Thompson vs Althusser: A Legacy of Revolutionary Ideas

E.P. Thompson versus Louis Althusser—what if their debate reshaped our understanding of Marxist theory forever? Join Nicolas D. Villareal as we unpack Thompson's contentious critiques of Althusser, revealing the misunderstandings and secondary sources that fueled their intellectual clash. We'll dissect Althusser's argument against historicism, his endeavor to preserve Marxism's scientific core, and how his ideas have often been misinterpreted or simplified, especially by followers like Foucault.

As structuralism evolved, so did the criticisms and new trajectories within Marxist thought. We dive into Derrida's deconstructionism and Eco's Theory of Semiotics, unraveling their impacts on Marxist discourse. Hear our analysis on Althusser's later works, where Gramscian influences and Lenin's revolutionary defeatism highlight the complexities of change within structures. We'll explore how these debates have influenced contemporary Marxism, with nods to thinkers like Richard Wolff and the ever-evolving landscape from the 1960s to today.

Finally, we tackle the nuanced legacy of Althusser's critiques and his contentious relationship with Maoism and Stalinism. The conversation spans Althusser's stance on traditional dialectics, psychoanalysis, and the unpredictable nature of social evolution, as well as his efforts to establish a left-wing critique of Stalinism. Reflecting on the broader philosophical and political implications, we examine how these debates continue to shape revolutionary theory and historical materialism, offering a balanced perspective on Althusser’s enduring impact.

Chapters

• 0:00 Debating EP Thompson vs Althusser
• 12:36 Critiques of Althusser and Western Marxism
• 30:29 New Approaches to Marxist Theory
• 44:29 Dialectics and Post-Structuralism Responses
• 49:56 Marxist Theory
• 58:34 Critiquing Marxism
• 1:04:46 Reevaluating Althusser and Marxist Critiques
• 1:17:22 Debates on Marxist Theory Mediation
• 1:24:16 Marxist Critique and Historical Analysis
• 1:35:13 Theorizing Althusser and Marxist Concepts
• 1:47:17 Exploring Lacanian Influence in Marxism
• 1:55:42 Materialism, Lacanian Influence, and State Formation
• 2:03:38 Global State Evolution and Decline
• 2:18:56 Critiquing Graeber and Structuralism
• 2:24:59 Reevaluating Bordiga and Left Communism
• 2:37:58 Critiquing Marxist Scholars and Orthodoxy
• 2:42:29 Debating Althusser's Marxist System

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 1:34

Hello, welcome to VARM blog. And today we pick back up on what was a maybe a patrons only debate. I don't remember because it was over two years ago and I have had you on the show like five times since. We said we were going to follow up on this. But we're going to talk about the EP Thompson-Altusserre debates, the consequences thereof, the weaknesses of both arguments. I reread the Poverty of Theory and I admit that I actually don't think it was a particularly strong argument against Althusser, as I originally thought. I do think it's a good argument against Althusserians who pick up Althusserian jargon without understanding it. And I was going to ask you what did you make of his reliance on and by his I mean EP Thompson's reliance on like secondary Althusserian historians, because it takes him a while to actually get to Althusser himself?

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:51

yeah, I thought that was weird because I well, honestly, I have not read that many Althusserians, except for a few who were engaged in like the post-structuralism debates in like the 90s and also a little bit of Polansas, Because I don't know how far Althusser is. I'm sure that if it was a trend at the time, I'm sure there was lots of people that hopped on and didn't really know what they were talking about. But he does also talk a lot about Althusser, which I about him, about the empiricism that EP Thompson is doing, or EP Thompson is like, not really like the critique isn't really that all meaningful at all, I think, and I don't. I have not read enough of EP Thompson's regular work to really know which one it is besides this critique. But I do think that Althusser's critiques of empiricism and historicism are important and aren't just ways to get around doing hard research.

C. Derick Varn: 4:17

Well, let's ask ourselves a question in as succinct as a manner possible, with minimum Althusserian jargon, which you know, and you can get why. I'm actually asking you to do this without the jargon, because there is a way in which I've seen Althusser used where his jargon stands in for his arguments, in a way in which I've seen Althusser used where his jargon stands in for his arguments in a way that actually doesn't help. But let's get into what was his critique of historicism in general.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 4:57

So the big thing was that, um, I think his primary critique, which wasn't even primarily aimed at historians, that was like a secondary thing. He didn't really name any historians, I think, when he was making that critique, or anybody particularly important. Um, he was most like he mostly goes after, like gromsky and Lukacs, I think, and he's saying that what they do is reduce the theoretical concepts that they're creating are fundamentally political concepts, so they're subordinate to the political struggle that's going on in that particular place in time. And this is bad for Marxism as a science. That, because this means that the categories like they, they mean, they can, they can mean different things than from what the actual theoretical, scientific hypothesis meant.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 6:06

And they can know, after a certain outside of that situation, they often are no longer true and are kind of totally unhelpful towards keeping this like working class movement or like keeping a knowledge of this, um, of knowledge of marxism, of of these, both strategies, and knowledge of political economy and what, what have you? Um, so, and I think ep thompson does, thompson does like he kind of falls into this problem of historicism in a slightly different way because he talks about the, he kind of shoehorns this way that class changes over time into it Because, like he says, oh, people understand their class situation differently at different times, which is true. But then if you want to appraise marxist claims scientifically which I don't even know if eb thompson wants to do, but which is what out there and I think a lot of like what was the idea of scientific marxism wanted to do, was that well, we have to think about what like an objective kind of political economy sense of talking about class.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 7:36

You can talk about those different definitions, right, but you have to appraise them in that objective sense, not in saying, oh, because class meant something differently in this time, now that whole scientific system no longer matters or applies, we can just take some certain categories from it and not worry about the rest. Does that make sense To some degree?

C. Derick Varn: 8:05

I mean the danger in structuralism, and by this I'm going to also just say flat out Althusser. It is unclear to me that Althusser's relationship to structuralism is entirely queer throughout the fullness of his career. I want to like put that out there. Now there's a reason why structuralism is not generally associated with Marxists. It's generally actually associated with weirdo Hegelians like Claude Lévi-Strauss and like Claude Levi Strauss.

C. Derick Varn: 8:48

There seem to be two different things going on in why I find Autistarianism frustrating versus what we see EP Thompson trying to do. One thing I will say is, as EP Thompson is mostly a historian, when he writes about things like emergent ideas and concepts he seems particularly unsophisticated about it. But the problem that I've always seen, nico, is that it takes 30 seconds to go from Althusser's concept of structure to this Foucauldian, locked, episteme's closed-off social world, which I actually do think needs to be flagged as pretty fundamentally idealist In the sense that it really does think that ideas are super socially determining and it makes transitions between epochs and whatnot incomprehensible. Now, I don't think it is fair to tarnish Althusser with that. I think it is fair to tarnish Althusser's children ideologically with that.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 10:10

I mean Foucault is basically Marxism. If it was a historicism, it is all the things that Althusser says is wrong with historicism and more. And there is a really unfortunate sense that all of Althusser's students kind of ended up becoming that more or less. You can argue about some of them.

C. Derick Varn: 10:43

Maybe Balabar is still okay. Yeah, I don't know.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 10:48

I feel like a lot of them. I tried to get into reading Laurel recently, who picks up Althusser's concept of non-philosophy, and it just felt there was no meat to it. Well, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 11:03

Laurel, is what happens if you read Althusser to Derrida and then, like Badoo? Is what happens when you read Althusser through Plato. So it's, yeah, yeah, so it's. You know, I mean Badoo's my favorite weirdo Maoist. But it needs to be emphasized how weirdo Maoist he is, because it's like he's basically a platonic form of cultural revolution. Is what we're arguing for.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 11:33

But Well, let's get back to that idea of structure, right. Well, let's, let's get back to that idea of structure, right? Um, because I think that, uh, so I I've been trying to get more into, like this idea of of what structuralism was, but I didn't want to, because there was a lot of problems with structuralism at the beginning, um, and ways that it was used in kind of an idealist way, almost in like a jordan peterson maps of meaning, kind of an idealist way, almost in like a Jordan Peterson maps of meaning, kind of way of saying that these archetypes exist in culture and they kind of structure society in some way.

C. Derick Varn: 12:05

Oh yeah, I mean like Derrida's entire career is either glossing I mean I'm being unfair here actually, like some of Derrida's like work, but it's either glossing Heidegger or attacking Claude Lévi-Strauss for exactly that, which is like finding these deep structures, which are basically archetypes that are like reading Hegel into you know early human history, Right.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 12:28

And here's the thing is that Derrida, from everything I've understand, was right to make those critiques.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 12:36

The problem was is that everybody became like deridians, or however you want to say it, and they stopped developing structuralism as like a real academic discipline and it all became about.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 12:51

It became idealist totally, because what derida does is like when you focus on how the division between categories is necessary to create those categories, including the one that is lesser or whatever, like when you do that you're fundamentally just focusing on the categories themselves and not what they refer to in any way. And that's what, like Derrida, deconstructionism all became and that's what, like Derrida, deconstructionism all became. But once you get into what structuralism became, there was a moment there after that when structuralism was still around and people were responding to this kind of critique that I think you can think of a mature structuralism. And that's why I've been reading Umberto Eco's Theory of Semiotics and that's been very illuminating, because I think it shows exactly the way that Althusser did relate to structuralism, because it was about because semiotics is the science of like signs and how signs gain meaning, and creating codes that have meaning and those kinds of things.

C. Derick Varn: 14:01

So I'm glad you're clarifying that for our audience. Just so you know, how I got into philosophy was Umberto Eco. I used to carry around travels in hyper-reality and what else.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 14:19

See, I have not read anything else by Umberto Eco yet. This is the first thing I've read. Hysteria of symbiotics.

C. Derick Varn: 14:23

Well, I came to him from literature, so actually like so, I read Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum in high school because I was a weirdo and in fact I reread Foucault's Pendulum about every 10 years. But my thing is with Foucault. I reread Foucault's Pendulum about every 10 years, but my thing is with Foucault. I mean not Foucault, echo is, I think, echo out of that group. You know, you know my biases Team Germany over Team France and then probably Team Italy over most of Team France too.

C. Derick Varn: 14:55

But in this case I do want to go into that, because one critique that comes up in the structuralism as we're talking about here I think it's fair that you see go rampant in, like italian marxism in particular, but also in people like baudrillard, uh, like the second generation of people who are responding to, uh, you know, the humanism of the French Communist Party. We do have to contextualize Autoussere specifically as both kind of a Maoist, but also I always find it very interesting when we talk about Autoussere. I was reading Alvin Goudner's book and Goudner puts Aut Sarah's like paradigmatic of of of scientific Marxism. But when you read Goudner's description of scientific Marxism, what he's actually talking about is like Bernstein and Dung and to some degree Khrushchev, right Right.

C. Derick Varn: 15:58

Like he's talking about developmentalist Marxism and institutional school Marxism, which is interesting because that's exactly what Althusser was responding to in the West, focusing on what is actually, from his French perspective of the 1960s, not a huge part of his debate, which is his debates with Thompson, lukasz and Gramsci, although debates where Gramsci is in quotation marks, because it's in debates with the little bits of Gramsci that have been put into the public by Tagliati in the 1940s, like it was not even all of Gramsci that have been put into the public by Tagliati in the 1940s, it was not even all of Gramsci.

C. Derick Varn: 16:43

And that critique he has of it being politically driven first, to a point of actually excluding the economy, part of political economy, I think it's fair when you read gramsci's prison notebooks I I don't even know that that's naturally what gramsci thought. But since he's writing in code and he's dealing with, like the books he has on hand, none of which are political, economic, they're all like the prince. It's hard to know when, like the modern prince, is actually supposed to be a symbol for something Marxist or when he's trying to do this trans-historical thing. So it seems to me that that kind of Granshian humanism very much gets picked up in quote Western Marxism, but ironically by Western Marxist groups that were officially aligned to the common turn and then when it existed. So it's a very it's a very uh interesting thing. Whereas today new altus here has an interesting reputation like um a lot of his ideological children right here we don't mean foucaoucault, I mean people like uh Ranciere and um, not so much Balabar, but uh yeah, richard Wolff.

C. Derick Varn: 18:07

Uh well, Wolff is interesting. I mean, yeah, wolff is interesting in that um his writings on state capitalism with what's his face? Who's dead?

Nicolas D. Villareal : 18:24

He's dead.

C. Derick Varn: 18:26

Maybe I'm misremembering. He seems like he's dead. I have the book back here somewhere Are very much Althusser influence and they're interesting in that they're using Althusser to critique contemporary political economy and usr and china. But um, today you feel like actually richard wolf has is like exoterically he acts like he's ep thompson and and like esoterically he's maybe a dungist like which I know I can't prove my Richard Wolff fans are going to at me, I get it, but like that feels like where he's actually at, which is a very different place than when he was writing in the 70s and 80s using Althusserian concepts. I also know that Richard Wolff doesn't really mention Althusser in his public speaking at all anymore.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 19:20

Yeah, I feel like most people that you'd be talking to wouldn't even know who he is. But the well there's a couple. There's so many things going on there, right. So with I mean one. Richard Wolf is like really big in China now, so I'm sure there's a little bit of dingus influence.

