Unpacking the Southern Roots and Impact of Neoliberalism: A Discussion with Connor Harney

Can neoliberalism be truly understood without examining its Southern roots? In this episode, Marxist writer and thinker Connor Harney joins us to unpack the complex history and dynamics behind the rise and persistence of neoliberalism. We trace its origins back to the 1970s, focusing on the American Southeast, dissecting how anti-war sentiments, financial crises, and the defeat of unions have shaped this ideology. Through a critical examination of labor-intensive industries, racial segregation, and state violence, we reveal why the South resisted unionization and how this resistance influenced the national economic landscape.

We also explore the origins of corporate paternalism and its implications for modern work environments. By investigating North Carolina's Research Triangle Park and early public-private partnerships, we uncover how companies like IBM set the stage for what would become the Silicon Valley model. Our discussion highlights the broader implications of Southern industrialization, including the stark contrasts in worker wages and living conditions between the North and the South. We dive deep into the contradictions of Southern exceptionalism and its impact on American racial dynamics, exposing the myth that the South alone carries the burden of racism.

Finally, we tackle the rise and fall of neoliberalism and the collapse of social contracts. Through a historical lens, we connect the plantation system, feudal landholding, and modern labor exploitation, showing how these systems perpetuate economic serfdom. We reflect on the Southern influence on neoliberal policies, legislative movements to curtail collective bargaining rights, and the critical need for unionization in the South to ensure the success of labor movements nationwide. This episode challenges oversimplified narratives and provides nuanced insights into the economic and racial complexities that continue to shape the United States.

The following works are referenced:
Ending the Eternal Present: A Historical Account of the 1970s
Textile Mills to Mainframes

Chapters

• 0:00 The Failure of Neoliberalism
• 12:56 The Origins of Corporate Paternalism
• 28:13 Contradictions of Southern Industrialization
• 37:46 Southern Exceptionalism and Corporate Paternalism
• 48:58 Collapse of Social Contract and Unionization
• 58:57 Southern Influence on Neoliberalism
• 1:13:41 Challenges of Marxist Economic Analysis
• 1:17:11 The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism
• 1:28:08 Challenging the Southern Blame Game
• 1:37:37 Challenges of Southern Labor Organizing
• 1:48:06 Challenges of Left-Wing Organizing
• 2:03:08 Southern Democrats and Union Influence
• 2:20:32 Labor Organizing in the South
• 2:29:10 Impact of Sanctions on Socialist Regimes

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 1:34

Hello and welcome to Barn Blog, and today I'm with friends of the show, connor Harney. Connor Harney, author of Connor's newsletter over on Substack, although it's been kind of dormant for a few years. We will probably reference a few writings there. Also regular-ish author for Cosmonaut Magazine, although, again, I think your big article there was actually about four years ago, so, um, but uh, so you are a Marxist writer and thinker and you have asked yourself, I think, um, an interesting question, which was how did we get to neoliberalism as as the vision of what Tina is, a T I N a.

C. Derick Varn: 2:29

There is no other answer and why, even now that neoliberalism seems to be exhausting itself in a very real, I mean?

C. Derick Varn: 2:40

I think that neoliberalism actually exhausted itself since like 2007, but we're kind of in this weird interim where everyone's policy instincts still remain kind of neoliberal but the basic apparatuses of how the whole thing works is, uh, fraying at the edges and doesn't really hold together, and we see this to me and everything from quantitative easing to on-shoring and friend-shoring and stuff like that, which just tells you that this way of building public-private partnerships, also in collusion for lack of a better word with international and transnational capital, is becoming harder and harder to maintain for a variety of reasons, but that's not your question.

C. Derick Varn: 3:29

I just want to point that out because I think your answer to how we got to neoliberalism will help us understand what is happening right now as it mutates to whatever the fuck. It's mutating to, um, and so that requires us to look at, according to you, two key things the 1970s and the american southeastern united states before the 1970s. And so I want to now hand this over to you and ask you how did you get to this question, like, why did the question of the ghost of Tina become such an animating factor in your thinking?

Connor Harney: 4:12

I mean, I think, probably a lot of my generation coming up on the left, I was sort of radicalized, first by the experience of the anti-war years and then the experience of the financial crisis, occupy, and so I started picking up on these like disparate threads of what was in the air and it was sort of inescapable that you had this question. Like neoliberalism became sort of the, the catch word of the day, um, and so there was this idea that, oh, um, you know the sort of david harvey answer of the workers were defeated over the course of the 1970s and the unions were suppressed and like, all well and good, that that there, there's truth to that story, right, like there was, you know, this onslaught against unions in the 1970s as they existed. But where I started to see the um, complexity of the situation, I found that that answer was too simplistic because it didn't show the reason why, I guess, or I guess it didn't really go into the reason why, the why unions were in a weakened position in the first place in order to be so, you know, obliterated over the course of the next 50 years. And you know, a big part of it, you know I had this understanding growing up in the South is that you know unions had never made their way South. And so you know, I started looking into this question of you know one. You know why there was never any, why unions never penetrated in the way that they had in the Northeast, the Midwest and the West. And so you know the classic question of you know, why not organize the South? And I started to see that those answers were, you know one, that in the 30s, right where this is where people start to draw the line of the sort of defeat of Southern labor, you know all the way. So the 30s, you know, for your listeners I'm sure, know it's sort of the sort of high point of American unionism or militant unionism. And in the South you actually had quite a militant labor movement. You actually had quite a militant labor movement.

Connor Harney: 7:07

However, where you get into the issues of why the South was so difficult to unionize is the sectors that were because of sort of the lagging industrialization of the South. The industries that existed to unionize were very labor intensive and not very profitable. So you know, think textiles, things like that. And so they were. It was easier to one break strikes, and then you had the racial division of the south and the segregation of labor. So all these things made it so that there was just difficulties. And then you had the willingness of the state to still continue to put put violence against the unions in the way.

Connor Harney: 7:51

For example, there's really good documentary on, I forget, the 34 textile strikes that happened and a lot of those interviews. You start to understand that there's this legacy, that that defeat that goes, it's intergenerational. You talk to people, you listen to these interviews of families of people who participated, who participated and they're still afraid to talk about it in some senses. So you know you have this break there. And then from there, everybody likes to cite Operation Dixie.

Connor Harney: 8:58

You know, sort of the move to unionize the South in didn't let organic organizers take on the the job. They sent down organizers from the north that had their experience in the culture of the north and were not really willing to or did not understand the terrain of the south. So it was sort of a a lost endeavor, as from the beginning. Um, so from there, um there, there was never really a large-scale effort to organize the south at to that, to that scale from the 30s forward, not to say that there weren't efforts, and we can go into that when we start talking about the 70s more, but just this idea that there's the memory of repression that happens and then just the actual conditions on the ground, right, so the kind of industries that existed in the South made it more difficult to organize in the way that the larger scale industry of the North. So I think yeah, I'm going to kick it off to you to see if you have any to say.

C. Derick Varn: 10:14

I mean that to me, like this, means that the failure of reconstruction is a double failure, one. It fails to integrate, uh, the working peoples of the south into one coherent whole. You keep them racialized and apart. That one's obvious, most leftists know it, uh. The other, however, not as obvious one, is that the south, once reconstruction, reconstruction is abandoned, is basically turned into, not just for Black workers but for the entire Southeast, an internal periphery, maybe even an internal subcolony that they actively, by policy, did not want to develop an industrial base. And then it was a. If it was allowed to develop any industrial base, it was in shit, like textiles, which, if anyone knows how industry seems to go well, textiles is the first industrial industry, so it's the shittiest. Wherever you find textile workers today, you're going to find the worst conditions. Um, and so that means you have a dual failure. Um, and that dual failure is kind of interesting. Um and so it does present a problem that you see, and one of the things that that you actually illustrate. That's interesting. I mean we talked about the David Harvey narrative I am of the Philip Morales school that David Harvey doesn't know what the fuck neoliberalism even is like, and I know that's an unpopular statement since he wrote the most popular book on the topic but that he views it as a political theory to reprivatize uh, markets I mean the public sector into markets.

C. Derick Varn: 12:05

And that's not really what neoliberalism did. It created new markets where the the public had public private partnerships but that those public private partnerships were never fully like, even in a welfare state notion integrated into a state-level welfare state. So it wasn't like removing the state from like welfare, it was removing the worker's seat at the table on the public-private partnerships that had already been established in the 1950s. And I think that's a subtle distinction, but it's a very important one when you ask yourself why the 1970s go the way they do right. And for me there's like two questions there.

C. Derick Varn: 12:59

There's the. There's the political, voluntarist vision of David Harvey that all this was basically engineered as a as a way to reclaim power from the workers. And then there's the kind of economistic view of people like Andrew Kleinman or even Ernst Mandel at the time that this was actually about profitability rates and it was inevitable, and Ernst Mandel at the time that this was actually about profitability rates and it was inevitable. I actually tend to think in a way, neither one of those narratives sufficiently answers the question. The profitability rate does explain a lot of what began to happen in the 1970s, but not what they pulled on Like it wasn't like they invented financialization out of nothing, or that these public private partnerships had not existed priorly. Right, and your research goes pretty good at finding this a lot earlier than people would think, I mean even earlier than Fordism in some ways in the Southeast. You want to go in a little bit about that no-transcript partnering and giving uh contracts to uh private companies.

Connor Harney: 14:54

And that's just what happens in in in the course of the south, honestly, from from Reconstruction forward, and there's this weird like way that they talk about it with these public-private partnerships and it's a way of like skirting around the issue. So, like I remember reading interviews with one of the um, uh big backers of of RTP, which is my, my big project uh, which is, you know, for anybody who doesn't know, it's the research triangle park in in, uh, north Carolina, uh, which was started in the fifties, uh, so one we're already challenging this idea of neoliberalism, just at that point, going back to the 50s. But the way that he talks about state development is he's like well, we're not actually giving these companies any money. What we're doing is we're providing them land and resources. So basically, what they're doing is they bought up all this land in the triangle for a song, lease it for nothing, and then you know, of course, you know in the case of the triangle, so the reason they call it that is that you have the cities of Raleigh, chapel Hill and Durham within a close proximity and there's three, you know, very important universities there that are providing graduates that are going to go into uh, these pro or work for these companies coming down there. So not only are you getting giving them land, you're giving them a workforce as well. What you're not doing is straight away giving them anything Like there's no formal straight direct subsidy, right, it's not a cash payment to the company. So that's interesting the way that they would talk about it.

