man-woman and soldier-non-soldier, there's also the human-non-human class division within those early societies. That probably really matter to people's everyday experience, because quite a few people in those early societies were using other animals and learning on other animals how to use and manipulate them, how to kill them well, I mean, this is, this is actually interesting.
Speaker 1:Uh, you and I have talked a lot um off air, um about that, because I'm one of these people who, uh, uh, I'm okay with granting personhood to animals in a way that I think makes a lot of communists uncomfortable, but I'm just like, um, uh, yeah, I, um, uh, yeah. I mean like they are like, if we're materialist, um, you know, uh, now I have to matter societies right.
Speaker 1:Um, if we're materialist, we have to also look at the early forms of society, both what anthropologically we might call meta-persons, which are like concepts that we treat as people, but there's also non-human persons, as animals we recognize as having person agency, and some societies go so far as recognizing that inanimate objects might be persons, which I wouldn't do. But you have this form of relating and I do think we have to deal with it like I. I don't think we can just go on with, uh, you know, treating animals completely subservient to us, uh, in that way. Um, yes, I know animals can't choose not to kill each other. That's kind of beside the point because you can.
Speaker 1:So this is where I sort of I do think maybe we do need to look to some pre-modern or indigenous although I'm going to asterisk that because indigenous has become a most abused word on the left right now but you know some, some kind of pre-modern ways of relating to the natural world that also treat these things as exploitation we should minimize, if not, you know, get rid of. And you know I think that's important, and you know I think that's important and I don't think it makes us the idea that caring about that makes you a liberal just baffles me. Like it's like OK. So you're basically saying that all ancient societies who cared about relations with nonhumans were liberal. That's weird.
Speaker 1:Like yeah, I get it. Pete is annoying, but like um, it's, it's.
Speaker 2:Uh, what, what was the phrase they, um, they used against homosexuality? It's a bourgeois concern. This is kind of similar. I just don't want to talk about it because they partake in the exploitation themselves because of how they eat and what they wear and stuff.
Speaker 1:So yeah, the the idea. Let's talk about workism a bit, uh, because while I am very much pro working class autonomy this is a big thing for me I'm always about we should act, the working class should act politically autonomously, uh, and I don't think that automatically means it's going to act socialistly, and I want people to know that, like I'm not stupid. But what I don't love is workerism, which is this idea that, like we should valorize workers' identity for its own sake. For one, I come from the lower end of the working class in the united states. There's very little of that life I'd want to like celebrate, and that's not. And that's not because I'm like anti-working class people or think that they're stupid or anything like that. Which, which, having gone through and I want to talk to this a little bit too I've gone through the educational program that makes you, you know, professional managerial, and for a while it really did like it instilled some class distinction values in me.
Speaker 2:That took me a while to like, find it's a heady drug. That's why it works so well to divide the class yep, it's effective, right and like you have to.
Speaker 1:If you go through it, you have to kind of actively rid yourself of it by reminding yourself of, like you know good things about the working class, etc. But I think you can overcompensate and pretend that every element of working class culture is inherently good or pro-social and I'm like, why would it be? It's a deracinated position in society, and I don't say this as a person who's against labor as such, like I'm not one of these anti-work Marxist in the sense that I think that well, I don't know, I'm actually not sure where I am on the pro or anti-work spectrum, because that's one of those debates, like the PMC debate, where people mean different things by it and you're never really sure if you're actually arguing the same thing.
Speaker 2:Same with DeGrove yeah.
Speaker 1:That's a big one too. I think we have to look at this as a way to organize the class, because Kath and Lou's workerism is deeply unappealing. I'm not gonna lie, um. But you know, I did read the book I I gave it a mixed review. I agree with some of what mcnair said, but I also thought, like she's on to something. Um, there is something going on there. She doesn't do the work to flesh it out.
Speaker 1:So far I've seen people kind of begin to throw out some things that would limit it or talk about the divisions within the PMC themselves. But it's interesting because one of the tragedies of the success of the term is that the more we use it, the harder it is to actually get anyone to sit down and define it and work it out and talk about it in a clear way. I think Gabriel Winnant's been the person who's tried to do that the most and has come to kind of radically different conclusions from Catherine Liu, kind of radically different conclusions from Catherine Liu. But in general most people just use it. I mean, it's almost just synonymous in communist circles with liberal shit.