C. Derick Varn: 19:39

Yeah, so maybe Richard Wolff is really big in China now, so I'm sure there's a little bit of Dengist influence Maybe drop that structural state capitalist critique a little bit.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 19:47

This goes back to the bigger thing going on here that I think relates to Althusser's or the critiques of Althusser as being a Stalinist or something. I've said this before one of the previous discussions we had on this is that the idea of talking about state ideology is fundamentally a way to talk about not just, you know, like the capitalist states or whatever and how like we get reproducing capitalism, but it's also a way of talking about how marxism is being um, like twisted by the demands of like the states, um of like communist states and stuff. And even if he's not directly saying that, that's, I think, is the subtext, um that you have to because you can't, because it's a way to participate in like uh the communist, the french communist party of really existing cop, like official communism, and still make those kind of critiques. I think um and ep thompson, who was someone who uh, abandoned that like pretty early on with like the um, was it the prague spring or?

C. Derick Varn: 20:57

and he may have even done it during the hungarian uh uprising. You know um which I mean. The thing is like. The hungarian uprising is interesting, I know like someone like carlos garuto will use it as like oh, all the people who sided with um with this were dirty, parmenidean, western marxist or whatever, like ars block, and. But I always point out that a lot of the first people who defected they were in west, they were in eastern germany as loyal communists, even during the end of high stalinism, right after the war. So there's something about the way the hungarian uprising went down which was too much for them and that. What I find very interesting about that is that you can't pin that on Stalin Like.

C. Derick Varn: 21:46

A lot of the events that lead to Western Marxist defection are actually events that happen under Khrushchev Khrushchev Now you take that reading, particularly when you like know the history of why the sino-soviet split developed, right, um, because the reasons why the sino-soviet slip was almost inevitable, they were all actually stalin decisions. They were not Khrushchev decisions, but they all became undeniable during Khrushchev. And if anything um Khrushchev's fault is that he wouldn't fully like repudiate uh certain like Russian centric Stalin policies uh, during his time here, for the good of the, of reestablishing something like the commentary which they never tried to do. I mean, that's the other thing is like there's no communist international after world war two. I mean it's just gone. So that's uh that that leads to these, these parties in France and Italy, and I think it's very interesting that um that like and this is actually very indicated to me that maybe calling altos air a simple stalinist is not actually all that accurate um in that uh, when he's attacking gram she, it's pretty clear to me that Alta Alta Sierra is attacking Togliatti's like concessionist to the popular front Gramsci.

C. Derick Varn: 23:45

That is this very particular reading of of certain selections of the prison notebooks which at the time when Alta Sierra was writing, they weren't even all available in Italian. Like I was actually surprised to learn that recently I was doing some research and I was like, oh, they weren't translated fully. I mean not translated, they weren't even published completely um for a long time because uh, togliatti published them, um, uh kind of edited um when he got them in Moscow and when he tried to re, when they tried to reform the Communist Party of Italy in in and I think 1944 as a resistance party, you know, and it had been pretty much destroyed between 1935 and 1944. So it was. I find that interesting.

C. Derick Varn: 24:38

And what does that say about altouser? Well, if altouser is critiquing that, he's actually going at something in official common turn lines, he's not fighting with, like, dirty hegelian western marxists alone. He is fighting them, I mean like, but that's not actually his primary concern, and so so when EP Thompson steps in, one of the things that I think is interesting is like he doesn't. Ep Thompson, for all of his historicism, doesn't read Althusser as having any of his own history Right Like are any of his own initial Francophone concerns, initial francophone concerns.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 25:17

Well, I mean he views it from his own perspective, which is that he sees Althusser as a straightforward representation of official communism. I think.

C. Derick Varn: 25:29

Yeah, which is weird.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 25:31

Yeah, which is what he's opposed to, but it's also like he can't, because Althusser was trying to shape things, reform things from within. I feel from that and I think this actually relates to his structuralism, because he saw official communism as a structure connected to this kind of material base of the proletariat, um, which thompson certainly did not. Um and uh, thompson, I think, really wanted, like official communism to be abandoned so that they could have like this, like oh, we could just start over, kind of in a trotskyist kind of way of like uh, if, like oh, if the ussr falls and we, and we can start over and do something better, or something in that vein. And I think he didn't really appreciate that kind of structuralist logic that Althusser has. Like, oh, the material base actually does matter and you can't just like abandon it because you think you can ideally get something better.

C. Derick Varn: 26:43

Well, I mean, and I guess in that sense, when someone like Alvin Gildner uses Althusser as a representation of like scientific Marxism, by that which we mean Bernstein Khrushchev Dung, does he mention Kotsky at least?

Nicolas D. Villareal : 26:57

Khrushchev Dung, the. Does he mention Kotsky at least?

C. Derick Varn: 27:03

He does. Actually, kotsky is kind of in the scientific marks, although Kotsky's a.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 27:08

Because if you just mention Bernstein and not Kotsky, that's very bizarre.

C. Derick Varn: 27:13

Well, I mean, he also mentions basically official Soviet communism, but he won't say that, he doesn't tar linen with that. He actually sees wildly, and this is what makes it funny. He sees the Guevara and the Maoist revolutions as critical Marxist revolutions. That's Goldner Like, because they don't follow the, the economistic development period and they have like, they have very like humanistic and historical rhetoric and I was like, yeah, but it's rhetoric, it's not. That's not even how they analyze it. You're just taking like statements, statements at face value.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 28:01

Yeah, I think that happens a lot in some of these kind of critiques that find kind of official Marxism a little bit impenetrable or official communism.

C. Derick Varn: 28:12

Yeah, well, I mean Althusser also like unlike. Say, someone like some modern peer likeic Lacerdo does not think everything in Western Marxism needs to be thrown out.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 28:24

Some people count Althusser as Western Marxism as well.

C. Derick Varn: 28:30

Yeah, I know Well, perry Anderson counted. Here's the thing about Western Marxism. It was originally, in Perry Anderson's world, a category built to talk about the new left thinkers that were cool, and then it became a category for us to talk about how all the europeans don't see the true light of. Survey says chinese communism as read through the ussr before 1952 uh, but only the parts of chinese communism that are recent. We're going to ignore everything between 1952. Uh and uh and um in 1981, like particularly anything uh about, like capitalist rotors. I remember gorito was like that's a western deviation, like motherfucker that came from china itself. Like thatido was like that's a western deviation.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 29:21

I'm like motherfucker. That came from China itself. That's internal party talk. That's the only reason we have that vocabulary of a roter Right.

C. Derick Varn: 29:28

A lot of the weird new left vocabulary is because we were translating Chinese literally into English. There's a lot of weird Maoice phrases that come from that. But nonetheless, um, I find I find this ultra Syrian problem rather interesting and and what got me more sympathetic to him was actually our last conversation and me thinking about Polansis. Because, polansis, you can't accuse him of being a Stalinist. There's no way. Can't accuse him of being a stalinist, there's no way. Like, like and if anything.

C. Derick Varn: 30:05

Also, this caricature of scientific marxism as economism and critical marxism is like wild voluntarism. Um, palancis breaks that down like, because, if anything, he's not economistic, he just thinks that political economy really matters. Now I find this interesting because it is opaque to me. One of my critiques of Althusser initially was I don't understand Althusser's theory of change, like how does change exactly happen between interpolation structure, um over the termination, etc. It actually seems like things are fairly closed off and I agree with you that one of the ironies of all two-stage children is that when they take those concepts and start messing with them in the 70s, they make them historicist and also they do remove any concept of political economy for the most part. It's pretty clear that that's where that ends up going.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 31:12

So there's a couple of things here, right?

Nicolas D. Villareal : 31:14

So in some ways Altheaer gestures at a theory of change but never fully develops it, I think, until his latest works, his last works that you can look at in the Philosophy of the Encounter, where he kind of adopts some of that Gramscian prince kind of ideas, adopt some of like that gramscene prince kind of ideas of, uh, um, of when, like, there's an idea of of well, well, in reading capital, there's an idea of like there there are structures that exist, uh, in like history, and you can move towards them or you can move away from them. But this is, and you like you, we can think of a country that regresses in terms of development, that de-develops or whatever, and that development what it's developing towards is that kind of more abstract concept of the structure. But how do you get like the formation of new structures and what you really have to go towards? The end when he's talking about, well, when structures start to break down, that's when you see moments where the prince emerges and things happen that you can't really predict from the structure that came before.

C. Derick Varn: 32:32

And do you think Althusser gets this from trying to parse out the implications of Lenin's objective and subjective conditions criteria? Because there are a few things that I think are both very misunderstood about Lenin and also are the things that are unique to him. So, revolutionary defeatism, which is often completely misread, but that's unique to Lenin. Revolutionary defeatism, which is often completely misread, but um, but that's unique to linen, that's not in marx. Um, it's not solely unique to linen. Arguably the whole zimmerwald left actually picked it up, but nonetheless, um, then there is, uh, subjective and objective conditions for revolution, which is not something that Marx talks about, although I do think in the letters there's implications of this, where you have, you know you, stuff about, like consciousness and political decisions, but also development needing to be at a certain pace, etc.

C. Derick Varn: 33:38

Someone like Alvin G gutner just sees these as contradictory tendencies and marks. But I've actually begun to think like, no, he was trying to work something out about the relationship between agency and, for him, determination, like, because if you like you know, marksman, particularly the brew mayor, marks makes all these like paradoxical statements about human agency. And that made me a lot more sympathetic to what Althusser is trying to do. Because Althusser is trying to to to really deal with. Like, okay, let's assume human beings have some kind of agency. We're not gonna say free will, because that's a stupid debate. Um, but uh, in which ways are they limited by structures and which ways not?

C. Derick Varn: 34:22

and you know, late Althusser does kind of a weird, ironically dialectical he does that a lot move where he takes a lot of the stuff he was priorly critiquing, reassociates that back into his understanding of Marx and then kind of ignores that he's actually incorporated some of his enemies into his thinking.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 34:55

Well, he never says that Gramsci is like his enemy. He always says like oh, he's a genius, but here's what he did wrong, or whatever he always qualifies it.

C. Derick Varn: 35:04

Right, I mean, well, attacking Gramsci is like also it's easy for us to do in some ways because Gramsci has been so like Walter Benjamin or somebody. He's both a martyr and somebody who's been like sterilized by humanities academia to the point that, like you can see, like fucking conservatives referencing him facilely and not really understanding what he's on about and using Graham G to like you know, you know, when you think about like the conservative pseudo history of cultural Marxism, they always like start with Gramsci, like oh, gramsci gave up on the proletariat.

C. Derick Varn: 35:48

He moved the culture, which is not true actually. That's just not true is what he thought he needed to understand to be able to build a viable party for the proletariat, while also navigating the distances between the common-term, fully-aligned factions around Togliatti and the very popular ultra-leftist parts of the Italian communist movement which were also the founders of the party. So like Bordigo later on, dement, etc. So it's um, this is this is something interesting about gramsci, but yeah, I mean it's. It's weird to me that we read all these guys now without context and, um, one, it was one of the things I find so fascinating about, say, like british trotskyism, for example. Like if you look at like the iso, there was a weirdly pro ep thompson faction in the iso and then there was also a weirdly like trotsky, but through all to say our faction in the iso. I didn't know that. Yeah, it was yeah, and that's because it was mimicking the SWP, like where there was like some thinkers who in Trotskyist circles who read the Miliband-Palancis debate and sided with Palancis and was like, okay, maybe we need to give this Altasair guy more of a chance, and then there were other people who doubled down On well, alterstairs, a dirty Stalinist, and fuck that guy. So that was, that was kind of the British. I mean. You can, if you really want to see this, look at the new left review From the 70s into the 90s, where, like, there's this battle, uh, between the alt-isarians and the anti-alt-isarians, and one of the interesting things that I realized emerged from this like political marxism has two origins, but that I mean the brinner school, the brinner milkman's road school, uh, one of which is, um, a response to analytic marxism and structural marxism.

C. Derick Varn: 38:06

Right, uh, but people miss the structural marxism part because, uh, milkins would, for example, thought that ep thompson went too far in his critique about tusserre in a way that actually made, like basins superstructure talk not make any sense, like, if you actually follow Thompson's logic out, it actually hurts understanding Marx and Engels. So so that was, that was one of the things that I found interesting that, like, the political Marxist in Britain split the, actually end up splitting the baby between a debate, which explains a lot.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 38:46

Well. I think that you would have to do that if you just want to keep a basic kind of Marxism Cause I feel EP Thompson was just like oh, we'll take some of these ideas, and he wasn't really trying. He rejected at the outset the idea of Marxism as a system, which was pretty fundamental. That's not tenable, that's like rejecting Hegel as a system.

C. Derick Varn: 39:12

That just doesn't work.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 39:15

We're still Hegelians, but the whole system.

C. Derick Varn: 39:20

Yeah, I mean like are arguably also trying to impose a system on Nietzsche. That also doesn't work, yeah.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 39:30

I think that the thing with this whole objective, subjective, objective, subjective conditions and the question of like human agency and things because I don't think alfazer was explicitly like explicitly links those things in in this later theory.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 39:48

But it is like because when lenin's talking about that, well, well, here's what here's what Althusser says is that the thing that gives, like the prince, the ability to interfere, to create this new structure, to intervening in, like, this moment of chaos or whatever, is the fact that they have some kind of imperative or like this he said like emphasizes the word like they must do this thing.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 40:24

They have, they're driven to this goal or whatever, and the goal doesn't like, it doesn't necessarily need to be, it's not necessarily fulfilled in what comes next, but it is what causes this new thing to come about.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 40:40

And that's kind, that's kind of related to ideology, but it's not like it's not the state ideology, but ideology is this kind of set of instructions that you must do this thing and it's an imperative to intervene, to create something new. It's it's, and I think that um like, when you think about things that way, and the fact that this is um that, and the fact that ideology is a condition that everyone has, regardless of um, like who you are, what you're doing doing, like the fact that like to him, like this whole thing of structuralism is like the hard part, the idea of like, having a set like an ideology, an ideological imperative to go out and do revolution or political change or whatever, is the part that comes naturally, because structuralism or structural marxism that he was doing was like an attempt to do like a scientific project that was beyond political conditions and that creating this like objective scientific knowledge, creating this objective scientific knowledge through a theoretical practice, not trying to just go out and do things but to rigorously systematize these concepts and what have you?