Connor Harney: 16:58

But it's also easier to manage those racial divisions as we talked about earlier. So building up a formal welfare state or or a uh in in, where, in turn, in closer alignment with some of the of what happens, like, let's say, uh up north, where you do have better public programs for education and things like that earlier than you do in the south, because you have to maintain by law this legally segregated system. So again it keeps the south one, because that's what's the draw, that's what's bringing people southward, is this backwardsness. They have a workforce that they can pay less than their northern workers. They can also get the inputs to the industry of north at lower cost. So basically, what they are developing is the roads they're developing basically all for mode of transport and then, as it's required more and more, you get electrification, things like that, but again, no state development directly in the sense of, of, of a formalized welfare state, um, and this is where I think we can kind of talk about the importance of um, uh, talking about uh, what? I guess?

Connor Harney: 18:35

I guess the the terminology is typically thrown around as, like the paternalistic capitalists or the you know the capitalist welfare or paternalistic, you know corporate welfare system, right Like so, where companies, rather than you know, rely on the state to provide, you know, goods and and you know necessities.

Connor Harney: 19:02

It's provided by the company. So there's, you know, there's a sense like where you've got the idea of the company town, but that sort of always puts it in a negative light. There is a sense, like in when you start talking about getting more into the 20th century, where there is good being provided to the worker, in less of that negative sense. One of the threads that I pick up in my work is looking at a company like IBM where they have this massive internal corporate welfare system where one you've got great wages, you've got great benefits, but then there's all these other cultural things that they have. They have the IBM Country club for the workers, right Like they've got these, uh, community, these gyms, they've got all like all these things that they provide to to their workers in order to keep them happier.

C. Derick Varn: 20:12

Yeah, the Silicon Valley model doesn't actually originate in Silicon Valley. It originates in a lot of these research facilities in the Southeast where they're also trying to keep these goods segregated. That's part of the underlying logic that people don't really see. I'm fascinated by this because there's multiple threads of political economy that you're connecting that don't normally get connected. So a lot of people miss, for example, that the South is deliberately underdeveloped as a part of US industrial policy, like on purpose, and your work ties into that.

C. Derick Varn: 20:48

A lot of people understand the failures of Reconstruction. They know they're WED Du Bois, they know, you know, but they only see this in racialized terms a lot of the time, even though Du Bois himself doesn't Um, and because of that they miss that. You know there is, for example, I think, that the stat that's pretty shocking is like in the 1930s, uh, um, even non-unionized African Americans in the North actually have a higher on average purchasing capacity and wage than white workers in the South and like they're like scales above what's going on in the black community, which is part of why there is the first, you know, great migration and the second great migration. It isn't just running from, you know, the racist South, it's also like, well, they're running into different kinds of racist and different, but they're also going to where there's fucking work, like, and there's jobs and that's not happening. But in so much where there are jobs, you do see the beginnings of this model that we might call like, uh yeah, corporate paternalism. That is going to be the basis of the fortis model on labor.

C. Derick Varn: 22:04

The neoliberal model like this is being worked out in the southeast, and even things like the silicon valley thing that we see today you're pretty good at documenting well, this actually already happened in the southeast to keep these goods located within a certain sphere of the economy and not let them bleed out because of formal segregation, which is we you know, which is deeply legal. So there's all kinds of political, economic threads and I know work that that talks about each one of these things by themselves. But but because they're kind of overdetermined in a very like multi-causal sense, I haven't seen anyone try to like put them all together to explain the relationship of the South to neoliberalism. I've heard people assert you're not the first person to assert that like neoliberalism you really see in the Dixiecrats first like, but as to how early it begins, you're one of the only people I know who's tracing it all the way back to the end of reconstruction. So, um, I think that's interesting, I mean it.

C. Derick Varn: 23:09

There's also these other elements of it that I want to ask you about, because the kind of shadow of this in the southern economy is that the southern economy is disproportionately, even to this day, dependent on the military, that it is very tied into military production, like, in some ways, the lack of a even, say, state level fortis infrastructure, like you see in new england and new york. Um, you don't are in the are in a failing sense in the industrial Midwest. You don't ever see that in the Southeast, because in some ways the military seems to be used as a bulwark off of the negative consequences of this development. So I was going to ask you what did you see about that when you were studying?

Connor Harney: 23:55

Yeah, so the the question of the military in in the south, yeah, as you said, does cast a massive shadow. Um, you know, I live, uh, about an hour from phayetteville oh yeah, you're, you're near, yeah yeah yeah, so I grew up an hour from warner robbins.

C. Derick Varn: 24:13

So like, yeah, you know what I'm talking about. Yeah.

Connor Harney: 24:17

Yeah, so yeah, it's, and it's so funny because it's a historical consequence of Reconstruction the reason why there's so many military bases in the South but they do, they provide this again. What we're I think what we're we're really trying to get out here is that we never get in the United States, in general, a formalized national level welfare state. So you have all these sort of competing welfare states within, and one of them happens to be the military, to be the military, Um, so, and, and, and, uh, uh, and actually some of the the uh largest scale industry in the South that does end up happening is for military purposes. Um, so you know it's like you're you're building tanks and bombs, like, but that's uh, what. What ends up being uh. And then, when we start talking about, like, going back to rtp, um, a lot of the research that gets done is directly connected to the military purposes, like you know my.

Connor Harney: 25:33

My dad works in semiconductors and I can tell you like a big part of their work goes into the military. So I mean it is uh, you know, it's the reality of the south. Like it's really hard to remove that, that connection um the well.

C. Derick Varn: 25:54

In some ways it's interesting because I think people pick up on the poverty draft and the poverty draft they think of the south, even though if they don't say it, yeah, which was a very real phenomenon it's one of those things when people are pushing back against it now it's because they're pushing back against it like trans-historically, because like, yes, now there really isn't much of a poverty draft. There's kind of one, but not really, but not really. Uh, whereas even before, like even before 9-11, like, there's a massive, like poverty draft. But there's another element of this too, and for those my listeners who don't know what I mean by power draft, the high encouragement of the only way out in some of these areas, particularly if you're of color, but even if you're like relatively unskilled white, is to go into the military as a way of getting access to education, benefits etc. Um, and also having a functional welfare state, and it kind of is a bulwark against things going totally tits up in the racialized south. I I mean, particularly after World War II and the military somewhat integrated, it stands off as an offset of like. I mean, it probably is why there wasn't more riots in black communities in the 50s and 60s, to be quite frank.

C. Derick Varn: 27:16

So, so there's, there's that, but there's also this other part of it that I think your research gets to it. There's also kind of like a for lack of a better term uh, a military, petite, bourgeois and professional program coming out of this too. That's often not looked at to that services, this military, and it's tied into this corporate paternalism and in like, uh, you know why is ibm in the south like, like, let's? It's not because they're going there for highly educated workers, even in the research triangle, um, they're going there to get around, you know, cost associated with what we're operating in new england, and also because they want to be near military bases, because that's who they're working for, like, um, so yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's, that's a good segue there.

Connor Harney: 28:09

No, and it and uh, yeah, so I. It's funny. So when RTP is started as as this idea of basically around the boostering of the North Carolina for anyone unfamiliar with the term boosterism, basically just selling your state to bring companies there and so it's basically this massive project to bring jobs southward so there was a realization all the way back in the early 50s that the reliance on these very labor intensive commodities in the long run wasn't going to work, because there there was the already then the the I, the knowledge that they're going to move to mexico first, you know, and then after that they move other other places as well. But there's this realization that it's not going to last forever. So what they come up with is an idea to one bring in, bring an influx of companies Southward, and then, with the idea of being, if you bring the research arm of a company, then you're also going to be able to plow that, those advancements, back into already existing industries, and then also you're going to, you're going to attract or you're going to have a basis for further development.

Connor Harney: 29:48

Um, so, but, but that being said, the idea around the research triangle was specifically to bring in these higher or more educated, highly skilled engineers, chemists, to the South. So they didn't want in the park there to be any manufacturing. So that was one requirement. You know, you could not have a manufacturing plant on the RTP campus, have a manufacturing plant on on the rtp campus. Well, fast forward to the, the 1960s, and, uh, the, the project is it hasn't really taken hold yet. Well, ibm says, hey, we'll come down here, but you got to let us have some light manufacturing yet. And they immediately concede to that. Light manufacturing them. And they immediately concede to that. And so you can see from the very beginning that there's the contradiction in what they want to do and what they can actually do and require of these companies. So from there.

C. Derick Varn: 30:58

There's no concessions to there being some sort of industrial proletariat, that this idea of the South as this like Basically agrarian, slash research aristocracy, and I do think like there is a real direct relationship between this corporate paternalism and planter class slash agrarian ideology, like it's beyond the scope of either one of our our research.

C. Derick Varn: 31:24

It's just a. It's like noticing how this rhymes with things that uh, a lot of these groups already believe is kind of a fascinating problem. Like noticing, like this idea of like subordinate labor, like, if you go all the way back to like fit you, for example, this idea of subordinate labor uh being a more genteel, more natural way, that's kind of a kind of a step between, um, feudal and bourgeois relations, as standing against bourgeois relations seems to actually be part of the ideological genealogy that's joining up under these material conditions, creating this corporate personhood thing, and yet they have to make concessions to construction and whatnot to be able to function. They can't totally operate under that, under those perceptions, even though it would probably make their ideological project easier. Is that kind of the right way to view this?

Connor Harney: 32:27

Yeah, no, I would say I would say so, and yeah, and it's funny because over time you, with these sort of this, this North Carolina, becomes one of the most industrialized states in the union. Now, that does not mean that when, because when you say most industrialized, typically people are thinking you know large scale manufacturer of, you know automobiles, things like that. But what actually? The biggest business in North Carolina in Roanoke Rapids and one of the biggest employers in Roanoke Rapids is the poultry business, if you know anything about that. Yes, it is heavily industrialized, but it's also still heavily labor intensive and the conditions in those factories are bad.

Connor Harney: 33:46

Nightmarish is honestly, I would say Basically he's dealing with a cycle of people where they'll get laid off for a month. Uh, they'll get laid off for a month, but because they're so deaf, because for missing, coming to work late for 15, 15 minutes late, or missing a single shift, or something like that, but they're so desperate for people that they'll just hire that person back, but after a month of no salary, right or no, uh, wages, excuse me so, yeah, I, and also it's one of the only industrial areas where you can have a straight up, like pretty massive criminal record and like it not hurt your employment prospects, because no one wants to fucking work in a chicken factory, like no, having seen it, it's a good way to lose a finger, like it's.

C. Derick Varn: 34:37

The work conditions are really bad.

C. Derick Varn: 34:42

Yeah, and I think that I think the nature of the industry I mean like the, the south, getting like what we think of as modern industrial, like modern industrial factories and stuff like that's like in the 70s and 80s, and even then it's weird stuff.