Speaker 1:I don't like oh, that's PMC and I don't think you can do that. One of the reasons why I don't think you can do. It is like we've talked about professors, but managers outside hr are not, by and large, woke like. I do not think that the leadership of, uh, of most corporations are like super duper, duper, duper, duper, robin d'angelo e like it. Just my experience unless stuff has changed dramatically in the 15 years that I've been outside of the corporate structure, my experience of that is that no, that is not true. The politics of middle management is incredibly diverse, actually. So what do you make of that like? Why do you? How would we start to answer this question in a more um realistic and scientific way than it is currently being answered? Maybe that'll be our final question for the day which question specifically?
Speaker 1:oh yeah, I think I did the thing where I riffed and asked like four things um, let's bring this down. How do we uh, I guess there's two things here how do we get a better way of dealing with this question of what we see as PMC and other forms of domination within the class structure of capitalism? How do we come up with a better way to scientifically deal with it, as opposed to these terms like PMC, which have been used so much that even if we wanted to scientifically deal with it, it's going to be hard now.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm actually not. I mean just generally, it seems to me this has to be a large part of union work, and that's also within unions. Of course, there's quite a few issues with representation and how union bureaucracies function that have to be addressed for kind of the same reasons, mm-hmm. So that, and the other thing that would probably help a lot to get get us started is to just encourage, encourage to breaking down of into a company divisions of pay and so to get people to care more about how their co-workers are treated, and to get away from what we have, especially in the older industries, just the graded pay and the different scales you have. I mean, I imagine the US school system has this as well Just to have different pay scales and different pay grades.
Speaker 1:Within that we have it from city to city variance on pay grades and scale. The difference in scale depending on where you're at in the country can be massive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean you have to do something with cost of living in and around San Francisco if you want to have teachers that can live in San Francisco, and that's true for other parts of the country as well. So there's that the amount of differences, and starting discussions about why these exist and how people relate to each other seems to me to be a good way to get conversations started about these differences and about the differences between managerial and non-managerial labor and how they relate to each other. But I don't know if I don't really see a simple solution to this other than other than just generally being aware of these indirect forms of exploitation and in focusing on that in our own agitation and propaganda work and educational work within communist and socialist parties, which is also, of course, largely missing because of probably the the soviet slash common term, common form influence which then fed into the creation of party and union bureaucracies in the west um which want to maintain their own positions yeah, I think that's clear.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna read, uh, my favorite paragraph in your essay and we can riff on that on the way out, so I'm quoting you here for my audience. I thus in no way disagree with McNair that class should be central to our analysis, but we must use a broader definition, because we have to keep in mind and communicate clearly that our goal is the abolition of class rule and not just of capitalism. We must stop papering over and ignoring interclass divisions in the name of worker unity and that's in quotation marks and be clear that uniting is hard work. Given that the class is marginal or multi-dimensional use, I would strongly recommend we start talking about class in terms of which immaterial interest people have in supporting or rejecting class rule. How people provide for their subsistence and basic needs affects their commitments and broader lives in major ways, but humans are complex and this is not the only use, value or form of exploitation that matters.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think this is key, focusing only on surplus value, and that everything else is completely separate from that. Uh, I mean, to me it kind of pretends that like and you hear this from for those of you who are listening and not watching, I'm putting this word in scare quotes marxist, who literally are concerned with that, like, worker rule is the only class rule we're worried about, you know, and that once the bourgeoisie is gone, there's no other classes to deal with. Um, we're only dealing with class rule under capitalism. And I'm like, well then, what's the point? Like you know? For for me, um, that seems to be like okay, so I replace one class rule with another, because of reasons I guess.
Speaker 2:Why would I want to do that?
Speaker 1:Like you know, unless I thought I was going to be. That ruling class right, Like, but you know that's dirty pool. That ruling class, right, but you know that's dirty pool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a dream that you can become the next Stalin and survive the culling. I guess it makes sense if you're used to society functioning that way, I suppose.
Speaker 1:Well, it's just interesting to me that I would say these people very much are not used to society working that way, because arguing for, for uh that kind of inter uh, inter um ideological violence and trauma seems to be a perfect way to uh make sure that you maintain class rule as opposed to get rid of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's my worry and also exhaust the society too. How many times has Russia lost a third of its men in the 20th century? It ain't great. Thank you, like it's, it ain't great. So thank you for coming on and I'm going to put a link in the show notes to your article. People should check it out.