C. Derick Varn: 42:22

That was the thing that was historically rare and difficult. You know, yeah, I mean this is. This is one of the this is why I asked is if you thought this might have some relationship to to linen's objective and subjective conditions is because people trying to figure out why the objective and subjective conditions don't have a clean relationship was like a huge intellectual project in the 20s and 30s, like it was just like okay, now that we have this distinction, we can always say when it looks like, when it looks like oh you know, immiseration or a certain period of development or whatever is going to trigger revolution, it doesn't happen where we have to go to subjective conditions and that, in a way, is even why Lenin develops the concept. But it's interesting because it does get into this. It does get us away from this automatic view of like something happens and X is going to trip and it's going to be inevitable.

C. Derick Varn: 43:11

And one of the things that makes I think all too Syrian structuralism, I think Althusserian structuralism, not guilty of a lot of the automaticity of a lot of quote scientific Marxisms which are basically developmentalist, honestly, is that he actually doesn't seem to think that. In fact he seems to think that it's a teleological error, you know, I think even uses that term, um, to read laws, um, as as being, you know, uh, unilateral, that way and and that. And he and I think what is missed when we discuss this is he's reading the, the pronouncements of the common turn and then of the french communist party, you know, both in their humanist and in their high stalinist periods, and going like, well, okay, if this is a science, uh, it, it does seem to be problematic that you guys keep on predicting wrong stuff, like he doesn't say that explicitly, but that seems to be problematic. That you guys keep on predicting wrong stuff, like he doesn't say that explicitly, but that seems to be implicit in his critique of the teleology, of trying to deduce general historical laws like that. And it leads to another.

C. Derick Varn: 44:30

Another development that I wanted to talk to you about and this is from the philosophy of encounter, by the way, I actually did my homework this time Is that this is a, this is an altusarian concept.

C. Derick Varn: 44:42

I don't see used that much um, but it is conjuncture, like the concept that, like that you have freedom at a conjuncture because structures are breaking down, but it it is not like, oh, the inevitable and virtual, or contradiction, if we go back to what Alta Sera is trying to do with overdetermination which I used to get annoyed with because the way Alta Sarians use overdetermination is often like is what they usually mean is actually just determination. But what he was going on about in overdetermination, which he got from psychoanalysis which is another reason why I didn't read it right, because I know that word from logic and the psychoanalytic meaning and the logical meaning are related, but they're not exactly the same. But what he was trying to get at is contradiction only deals with two causes. Right, there's the thesis and then the off-hebung. Well, you have the thesis it's not really a counter-thesis but the negative response. And then the off-hebung, right, and Althusser is like that's way too simple of a model. Right, things don't have singular causalities like that.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 46:02

Right, the whole thing with dialectics is that they're a very specific kind of logic. That is the whole thing this applies to Marx's formulations of communism as well is that you can read into communist society like a structure of it, some ideas of it, because of this dialectical process of working out, but you can't actually, his whole point is that you can't, through that logic, assume what comes next, because when a logic breaks down, it no longer um, like it creates what comes next. The next thing can be totally differentiated, totally different. Yeah, I mean go ahead.

C. Derick Varn: 46:59

No, I mean, but I see both why that is super helpful, but also how it could lead to fuko my yeah, well, here's the thing is.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 47:09

I think that idea came. I'm pretty sure that idea came after fuko and the whole post-structuralism thing happened, that this was a response. Okay, we have to deal more with like these kinds of things of what, like the, the breakdown of structures and um, and neoliberalism and everything, um, because this I think this was the most fertile moment for structuralism, but also it kind of sealed its fate as an academic backwater because everybody was just post-structuralism now and nobody was reading the responses to post-structuralism, which was very frustrating.

C. Derick Varn: 47:52

Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, one of the things I want to go back in marxism and humanism is that, um, and that's another alt-serian essay I I have I'm still parsing, I I don't know if I ultimately agree with it, but I do think there's interesting things in there. One of the things I realized is what's that say? Uh, marxism and humanism are like the, the anti-humanist text, um, uh, but one of the reasons why I think it's interesting um, is that there are some critiques of of things like species being in human potential in there that I think are, I think, are fair.

C. Derick Varn: 48:40

Um, one of the things is like, I didn't realize until very recently that I was correcting species being to mean like human biological functioning, and that is not actually what that term means in furibok and and and probably in marx. It actually means not human biological functioning, but what makes humans unique and it's a unique. It actually means not human biological functioning, but what makes humans unique and it's a unique. It's like a humans as a unique category of life thing, which to me is, I mean it does veer into biology a little bit sometimes, but that's basically the gist of it.

C. Derick Varn: 49:13

Well, yeah, and what I find interesting is like, uh, it does be learned to biology, but like it, it does it in a very 19th century way yeah that people would 20, would, would 20, I mean, and you see this, actually, even today, in 21st century marxist writing about animals and stuff and they're just assuming that like they're totally separate from human beings and their way they can and and I'm like dude, not even not even bourgeois people do that shit as much anymore.

C. Derick Varn: 49:46

I don't know why you guys are still like sticking to this and that and, and I realized that in that way. Alta Sarah has another point because, like, this is a mystification of the human being or somehow outside of the kinds of processes all other life on earth is in um, and I can see why he would bulk against that when we're trying to make marxism more scientific, like um regardless. You know, just to put it on a little biography and I'll let you come back up and we'll come back to the EP Thompson critique because there's some interesting things in there that I think maybe is fair to call empiricists. But I also want to push on the fact that I think EP Thompson is actually consistent with early Marx on how ideas are formed, and that's maybe a problem in early Marx.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 50:51

I mean, it's a whole problem with Hegel, right, but here's the thing is that the whole Hegelian thing and the early Marx thing of how ideas are constantly changing is correct, right, it's obviously correct. But that runs against the whole idea of scientificity, basically that like you kind of, because when you're creating a hypothesis or something you kind of have to, you can't just let the definitions drift with how, like the cultural meanings or whatever, or even though sometimes that's difficult, you have to, you have to pay attention to what like was being predicted or was being understood this is how things work and see if that's actually correct or not. Because if you just let the concepts go loose, however you want, in Althusser critiques this is even present even in some later marks he points out Ingalls is doing this, one of the introductions to one of the volumes of Capital Then you can't like it's no longer a consistent question that you're trying to answer, but, but, but, and here's the thing is that like it also relates to, like the, the question of realism, right, because what Asher consistently says, that what is being changed? When you're creating a scientific critique, the new theory, you're creating a scientific critique with the thing that you're, the new theory you're creating, you're affecting, um, the uh, the real object is like the of knowledge, the thing, the idea that you have about this thing. You're not actually changing the real object in the world. This is kind of obvious, but it's something that kind kind of isn't necessarily the Hegelian understanding of things. That is, and this actually relates, I think, a little bit to what we were talking about earlier, which is like these political predictions not coming true, to what we were talking about earlier, which is like these political predictions not coming true.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 53:29

The Althusser's intervention was that, in reading Capital at least, was that this political, like the whole idea of the base and superstructure, and isn't that like the economic base of this abstraction, is determining, um, like the uh, the the empirical reality of of political history, of this political phenomenon that's happening in like every day. The political that it's determining is also abstract. It is determining because otherwise you're kind of mixing apples and oranges um, the political experience there's, there's economic experience and there's political experience, and those things might be related. But what the abstract structures determine isn't the immediate experience, which can be determined by all kinds of things, it is the larger political structures that are more abstracted.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 54:31

The problem with like dialectical thinking is that you can't, like, you're always just when the circumstances change, you're always changing with them, so you can't actually, you're not, you're, you're, you're adapting to them, but you're not actually learning something consistent, which is kind of, I think, a self-contradiction within Hegel, because the whole point is to learn stuff, whole point is to learn stuff, um, but you, you actually have to, like, go against that tide of meaning, the change in meaning, in order to make sure you actually know what you're talking about, in order to get back to the what the concepts are referring to okay, so where do you think EP Thompson really messes up here?

Nicolas D. Villareal : 55:30

Well, I think he's basically doing the same thing that Althusser critiques Engels for in that one period period.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 55:42

Eb Thompson does this whole kind of cheeky thing of, oh.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 55:44

He does these extended metaphors about how Althusser is on a stage in a theater and putting on a ridiculous vaudeville performance or something and making fun of Marx and Engels in weird ways. But he's, I think he's straightforwardly doing that thing of allowing, um, in particular the concept of class, to change over time so it doesn't have scientific meaning or it doesn't have. And he's also like very against the idea of system, which I think is very important both for scientific theory and for Marx. And so empiricists, he does kind of slip into empiricism sometimes in that way that like, oh, we can just like he sometimes like he'll qualify it and say that like, yeah, of course we don't do just empiricists, like empirical research, without a theoretical understanding, although he says some historians do that, um, but you have to. But we do have these important concepts that we take from marx. But the fact, but if those concepts are changing with the empirical data that you're getting, then you're not actually testing those concepts in any meaningful way, you're just expressing the current situation in Marxist language.

C. Derick Varn: 57:14

So this has interesting implications to me. You said privately that you think this led to the problems of the New Left, and at first I had a little bit balked, but then I thought about this particular problem. Let's talk about Deleuze and Guattari for a moment. One of the things that Deleuze and Guattari do and Baudrillard does it during both his Marxist and his post-Marxist, anti-marxist period is they use Marxist vocabulary and Marxist structural systems but they strip them of all their uh placement in the system of of ideas. And let's think about it as like, like, uh, it's like if I'm given a machine, uh, that does a thing, and I just start start taking parts out and I make a clock on the wall with the part, okay, cool, but the part no longer is part of the clock. It's an aesthetically part of the clock on the wall.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 58:11

I literally just the other week, I was at an art shop and they had all these clocks made out of computer hard drives and motherboards and stuff Exactly like that.

C. Derick Varn: 58:22

Yeah, and I think that is sort of what's happening with this apparatus. So, like you see, the MCM stuff from capital volume two, the way to lose in guitar use, that has nothing, yeah, nothing to do with the way Mark uses it are when baudrillard is critiquing value and marx he's he's deliberately equivocating like different ideas about value that, again, contextually and textually speaking, both have nothing to do with what Marx is specifically talking about. It's like it is. It is uh, shaking marks out for, for nihilisms are are even not even nihilisms, but just like concepts and applying them willy nilly to how you want.

C. Derick Varn: 59:15

Now that this is like my major critique of team France, like seriously like um a lot of French french people, a lot of the french philosophers do it yeah, um, and I realized that, like altouserre actually isn't doing that, like he's actively not doing that and in fact that's what he's afraid of, and when you remove this idea that Marxism has systemic reference. Now for Althusser we know from his letters and stuff he basically admits that that he only considers, like what? Two texts to be fully without humanism, which is like the critique of the Goethe program and like some letters. Humanism, which is like the critique of the girtha program and like some letters like you know, late altis air kind of like for those.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:09

I'm not even sure about critique of the gotha program yeah, it's like, um, uh, you know, and I find that interesting. But I also find it interesting that you also can't accuse altis here becoming one of like these dungas developmentalists. If we just develop productive forces, uh, that you know, socialism will just happen, or the immiserationist or accelerationist, depending on what time period you're in thing is, if we just let the contradictions of capital get heightened to an absurd degree, people will have to rebel, which is also dumb. There's no historical evidence for that, um, but uh, I'll just say it's not guilty of either. And and I was, I was surprised, and the reason why I bring up um, my own relationship to altis air, you know, I told you the first time I ever read Althusser, I threw him against the room and it was Lenin and Philosophy.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:01:11

I thought it was the Ideology essay.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:13

No, no, no, it's Lenin and Philosophy. And then the Ideology essay. I threw that across the room as well. The first one was my teacher's fault, the in grad school in a critical and literary theory class, and the second one was douglas lane's fault. But I realized that, like jumping into altas air in the middle, which is normally what you do, is actually really not helpful to understanding his political thought. I mean, that is what.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:01:45

I did and I really liked him. But I only really loved him after I read the Philosophy Encounter. I thought the ideologies was just okay. But you know, I had a similar experience. I didn't throw him against the wall. But when I was first reading Marx, I was not a fan because I was reading the early humanist texts of, like the, the 1844 manuscripts or something like that um, and I did not like that um well, I mean, you and I still disagree on on alienation, but it's actually because I think alienation is a more scientific concept than you do.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:20

But um, uh, nonetheless, I think like um, I actually have really well.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:02:28

You know, the thing about alienation is, as I was reading it was getting back to reading capital. Uh, the book, um, there's a a thing in there about I don't remember if it was alfie's section or one of the others, but they were talking about how the idea of alienation and personification is related to the immiseration thesis. And then it clicked for me. That's probably why it stayed in Marx for so long, because by the time that Capital starts coming out, it's already kind of the immiseration thesis is kind of breaking down yeah, it's been proven wrong.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:08

I mean just like, because he thought I mean he had a time there was a time stamp on early marx and when it was gonna, and it was like 1852, like yeah but it's like it.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:03:18

but by that point, like wages were rising pretty, like regularly, uh, and like when the capital books were coming out, um, and he there's still, like in capital there's still the immiseration thesis or a form of it, um, and it's probably because he was very committed to this idea of alienation, which I think in that sense it was scientific but it was also wrong.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:48

I think this is interesting. I was rereading and, in fact, our next discussion, my next bit of homework for you is to read Althusser, the Detour of Theory, because I think that's actually probably have you read it.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:04:00

No, I haven't.