C. Derick Varn: 34:56

It's tobacco manufacturing, it's uh, it's uh, you know there is specialized stuff for the military, and then later on you have like Japanese and Korean car manufacturers and even American car manufacturers moving down there, cause it gets out of the UAWs uh, reach the UAW's reach. But one of the things about that I mean and this is interesting and it's one of the reasons why industrializing the South is so hard, although we're going to have to talk at the end of this show, we're going to actually have to talk about how this has kicked up. In the last two weeks there's been legislative movements out of the South that we haven't seen in a while Like basically making collective bargaining illegal, not just for, you know, not just for the private sector, but also, I mean, for the public sector, where in most Southern states it already is.

C. Derick Varn: 35:54

But also like making it damn near impossible to get for the private sector, but also like making it damn near impossible to get for the private sector, and this and interestingly, it doesn't look like Biden's NCRB is really going to do much about it.

C. Derick Varn: 36:09

So we'll come back to that, though that's can see that Like a lot of things that are happening. For example, another thing implicit In your research I didn't see it In what I've read of yours but Is that the mass Incarceration regime that hit the black Community in the northeast and the west was already basically based off like. This is like the, the, the rational core of the of the new gym pro thesis, which is to some degree overstated. But there is a sense in which curtailing the surplus population, which was very heavily racialized, but not just racial, and this is what I don't like about the liberal version of this narrative was practiced in the South first, in conjunction with these things that you're talking about in this corporate paternalism Right. So you know the reason why neoliberalism and mass incarceration go hand in hand is in some ways worked out, probably by the 1950s in the Southeast. I mean, do you agree with that? Like I?

Connor Harney: 37:29

mean absolutely. I mean there, I mean I would say really like, it's really probably more like the ths I I would say, but but yeah but, but yeah, so, so, needless to say, a very long time.

Connor Harney: 37:46

No, but, and I do agree with you, there's this, and we and we in in the field of southern history, they call it the sort of southern exceptionalism, right, where you put all the sins of America on, of the racialization of the American population, on the American South.

Connor Harney: 38:07

And I remember the first that was you know, obviously I know, derek, you grew up in the South as well I mean, like racism is as real as it's something you can, it's just a fact of life here in the South as well. I mean, like racism is as real as you know, it's something you can, it's just a fact of life here in the South. But it's also, I don't think it's quite the same way that you get in pictures of the South from people who don't, who haven't grown up here. And I think one of the things that really like drove that home for me I was probably in my early twenties when I came across. I was reading, funny enough, like not the popular Zen book, but I was reading Howard Zinn's the Southern Mystique, if you've ever read it. But basically, basically his, his, his argument is that. You know, basically his argument is that the South is used as a bulwark so that the rest of the United States does not have to reckon with its own racial tensions.

C. Derick Varn: 39:13

Yes, you know, you know, I mean getting people to understand that sundown towns were not just a southern thing. Martin Scorsese, a favor for talking about the racial rioting and the use of immigrants against black, against black folks. And, uh, new York, because until it showed up in that gangs of New York movie, which is otherwise not a particularly great movie, a whole lot of people had no idea that shit happened. Um, like it was, it was just sort of. You know, as a Southerner I've always been sort of torn, because the way that the South wants to tell the civil war is a lie. It's about slavery. It's a hundred percent about slavery. States rights is about the rights to not just keep slaves. They could get that. It was about expanding the enslavement franchise. That's what it was. For the northeast, however, not so much about slavery, like like uh, for lincoln it was, and I think for parts of the republicans it was. That's why marx was supporting them. Um, for those of you don't know, mark supported the republican party of the united states. That's one of the the greatest funny historical ironies about where things are now that I like to amuse myself with.

C. Derick Varn: 40:42

But for industrial policymakers in the Northeast the racial problem was still a real problem. And even though they opposed slavery, they didn't necessarily know what to do with all these workers like potential workers and, um, they were already having the problem of lumpen development with immigrants. So it was on their mind, uh and uh. It's interesting for me because in some ways the New York example actually is better utilized in the South later, because it lets people know not only can you play off the dominant population against Black people, but you can also play off different minority groups against each other and also expand and contract whiteness as needed to like that really happens in the South. So for my favorite example of it is like Latin people when I was growing up, unless they were very, very, very, very, very dark, were generally considered white and there was that much.

C. Derick Varn: 41:45

There was not that much racism aimed their way until the late 1990s where it seemed like because of the expansion of canning factories and migrant labor in the southeast there was. They were used as a scapegoat for the view of de-industrialization in the south, um, kind of falsely, yeah, which was able to get those narratives of anti, um, anti-latin, uh, sentiment that was common in the west to link up with southern racism. And thus you started seeing like what you the bullshit you see in florida, um. But that that's actually a really late development and a lot of people don't realize that because the the southern racial notion, unlike the new england racial notion, was kind of binary, like it was just like you're white or you're not like um, whereas that was never true in the industrial northeast where, yes, there's a notion of whiteness, yet it's a little bit too simple to say the Irish weren't white, etc, etc. But they weren't considered full white people.

C. Derick Varn: 42:53

I think that's an interesting thing to look at when we look at how this developed, like why this corporate paternalism would have been so attractive to the southeast. I think you're right that the segregation is part of it but ironically, like it's in the north where we see the first instantiations of this, when people like don't want to support the slavery regime and they want to expand you know northeastern industrial hold over the nation but they also don't really want to deal with like incorporating massive amounts of black agrarian workers who are undereducated and underfed. Like you know, this is a, this is a big social problem for them.

Connor Harney: 43:35

Yeah, I, I. I mean that's an excellent point because they, on the one hand, they might oppose slavery from the standpoint of moral principle, but again, from a practical point, you mentioned the lumpenization of some of the immigrant population that comes to the United States. The sort of basis of, of of carceral role, of the carceral system in the U? S is actually comes out of the new England area where you've got all of these, you know, irish immigrants, german immigrants, coming in to the United States, which makes sense because, like when you look at it from, because everybody you know, there's this very simplistic notion that you get coming out of, like something like a documentary, like uh 13 or whatever, about the 13th amendment and and sort of the continuation of slavery by other means.

Connor Harney: 44:54

Uh, and then, like, like you said, about the the, the problematic nature of the new Jim Crow narrative, because it does ignore some of these elements here, because why it starts in New England is because you have a population of a free workforce that doesn't have access to work. That's one of the problems of free labor, right, slavery well, they're constrained anyway. Their movements are already accounted for, right, I mean, obviously there's examples of resistance to slavery and societies that grow out outside of the dominant Southern society. But, by and large, when we're talking about an enslaved population, we're talking about people whose, again, their movements are accounted for, whereas in the North, yeah, go ahead there.

C. Derick Varn: 45:54

No, no, you're right In the Northeast, but that's also why sharecropping for both Black and white laborers and I think people ignore that like three fourths of sharecroppers were white Disproportionately. They were black, just like this, but in absolute numbers there were tons of white people in them. It's a rentier relation. Since it is a percentage rentier relation, there's very little incentive to get out of it. And by that I mean, like if you have to pay rent in absolute terms, the of whether it can fuck you as a farmer but you will maintain some of your produce as setback because you owe a share. You don't actually owe an absolute amount of either currency or product. Now, in the short term, that's to your benefit. In the long term it makes it impossible to get out of the situation because your share is always relative to what you're bringing in. So you're going to have to run faster and faster and faster and there's only so much you can do before you exhaust the soil right. So like that is a way to maintain a semi-feudal relation in the Southeast. And one of the interesting things about the way the Southeast thinks of itself and you're a Southerner is they really do posit themselves as like these, like I don't know. A vanguard of the rear guard, like we are the maintainers of pre-bourgeois relations, is actually kind of their narrative to themselves. I realize that's complicated for Marxists. I've had the biggest debates in my life about whether or not the southern economy was properly speaking capitalist and I'm like, well, it's capitalism with semi-feudal elements and people get mad at me for that and they talk about real subsumption and other stuff Marx wrote on the back of the napkin. But in a real sense it's kind of beyond the point because, as we're illustrating today, not just in terms of primitive accumulation, which southern slavery clearly is a major contributor to development of capital, because of the primitive accumulation in all the periphery slave-holding settler colonies, not just in the United States, even you look at the Caribbean and Brazil and in brazil, etc. Etc. Etc. Um, so in a in a real sense you have this like kind of fish out of water thing in the south where the southeastern development is crucial, almost as a state of exact of exception, so that you can develop all this uh, massive accumulations of surplus in ways that aren't even efficient but limit the problems of massive populations moving around in the free labor problem and also totally expropriate massive amounts of capital from everybody, I mean the.

C. Derick Varn: 48:59

The plantation system is very similar to a feudal landholding. It is like, and that model in the south is maintained with sharecropping and it's also maintained with mineral extraction. Like this is where these company towns come from. Like, like this idea that the company provides everything but ties everyone everything into a closed system.

C. Derick Varn: 49:19

I remember when the, the mine workers, uh in the southeast, were talking and this was in the 19th century, but they were talking about, uh, their relationship to, to the owners, and I'm like look, we have a system that isn't even bourgeoisified. We have not, like, like the the mine workers with, like we're not even proletarians yet, like we're basically serfs. So this dynamic is interesting because, to jump to your more recent research, looking at the development of IBM, what it indicates is there's a willingness to experiment with the what we might call the regressive reincorporation of prior forms of rentier relations or of state patronage or whatever, into the market, to maintain these kind of backward systems, but at the benefit of both US and global capital. Right? Is that a fair summation of what you're trying to argue in the long duray?

Connor Harney: 50:24

yes, yes, yeah, absolutely, you've got, you've got to maintain and I think, like, thinking about it, you, I think you use the core periphery language and I think that that is actually really um apt for understanding the relationship between the south and the rest of the united states. But I think, really importantly, there's cores and peripheries within. Yeah, so you know, you think about like, in terms of like, the development of, like, my state, north carolina, right, like, so, uh, the triangle is very much the Charlotte and the triangle are the cores of North Carolina, where everything else is pretty much a wasteland, like it's, it's really I mean in the.

C. Derick Varn: 51:12

Southeast it's really more obvious and extreme than in the Northeast or the West for a variety of reasons. Like the West has never been really we can get into that. The West is like only kind of industrialized, like even today, because the population until you hit the coast, the population is low. But when you look and if you look at the industrial economy of the West, it's extraction and it's finishing. It's not industrial commodity production. It never really has been. There's not a strong history of that here, Whereas in the South, there like, there's a commodity production, but you're right, it's like the shittiest commodities, it's food, it's textiles, it's like and there's a way also in which if you're not in either a cultural service corps like the Research Triangle or Atlanta, you're not in a port like Savannah or South Carolina Charleston.

Connor Harney: 52:32

Charleston yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 52:33

Yeah, and you're not tied to a military base like Columbus or Augusta, or your military base gets shrunk, like in where I'm from, the central Georgia, you'll just see that place become like a basket case economy locally overnight.