Speaker 1:I thought it was pretty good. I, when I was reading it, I was like, oh, this very much reminded me and I thought it was actually kind of smarter than what I did when I was trying to respond to Mark Fisher's Vampire Castle by going yeah, mark, you're right about those assholes, but maybe you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And what's interesting is that has become the first volley in a gambit that led to this. I mean, there is a way in which Mark Fisher's late politics very much presage this turn we've seen post-Bernie to blame the PMC, the two people that we're always blaming. But Marxist is the PMC and if you heard Marxist talk taught you would have thought that anarchists were the most common kind of politics on the planet. Because we're always blaming anarchists for, like, why the bernie fit, why bernie failed. I'm like, in what world do you live in? Where like uh, one that the anarchism in the united states is new, and two that like, even though it's not new, that it's a, it's a dominant politics, it matters at all.
Speaker 2:like yeah, no, that's I mean that that's a big part of what motivated me to to write this and to try to get a conversation going about this.
Speaker 2:It just seems to me very sad that people who mean well and I mean Mark is an exceptional case, of course, because of what it did for him and how he ended but there's just so many people who want to get somewhere, but we don't, because we don't reflect enough on the history of the 20th century and why it went wrong and the answers to the national question are a very big part of that but also just the bureaucratization of both the USSR and the Union and communist movements within Western countries.
Speaker 2:There's a lot that was never looked at seriously because obviously it wasn't in the interest of the people who were running the place at the time to do so. But we're still not really doing that and still not taking seriously all of the ethnic and gender and every other kind of division that just exists and is an important thing within the working class that we thus must take into account when building a new movement, and that we should have done so before. But we can change that. So let's please start now. So, yeah, that, and thank you very much for the invitation and the chance to talk about this.
Speaker 1:It's very much appreciated yeah, thank you for coming on, and is there any other place where people can find your work? I I'm sure I have some listeners that read Dutch, but most of you write in English too just want to give you central Northern Europeans type. You always think your English is bad and your English is always better than ours and it really like like I don't speak. I just want to like give props to your school system on languages, because Americans can't speak any other fucking languages ever. Like you know, I'm proud that I can butcher German and Spanish and Korean. By butcher I do mean butcher, but if people want to find your work, where can they find it?
Speaker 2:I have an own blog that's not explicitly communist but it's just trying. It's beyondmeritocracyinfo. I there try to just explore how meritocratic reasoning is expressed in different domains, and I haven't been able to really put up anything new since I became more active politically, so it's sort of defunct, but I still think it's just an interesting way for me to play with meritocracy and meritocratic logic to see how it expresses itself, and otherwise I most usually write in dutch, so that's probably uh and that will be on. Uh, communist new. It's uh.
Speaker 2:I'll give you the link yeah, I appreciate that, because, um, because uh and the other reason my English is okay is because of American cultural imperialism. So thank you for that.
Speaker 1:That's true, that's fair, you know also. I mean, our languages are sort of related kind of.
Speaker 1:Whenever I read Dutch, it always reads to me like a. It reads somehow which I'm reading wrong. By the way, what I hear in my head when I read Dutch is ridiculous, but it always reads to me like a German who's drunk speaking English when they forgot their school english. That's how dutch reads to me um, which sounds fun. Uh, you know which? I've always wondered like, what does? What is the reverse of that? What is english like for you, guys? You can insult us, it's fine. Um, I feel like.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I mean, yeah, english for me is quite diverse anyway, because of how many English countries there are and different accents and stuff.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, that's true. I mean, I guess that's, I actually don't know much about Dutch accents, so that's, I actually don't know much about Dutch accents, so that's interesting. I mean, english is a great. It is like a perfect language for cultural imperialism, because we'll just take your words and keep them anyway.
Speaker 2:I very much like how enormous vocabulary English has. I mean, in Dutch we have much more constructed words, like in German a bit less. But yeah, it's nice because you stole so much from via Shakespeare and stuff from Latin, and it's a very useful language in that sense. It's just terrible for dyslexics because of spelling and the complete disjunction between spelling and pronunciation.
Speaker 1:As a dyslexic and an aphasic, which I am, I completely agree with you. I'm a writer by by profession, and actually I kind of became a poet, partly because editing in english is a pain in the ass because you don't know how to spell anything, um uh, and we don't teach spelling anymore either, by the way, in our school system. So it's just like. It's just like. It's just like. Well, without our robot overlords, we can't even write anymore. So like yeah, that's where we're at, anyway, thank you so much.
Speaker 2:You too.
Speaker 1:All right.