C. Derick Varn: 1:04:01

I think that's the fairest take on Althusser. That's actually probably. Have you read it? No, I haven't. I think that's the fairest take on Althusser. That's written. It isn't like Althusser did nothing wrong, but also.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:04:11

He did do some things wrong.

C. Derick Varn: 1:04:12

Oh yeah, I mean other than killing his wife even yeah, besides that, but it's interesting because I was reading that book and I actually got to a quote that like clarified to me what, like calling Althusser a Stalinist, how wrong it is, and I'll just read it. Um, and this actually, to me really does put to put a sword to how bad EP Thompson's reading, uh, althuss's reading, uh, officer, um quote. I would have never written anything were it not for the 20th century congress and khrushchev's critique of stalinism and the subsequent liberalization. Okay, pause, you can say that you're like, oh well, that's, that's stonis, but let's go on. Uh, but I would have never written these books if I had not seen this affair as a huge bungled de-Stalinization, a right-wing de-Stalinization which instead of analysis, offers only incantations, which, instead of Marxist concepts, had available only for the poverty of bourgeois ideology.

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:17

My target was therefore clear these humanist ravings, these feeble dissertations on liberty, labor or alienation, which were the effects of all this among the French party intellectuals. Mayhem was equally clear To make the start of the first left-wing critique of Stalinism. I mean, other than, like Bordiga and I will admit, sometimes Althusser doesn't seem to know that Trotsky exists A critique that would make it possible to reflect not only on Khrushchev and Stalin, but also on Prague and Limbaugh. It would above all help put the substance back into revolutionary project here in the West. I think that's interesting. It also shows that my whole Altasir is probably a secret Maoist thing. It's still kind of holding up there.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:06:08

But I think he was, but he also I mean, he also didn't know that much about what Maoism was going, was doing.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:17

But yeah, well, I mean that's.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:19

That's the problem I have with anybody writing about Maoism in the 70s is like they're taking either projections on what they think is happening in the Cultural Revolution, like or like Fanshawe or whatever at face value, or, even worse, they're taking reflections on it from the late 1970s and 1980s as, like by the official state, stuff which you can't accuse Alta Sarah of doing, cause he was not really able to do that, but as being, as being, like straightforwardly true, both of those are problematic, but I do think it's interesting here that, like, what Alta Sarah is saying is like Stalinism is a mistake, like at least by 1975, what Alticeira is saying is Stalinism is a mistake, at least by 1975, he sees Stalinism as a mistake, but almost like Berdicka just to upset you, nico talking about anti-fascism, he seems to think well, the only thing worse than Stalinism is this stupid anti-Stalinism that came after it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:22

Thank you, thank you. Well, the only thing worse than stalinism is this stupid anti-stalinism that came after it. Because he also thinks, um, I mean and this is at the end of this little quote here that if we want to understand prague, are like what happened with limbaugh and mao, I mean like we need to be able to do a critique of stalinism. That is not about stalin, the man, uh, you know, suppressor of human liberty, but like the larger systems that led to the screw-up, and I think that's a pretty insightful thing. Uh, unfortunately he doesn't like extra know. One of the things about it is Althusser doesn't say that explicitly until very late, like you know.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:08:08

He says that in the mid-70s.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:08:11

I mean it's hard to. In many ways that, like because of the things that I was mentioning before, is that like trying to change official communism from the inside, basically of you can't like I mean he does make like anti-stalinist critiques and stuff and but he most, I mean he does kind of just focus that on his more immediate ideological enemies. Um, but it's like he wants to instill this idea of scientificity as like a bulwark against this kind of just letting the state determine everything about ideology and philosophy and science and everything that there has to be, that that has to be its own autonomous thing as part of a marxist project well, this is what's interesting, and you see this in palancas and badu, uh, badu is basically.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:10

I always, I always joke that like, uh, when people are like you know, what would stalinist anarchists look like? And I'm like, honestly, it would look like it would look like, uh, it would look like a land badu. Look like it would look like, uh, it would look like a lambadoo, uh what. And I'm like, well, he really doesn't believe, like like he has a platonic, trans-historical rebellion against the state that he thinks is like eternal, like it's just yeah, um, uh, that that that the philosophy of the encounter requires, like this intransient, uh devotion to like revolution that makes Trotsky and isn't it called something else?

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:09:48

Uh, the philosophy of uh, because the encounter was out this air. But no, it's a phrase.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:55

It's philosophy of the event, event, right. Right, because also Badu is taking Heidegger and Altafere and doing weird malice magic. And, by the way, badu is one of my favorite, least favorite French philosophers that, like I often agree with the conclusions he comes to, but like how he comes to them, I'm like what in the blue hell? Like it's just, it's just bizarre. Um, although I don't agree with him about like this eternal revolution where basically we just have to slaughter everybody forever because that's not great I mean he doesn't say that, but it's strongly implied well you.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:10:42

You know one thing I think I guess it's just a hypothesis, I don't think Althusser says this, but I think one reason he was attracted to Mao is that, like Lenin, he was a prince figure and like, uncontrovertibly like, probably one of the most prince figures there ever was. And there's something to that of like the like what the changes that he created in china because of that um, and I I even wrote a palladium article about that. That also goes back to the uh romance of the three kingdoms which, as I've reflected on in the, I'm sure that it is. If a chinese person was to read it, it'd probably be the most cliche thing to them.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:25

Thank you, obvious Western man. Thank you for showing even passing understanding of our culture as translated into English as translated into English.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:46

It's interesting to me. I mean like it's interesting to me also what Altasera comes to represent, because One of the things that I find interesting is, like everyone reads, um, lukash is like the anti-Stalinist um, because of history and class consciousness and all that, and like his early uh Sovietism and by Sovietism I mean councilism, um, which I find interesting. But also, like, did you guys read the destruction of reason or anything else that Lukash wrote? Like are his defensive himself about tailism or whatever. Ironically, if I was going to map the trajectories of Lukash and Althusser, it seems like Althusser becomes less wedded to any official communism, even though thinking you have to work within official communism, like you have to work within the official communist parties. There's a material history for that, there's a historical reason for that by the end he was working in a mental hospital

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:57

yeah, there's that, too, where he deserved to be yes, but there's that too when he deserved to be yes. But it's interesting to me to think about that compared to later Althusserians, because he he's working moving away from official communism. Alt-syrians are all over the place in their relationship to any form of official communism, but I do think in that way Palancis is actually an interesting successor to Alt-Syria, more than the other people I mentioned, because Palancis seems to understand what Althusser is implying about the state, because when I read the repressive and ideological state apparatuses books, I kind of read Althusser just saying we needed to do that.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:14:00

Sometimes he kind of is, but it's also like you can't, like I got like the working class has to have like these. Oh, we have to have these institutions. They're creating ideology and whatever, but you can't take it too seriously, right, right, which is the the problem of historicism? Um, that you, that you are taking it fully seriously in a sense.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:23

Well, this was the thing is, when I read those Althusser essays both on ideology and Lenin and philosophy, and particularly the early form of the state and ideological apparatus essay in Lenin and philosophy, I read those as like almost state absolutist in a particularly French way, like there is like like almost state absolutist in a particularly French way, like there, like there is like a French state absolutism that goes all the way back to enlightenment.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:48

It even shows up. I think it's some French Marxism sometimes, and my professors who also, by the way, tag me to teach this with, just reading those two essays or three essays or whatever, which is insane um did not really contextualize to me that altas air was just, this was descriptive, and he did not think this was something that communists should necessarily just do. Um, and so I read him as like, like the ultimate form of status marxist, like that he just thought we could like build our own ideological state apparatuses and and just counter the current ones, and never the point you'll meet and move on, and that's not what altus air means. Like to be fair to him, and I think altus air is taught really poorly, like I really do, like I think he's taught really poorly. I don't think his, uh, my encounters with people trying to get me the grandma and all to say or made me really sympathetic to EP Thompson, um, whereas when I tried to read it neutrally, I started seeing that like, oh, there are problems in Thompson, like for what you said, so let's talk about this.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:00

Like Thompson seems to think, think that that, like, the physical use of something emerges naturally from, like, I guess, its form in nature, um, which is, which is a theory of emergence that you can get when you try to like, materialize hagel, which early marx is trying to do, which is like, well, you know, ideas reflect A the relations of production, b the mode of production or how you actually produce stuff, and C the physical material in the world. And so, like you know, there's only so many ways You're going to figure out how to use a screwdriver. But I think you're right to go back and read Echo and talk about how semiotics and mediation greatly complicates this. Actually pick up on is, uh, that the, the want that you get from, from hegel for a totally unmediated reality, that some that, particularly in french and I'm gonna say this also, this is important we have to deal with the fact that french hegel is not hegel, it's kojave um, which is also bad.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:17:22

I don't know enough of the genealogy here.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:26

For example, the Hegelian end stat, stuff that's actually Kojave, that's not actually explicitly in Hegel. Yes, there's an end stat, but there's no moment where dialectics for Hegel just ends, except in the literal apocalypse when you know it's. You know, but we can come to the point of maximum human freedom, whatever. Then God can come down, I guess.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:17:57

And the guitar.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:57

You also say that kind of whereas, and so I can get why that would really bother altus air, like, because that that has like uh, that's not a scientific notion at all of human development, it's just not, it's it's. And also, if you think that you also, when you try to materialize, that you think that like well, like, it's just obvious what things are, we look at them and that's what they are, and I'll just say it's like no, you're mediating them in the context of ideology and all these kinds of uh mediations, and you're never gonna not do that. Like there's no way that you're not gonna have a mediation on what these concepts do socially, etc.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:18:43

Etc I mean this is this whole thing of it. Like that materialism is is is about ideas. Right, materialism is like it was a response to idealism, but it's this idea that, like, certain ideas are real than others and they're more material. The reason that Marx begins with political economy is that these concepts were more real than the concepts that Hegel and Kant and whatever were working with. They're referring to specific things in our experience, um, of of social reality, um, and and but that, but not just like our direct experience of them, but things that a hypothesis of um, an abstract structure which is informing our experience, that like, we may only see, like a part of it, but this is the idea of what that stands for and that's the, that's the claim, that's the hypothesis.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:19:48

It's just, it's just an idea of in our like knowledge, but it's and but it's scientific in the sense that we're making the claim that it could be real and we can learn more about it, that maybe it won't be real and we'll come up with through critique, we'll create a new theory. And there's problems with Althusser that are related to this, that he, in talking about the form of how science acts, he kind of like Althusser is still just a philosopher a a theoretician. He doesn't really know. I mean, he knows history, but he doesn't know it as well as an actual historian or archivist would. He doesn't know political economy as well as someone who's doing statistics and whatever.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:37

He really didn't know Marx that well either until the 70s. I'll be quite honest.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:20:41

Well, the problem with all that is is that he's giving us this theory of how to do science, but he doesn't know enough about these other topics to necessarily do it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:00

I think that's true. I would even go further, and you and I had a debate early on when I get frustrated about the altusarian notion of science, because, but then I was like, well, but his models for what science are are were common in france at the time, but they're like only one of them. We consider still um part of it which is like new developments in physics, like because cause that's? You know that allotor materialism is related to that, but it's interesting because that's one of his critiques of of Marxist humanism and that is big M Mark, small N humanism. Is that by reducing Marx down to universal laws or by doing two things, one, one way. It's one of the interesting things. When we talk about EP Thompson versus someone who really hits Althusser like the Marxist humanist, marxist hyphen humanist, it's confusing as fuck that there's something.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:21:57

Which ones are the TSSI people?

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:00

That's one of the like. So the Marxist hyphen humanists are the MHI, that's TSSI people. That's one of the like. So the Marxist hyphen humanists are are the MHI, that's TSSI people. That's Kleiman and and and his code.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:22:09

Those people are related to Althusser a little bit right. What do you mean? Like they got something from like, from Althusserian interpretations.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:20

I thought oh yeah, they do get something like the original SSI, the single system theory, that is from Althusserians.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:22:32

Now, you see, I was catching on to that as I was looking at reading Capital, and this is symptomatic of that problem that I'm talking about, because they're talking about the transformation problem, but they're just using it as an example of Marx's philosophy, as opposed to talking about it as categories of political economy and because of that they squared the circle.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:59

but it doesn't actually make sense when you apply it back to political economy it just seems to me like, like, the tssi becomes like okay, so you made, you got rid of the transformation problem.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:11

Great that, by the way, that's not the only way to get rid of the transformation problem, people, but whatever. But also, it either makes no sense or it has no implications whatsoever, right, and if any implications that it has, if you look at what the, uh, the, the mhi actually do, it's like we, we must defend center keynesian capitalism forever, uh or no? We must defend center, center liberalism forever, so that the advanced parts of the proletariat and by advanced we actually mean oppressed, um, interesting, uh, this is rooted in your sky, this is the other part of their philosophy uh, uh, can rise up through things like black lives matter, but we can't actually have the left wing of the democratic party because those are bad, heterodox keynesians who will destroy the economy and provoke a reaction like Trump. So we end up having a very radical reading of Marx, but our actual politics is the same as the right wing of resistance liberals. Yeah, which?