C. Derick Varn: 52:49

I mean, like it's crazy how fast those cities go like basically nose up in the water as soon as you start shrinking the military investment because there's so much downstream stuff and and all these benefits go away et cetera, et cetera.

C. Derick Varn: 53:11

So people either leave and it's also tied into white flight, because you know a lot of people of color are not in the position, they don't have family wealth to to liquidate, to leave, so they can't leave, and so these cities get both whites flight, both from racism but also actually from economic, from social, economic conditions where white people have a little bit more generational wealth, even poor white people than black people, so they can kind of like sell their house and make a little bit of money and move to, you know, a shitty southern suburb of atlanta or whatever, and get closer to the, the core of the, of the, of of the industrial development.

C. Derick Varn: 53:52

And I I do think these dynamics go on in the west of the country but in the South they're really really really obvious, like it's not hidden at all, like you know the way it kind of is, like I guess maybe not in New York, because it's pretty clear that NYC is a is a core to everything else, but like, if you look at New England, for example, it is not as obvious, at least not until the 1970s, that this is actually happening, at least not until the 1970s that this is actually happening.

Connor Harney: 54:21

Yeah, I was going to say I think, like in New England, it's not so obvious that you know this is happening around, you know, or Boston is really like this flourishing center that's bringing, attracting all these folks. But again, as you start to see things develop over time, you know, the suburbs of Boston become a hub for technology, and that's just a tangent.

C. Derick Varn: 54:53

But a lot of the US after the 70s, a lot of the US starts to look a lot more like the Southeast, like in that sense, like a lot of liberals who talk about, oh, the Southerners ultimately won the Civil War and they think it's because of political dominance, which is bullshit. It's more like the social technologies developed in the South are, during the beginnings of neoliberalism and under Reagan, employed everywhere. Like you just start seeing that developmental pattern throughout the united states like yeah, um, anyway. So so let's talk about the 1970s. Why is the 1970s so important, connor um?

Connor Harney: 55:29

so I mean I mean, yeah, the 1970s, that's just what it's. When the, the wheels come off, everything like uh, I mean what, what existed of of the, the fortis social compact, just gets shredded.

Connor Harney: 55:45

I mean, uh, and I'm not going to get too much into that story because I think, like that's been told many times before, but where people know that, yeah, yeah yeah, but where I think it gets important is like so you have this narrative of somebody like Jeff Cowey's book, you know, staying Alive, the Last Days of the American Working Class, where you've got where.

Connor Harney: 56:11

What actually happens, though, is it's not the last days of the working class. In fact, you know where Cowie is drawing on union density. If you actually look at the numbers for the number of union drives that happen in 70s, there's actually a very noticeable uptick. Problem is they failed, and the problem is they failed in the South, and the reason being, at that point, the way that the, the way that the bargaining structure and the and the unionization structure was set up is, was so in favor of the company that, even if a union won their election, there is a good chance that either the plant was going to close or the union was going to get broken up before they even got to bargain for a contract.

C. Derick Varn: 57:12

That was the reality.

Connor Harney: 57:15

And so again you're at this point where, in the 70s, legal reasons and how and that was very much part of the whole basis and the issue of the social compact in the first place, because it really was based along these politics of resignation right, it was this, was this I? After you know taft-hartley and the, the uh, uh, basically the defeat of the post-war uh strikes, uh, the massive strike wave in 48. And then taft-hartley, um, you had this formalization of, hey, like we're going to basically accept the terms Right, like as they are, we're going to, we're going to bargain for a better life for our people, but that's all we're going to do. Like this, the focus on, on expanding definitely starts to go away.

C. Derick Varn: 58:44

And yeah, no, I think this is interesting.

C. Derick Varn: 58:48

I mean, I hate to give Chris Katron credit for a whole lot, but he actually does make an observation that I kind of fell into separately for him, but agree with him on that.

C. Derick Varn: 58:57

The new left did not recognize the nature of what it was fighting, because initially it's fighting fordism and it's laying the groundwork for an intellectual strategy for leftists to sign on for the dismantling of the fordist system, and one that I think is actually some like we romanticize fordism in retrospect because we know what the end of neoliberalism kind of looks like.

C. Derick Varn: 59:20

Well, the end of the current phase of neoliberalism. Maybe I have no idea where we're at in this right, not a not in the business of making predictions anymore, but um, uh, the you know, um, but but there was a real critique of that, whereas in the south there was a real critique of that, whereas in the South there was already an answer to it and it presented itself from the right but the left was unable to really respond to it in any way. Like the unions went into a defensive modality, now trying to defend something that their intellectual, like forebearers, the younger people who are entering the union from the new left, uh, uh, couldn't have already spent like years critiquing when they were, when they were in universities or in their youth activist phase, like that, like and to the? That's a perfect storm for misrecognition, I think. How do you feel about that?

Connor Harney: 1:00:21

No, that that rings true for me. I mean, and I think part of the reason they missed the, the problems of Fordism, are actually understandable, because you have to think that many of them were children that had come from that labor aristocracy background. That had been their experience. Going from, you know, my dad was a factory operator to I'm able to attend university within a generation is kind of a big deal, right like right, and I think this will.

Connor Harney: 1:01:08

I think we can segue to where I think the South also gives the answer that the liberals pick up on which, and the liberal left generally, which is, when you have the failure to unionize in the South, well, you've got to provide some way of letting lower classes or lower strata work their way up. Well, where do you go? The answer is education. So that's why, again, the part of the larger RTP project is we're going to start making this a place where people want to not only move to but send their kids to school here so that they can be educated and then get a job in one of these high tech industries. Right, so that becomes the answer of of moving out of those labor intensive jobs like be a tobacco, be a textiles, anything like that. That's the answer is education.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:16

So, I can build both the the land grant research school pipeline and the military pipelines, explained right there. Well, hey, um. So you know, as I've often said Many times, as is done To black people will eventually be done To most of the non-rich. Also, as is done to the south will eventually be done To most of the rest of the United States. And in some ways, when reading your stuff, I'm like the south as the vanguard of regression or whatever it really is a way to understand it. But the way that it is commonly framed in liberal discourse and you know, you and I are not Southern chauvinist I don't think neither one of us are particularly proud of the heritage as a part of the country we come from. But um, um, it is it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:12

It is interesting how I still respond so negatively to the hey, don't pretend that my region of the country is where all these sins come from. Uh, particularly when I'm out in the west, where I'm, like you know you guys, come from a religion that didn't even recognize that, like people of color were fully and sold until the 70s. So, like you know, like, don't be, be very careful on casting those stones right. Or if you know the actual race history of new england and like particularly boston. I mean it's just kind of really ugly, um, uh. But the south is where all this stuff is perfected. And if you look at this like you're saying, like we see, we see the beginnings of neoliberalism literally from the failure of um reconstruction and in this weird integration of this Southern agrarian, like semi-feudal ideology which, like it, never really existed. Want to make that clear, I'm not arguing the agrarian economy that people like robert penn warren thought was possible, was ever possible or ever actually even existed it didn't. But that ideology was rife for intermingling with this like corporate person, corporate personalism or paternalism. And it is interesting because that's still common in the southeast, like like the way, like when I worked at a said unnamed large insurance company with egg echo as a mascot, um uh, I signed a no unionization bill to work there and the argument they made is that we will give you better contracts than you can get in a single unionized. We didn't have contracts, but better working conditions than you can get in a single unionized shop. You want to deal with us directly and not with a mediator and that was pretty convincing to a whole lot of people for a long time. It's not so much anymore, but like um, and you know this.

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:21

Even this, even like, went into um the public school sector. So, like in the public schools and most of southeast, there either are no unions, like in georgia. There are associations, but they're literally only lobbying associations. They can do nothing, um, they like, like, like here in utah, for example, the association I say the union, they say the association but the association can collectively bargain but cannot strike right in. In the southeast. They, with the exception of like florida or whatever they can't collectively bargain either. Like um, so what they can do is lobby and that's what you're paying for. A lobbying group with an insurance program, right, um, but there is this attitude like, look, we'll pay you more in the where we can. Uh, now you might go to.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:13

The Southeast has really poor pay teachers, and you're right. But like Georgia and North Carolina, for example, really did try to up their teacher pay. Uh, to be like, oh, we don't need unions Now, your work conditions are still shit, but we're giving you a fair amount of money, particularly compared to the average cost of living and average wage in the region outside of, say, atlanta, um, and that's a lot to leverage, because the other thing that that I think the work of phil nill uh, really overlaps. What you're talking about is the way in the 20th century, automation makes this capital more concentrated and a lot easier to move. So, like a union is a real threat to these people. If these businesses can move their factory and there's no intra-state capital controls, like there's no way for a state to go, you can't move to new york or utah or wherever um, and so that's a real threat? That is largely not.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:18

I'm actually kind of amazed at how leftists don't talk about this threat more thoroughly. Like it's a real reason why, like um, for example, uh, most of the unionized labor in the country is in three states Hawaii, new York and California. Like, and why is that? I mean when people talk about like the labor strategy in the DSA and like using that to get out of the coastal corridors, and I'm like, but you can't really, because the established unions are strong there and nowhere else too. Uh, and why?

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:52

I mean and and you know, again, I don't want to jump too far ahead to the future when we're talking about the current wall that the ua, the uaw strategy, hit literally the week we're recording this. It'll be about two months old by the time, or a month and a half old when this comes out, but, like in the week we're recording this, the UAW finally, finally fucking decided like, okay, we got to take an offensive to the Southeast for real, and they seem to be successful for the first few. And now there's been some legislation changes that have seemed to completely undermine their strategy, and so they've hit a wall, and I think it's worrisome because, as your research indicates, what happens in the South will spread to the rest of the United States and maybe even a large part of the industrial world. So to get back on that, so the 70s is where this really hits a wall. We start seeing what you know we might call the suddenification of of industrial workplaces you know, around the country, ie de-industrialization with, uh, with like this corporate personal model ahead of it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:07

And I think and I do think people often miss that the faction of the Democrats that won in the 1980s were just as neoliberal as, you know, reagan and whatnot, but not even because of like this weird, like Von Hayek inspired, you know, mount Pelerin institute stuff that is inspiring the reagan knight conservatives and thatcher. It is because this is the way their economies work in their home state. So clinton comes from arkansas and like that should be apparent immediately once you like, look at this. It's like it's not just an ideological project, people, it's also the. That's where the political economy of the winning faction of southern democrats come from. After lyndon johnson, like um, you know, and I think the political ramifications of that uh are obvious now, but I don't, I don't know that they were obvious at the time. I mean, they, I, you know I didn't see them. I was also a high schooler but I didn't see them in the mid-90s. Like so what do you make of that? Like, how do you think this affected like progressive politics Right?

Connor Harney: 1:10:25

So, yeah, I mean, I think, like, I just want to like deindustrialization is, on the one hand, a fairly useful term, but also it's kind of misleading. Actually, it can be misleading because, yeah, because it's not that industry goes away, it's that it's automated and decentralized, right, like so that you need less people, right, that's what it comes down to. Like the example that you mentioned earlier about Southern automobile industries Like so, you know, you make specific parts in small locations rather than constructing the vehicle all in the same location, right Like that's. And then you've got another area where everything's put together.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:07

In fact, if I'm going to critique classical Marxism in anything is they did not imagine that could happen. Like, if you read Ingalls, he clearly thinks that everything's going to be increasingly centralized forever and that there was no like, even though I think it's actually implied in Capital Volume 2 and 3, that there would be a weird dialectic of automation that would re-decentralize parts of the workforce. They don't like mark, even though it's implied in marx and engels's work are uh, and marx's work in capital it doesn't seem to be something they like cognitively picked up on right. So, like this blindsided, a bunch of marxists, just to put it like as a, as a developmental pattern, like euro communists, for example, are freaking out about this like um, when you read, like someone like gorts who's like, like you know, giving up on the working class almost in, like almost communization theory, like out of euro communism. They're not doing it because of supercomputers, they're doing it because of the, because of mechanical automation, like fragmenting the working class once again, and this is also why a lot of stuff, like you know, there's, I think right now there's a pipe dream, dream amongst a certain kind of Marxist that if we just actually get on the, like the Trump reshoring program that it'll return us to classical conditions of a political economy.

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:30

And I see, like you just shake your head in pain Cause, like you know that that's impossible now, like, and it's impossible because it would be completely inefficient from a capitalist standpoint. There's no way they would do it Like. So, as stuff comes back, like, stuff has been reshoring in the United States actually since, since actually into the Bush administration, and it just doesn't affect relative uh, it doesn't employ that many people like, so, yeah, schemas just aren't going to lead to mass re-industrial employment, because de-industrialization wasn't a removal of industry, it was a decentralization and and reduction the number of people, which is totally predictable on one sense, on a Marxist schema, when you're like, yeah, you're trying to reduce socially necessary labor time all the time because, even though it doesn't increase your profits, ultimately increases them in the short run, and particularly when you're in um, a legally constrained constant profit growth in the immediate sense, as set up by the american shareholder system, then there's no reason not to do that at all.

Connor Harney: 1:13:42

Like, even if in the long term it might destroy your, your market share or whatever um yeah, I, I think you're, I think you're right and I will say, it's like I, I won't give marks too hard of a time on that one with I. You've got to have your, you know you, you can't live outside your own moment too much. Because on the one hand, he might have acknowledged it as a possibility. But it's like you see, if you saw the dominant historical trend of the last you know, uh, probably I would, I guess I'd say century right, like was for centralization, uh, it's understandable that he would have missed that as a as a possibility oh, absolutely I'm not.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:24

To me, this is like not it's a critique of marx only in so much, if you think that you can just pick up capital volume one and understand everything about the modern economy, um okay and that's, and that's fair yeah, I.

Connor Harney: 1:14:39

I, there are, and there are a lot of Marxists that do think like, yes, if I, if I read, yeah, like you said, just just the volume one, which is that's a problem you got to read all three volumes.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:50

Like, yeah, like absolutely, and you probably need to read theories of surplus value and then you probably also need to read the secondary stuff after that. Like, which, again, is daunting. Like I'm not, like I don't want to shame people for not devoting their lives to reading literally tens of thousands of pages of dry 19th and early 20th century pros, but like it it, it is a daunting project when you're talking about stuff like this, because if you just look at that early commodity production stuff in the cycle of commodities and capital, volume one, and and you try to apply that to understanding class today, you're just going to be wrong like it's, it's, you're not, you're not going to be able to see the, the problematic limitations of like automation and all that on on the whole system. And it does mean in some ways that, like some classical marxist strategies in the first international and the second international are not really viable anymore.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:48

Like and you know, um, particularly when you get in the katskis, like real optimism about, like the centralization and and uh, like, uh educational skilling of the proletariat from centralized workforce, seemingly infinitely. Like that seems like a joke today, like it's just kind of sad and funny. Um, so you know, and I think the south is a real good illustration of this, and I think the south is also a really good illustration, as you said, of like it's not just that there's a world system with a core and periphery, or even a national system with a core and periphery, there's a regional system with a core and periphery and that is playing itself out and how this stuff is being organized right, like yeah um and uh.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:35

Another thing that your work illustrates and I want to give you credit for this is you pick up on how relations of production, via racialization and other things, affect directly the mode of production, which is obvious in marx. And yet it's something marxists just fucking drop all the time. They're not looking at the legal relationship of production, because I think they're mistaking something as super structural as just epiphenomenal and non-important, which is just wrong. So 70s happened, we got that. We talked a little bit about the eighties. When do you think the, say Southern application into neoliberalism really gets booming? It's, it seems to have its core in these problems in the seventies, but like when do we see it accelerate?

Connor Harney: 1:17:29

I, I would honestly say the ninetiess. That's really like the sort of high point of, I think that's really the high point of neoliberalism if we really agreed yeah I I think pretty much the bush years are the the end of neoliberalism, and we've just been, you know living in its, yeah, in this weird zombie.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:53

I mean, in some ways it's interesting to me because, you know, fordism took a long time to die. I mean it was really only dominant from, like, say, 47 you know the end of the war into maybe 61, 62, but it doesn't the early 60s recession really right is the starts to kill off fordism right early 60s recession and then the japanese and germans entering the commodity market, etc.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:24

Etc. Etc. Like it's, like it makes fordism much more untenable project. And then when you look at that you're like damn, that's actually not even. It's barely a generation. It is the generation that sets the norm for a massive amount of people because it happens to correspond with the baby boom, but it's barely a generation, whereas also when we look at the height of neoliberalism, it's like okay, even if you date it to like 77 which is probably where I date it as a national project like maybe the second year of the Carter administration, it's over.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:58

I think by I think 9-11 puts a real big dent in it and that first little commodity bubble that blows up right before 9-11, then the economic fallout from 9-11 itself happens, so we don't really pay attention to that first commodity bubble burst, and then you know, the securities thing happens in in the home market and it really becomes obvious how much this is based off of like computerized securities and whatnot. Uh, that even leftists like boudreaux I mean leftists like baudrillard c is like solving the problem of the business cycle and of the capitalist contradictions and it's like no, it's actually just accelerating it because all the priors are built into the automation right, um and it. It kind of accelerates this speed up to this blow up that we've been living through. But it's become clear to me that that our, our erstwhile leaders don't have a consensus on the solution to the problem. Like they arrived at at neoliberalism, and the arrival of neoliberalism again is kind of overdetermined, because you have the southern thing and then you have the separate intellectual project that happens to be able to glom onto it in the mount pellerin society like, um, okay, so so the 90s happens, yeah and uh.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:24

I mean I think we underestimate how bad the 90s was for the labor movement. Like it, like because the labor movement and all the us starts a little like the labor movement in the south, from my opinion, in the 1990s, like in the 1980s, like, interestingly, we only keep formal stats on a lot of this stuff starting in the 1980s. And in the 1980s you're still dealing with like 35 private sector union density or something. It's actually quite high for the United States, it's not high historically for Europe, but it's actually fairly high. And by the end of the 1990s you're looking at 10, 14, somewhere in there. It was incredibly low. The union density had been cut down by half in the spectrum of 15 years.

Connor Harney: 1:21:10

And it's basically stayed within that since, between that 10 and 15% range ever since.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:16

Yeah, yeah, exactly it, um, and it seems like we only realized it in like 2011. Oh, you know it's. You know a lot of. You know you're talking about this. Uh, and maybe this is a cautionary tale about like both holding people too accountable for like, like, yeah, we can't hold Marx accountable for developmental patterns that might be implicit in his own work, but we're nowhere near historically obvious, right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:48

But I think that's also true for our responses to things like fordism or neoliberalism that we're often drawing conclusions like and over over, extrapolating like techno neo-feudalism or whatever somehow this brand new development and it's like no, if you actually look at things, like some of the stuff has been around for like 100 years within capitalism itself and it's just coming to become more dominant now, or or came to be more dominant during the neoliberal period or whatever. So I guess this, this, we can tie this into union organizing today. Yeah, our, our left organizing today. There's been a lot of hay made about the uaw's, really, you know, and sean fain's like more strategic, more aggressive, rank and file oriented strategy, even though he's pretty, you know, he's made a lot of like symbolic kowtowing to the administration of the democratic party, um, and it's been pretty effective in uh, finally get the auto unions to start trying to breach the, the mason dixon, the uh border, like that really the uaw has just respected since the 70s, for some reason, um to its own massive decline, as made obvious in 2007.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:13

Um, but it's hitting a wall, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, as these southern states are passing state-level legislation that seem to be, you know, unable for the for the nclb to bypass for whatever reason, probably constitutional.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:29

I am actually not quite sure. Some of these are also so new that their constitutionality remains unadjudicated. So, and you know, given the current makeup of the court, not likely to go in labor's favor. But we're seeing, like, like the renewal of, for example, like uh, these passages in three or four Southern states that are all but uh car check blocks. Like you have to have like secret votes and there's a high threshold of of uh what you can do and the fear of that alone is causing the, the uh UAW and there's a high threshold of what you can do and the fear of that alone is causing the UAW salting attempts in the Southeast to just dry up. So they had their first loss and it looks like these bills are spreading throughout the Southeast which is going to make it much harder. Do you think that we have historically underestimated, because of the view as the south is just backwards, the kind of evil ingenuity of uh the southern like political elite and setting up anti-union legislation like do you like? What do you think about?

Connor Harney: 1:24:46

that like, oh, I think we've definitely underestimated it. Um, and I I mean, and going back to the unionization drives of the 70s, even if this legislation is found to be unconstitutional, it can be, it can hang around long enough to do enough damage to organizing efforts. So, even if it is found to be unconstitutional, in the long run it's going to do so much damage to that potential militancy that that's already existing. Like, I mean it's. I don't think it. I don't think they need to be successful in order to be successful.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:26

Hmm, yeah, well, this is, I mean, this is the the irony of our current age, right, like, and I keep on telling people they really need to answer this more seriously than they are, and I I want to give you some credit for this, because the jacobin thinkers about this there's one of them that I think is responsible and that's been fong because he's very aware of label history but everyone else seems to be like kind of in a delusional cycle of like, well, we can get logistics oh shit, that didn't work. Well, we can get, um, service sectors oh shit, that's really hard for, for, for logistics reasons, cause it's so fragmented and shops are so small, et cetera, et cetera, the work, the workers are temporary, or at least they're the whole things. Basically. What one of the ironies whenever people say, well, those jobs aren't meant to be lifelong, you know, you're supposed to just do it for one, for one period of time.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:22

I'm like well, isn't it weird that you basically have this, this sector of of the working class that even you guys think should be transient within your own culture and within your own state, just by age? Like, that's bizarre. Like, um, because if there's any change in in, like, even age demographics, of which there's a massive one happening right now, that becomes an untenable position like um. So it does seem like right now we're putting a whole lot on, particularly the auto industry, and I've had some things to say about this. This is not a critique of the uh, of the uaw, but it is sort of like, guys, the auto industry is a dying industry and, honestly, its biggest competitor is actually communist China, which I, you know, I don't really think it's communist, but you know, uh, they do Um. So it's going to put the, the UAW, in a weird position um, in regards to international labor and in regards to things like green transition in the in um in like the logistics fleet, and it is like, it's a very like.