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:19

is ironic because the other people who do that was the CPUSA prior to 2017.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:24:25

So it's like I was thinking, you know, it sounds a lot like CPUSA.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:31

Well, that was my critique at the time and they called me a McCarthyist, but nonetheless like but the other Marxists hyphen humanists, that's the International Marxist Humanist Group. They don't have TSS, I don't think that's important, but they do have that latter part, like they're all about, like, um, the, that racial struggles will actually be the proxy for, um, uh, the advanced parts of the proletariat. A la, so they're not third world-ist, but they are basically like skin colorist Right.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:25:14

Sounds kind of like Endnotes kind of stuff.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:17

Kind of, except that Endnotes actively rejects the proletariat, whereas they valorize the advanced part of the proletariat, aka the non-white part.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:25:27

So they still try to shoe this into like Leninist kind of theory.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:30

Right, even though they're not Leninist. That's another thing, really, yeah, well, okay. So Rudodoniskaya, marxist-humanist break with Leninism in so much that they critique even lenin's ussr state capitalist a la the forrest johnson tendency, uh, picking that up from like councilist anarchist, and you know those kind of people. Um, and later on, later, what I find funny is they break with trotskyism for that, but later on they're trotskyist to believe it. So it's like it's, it's, it's, it's, it's. It's hard to articulate why they aren't trots, because there's a trotskyist tendency that develops later that believes the same thing, um, kind of. Except tony cliff's version of uh of what state capitalism is doesn't, is not very well thought out and seems oddly just to just to justify not taking a side in the vietnam war, but, um, nonetheless, um, uh, that's. That seems to be where they're at.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:36

And but I think it's interesting you point out that, like, like, when I was in marxist humanist, the enemy was Althusser. And yet, and you're absolutely right, when I did the research on where the SSI came from before they added the T to it, that interpretation of capital comes out of structuralist Marxism explicitly, and like, because Richard Wolff and his compatriot whose name I forgot I need to grab that book sometime, is it Resnick, right? Yeah, resnick, they were ssi guys, they weren't tssi guys. The. The innovation for uh, for friedman and um climbing was uh, was the adding time as the temporal single system, my, my whole thing, and like Friedman's, cool, don't get me wrong, I mean in this. What's funny about this, though, is like Friedman's politics have become like standard, multi, anti, multi, anti-imperial, multipolarity, ism, but with a TSSI glean and climate's politics are. We must protect the center of the democratic party to save black lives so that they can lead the proletariat sometime somehow, right?

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:27:53

And you know, I think this can lead us back into another critique of Al-Fazer which I have, which is that he was he developed this brilliant critique of how states control people through institutions and how they socialize people, and he included schools and universities in that. But he still participated in that as a professor and and also political parties, and he thought like, obviously the idea was that the communist parties would represent a challenge to this order somehow, but he never really um. But I mean, I mean this is even true after all of this, when the communist parties are gone and we have all these tendencies that you're talking about, um, that they're still like the, the academic nature, like academic marxism has this kind of nature to it of of creating these kinds of tendencies.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:53

I think, well, I mean, if we think about like instrumental, like what they, what what palancis and altocer thought they were arguing as an instrumentalist marism, academic Marxism almost always ends up instrumentalist, even when it's critiquing it, which is interesting because from the Althusserian point of view that actually makes sense, because the critique of the thing, as long as it's still in that context, cannot get out of the fact that it has a function in the thing. So you critiquing the university as a site of of elite replication doesn't make it not a site of a replication just because you are aware that it's a site of of elite replication, which is something that altusser works out. The theoretical language for us to be able to talk about, yeah, I mean he doesn't and this kind of really blows up in.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:29:50

I think 68 that, like the, the communist party is kind of useless and all that. That it is you kind of realize it's very much a parliamentary party and like a bourgeois, like it is a bourgeois, like it is a bourgeois, it is within the bourgeois state system, it is, even if it's kind of like the opposition. But Althusser is kind of still it doesn't really have a way to to create, get out of structure. Basically, personally he doesn't. He theorized, he theorizes some ways near the end of how to how to do it, but he doesn't actually do it. And you know, it's funny that you're talking about that, because I was just listening to the cosmonaut podcast about critical theory the other day and they were talking about how all of the Frankfurt school people had this critique of instrumental reason or what have you. And then still just do all this stuff that is so clearly just instrumental, including doing studies for big companies on how to get along with their workforces.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:59

Yeah, they did that. They participated in the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which, admittedly, a lot of people did. It wasn't just the Frankfurt School. I do get a little bit annoyed when Gabriel Wachill's bringing it up. I'm like, well, why don't you list all the other people who worked with the Congress of Cultural Freedom? Because it's a lot, but nonetheless I think you're absolutely correct. So one of the innovations of Frankfurt School Theory that I think is useful is taking this concept of instrumental reason from Weber and applying it to Marx, kind of I lost you there for a second what was that part?

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:39

Oh, they take this concept from instrumental reason, from weber, and apply it to marxism, um, but they don't even try to overcome that at all. I guess marcusa kind of does at the very end when he gets on the 68 train, but like, not really, like it's um, you know, um, and I find that really, really interesting. The other thing I find really interesting and I don't know what you make of this, but this is something that has been observed a lot theory marxist by the middle of the 1970s both think marxism is actually in a terminal crisis. Theoretically that's going to have consequences politically, but they don't know how. And we have to remind ourselves like marxist leninists are killing each other in east asia at this time. Like this is something that we, you know, forget, um, so this was not just an ideological question.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:43

They were looking at like the Sino-Soviet split and like the Yugoslav-Soviet split and the degeneration of the common term parties into either bourgeois, I mean, you know, as I pointed out like man Allende's, like Christian Socialist, like flank, the Communist Party in Chile, to the left.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:04

It's wild and you see this all the time in this time period, and yet also in this time period, if we're asking ourselves this, it's also the time period where everyone thinks these national liberation revolutions and the developing world mean that Marxism is ascendant. So I find it very interesting that in a way that I think actually kind of makes the structure argument for all to Sarah like but not as a not as a philosophical argument but as a historical argument that that both these two schools of Marxist thought are, I don't really think actually critical and scientific schools are discreet enough. Because when I was reading Gouldner who he pokes in the scientific school, I'm like these people would hate each other, like, but nonetheless like who's gets listed there, they all end up thinking that there's a crisis because there's a structural problem in marxism and like people like ep thompson by the 70s are like they're barely marxist by that point, like um I mean it's interesting because ep thompson critiques one of the things he critiques alfazer for is that his structuralism is a reflection of the post-war period.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:34:27

But in that sense, as I was reading that, I was like, well, you know, the stability of that kind of stability, that kind of not being in world war, it tends to be the norm of societies he's talking about. Oh, it tends to be the norm of societies that like he's he's talking about. Oh, we need to get back to like this, like a quote on, like romantic as he he puts it in quotes, or something of of, like the heroism of, like the proletariat during the two world wars period and they were able to do so much.

C. Derick Varn: 1:35:05

Yeah, this is. This is weird. We, we see this today, although it's never, it's not phrased the way thompson does. It's like oh, we need our mass, we need all of our mass movements back, like right before and right after world war ii. And I'm like, guys, you're missing that world war ii and world war ii, or why those? And you don't want that. I'm just saying, if you want to start talking about losing 25% of the world population, then that's a hard sell, particularly when you're talking about it in a post-World War II major powers have nuclear weapons kind of way. That's a hard sell.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:35:46

Okay. So I think the thing is that Alcázar does kind of talk about the same kind of romantic, kind of heroic struggle later on too. I don't know if you read or internalized EP Thompson's critique there or something, but it's the same thing that we're talking about, with him taking in those parts of Gramsci with the prince.

C. Derick Varn: 1:36:17

Right.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:36:19

That it's like the prince is engaged in this moment of turmoil that he's taking advantage of to change history, um, but at the same time, like but thompson seems to want it to be like that all the time. This is the main thing that everybody should be thinking about and trying to create um, which, I mean, could serve an instrumental goal in certain circumstances. But Althusser's project, I think, is so much more important because it's I trying to think about how, like it's the same thing that Marx was doing of figuring out how the way the system works creates a crisis or creates its own destruction and stuff, because the uh, while the way the system works may not define the next system, it does, if allowed to play out, define how it breaks down, and that's important, that's, it's the, that's the whole thing that I think marx was doing in like his scientific work.

C. Derick Varn: 1:37:25

Yeah, I think that's actually that is important, and I think we can criticize Althusser from being French. By that. I wish I mean before people think I'm just being bigoted against the French. There is something that I always find fascinating about the love of of French neologisms, neo neologisms in English that removes the fact that they have to do that in France, like because you can't, because the economy Frances will stop you from importing stuff into, oh right, like, so, like. That actually does lead to like, uh, lots of like, you know, weird words that you have to use to approximate another concept from another language, um, if it doesn't already exist in french, um, and so that makes all french theory, particularly when translated back into english, because we tend to try to replicate the neologism. The neologism is like pretty, you know, close, um, it leads to everything sounding weird and esoteric and magical, um.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:38:47

I like that part of it. I think that's kind of cool, uh, because I like incomprehensible things that you can kind of like, oh, this, like you can figure out what it means by the structure of the text or whatever, um, but it's. It's funny that you're saying all this because I actually have an article draft that's all about Althusser's theory of the state as I interpret it, and I was like you know what this doesn't have. Althusser missed an opportunity to create neologism here. When he talks about the people doing all this being of doing the state ideological apparatuses, he borrows the term intellectual from gromsky and I was like we could like that's not specific enough or general enough to the, to what we're talking about. So I was like what if we call them, uh the off stat for, like the uh odd meaning, like perception, and stat meaning uh control? I think that'd be cool.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:45

Well, so this is actually interesting. Um, this leads to uh, this is kind of separate, but this is actually a problem I have with EP Thompson. It's a problem I have to a lesser degree with, uh, rodney Hilton and Stuart Hall, um, and the the British Marxist historical school, um, stuart Hall and the British Marxist historical school, which I think has a distinct advantage of being comprehensible, but has a distinct disadvantage of being comprehensible. I've also complained about this in Christopher Lash. By that, in which I mean they write so clearly when they're using concepts in a very particular way and they're still using everyday language for it. You can miss that they are using these concepts in a very particular way, which the French way of like using these, these kind of like neologistic, neolog, uh, actually does make you be precise.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:44

So this gets into like one of the things I find frustrating about altus arian. So, for example, orbital determination. Like people just throw that fucking word around without really realizing that. Like it means, um, it means, you know, like multi-causality basically, um, which is actually what it means. You know. Like multi-causality, basically, which is actually what it means too, and and and analytic philosophy, like something is overdetermined. It has so many causes you cannot figure out a primary determinant.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:41:16

Richard Wolff uses it that way as well in like economics.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:19

He actually specifically uses it in place of dialectics economics, right, actually specifically uses it in place of dialectics. Um, but, uh, and I find it interesting as a development because, um, while I I used to think that dialectics was the beginnings of systems theory and I think it kind of is, but it's also something fundamentally different, and by that I mean dialectics really does think the form of opposition and everything being able to be broke down, and binary opposition and all that's really important.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:53

Um, uh, it's so much so that, like ingles tries to, like you know, make reality work that way, um, and reality, no, worky that way, like not most of the time, no, like well, I've said, like dialectics is a good way to get a handle on human ideas I really do believe that but it's not a good way to get a handle on like actual, like causal analysis. It's just there's too much going on. Like you know, if we were to talk about the primary country, one of the things that leads to is what I, what I consider the dumbest part of malism, which is trying to figure out which contradiction is the most important one yeah and uh, and then, like having this whole setting yeah, and like having this whole orientation based off of, like the primary contradiction versus a secondary contradiction.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:47

And let me tell you that if I believe in a primary and secondary contradiction, I think malice have it backwards. I think imperialism, uh, stems from capitalism, uh, imperialism in the way that lenin describes it, stands from capitalism uh, not the other way around. So it's and um, and it's never clear to me, like when maoists talk about this, whether or not they think that capitalism is that, that capitalism is a development from imperialism, as some people interpret that, or if it's just like well, that's, the primary contradiction is the one we can't address.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:43:29

First, um, which is imperialism, and then capitalism will deal with later, I guess I mean, it's almost like explicitly the kind of uh, political expediency kind of thing that we were talking about earlier, that it's like, well, this is the thing we have to deal with first, so it's the most important thing right and it's the thing that we're going to do, the unified china.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:52

So, like I mean, and I think that's actually part of why someone like Gouldner would actually read Mao as a critical Marxist development, because it's got this romantic heroic thing going on there. But in the same and in the same reason, like yeah, I mean, althusser sees that those moments are important. But Althusser would say, like a Mao can only happen at a certain time period, in a certain kind of breakdown, like if you put Mao in the 1950s or you put him in the 1890s, it's a very different set of outcomes and he doesn't end up being that historically important, like so what I find um interesting about auteuil serre is I find it fascinating that, for example, like all the new left marxists hate the cult of personality, but they also come up with a theory that would be very given to it, because in some ways it never made sense to me, for example I'll give you an example of another person who uses these things wrong, but it makes sense to me now after reading Altus Air.