Connor Harney: 1:27:40

It's not that the uaw's come out against it, it's like, but it's it's a real problematic question for them it is, and I and I do think that that is partly why you've seen the uaw expanded to so many other industries outside of automobile, like I mean even you even have the UAW involved with, like the graduate student.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:59

Yeah, that's right. Big expansion, honestly yeah.

Connor Harney: 1:28:02

Yeah, but yeah, like they've you know unitized janitorial services and things there's a lot. But you know, but I think that is there's a, there's a some recognition that you know the party can't last forever.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:17

Right and, and I think we're seeing that wall hit. So yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:22

You know, I want to ask you a little bit, though this has come up a little bit is the liberal half recognition or misrecognition of this? So there is a narrative, that's a very liberal, political ideological narrative, that like, really, somehow the South like hid behind the whole time and when Reagan they snuck up and they, they installed the counter-revolutionary, like post civil war regime and the whole nation, like that's the liberal narrative and if you just got rid of the South, this would go away. Like you've seen it every fucking four years. There's like this If we get rid of most of the United States, from the United States, our political problems will be solved, and I think that is absurd. So let's you know what, what like. But I do see it as a like, a half recognition, like they see some of these trends.

Connor Harney: 1:29:14

They can't explain them except in a political, ideological manner, cause they're not going to look at the or along cultural lines too, like I mean, you're right, like oh, it's Southern culture, it's backwards, like that's you know. Know, that's where you get into the question of the rural urban divide.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:34

Yeah, everybody who in the south is just a bunch of backwards morons and yeah, yeah, I'm missing like the research triangle, atlanta, uh, the development in tampa, etc. Etc, etc. That a lot of the intellectual labor of the country actually goes on in the southeast. But also like it has unintended and very fucked up racial implications and stuff. To you, like there's a whole like oh, so you want to kick out the places with the largest concentration of people of color, you know, except except for, like southern california, like it's, except for like Southern California, like it's. Like you're not looking at that at all, like it's. It's a weird response, but it does seem to come out Of what you're Talking about, where people can kind of see this stuff. They can't articulate it, they're not looking at it in political, economic terms, they're not looking at it in historical, material terms. So, like All they recognize is, oh, the rest of the country looks a lot more like the south.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:34

The south is backward. The rest of the country is backward. It must be because the south is like politically instantiating its ideology upon us, uh, through ronald reagan and donald trump, a californian and a new yorker like, and george w bush, a connecticut new englander who just learned how to fake a texas accent. Like I don't know, it might not be fake at this point, but it was probably fake at one point. I've heard him talk in the 80s um, you know like, because when people often ask me you know like, well, isn't george w bus a southerner? I'm like yes and no, like he's not, for he's, he was born in connecticut. Man, like yeah, um no, admittedly, derrick.

Connor Harney: 1:31:19

I was born in new york, but I only spent two years in new york. I've out of my 33 years of existence, so I, for all intents and purpose, all of my memories are of the South.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:31

So you are a carpetbagger gone native Got it.

Connor Harney: 1:31:34

Yeah, there you go.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:38

No man, one day I'm going to get in the carpetbagger discourse because there's some really messed up stuff implied in that. But no, I mean there's, there's, there is a, you know there's been several. There's also been one of the things that happened in the 90s that's been overlooked because it's kind of it kind of got undone in a way for parts of the south, but not all of it in the 2000s was like this great remigration both of people of color and of large swaths of people, people from like Michigan and Ohio, back into the southeast, because that economy had really already adjusted to these current conditions because they were pioneered there. Housing market, you know, blew up. Uh, what you saw is like a fragmentation of that labor force. So it's like things went well in atlanta, things went well in savannah and, like I said we mentioned earlier, any place today, still any place where there's a military base, things are still doing okay because there's these downstream privatized production economies that actually do massive scale high-end industrial production for the military.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:53

Um, but in general the southeast went from like absorbing a lot of labor that had been pushed out of the de-industrialized in quotation marks, uh, midwest into the southeast and then they got fucked immediately again because the housing crisis kind of destroyed a whole lot of the production economy of the Southeast. However, it's coming back Like that is where today the dominant amount of new factories and stuff that are being reshored or opening up is in the Southeast and in the west, like, um, texas, georgia, not to a lesser degree, uh, florida, but not actually as much the carolinas, um, etc. Um, now that like real hinterland of the south, like upper appalachia, and like mississippi and the and and the delta basin that's still too poor to be really useful for um a skilled labor force, to be quite frank, and so that that part of the south is still getting left behind. But, like right now, the southern economy looks to be doing a little better than the new england and californian economy, relative to its size, I mean, uh, whereas the california economy is doing okay, I guess, um, it tends to be the cal like. For people who know regional trends, the california economy tends to be like hyper cyclic. So whatever the cycle of the United States is at, california is doing.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:34

When the US is doing well, california is doing way better, and when the US is doing shitty, it looks like the California economy is just going to collapse and New York is weirder because of the financialization of the economy, but it also it is the last major city that has a Fortis infrastructure left, like the New York state still has a lot of those Fortis infrastructure laws.

C. Derick Varn: 1:35:00

Even the bankruptcy of New York city didn't get rid of them and they're only really ironically, being attacked now by Southern governors through immigration stunts, which is aimed at, like, sharing the burden of of dealing with the immigrants. But what it's actually doing and I don't think that the southern governors are are doing this on purpose, they're not thinking this through but what it's actually doing is destroying, like the ford, it's infrastructure that new york city has to deal with the homeless population like um, and it's overtaxing it and it's creating in some segments of philly new york, um, and that, like rust belt, new england, like overlap corridor, a lot of racial tensions between immigrants and black people, that is. That is, that is pushing parts of the black voting population towards the Republicans. And again, if we studied the Southeast, we could probably see this happening. But since people don't um, because I guess the South is a useful ideological scapegoat right For for all these American problems, uh, we are not seeing how this is rippling throughout the entire country again like is that? Do you see that?

Connor Harney: 1:36:20

yeah, no, I know yeah, because I feel like we're we're having the the discourse on immigration up in the northeast the same way that it happened in the 90s and early aughts, like, if you you remember how much of a big deal the conversation around immigration from Central America was, that was all the conversation. And North Carolina happens to be outside of the Southwest, one of the most dense Latino populations in the country and so, yeah, like a lot of these Southern governors, they're shooting themselves in the front anyway, like in the longterm, because, like, it's so much the backbone that work is so much the backbone A lot of these, of a lot of these industries that we've previously talked about, because, quite frankly, nobody else wants to do that work or right, you know like no one dreams of having their finger cut off in a chicken factory no like yeah and yeah, absolutely not no and uh, yeah, and or you know working on a, you know a one of these massive pig farms dealing with pig shit all day, or an oil?

C. Derick Varn: 1:37:37

refinery, or or, or. Think about the stuff in the southern economy. These are the shittiest industrial jobs they are. The exception really is the southern auto industry. Those jobs are relatively good comparatively, but it's because they're super automated and and whatnot like, so they don't hire that many people.

Connor Harney: 1:38:01

Yeah and and for a time they're, you know, like, like niche, like luxury like, like, for example, like um, furniture production for a time was like a place where you could like make a decent living as a factory operative, right like. But as that furniture furniture became more cheaply made for all the reasons we've already discussed, you know that dried up and like I, I used an example in that piece that I sent you, uh, of an interview with a former operative in a furniture plant and you know she basically said, yeah, my options were to go to a worse plant or I could work fast food, and that was it. And that's like. I think that's the reality is like people are getting pushed out into either these shitty manufacturing jobs, these shitty retail jobs or these city shitty logistics jobs. And I think, like anybody I am, more I am, I will say overall I'm I tend to be on the more optimistic side about labor, but I also don't see that it's going to be an easy thing, like, like, I don't see that there's any easy answer.

Connor Harney: 1:39:17

I've been involved with trying to unionize a workplace in the South. It did not end well. I've told this story before, but you know, basically we staged a walkout during COVID. They put us on leave for two weeks and when we came back they were like you guys can't work on the same shift together ever again. And that was that, and that pretty much killed the union drive.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:44

Yeah, well, this is one of the things that I talk about a lot is the public sector. Unions have two strategic advantages. One, they're actually kind of weirdly more protected now because of federal involvement. But two and this is something that people miss most, public sector institutions are still factory-line drawn up. So schools, hospitals, whatnot, are still highly concentrated labor. I think Gabriel Winnite goes into good work on proving why that is Like, why did that happen? Good work on proving why that is like, why did that happen? Um, but in a real way, like like the, the social reproductive services, um, uh, health care and child care, uh, which is what schooling kind of really is. If we're honest, um, it's not really about education anymore. It probably hasn't been for a while, and we saw that when conservatives and I dare say Derek higher education as well.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:44

Yeah.