C. Derick Varn: 1:45:19

Joshua Clover wrote Riot, strike Riot, and he really depends on Thompson's description of 18th century riots and then how they co-geal into unions and those congealing political parties. But he goes like basically oh, but we've returned to the, to another time period of riot Um, and that's how we're going to like deal with the situation of contemporary capital, blah, blah, blah. You know it's a very that book is already dated Like that feels like it's from a hundred years ago now, even though it's a very like almost delusional gattari move. And then he's basically, and then he uses it to basically justify the communization practice of like well, we don't have to worry about the working class anymore, we just write right.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:46:17

Well, this is. It reminds you of the way that uh zizek uses uh quantum mechanics.

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:22

It's like, yeah, this is how it works, you know well, zizek uses quantum mechanics and the way depop troppo uses quantum mechanics, which are also really we can. We can do a whole another thing about like uh, as important as zizek was for me in 2007 for, like, making me feel like I wasn't a weirdo for being obsessed with Marx when everyone was on the Hart and Nagiri Muffin-Laclau period of we just need populism and it's the multitude versus the elite or whatever. Luckily, nico, you know. Luckily, nico, you are just slightly too young to have dealt with all that.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:47:02

Oh yeah, I mean Zizek was still important to me too, and like the 2014, the 17, 18 period.

C. Derick Varn: 1:47:10

Yeah, yeah she's like was important to me in the 2007 to about the time period that you're talking about he became. I started becoming more and more skeptical beyond his lacanianism, by the way, uh, because, uh, uh, the also one of the things I hope to get salt to stairs.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:47:29

There's lacan in there um, I mean, I don't. I have not read lacan yet. Everybody keeps telling me to read lacan. I should get to him, especially since I'm going through alphys influences right now. Uh, you have to read thean. I should get to him, especially since I'm going through Alphys' influences right now you have to read Lacan.

C. Derick Varn: 1:47:41

But also good fucking luck, because every my thing about Lacan is like everybody kind of reads Lacan the way they want to read Lacan, because it's really vague, like well, you know this is like when you're talking about the way that French authors write. The thing is that Althusser is one of the clearest of the French authors compared to everyone else oh yeah, compared to like Derrida or Baudrillard or Deleuze, deleuze and Guattari, particularly Deleuze, deleuze and Guattari, particularly Deleuze, actually yeah, I was pretty clear, but yeah yeah, I was about to say Foucault is bad, but actually he's.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:30

He actually is like Althusser in that his neologism are actually needed, although he does pull some stunts. One of the things that uh fuko does that I've always been fascinated with is he softens nichi yeah, yeah, he does like and he.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:49

The way he translates certain nichian phrases into french actually softens them significantly than what they are in german or even in english, significantly than what they are in German or even in English. So, like when they talk about like force, our power in, in, in, in French I'll just say or uses like the software, like the power to make, and like it's pretty clear that power in German and in English really should, if you don't use power, you use force.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:49:19

Yeah, like it's the will to force I mean, I mean, this is the start of like nietzsche is like a, a queer self-help guru, or whatever, yeah, um, I mean that does come out of.

C. Derick Varn: 1:49:34

Uh, yeah, um, uh, I think particularly I'm like uh, fuko and derrida, who soften I mean derrida also softens heidegger a lot, um, whereas, um, even some of the earlier weird, like nichey marx hybridists, like I don't know, butille, who's a crazy person, but Bataille's not softening, nietzsche, bataille's just weird. Bataille does think of himself as a Marxist but also maybe a deaf cultist. So do with that what you will.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:50:15

You talk about a guy who's a Marxist but also obsessed with human sacrifice and willing to have it done to him, you know what's something that I feel goes under commented on is that I think that the reason Althusser is so focused, laser focused on, like the scientificity of Marxism, is because he is a Catholic and still remained a Catholic throughout all this.

C. Derick Varn: 1:50:39

Because that's interesting that he people forget that he's religious.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:50:43

Yeah, like I mean he didn't go to church very much but he was, I mean like he was still catholic and he's talked about being catholic and he late, there's that interview.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:50:52

He's like, well, maybe I'll go meet the pope one day, um, but he's uh, and he thinks about like, it's like this he still thinks about communism as like an expression of his like, of his Catholic values, of universalism or whatever. But more specifically, I think, like the reason he doesn't do like a lot of the errors that Marx and Engels do with like dialectics and taking them into the scientific, the science of it. It's also related to his like, ontological like. This was probably related to Marx and Engels as ontological atheism is that by turning Hegel on his head, they were trying to take, like the like, the religious connotations out of that and replace them with and use dialectics as a, like a, and it's like a material kind of thing that could no longer be like the spiritual Christian kind of idea. But still, but because they were trying to displace that Christian idea and Althusser wasn't, he wasn't trying to displace the whole Christian thing they were still sneaking in all of these unscientific things into their project.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:16

I think into their project. I think so in some way, since Althusser has a we might call it a secondary worldview, he does not need the primary worldview to do as much work. Yeah, yeah, I find that interesting. I actually remember learning that Althusser never fully renounced as Catholicism and probably died some kind of Catholic and and that he was that I I've actually not heard that discussed a lot, except in like. I think there's one article by Roland Boer about it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:57

You know, roland Boer, everyone's favorite Calvinist, marx, marxist, leninist, dungest, um. So well, what was his verdict? Basically that, like altisera, marxism is a catholic marxism, but I, you know like, um, okay, yeah, and I'm like, okay, fine, you know that stuff doesn't bother me as much as it bothers other people, you know, and Roland Boer is a weird Calvinist, so what Like? But nonetheless like. Actually, if people want to read something that's wild, go read Roland Boer's biography of John Calvin. That is wild. Just justland boar's biography of john calvin. That is wild, just just heads up. It's okay, like, if you want to read a, a stalin adjacent, a dungest interpretation of while, of why john calvin is a revolutionary figure that marxists should care about, um, have a nice day with that one I mean there's always that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:54:00

It's always been the line that the marxists are the calvinists of the social science world or the yeah yeah, I mean, and that's always like I don't know, um, maybe on this one I just have a sympathy for Catholic Marxism, because I tend to side with the Italians too.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:54:27

It's better over here.

C. Derick Varn: 1:54:31

It's just like, even though I'm on Team Germany, anything that whiffs too much of Protestantism, I'm running away, because people know how I feel about hagel.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:54:43

Um, you know, it's funny because this all ties together back with zizek, because I was like I was thinking like I talk about that in reference, like the way he talks about christian atheism um but it's also like is when the first time I actually sat down and read one of zz's book, it was the um, uh, the uh incontinence of the void right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:05

Well, that's a weird one to start with yeah, it's the only one I've read I haven't read any of his other ones I think my first two. I read two in back to back and I've read a lot of them now, but, um, my first two were, uh, the slime object of ideology and on violence. And then I then I read living in the end times. I think that's the book, or it's a book with something apocalypse on the cover right and then I read his book on, uh, on, move from the cloud.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:33

Um, but the incontinence of the void, that's a wild one to start with.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:55:37

That, that's like you know Well the thing is, though, is that it forced me. He has a criticism of Althusser in it that he says that Althusser, it's kind of a throwaway, but he says that Althusser like couldn't get past the duality of idealism and materialism, and I'm like, yeah, because that's what materialism is, that's what it comes out of, that it's this whole. Like you need materialism to define. What is idealism? What is just ideals? What is what? What is it? What is an idea?

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:56:09

that is like um, not, it's not giving a material explanation of something. Um, you, and by going beyond it you're just going back to idealism. Um, and this is one of my big critiques of zizek, that, uh, I took away from reading that book, uh, because he talks about all kinds in the way he talks about quantum physics or whatever. I mean, it's interesting analogy, but he kind of, like he uses, for example, lacanian lack is a thing that structures reality itself in a sense.

C. Derick Varn: 1:56:41

Oh yeah, well, here's the thing is, zizek is not a Marxist out of Lacan and trying to maintain his Marxism by saying that the material ideological distinction is just fake because of energy or whatever. And yes, there is a way in which what we think of as material does break down at the base level, but that's not the same as idealism, like Douglas Lane really likes that too, that like you know I got him I.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:57:22

It's so funny that he I think I guess he introduced you to some of alfazer, but I've made him come to hate alfazer um, why is that?

C. Derick Varn: 1:57:32

by like throwing it back?

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:57:34

at him. Well, I, we had this whole back and forth in the letter section of cosmonaut and then he did a whole, because I was. He has the thing of like saying, oh, we need to protect civil society from the state. Um, and I'm like, what you're protecting is bourgeois civil society, which is a part of the larger state apparatus right, which is part of the bourgeois state. Yeah, which made him very mad, and he did a whole stream denouncing Althusser.

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:04

Oh man, it's, it's. Uh, I mean Douglas.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 1:58:16

Lee.

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:17

Douglas Lee was always interesting to me because he was a Zizekian, marxist, humanist, which makes no sense already, because Lacanianism, which I also think is crypto Catholic, by the way, is uh, the least humanistic of the, uh, in so much as comprehensible, is the least humanistic of the, of the, of the psychoanalytic development slash successors, um, uh, whereas, like you know, I guess, like klein klein, thought or anafroid, that's pretty humanistic. So it's. I think that's interesting. I mean, one of the things that Althusser does give me with the system of structure is how, like I always talk about this, you take two of the binaries in, let's say, geopolitical life, let's say pro-R, um, let's say, uh, pro Russia versus anti Russia and Ukraine, or something like that, and even if you try to stake out a third position, um, the way you stake out that third position is still going to put you closer to one or the other, because you're still in that system, right, Right, um, there is no way to truly get out.

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:41

This was my whole critique of, like, this left communist phrase, uh, you're the left of capital, and I've always been like motherfucker, you're not special, like we're all the left of capital, as long as, like, there's not a communist society. So I guess maybe you can talk about, like you know, people in china are whatnot and being not part of the left of capital, although that's definitely not what you mean. And uh, also, there's a difference between being able to discipline capitalist and being able to discipline capital, uh, which, uh, china does not seem to be able to discipline capitalism. It can just discipline capitalists, but every now and then so can the US. We just don't. That, to me, is an interesting distinction. So, if you think about this in terms of the structure and this shift from a and I don't love unipolarity and multipolarity talk when I'm just using it because that's what everyone's using right now but in a shift from like a unipolar post 1992 to 2007, maybe United States, to whatever the fuck we're in now, this new kind of multipolarity. This new kind of multi-polarity but with nukes, where we both try to act like it's the 19th century and try to act like it's a cold war, but there's not really clear ideologies that separate things, but there are clear political objectives. You get what I mean.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:09

It's very hard to categorize with full analogies to the past. So you go in and you say, like me, I do not support the, the uh, the russian invasion of ukraine. However, I do understand why russia got there and what nato did to provoke it, and um, concretely, uh, and there's no way for me not to be because I do all those caveats because I think they're correct. I don't do them for ideological reasons, I just think they're true Like um for me not to be read as being closer to the Russian side of things, because I, I like, I'm like, okay, we have to understand, like, even if we think this was a, was a necessary or geopolitical mistake or whatever, and that NATO was baiting this the entire time, the Russians aren't acting irrationally, they're acting in a certain system where there's only so many moves you can do, and maybe all the moves are shitty and all the actors are shitty, but here's where you are, but here's where you are, like you know there's.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:02:19

Go ahead. There's two kind of things I want to bring up, because a lot of my present work is kind of taking Althusser and taking him a step further, because what Althusser doesn't do is formalize the way that structures evolve over time.

C. Derick Varn: 2:02:41

Yeah, and I think that gets fetishized in Foucault, where he just says we don't do that.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:02:46

Yeah, but I think we should. And this is a lot of what social science of state formation stuff does, except for Graeber and his school anarchist anthropology.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:00

Which is basically like it's all the family man, which is both, which is really frustrating, because there is truth in which state formation, in a very deep sense, has a relationship, the symbolic mediation and kinship. But the idea that it because, just because there's a relationship there, like even mentally, that uh, they're the same thing, it's nuts to me. It's like I mean not to give hagel too much credit, but there is a. There is a point where and uh, this is a hagel point, but where, where a quantitative difference actually becomes a qualitative difference yeah, yeah.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:03:38

But all Althusser says about the topic is like oh, there are different structures on different abstraction lengths of history. The philosophy of the encounter can be kind of misleading to a certain point where you're thinking, oh, now that we've hit an, we can start fresh. Well, not exactly. We started fresh on this one level of abstraction of a structure, right Of structures, on this level of abstraction. But the biggest level of abstraction there is is the state itself as a social formation which goes back like a few thousand years or whatever.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:04:23

And what I'm trying to do is use this idea of structures and Cizek was actually helpful for this when he talks about spandrels and the incontinence of the void.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:04:35

That, like it, got me thinking about this evolutionary, biological way that structures can like, once they've been proven to be useful, become widely adopted and become like have this, give this evolutionary advantage to become standard. And then you, this keeps going and what I really like. So there's a sense that you can look at states and say, well, this isn't going to be going somewhere in terms of the evolutionary process, of that, this might like lead to something down the road. And there's another thing. I was just reading this today, I just saw this uh get published by rand corp um talking about um neo-medievalism. Um, it's an interesting uh turn of phrase, but I think it's a much preferable and more accurate um phrase than like neo-fuelism, because it's not talking about technology or the relations of production. It's talking about a set like the relative strength of states and their inability to be strong, central or really like be able to marshal the same kind of resources that they could before.