Connor Harney: 1:40:47

If we include that in there.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:48

I just Higher education is a way to charge people for the skills that before the 1980s they would have got in a public school, in a high school, if they could get through it. I mean, the way we've gotten the graduation rate up in the United States is increasing literacy at the low end. We really have done that. Things have gotten better. But really giving up on high end literacy being taught in secondary school at all, we just pass that up to universities and you're basically making people pay for it and we're in a weird position right now in regards to higher education.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:27

All this PMC talk is a fundamental misrecognition, because I'm like, okay, on one hand, we have more people with college degrees in the united states than we've ever had. It's over 50, yes, um. On the other hand, colleges are dying institutions in the sense that they're that their educational mission is less and less because they're having trouble attracting, uh, domestic students. They are. So, even though we have this boom of people with degrees, in a weird sense it's also mean that degrees no longer help you as much as they used to. They're not as big as a distinction factor for the reasons why you're saying, and it's a way to delay people entering in the workforce which keeps the, which you know is a very expensive way for both the state and individuals to stay out of unemployment, um, but it's very expensive and a lot of people, including a lot of states, have just decided it's not worth it anymore. Um, so there's that. I mean, I agree with you with that. I think there's also something else there that we have to look at, though, uh, which is like you, you're a graduate student, you had a union, you had a union, impossible factory-esque job, and this is the other thing about the PMC thesis.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:46

I'm like well, there's tons of people who've entered what traditionally was the non-skilled workforce, either because of the 90s and aughts credentialing drift where, like I remember living through this when I worked at said unnamed insurance company with a giant lizard as if it like more and more stuff that didn't even require a college degree, even when I started in 2003, by the time I left in 2005, like was requiring graduate degrees and shit.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:15

Like it was crazy how fast the credentialing race like went up, so much so that they were even like the companies were paying money to like credentialize their own workforce just to meet their own internal certifications, which tells me that it was worth it to them to limit the job pool for something like like, even at the cost of like educating you know, qualifications, which tells me that it was worth it to them to limit the job pool for something like like, even at the cost of like educating you know, you know other work members and, essentially, stuff that was somewhat superfluous to them. Um, I do see that being slightly undone just because the lack of domestic labor, like, so decredentialization is on the horizon in a lot of these industries. But, um, I think a lot of people think that's going to create a massive workforce for unions and I think that might be why we see so much militancy right now yeah I do um, because you have skill.

C. Derick Varn: 1:44:15

You have people who are trained with skills and knowledge of history, meeting up with people who aren't and joining together um, which in some ways means that this focus on the pmc question is weirdly anti-solidaristic within the working class itself. Um, uh, which is not to say that there isn't a problem of professionalization and management and petite bourgeois values. I actually separate those out, like because they're not to me. They don't actually all rhyme um, but because I actually you can't really convince me that, like a worker in the Southeast in management and an auto plant, even though they're probably highly educated, really gives a shit about a DEI initiative, the way a business that's doing it, for that's selling to the public as opposed to selling to other industry, and I think that's kind of an interesting problem for for us as a, as a period of recognition. And while, like I'm probably more in short term pessimistic on labor than you, I think in the longterm, my my conclusion is this labor militancy is actually very real and that the a lot of the legal barriers that are likely to be exacerbated in any future conservative administration, be it trump or otherwise, um is going to make that militancy harder and it might actually further break up contemporary political coalitions. But as of right now, it is not clear where any of that goes, because it like the democrats are not using like, even though biden's for like for a democrat, biden is okay on labor, I don't. I think there's been a lot of even dsa people over praising him, but like, like it's just because the bar is incredibly low after nixon, um uh. But in the long run, the it looks like there's some real hindrances coming up. But it also looks like there's a there's a bipartisan scramble to catch some of this disfranchised labor militancy, like for real.

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:44

Like joss harley pulling pro-labor stunts is is an indication that this militancy is real, because otherwise they would not care, like um. So I guess this leads me to a question as a person who thinks a lot about political strategy. You're involved in political strategy a little bit and that's in some ways why you've done this southern research question right. It's a re I you haven't said as much, but it seems to be the revive a political strategy to deal with these changes. What do you see as a viable strategy for dealing with these changes that doesn't underestimate this rump southern politicians, who seem to be able I mean they get, they get a. They seem to be really on the offensive against both liberals and the left in a way that the left seems fundamentally unable to deal with like so so how would we strategize for that?

Connor Harney: 1:47:35

you know that's the million dollar question and I don't know if I have a great formulation quite yet, but I I mean I think like, first and foremost, I think like this question that often, or you know, when you start to get in conversations about Southern organizing, immediately you know the question comes of of the legality of of organizing right and and collective bargaining.

Connor Harney: 1:48:06

I think like we're going to have to start to really be prepared to get in to blur those lines of legality, um, and be willing to work outside the law, like quite frankly, because that's the only way that, in my mind, that we're we're going to be able to expand and, I think, thinking beyond terms of, just like, collective bargaining as it exists, and that's very abstract, like I, you know, as the immediate, like where my gut tells me to go. But you know, on the ground, I think, like you know, having as much part of the DSA strategy that I do appreciate for towards labor, is this, you know, basically creating a volunteer networks of organizers organically, like I do think that is a useful strategy. The problem is, like, how do you fund that in the longterm? You know, because traditionally it's come out of funding from other unions, like in their instance, in this example and in the example of Ewok, you know, it comes out of the UAW I'm not, excuse me the UE, and then increasingly they've moved towards sort of a voluntary dues system to fund it.

Connor Harney: 1:49:32

I don't know if that is a long-term sustainable project, I really don't, but I do think it's better than what has been tried before, which is creating a similar network by just sending down paid organizers, spending like a $90,000 on a salary for an organizer to, you know, try to work on an individual campaign, I think, creating the understanding how separate things are and how decentralized things are is the first step there, and part of it is going to have to be relying on a lot of voluntary work. Now again, that's how do you sustain that in the long run? I'm not there yet.

C. Derick Varn: 1:50:24

Well, this is an interesting question for me because, on one hand, I find that leftist organizations that prematurely professionalize their staff, such as the DSA, often destroy themselves because they have large bureaucratic apparatuses and people with labor rights. And you know, I've had people push back on like, well, you know why does the DSA have a union? It should have unregulated labor. And I'm like dude, if you're arguing that the people who push for labor regulations themselves can't have it, what you're actually saying is that I mean, you're actually saying that that is not a viable model Overall. You don't realize that. That's what you're saying, but that's what you're saying. However, on the same note, there's no way an organization of the DSA can maintain a massive staff and whether, particularly when it's basing its staff off of projections of membership that are kind of distorted in the first place. But that's not the only place we see this.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:29

The over-reliance on professional organizers for salting have also led to the over-dominance of professional organizers in the union, and that alienates workers, and I think we saw that in the 70s. I mean one of the component of the 70s that people always think is like you hear people talk about the 70s as if the the the negative reaction to labor bureaucracy was was completely uh, a neoliberal ideological construction and it fooled all the workers and my response is like bullshit. Like like no, they were legitimately angry about stuff happening within the unions themselves and the union's own concession to the corporations. That was organic, it was in a neoliberal seized on that, but if it wasn't already there it wouldn't have worked. Like people aren't just duped by new ideas, like they just are enforced upon them like a mind virus. That's some liberal nonsense and we need to stop it. Yeah.

Connor Harney: 1:52:28

No, no, talk to anybody who is like in their, you know, late twenties, maybe early thirties, in the seventies, like that was like work, like in the workforce at the time. They'll tell you. They'll talk about the corruption in the unions. They'll talk about it Like that was a real issue. And there's a reason why there was reform movements in the seventies for within the unions, like you know. So it's so to to say like again that people were completely duped is to ignore that there were actual problems in in unions. And I mean, I think, like to go back to an earlier point, I think we also just need to acknowledge that the structure of unionization in this country is based on a flawed model. In the first place, it was basically concessionary. We gave up too much power to capital when we formalized collective bargaining the way that we did.

C. Derick Varn: 1:53:31

Sectional bargaining for all its limitations, that we've seen in Italy would still be a where a way better basis to operate off of than, say, shop site bargaining or whatever the fuck we have like yeah, I mean like, even in the same organization, like I pointed this out with, like the, the federal nature of like something like the nea. Um, in some states the nea is basically a guild union and some are the, the, whatever the branch is, and in some states it's not, and sometimes it's even regionally variant within the same state, like because of the different charters, the way those charters interact with law, the way that the like. The other thing that you you know we haven't mentioned, but it should be made obvious because it finally came to the forefront during the like. The other thing that you know we haven't mentioned, but it should be made obvious because it finally came to the forefront during the Biden administration is how many fucking carve outs to the National Labor Relations Act are in it and have never been addressed for the entirety of the 20th century like.

C. Derick Varn: 1:54:30

The only major carve out that was ever addressed was the allowance for public sector unions at all Like it. It doesn't even apply the NCLB protections to those unions, but at least it allows them to exist. That was made in the seventies. But other than that, like there has, there has been, you know, because the government ironically exhibited itself from union organization until the 70s and until it was forced by a bunch of Raucat strikes basically to recognize it ironically under Nixon. And you know, I think people miss that and I also think, like we have to do, like I'm not saying that, and I also think we have to do I'm not saying that we should become a legalist in the union. No, no.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:20

But, I am sort of like we kind of have to become a legalist. It's just like we can't be worried about that. I'll give Sean Fain a bit of where I see his brilliance, for example on feign uh, a bit of where I see his brilliance, for example, uh using the fact that the uaw actually organizes tas for a way to actually say, politically intervene um in in aid of uh palestinian solidarity actions and campuses, um, because it actually affects it, because otherwise that would, if they weren't organizing tas, that would be illegal under Taft Hartley, um. So I'll give Sean Fane like, like he finds ways around the law, uh, but what? What we are seeing is fine and it's in the Southern States again, to bring it back to your points. So are they like? Like it is not just one-sided, this is a weg green game and both sides are playing it. Um, and because a lot of the, a lot of the left just doesn't understand, focus or care about the southeast, they don't see this happening until it's already too late. Like, yeah, I shouldn't say they don't care about the southeast.

C. Derick Varn: 1:56:34

I there's more discussions of like you know, a neo-Operation Dixie or whatever, but like it's not. Like if you look at like the DSA base. There aren't massive DSA chapters in the South, like when I was in the aughts, when I was looking for socialist organizations. When I realized it was a socialist and I was in Georgia, there were none. Yeah, socialist organizations. When I realized it was a socialist and I was in georgia, there were none. Yeah, like the sp. Sp usa wasn't there. The cp usa may have been there. The only the only option that I had was the iso or salt at the time, uh, or maybe the psl, if I really wanted to like start my own chapter like, uh, that's different now, but it's still kind of amazing how like non-penetrative this stuff is.

C. Derick Varn: 1:57:20

And even when it does penetrate, it is like you know, there have been dsa victories in southern cities, but they've been in like really rump, uh, shut out southern cities like jackson, mississippi, um, and they have not been able to expand beyond those borders. They're very carteled into these highly educated and or very, very, very deracinated areas, either where you have a fairly educated workforce or where the entire city's shut out of having a functional economy, um, and it hasn't been able to go past that. And I think like that's a real barrier, uh, because when everybody talks about you know you still hear this like oh, red states, they're not actually as reactionary as you think. That's the socialist thing. Um, you know most people in red states actually sign up to like 80 of the bernie platform if you ask it in the right way. That last point's important.

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:20

You do have to ask it in the right way um uh, and that's true, but there's been no ability to capsize off, I mean to like develop off that and one of the things that I think people miss about this, and I think this is funny. But there's a lot of anger in the south, not just at the progressive democrats. There's a lot of anger at the dixiecrats that still extends to the democrats to this day, that is not really tapped into or even understood, like when did your, when did north carolina get its first Republican governor? I don't remember, but that's what I'm asking. In Georgia it was 2000.