C. Derick Varn: 2:06:02

Yeah, this is the irony. This is the irony when we're talking about states. Right now, we've seen this return to nationalism and state functions across the board. It's trans-ideological at this point. And yet there's also a sense in like.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:06:20

States seem to be really fucking weak compared to even 20 years ago, like and this is the thing that the rand guy points out is that the strength of states the past 200 years is historically pretty rare right, yes, absolutely, it's a.

C. Derick Varn: 2:06:35

it's actually weird, like um, and no wonder. Well, this is, this is a problem that we have in the 20th century that in many ways like the 1940s, 1950s, the first, the post-war consensus and the pre-war mass barbarism, frankly, um, those are taken to be historically normative, like yeah, and that's just wrong.

C. Derick Varn: 2:07:02

It's just like not how things have traditionally worked. Um, and I keep on, uh, umberto Eco used to talk about this too. He was like well, sometimes you have to just admit how similar the current time period is actually not to the 17th century, but to the 14th or 15th, Like uh, and for me it's like 14th century, 17th century, but to the 14th or 15th, like uh, and for me it's like 14th century, 19th century, third century. Um feels a lot more relevant to us right now than the middle of the 20th. Weirdly, because of the nature of the way states are functioning and these empires both exist and they're gonna exist, probably. I'm sorry if people like you guys are like well, the American empire is falling, I'm like it's declining, declining and falling are not the same thing.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:07:47

Empires can decline for hundreds of years.

C. Derick Varn: 2:07:50

In fact, arguably, most empires decline more than they actually like exists at their high point, so are built up like it, like empires often fall for longer than it took to build them. Um, so it's just something to think about. So, like, like, oh, empire, you know, like, like, for example I'll give the example today uh, uh, we're. We're in a time when starmer is probably going to win in a landslide in the UK, even though he's one of the most personally hated politicians ever. And also it's pathetic that it's taken labor, like how many Tory governments to actually reassert themselves Like, what? Like eight or something. It's it's third, um, uh, but um, what we're actually in my mind, what we're actually seeing in the uk today as the slowly turns itself into argentina, um, in argentina turns itself and I don't know where, angola or something, um, uh, is that the decline and fall of the british empire. Even though there were hard times for britain in the 60s and 70s very hard times uh, it's really coming home now, like right now. Brexit accelerated it because it ended their like. What people don't realize is, for whatever reason, britain got a crazy, stupid good deal um on its relationship to the eu in regards to being part of the political and trade zone but not the currency zone, and thus was able to leverage its former hegemonic bank system, um to like hide all kinds of shit which brexit exposes. It just breaks it open, um.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:38

But in a way it's like okay, so the empire is finally dead. It's been dying, for I mean, the british empire has been dying since probably the 1910s, but like it's taken a hundred years for for those cows to fully come home and even though, like the british, like they think about the hard 1970s as a moment of this, or like Thatcherism in the 80s, it's really it really hasn't hit. And my critique of Corbynism back in the day was that it wasn't structurally correct. So ironically, even before we had me being some set of authors there, and by that that it wanted to return to a prior system of government, that was not possible outside of the empire. They live in a fucking island. It's a highly populated island. You're not going to turn it into a self-sufficient mid-20th century Fordist industrial state. It's not big enough. The US has trouble doing that. And it is big enough.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:10:39

The us has trouble doing that and it is big enough like so well, this is well. I think this is related to the second thing that I was thinking with this because, like the, the other book I've been reading like a series of books, because it's three volumes um is samuel finer's uh history of government from the earliest times. I don't know if you've heard of Finer before.

C. Derick Varn: 2:11:01

I have. I have not read that, though I have not touched the three. Anything. Three volumes is on my.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:11:06

I have to write too many essays that require me rereading Bodega and Mark Fisher for me to do this, but yes, it's been very helpful because what I'm trying to do is eventually do the research to write a more comprehensive work on the theory of the state, elaborating on all the Althusserian stuff I've been doing.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:11:27

But one of the things he mentions is he's getting into, like what he calls the intermediate area, which is like the medieval period, is that the medievalness of a period happens at different times in different places. Right, so it happens in Western Europe first, um, before Eastern Europe, because Byzantium is still there, um, and it's still kind of like an extension of like it's. It's still like uh has things going on there, um, and then it happens in the Han China, in a different era too slightly, um, even though there's like similarities between all of these different like medieval periods and stuff, uh, structurally uh, which I think kind of confirms alphacist thesis there. But the important thing is that, like as we're experiencing it today, like this, these tendencies are emerging all over the world, but they're emerging at different paces in different places.

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:24

Yeah, uneven development mandates, that right, yeah, I mean, ironically, I would actually say, a lot of the stuff we see in the US. A lot of people in the US are like, oh, trump's at the forefront. I'm like no, we're at the rear of this shit. This shit's been going on in Asia, in non-chinese asia, and in europe for like a decade more than it's been going on here, like, um, I mean, and it's even hard for people in europe I think to to recognize that because, ironically as well, my thesis is is whatever's happening the states right now is creating a less of a gap between the way that European states work and American states work, and this was even before the Russia-Ukraine conflict forced Europe back into the American orbit. Well, it didn't force it, they chose it, but nonetheless push Europe back into the American orbit that there is a way in which, like the media structure, the, the, the nature of large corporations, so, while we're fighting for, like these, national identity, like the alex hochiles of the world, I mean, I like alex personally, but like they're like, oh, we need this left nationalism and left national sovereignty, and we could do, and I'm just like you don't live in that structure, bro, and you can't just create it out of will like, and that's where a lot of these like post mortems for, like the millennial left, I think they miss that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:49

Like the millennial left, uh, fucked up and not all of its errors are forced uh, but that, hey, these these things happened in sequential orders, in multiple places at different times, but within a relatively short time scheme of each other. Um, that should tell you that some of this is not just about bad ideology, or it's about misrecognizing the moment that you're in and that, like, we are not yet quite any what altus air would call a moment of conjuncture, or what we could talk about in linen terms, where objective and subjective conditions exist at the same time. Like, um, and I think that's a, that's a huge problem when trying to like analyze the left, because one of the things most of these left critiques of the left end up doing is they end up being moralizing, like, even when they're like, oh, the, you know, left is too moralistic. There's like, if you just believed what we believed, like in my invariant program or whatever, um, uh are my, uh, my, my ability to build communism off of, uh, cut uh off of, like communization theory or whatever, like, um, like I think that these things actually come out of a misrecognition and an inability to deal with the fact that history changes.

C. Derick Varn: 2:15:31

I mentioned invariant programs. One of the biggest things I find ironic about the invariant program and Bordigas is, even though Bordigas is doubling down on the invariance of the program, right, bordiga himself wasn't that he was a schematic thinker, but he actually didn't actually stay frozen in his ideas. It's actually kind of funny. I'm like Bordiga is not invariant, he just doesn't like democracy, for whatever reason.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:15:57

The thing that I'm trying to formulate is like reason. But you know, the thing that I'm trying to like formulate is like well, what's the thing that? Like? Like the thing that did, you can learn that could be applicable to try to change the circumstances. And it comes back to like well, the only consistent thing is that you have to in like the history is like you have to find a way to organize more violence or potential violence and everybody around you in order to like, take control or whatever right and the um the thing with. So that leads you to inevitably to the hard problem, which is that there's a social, technological frontier of creating that violence or whatever.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:16:49

And this is related both like in a political economy sense and theoretically, to Marx's idea of fetters and theoretically to Marx's idea of fetters, because what I've been thinking is that the thing with the bourgeois state is that it's expensive, and that's consistent everywhere.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:17:15

And it's most illuminative when you look at China's transition from the collective to the non-collective periods, that the local government became incredibly expensive because now you had to hire people to beat people into submission and get their taxes from them, because people didn't volunteer to participate in the local government, didn't volunteer to be participate in the local government, um and um. This is a similar thing in history that all bureaucracies are always more expensive if you look at like democratic assets. For example, taxation was almost never an issue in athens because they didn't have a permanent bureaucracy that they had to pay to keep things running. And what I've been thinking is that you have, we need to theorize about ways to do government much more effectively than everyone else, and that's the only way to basically get a leg up on people. And I think that the like, the, those experiments with, like non-bureaucratic methods of government, of direct government, Ah yes, I can see you are beginning to understand my critique of bureaucracy that you did not entirely.

C. Derick Varn: 2:18:29

Well, here's the thing.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:18:32

The thing is that bureaucracy is the most effective social technology of government at the moment. The thing is, we haven't created this new thing. That could be better than it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:18:42

No, yeah, no, we have not. Bureaucracy is both the most and least efficient way to handle the problem, and you and I talked about this way back. This is one day I am now. I've almost been convinced that I need to write a chapter in my forthcoming book on the paradigmatic figures of the millennial left and how everything got screwed up, and I want to. One thing I want to do is the reason why I haven't included Graber in this list of people I was going to talk about is because I feel like I can't be like everyone. I want to be kind of charitable to like, like, like I could be charitable to fisher and um and uh, bro, it's hard for me to be charitable to graver the more I read him, because I'm just like, like, even though, um, I I actually owe my reawakening interest in anthropology to Graeber. Even the way he uses anthropology is wrong so it's.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:19:44

I mean, at the very least, what you can say about him is that he brought all these case studies to the public yeah, even though he misrepresents a lot of what they are.

C. Derick Varn: 2:19:57

You know to be like. You obviously really spiteful, like um, everything graber says about marcel mouse is like it's not all wrong. But he adds a gloss on marcel mouse that completely leads you to misunderstand him, as if marcel mouse was somehow a crypto fucking anarchist and not like a right-wing dark hymen social democrat, like it's just bizarre well, I mean I commented on your, your videos on one of his texts which, by the way, you should, people at home should subscribe to barnes patreon to get these videos.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:20:33

Um, just a little plug for you, um. But uh it like he talks about democratic athens in this bizarre way. Like, oh, it wasn't special, all these hunter gatherers were doing egalitarian social formations. But like, oh, yeah, I remember that, but athens was the class society and we're in a class society that, like we like, we have a lot to learn from that. How to like of it applies to like a dictatorship of the proletariat. Um, like, how do we maintain these social structures in a complex society which he doesn't, doesn't even consider that to be a thing of a complex economy or whatever?

C. Derick Varn: 2:21:13

no, he just doesn't think complexity matters at all, like his whole thesis in in his early work, and it shows back up and and uh, the dawn of everything is basically like if you build it, they will come a and b. Um, that it's a matter of like meta humans and beliefs and and and like look, I think there is some truth to like offloading, uh, certain concepts to metaphysical concepts. And and like, yeah, I get it. I I think there's like anthropological reasons to believe that people do that. Um, that does not mean that the 20th century can be effectively the same thing as hunter-gatherers in Madagascar or anyone in I don't know, 50,000 years ago in hunter-gatherer bands. And, by the way, nico, he eventually drops the category of hunter-gatherer altogether to get around the problem.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:22:15

Yeah, yeah, I remember that, get around the problem. Yeah, yeah, like, but this is. This ties back to ep thompson. I was like I was telling you, like all this this is kind of prefigured in that critique of alphys air that like of this, this is the um, like political, uh, like, what's the like? Determinism, was it like political? Yeah, that like this, all of all this moment that we have, of all the post of post structuralism and people like David Harvey who like don't take like a systemic view of thing, like to take take the system. Well, if we just take these lessons, these moral lessons, essentially we can use politics to get our way out of this, and there's almost no discussion of structure in a lot of these popular thinkers.

C. Derick Varn: 2:23:09

Absolutely, and it's a major, major, major, major problem. Like I happen to know, because I've been reading a lot of stuff from the 70s and 80s and 90s, that some of the reactions against structuralism isn't even people reacting against Althusser, it's people reacting against Talcott Parsons, which is Durkheimian, weberian structuralism. And yeah, that shit sucks structuralism. And yeah, that shit sucks like honestly, like that almost assumes that structures just exist and impose themselves and like and I want to see, I mean this is important to like the like, why Marxist structuralism is more important than structuralism in general.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:23:59

Because the whole the most important than structuralism in general. Because the whole, the most important thing for Althusser is the material determination in the last instance, which a lot of these people don't have. Because if you just have the idea of structure that is organizing society or culture or whatever, and you don't have something that that's emerging out of, then there's no reason that it can't just be like a kind of Platonism or like some kind of like idealism that, like the structure is this cultural idea that we have that's imposing on reality.

C. Derick Varn: 2:24:37

Yeah, I think that's actually a crucial point. I think that's a good, that's a that's actually a crucial point. I think that's a good place to leave off to now, although I'm going to now invite you back for three different episodes People can hear it so you can hold me to it One I promised eventually we were going to talk about you were going to intervene with me on the critique of the Gertler program. I've gone through all the early classical reception texts of the critique of the girth of program, which is the um? Uh, the chapter in state revolution, daniel de delon, who's actually the first person to write about in english, and um? Uh, carl coros, which is who everyone in cosmonaut blames for every bad thing that's ever happened. With the curriculum uh, which I actually find interesting because I realized that Korsh is actually fighting a different battle than that is not being recognized in the like in the second international 2.5, when they when bernstein goes full explicitly lasallian, which I did not even realize was a thing like I didn't know that was the.

C. Derick Varn: 2:25:48

Thing late history that well, um, uh. And so now that I know that I'm like, oh well, well course, is actually responding in a very specific context that we're like not dealing with when we talk about it. And I about to get to the secondary literature, one thing I've found interestingly in the critique of the program and in state and revolution I was arguing with someone that, like they said, state revolution wasn't important until the 1950s resurgence of it through Trotskyist, and I was getting mad because I was like well, but it's in the fucking Soviet constitution and it is, but they don't reference either state and revolution or a critique of the Greta program. For that being where, where they're getting it from, which is interesting. Like so you have all these revisions in the Soviet constitution which are based on the critique of critical program and state revolution, but they're not citing it. When I go back and try to find citations to those two texts, I find them again in the 1950s. So basically, from the 1920s to the 1950s it's not mentioned that much.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:26:56

Maybe it was one of those things that's like well, everybody knows.

C. Derick Varn: 2:27:02

Right, yeah, I don't't know. I don't know either, it's. It's one of these things like are they uncomfortable? Like was this? Was the stalin regime uncomfortable with um? Well, they're definitely uncomfortable parts of state revolution, for sure, right um, it's just, it's just interesting to think about because a lot of, a lot of modern day marxist linearists actually like state revolution. So it's it's just interesting to think about, because a lot of modern day Marxists and Leninists actually like state revolution.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:27:22

So it's well, now there's no really existing communism to compare it against that's actually true.

C. Derick Varn: 2:27:30

they can't like, except when they get a wild hair up their butt and decide to defend Putin's Russia somehow Marxist Like it's. They don't tend to do that. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. So I want to have you back for that I want to make. I'm doing a series on Bordiga and I have found myself torn. The more I'm going back and restudying Bordiga and by torn I mean the part there I find that there's more parts I like about him than I thought, but the parts that I don't like organic centralism and invariant program I dislike even more than I thought, I disliked it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:28:17

It's actually like it's. It's like, okay, he's an innovative thinker actually, but like the two flaws are huge, so I want to get you to come back with that. I know you've read bordegon democracy, which I know like made you have a heart attack.

C. Derick Varn: 2:28:28

Yeah um and uh, um, I I recently read um out of morbid curiosity. Hazaldine came on Platypus Affiliated Society's website and they interviewed him and he like mentions Bordiga positively and it's like, of course, this is stuff I hate. But then I was like, huh, I wonder why this is and one of the things I was getting a bit what this has to do with. The Althusser reading is like this want to do with the altus air reading is like this want to freeze, like the program forever and eternally seems to be based off of trying to get out of these ever-shifting sands, or concessions to national governments. Because that's, you know, uh, during tagliati's period, you have more and more concessions to bourgeois. Uh, you know, during Togliatti's period, you have more and more concessions to bourgeois parties. And the thing that the Italian Communist Party and the French Communist Party share is they're an act of resistance that's heroically popular during the popular front and they pick up, you know this, 1930s, post third period, like patriotic socialism stuff. Uh, they both do that and um, it's interesting to me because all two stairs, both critiquing that but not going where the like, the, the left communists, end up going with it, which is like this irredent, this irredentism, this invariance.

C. Derick Varn: 2:29:59

No, no, we have the program. The program's eternal and we already know what it is. And I'm just like wow. I'm just like well, if it was eternal, then why didn't you see all this stuff? Why couldn't you guys figure out how to deal with fascism, or even your own party? It seems like maybe your program should have been able to deal with that. But there is this and I say this because just get back to Althusser, maybe Bortiga is an interesting counterpoint is there's this attempt to stand above and aside of the country, systems and events. If you just like, believe in the right thing and push it for long enough, eventually the proletariat because you're right will be on your side and you can just do it.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:30:46

And I'm just like that's the the constant left calm kind of strategy right forever.

C. Derick Varn: 2:30:53

Yeah, I mean, and that's you know, this is also the councilism does this a little bit, like I guess Bernie Sanders did it too. Yeah, well, I mean it's Everybody kind of does it. I mean like it's Like the thing is like left communism gets a lot of shit that it doesn't deserve, but it also gets a lot of shit that it does. Yeah, and one of the things it deserves is like believing that just because you have the right ideology, that because of that you're somehow inevitably going to win and you can somehow stand outside of the historical and systemic context, is that you're in and comment on it without, without being influenced by it. I just like and you, you even hear this in the language of like you know, as I said earlier, you're the left of capital.

C. Derick Varn: 2:31:42

I'm like well, okay, but there's no common turn. You're not to the left of the fucking common turn. It doesn't exist anymore. Like there's no, unless you're talking about someone in a non-capitalist society and and you'd have to grant which no left comm is willing to do, and I'm not even sure that I would I would disagree with their unwillingness to do this that, um, that vietnam, cuba, uh, china, the dprk are non-capitalist societies which I sort of think like. They're aspirationally non-capitalist, but they're still in capitalism, they're still subject to capital constraints, et cetera.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:32:22

It's much more interesting to talk about them, not in political economy. The political economy is all converged, but the state formations are still. There's differences in there that are interesting, I think.

C. Derick Varn: 2:32:35

Well, I mean this is, this is the problem that, like you and I were talking about this with you. I'll just say, well, I mean this is, this is the problem that, like you and I were talking about this with altus air. But this is a problem.

C. Derick Varn: 2:32:46

Marks marks never gets to his fucking theory of the state, other than it's the ruling committee of the bourgeoisie, uh, which is not really fleshed out as to what exactly that means well, let's talk about this more when we talk about the gotha program yeah, we'll come back to the gotha program and, uh, I would like to have you on to discuss a board, to go on democracy sometime too, which and then we'll have you come back and talk about Althusser and the state in more detail, because hopefully that'll give you time to finish your essay that you're writing on the state and we can talk a little bit about that and maybe some more Althusser stuff, because everyone today is hearing me being concessionary to altis air and you're the one making critiques. I want people to know that I'm still a little bit distrustful of that french guy, um, but uh, uh, and honestly, it's reading palan, uh, palancis, palancis, fucking greek. Anyway, if you're a Greek speaker, can you tell me how to say that name, that it's reading Nicholas Palancis or Palancis or whatever the P guy. That has me more sympathetic to Autocera, because I actually end up like when I read the Palancis Milibandabrates, I'm like, totally on team Palancis. I'm just like, oh, no, plants is just right, it's just like it's just clearly correct and particularly post 2020, I feel like you guys should go read that and be like, oh yeah, the Bernie strategy was always doomed. Also, ralph Miliband made Ed Miliband and that's all I got to say, um, as my last comment and I'll let you sign off, nico, uh and and plug your stuff.

C. Derick Varn: 2:34:26

Why is it that, uh, that, um, so many Marxist scholars like Ralph Miliband or Pete Buttigieg's dad or Kamala Harris's dad actually was a mark scholar, uh, end up having the most shit lib babies like what is what is with that? Well, like neoliberal shit lib babies like how does this?

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:34:52

happen. I feel like there's two answers. There's a hegelian answer and then there's the alfazarian answer. Um, like one is that there's. Like. The Hegelian thing is oh, there's a dialectic of generational cohorts or something. But I think that it has to do with the fact that, like, because they're academics, they have a certain standing in society and they're socializing their kids into bourgeois institutions. Because they're not like, they can't be proletarian intellectuals because there is no proletarian structures for them to inhabit.

C. Derick Varn: 2:35:30

That's all there is the closest thing to proletarian intellectuals are bloggers. I'll count myself as one of those which is also a quick way to accidentally become Petit Bourgeois I can tell you, as a person who is structurally both a labor aristocratic pro and a Petit Bourgeois person, I feel those battling in my soul.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:35:59

Yeah, I got that too.

C. Derick Varn: 2:36:04

Every now and then, the petite bourgeois part of me comes up and starts complaining about taxes. So although, as a side note, marxists aren't historically pro-bourgeois taxes people, this is not me trying to say I shouldn't pay my taxes and Marxists are pro-bourgeois taxes people.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:36:20

Yeah, this is not me trying to like say I shouldn't pay my taxes. That's not my point here. And Marxists are pro-cheap government?

C. Derick Varn: 2:36:24

Yeah, they are. They're pro-class independence, not dependency. I was actually laughing the other day when they're like you know the problem with all these, you know dependency theory stuff, you know, and it became popular in Marxism and I don't even think dependency theory is bad, but they're like, they're like. So they see the problem of being the, the problem of being dependent on empires, but they don't seem to see the problem of the proletariat being dependent on a bourgeois state Like, which is wild to me, because it's like it's clear that one isn't is totally analogously structurally the same as the other. Anyway, is totally analogously structurally the same as the other. Anyway, thank you so much, nico. In addition to you being probably my most regular guest that doesn't have an officially titled co-show with me, where can people find your?

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:37:13

work. I have a Substack blog called the Prehistory of the Encounter, based off of Alphys' philosophy encounter, and I do stuff there. I also publish with Cosmonauts. Sometimes I publish with Palladium, which I might have something coming out with them soon, publish with Palladium, which I might have something coming out with them soon, and I'm also on Twitter as Nicholas D Villar something, and that's how you can find me. I'm also on BlueSky BlueSky, however you say it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:37:54

Yeah, you're on BlueSky with me. For those of you who want to find me on social media, I don't tend to take random Facebook requests. My Instagram is open, but I'm not going to tell you what it is and although, if you want to understand that, I do have a sense of humor, that would be where you find that out. And although it's mostly me just sharing memes, don't get your hopes up to Varn doing TikTok, shorts, shorts. That's never gonna fucking happen. I can't be that brief. Um I I was literally trying to figure out one day how to cut my interviews into like minute-long clips to just put in my advertise yeah, it doesn't work.

C. Derick Varn: 2:38:35

I can't do it. It's just, you just get weird decontextualized stuff. The shortest I can tend to get anything down to is 10 minutes. There we go, which I still think is too short. Thank you, nico. People should check out your writing. You do a lot of writing on the contemporary political economy. You're in your battle with the Keynesians, which, and the Heinrichites. You really battle a lot with Heinrichites.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:39:12

Well, now they've kind of mellowed out a bit Now that Twitter's dying.

C. Derick Varn: 2:39:20

You're not debating them anymore, but it's not because they wouldn't debate you, it's because they're just not talking that much.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:39:26

Yeah, exactly.

C. Derick Varn: 2:39:31

Yeah, I think that's a fair assertion. I've decided that, as much as I think Heinrich is a respectable scholar of Marx and I do think that I do think his like the stuff that people like about him is where he's the least justifiably a scholar of Marx, which is like his monetary theory stuff, which I think Fred Mosley actually fairly just.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:39:55

So just a quick anecdote. I had a friend go to one of his talks and I it asked me if there's anything. I wanted to ask him and I said he uses this phrase that money is the necessary form of appearance of value to justify his whole interpretation of Marx's value theory. And I was like he also uses Marx also uses that phrase the form of appearance to say that this is what bourgeois economists are focused on. They don't actually understand the content of what's in there. So I say what's up with that? And apparently Heimerich says oh well, it's the necessary, that's the important word there. And I was like for Marx well, it's the necessary, that's the important word there. And I was like for Marx, I was like are you sure it's not the important word there for you.

C. Derick Varn: 2:40:45

Yeah, this is the thing I mean. To some degree, everybody, I guess, uses Marx as a ventriloquist dummy, but like damn. The other thing is as much as I love mega two scholars and I do, I but my favorites are like the ones that aren't popular, like tarcell carver and marcel musto. Um, uh, because, uh, cohey sato just makes shit up. Um, I'm just gonna say it outright, outright, like this idea that the real crisis in marxism was the ecological crisis all along, and that's what crisis theory really refers to, which he really does say in an essay on.

C. Derick Varn: 2:41:25

Lukács. That Lukács was. It was foolish to abandon crisis theory. But it's not economic crisis, it's ecological crisis. And I'm like what the fuck are you on Like? Yes, ecological crisis is a thing and, yes, Marx does care about it, but that's not what crisis theory refers to. It's specifically economic crisis. Like you can't just it's more of that free-floating concept stuff, but these are from people who spend their entire life in the Marx archives. That's crazy to me. This you can't even just put on Trotskyist or anything. This has become a universal tendency to use Marxology as a ventriloquist dummy for things you may or may not like.

Nicolas D. Villareal : 2:42:16

This is exactly what I'm talking about. There is no proletarian structure, even nominally. There's nothing. There's, there's no. We need orthodoxy to put these people in, to discipline these people right.

C. Derick Varn: 2:42:29

Well, yeah, I'm, we'll get up like we'll get up in the orthodoxy in a minute, but I do think, I do think you, you have to at least have like marxism is a system, and what makes it interesting for altouserre is altouserre is willing to admit yeah, it's a system. It's not a consistent system throughout all of its history, though, which is what pisses off the marxist humanist, but the marxist hybrid hyphen humanist. But it is a system like, and it also isn't a. It also isn't a theory of everything a la jameson, where you can just like use whatever concept to talk about whatever the fuck um, and it'd be totally okay.

C. Derick Varn: 2:43:09

And I'm like that's, that's just going through marxism for spare language parts, like that's not really doing. Uh, I don't know what you're doing that for. Also, if you really need to come up with new ideas, come up with your own words too, damn it, don't confuse us. But anyway, thank you so much for coming on, nico. People know you're going to see you again. They're going to see you on a lot of my shows, not just the one that's got my name on it, the other ones that have my name in the subtitle. But nonetheless, thanks so much, and we'll talk more about Mr Frenchy again soon.