Connor Harney: 1:59:00

Gosh, that's a good question. Actually, I'm trying to think Was it the 80s or 90s?

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:07

I think North Carolina got it before yeah.

Connor Harney: 1:59:09

I see I've got a friend of mine's face in my head right now wagging his finger at me. How don't you know this? I've done this work, but no, I'm blanking on the exact year, but I believe it was in the 80s or the early 90s, but I could be wrong on that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:34

So this is interesting. Uh, uh, there have been 69 governors of North Carolina. Uh with, with uh, 75 terms. The majority, the great majority of them have been Democrats. Let me see if I can find my. The first Republican Is in 70, actually.

Connor Harney: 1:59:59

Okay, 70 okay.

C. Derick Varn: 2:00:01

It was earlier. The rest of the Tidewater South was much later, but you don't have a major. He's not a conservative Republican. You don't have a conservative Republican Until 1985. That's what I was thinking, okay, republican, you don't have a conservative Republican until 1985.

Connor Harney: 2:00:18

Yeah, that's what I was thinking, okay.

C. Derick Varn: 2:00:20

Yeah, whereas in Georgia our first Republican is Sonny Perdue and that's like 2000. And what happened is the Dixiecrats literally worked out some. They actually met with the Congressional Black Caucus and worked out something, and then most of them switched their. They just changed party affiliation. They didn't like it, wasn't even like the. What is crazy when I talk about georgia, it wasn't even that the, that a republican legislature was voted in, the same legislature was voted in and shifted from from Democrat to Republican with the governor. Like it was wild.

C. Derick Varn: 2:00:58

And I think that tells you a little bit more about the democratic party and the kind of deal with the devil that has been made, going all the way back to William Jennings Bryant. We can't even blame this all on like the, the popular front and the and the 1940s. Like it goes way back. And I think Clinton and Clinton and Obama because in a lot of ways Obama is a, is still an ideological successor to the Clinton administration, even though we don't like to look at that very directly. They are the, they are the culminations of this in a lot of ways, like um, and now that that's over, it's, I mean one of the, one of the reasons for the chaos and trying to figure out the electoral coalitions of the country is the regional coalitions no longer make sense? Like, like, it's not clear. Like, like, like, southern Republicans are too scary for the majority of the US to vote for and California Democrats are universally hated outside of California. So, like, where are you going to go? Like it's it's. It's an interesting problem problem.

Connor Harney: 2:02:18

Um, yeah, I mean, I think this question of southern democrats, even beyond, like the question of the dixiecrats, is, like you had many like, like on the question of of cultural issues and these immoral questions of race that were would support desegregation, but like otherwise, be, uh, in, in favor of things that would keep along, would keep those racial divisions in line anyway, like you know the I call them, like you know, basically the business first, democrats, right, like that's their prerogative is what's good for business is good for north carolina, uh, you know consequences be damned on, you know, again, maintaining the majority of North Carolina as a backwards backwater for, you know, these rich enclaves. So I think there is a resentment there, right, that exists to those people or towards those people, not because they're outright, you know, segregationists or racists, but because their actions are either, you know, intentionally maintaining this or, if not, you know they're turn a blind eye towards what's happening or what continues to happen. I tend to. My personal feelings is that I tend to think about the democrats in the south as spineless.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:45

I mean, that's my, that's the word I tend to use I mean when they have a spine it's usually for the worst things, but I mean to me. In a way it's interesting because I do think people underestimate how much influence that coterie of Democrats has, because and this is what people miss when they talk about a lot of this this is from the electoral strategy of the democratic party. They gotta either get um, they have to reclaim the industrial midwest or they have to reclaim the south to win an electoral college coalition. And they're not going to do that in a radical way like like. For example, like biden makes a big deal of his appeal to the black electorate in like, uh, south carolina, um, and I just like to point out I'm like, but that's the most conservative black electorate in the democratic coalition. Like it is, like it's.

C. Derick Varn: 2:04:47

He's not making appeal to the black electorate in chicago, which is uh, much more enfranchised and a little bit more radical. Like it's an appeal to um. And why is it conservative? It's not because black people in south inherently more conservative, because a lot of them can't vote like yeah, because of felon laws and drug charges, um, and that's not been fixed. Like yeah, and and apathy, and you know who the fuck can blame them.

Connor Harney: 2:05:20

Well, yeah, a hundred percent, A hundred percent no.

C. Derick Varn: 2:05:23

Yeah, like when people ask me, like why, why do working class people not vote? I'm like, when? When have progressives even ever delivered on anything they promised? So like, what? Like when you keep on saying they vote against their interest, well, if you actually did what you said, maybe they wouldn't vote that way.

C. Derick Varn: 2:05:41

But since it never happens, whether you're sincere or not, why is that an illogical presumption? Right, like, and particularly when it's their Democrats, their Democrats and their states that are doing the sabotaging, like, so why would they ever trust you? Like I don't know. Like it makes total sense to me and I know I've made this point like for years, but like I do kind of think that a left that matters has to be fundamentally hostile and antagonistic to the democratic party. Uh, even if it might tactically sometimes vote for a democrat on a local level for reasons of like influence or whatever, because I'm not saying that we should never vote at all, um, but like the overall orientation, like the, if the main of the democratic party is not attacking us, we're kind of not doing our job.

Connor Harney: 2:06:41

Yeah, like I, I kind of like maybe you disagree with me, but oh, no, no, I, no, I, I and I think the reason and I don't want to attribute everything to geography, but just growing up in the south, I just just think that's to me something that's just inherently obvious that you can't trust the Democrats and you wouldn't want and and, quite frankly, they're not working within our interests, and I think maybe the reason why the that's not the majority socialist opinion is because of they're from the Northeast and the West Coast socialist opinion is because of they're from the northeast and the west coast, exactly exactly so they, you know they're coming from a very different, uh, historical background than we are, like just that, and so I I get where they're coming from.

Connor Harney: 2:07:29

But I think they're also the fact that the as we've already noted unions have been on their back foot for the last 50 years. Maybe we should reconsider, uh, who our allies are, and maybe we should reconsider I mean, a big thing is a lot of how much union money goes towards campaigning for democrats of which they get so little back.

C. Derick Varn: 2:07:54

It is totally a real guard defensive measure based out of fear. I mean, I know I'm going to sound really controversial in this. The Teamsters recently got a lot of shit for giving money to both sides of an electoral campaign both Democrats and Republicans in one of the states I think it was Josh Harley's state and it was somewhere where the Republicans are clearly going to win.

C. Derick Varn: 2:08:18

And everyone was like oh, it's red Brown and I'm like, they're trying to have political influence, they're not trying to win an ideological battle. So asking them to be loyal to progressive Democrats when the progressive Democrats can't win their state is fucking stupid, like. And yet we've done that for years and the progressive Democrats have never paid it back to the unions anyway. Like. The most you've gotten is these kind of paltry concessions under Biden, through administrative fiat in the NC and the NCLB, through administrative fiat in the in in the nclb. And administrative fiat is the weakest way to change things, because the moment you have a different president, even within the same party, it can go away.

Connor Harney: 2:09:02

why yeah, um, and that also ignores how long that's been going on. By the way, the example of of giving money to both sides, I mean the obviously the majority of the money that the unions that are a part of the FLCIO give to Democrats, but they absolutely have given to Republican candidates and they would be stupid not to.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:25

Exactly. I mean like, yeah, like corporations give to both candidates, wives and unions. Why certain unions come on dipshit. Like, yeah, like if you're dealing with a, with an inherently corrupting system, the fact that you would play both sides is like honestly, I kind of think everyone should be assuming everyone's playing both sides about everything yeah like, um, it just seems like it would be dumb not to you put yourself at the strategic disadvantage against capital.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:53

Like, yeah, because they are going to play both sides and historically have and you know they have a lot more. Now unions have a lot more non-liquid wealth than we tend to like to admit because they have all these property holdings but it isn't particularly liquid. It is hard, particularly as interest rates are high, for them to utilize that. Um, uh, but so I don't like. It's actually one of these strange things when you look at the money and maybe you know I I have a friend of mine's always telling me to be more vulgar marxist and I'm like vulgar marxism is stupid, except for one thing look at how the funding actually plays out. Like if you want to understand why the why the educational institutions are weird about Palestine. It's not even about the Israeli donors. They don't want people to realize that they're basically landlords that have a school attached to it for historical reasons. In the revenue sphere, the universities make most of their money off of profiteering off of healthcare, and then they make the next set of money off of profiteering off of land speculation and rents, and then the third part of their money is government grants, usually for the military, which means that the vast majority of their income does not come from their actual mission at all. Majority of their income does not come from their actual mission at all. And I think even you know that's been my big thing, even more than like losing, you know, zionist donors which are actually still a drop in the bucket. You look at, like, the exposure of what these schools actually are. Well, you know, similarly with some of these unions, the reason why it took them a long time to develop a rank and file strategy is that they didn't financially need to like um, it took, it took, uh, it took 2007, ironically, to really decimate that old corrupt leadership. I mean, we talk about the UAW that used to be the worst union in America, like, I mean, like most of the UAW's, like aughts and 90s leadership is in prison, like it's. It's like Sean Fain and that coterie played a long game to return rank and file unions into a union that had it like a long, long, long time ago but hadn't had it since the 50s like and in some ways had a reputation for being the most bureaucratically corrupt. So, in a way and I say that because they end on a. To turn this over to you in a slight note of hope, the sean fain strategy there does indicate that, yeah, you can beat the worst parts of these unions in these crises if you know how to take advantage of the situation.

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:38

Um, and the problem with the situation in the south is the way that we've mostly handled it is professional assaulting, which is, I think, always going to have severe limitations. Like it's just, it's um, it's seen as outsider imposition, if nothing else, because, I mean, you and I both know one thing about the South is like because, probably partly because of the Civil War, it does not really trust other regions of the country. Like, and that's even down to like progressive oriented people Like I have to remind myself to like drop my instinctual hatred of New York. Like it's just, like it's in there, I see it as like it. Like I see new york is like an empire getting its octopus hands in my life. And like I have to be like no, no, no, don't be a southern chauvinist.

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:25

Like it is true that has a fiscal core of the country and is awful, but it is also.

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:31

It has nothing to do with most of the things to do in new york.

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:34

But that's a hard thing to like break yourself of if that's been your socialization for most of your life Like, and I think people underestimate that in the Southeast and also how resentful this the Southern exception as the proof of the progressiveness of America because we're really the evil, dirty, racist ones and everybody else is perfectly fine and good that that gets really resented, because I used to have like people from Ohio who go to my school tell me how racist the South was and I'm like motherfucker. The only time I've seen a Klan rally in my life was outside of Dayton like, and there was Klan active in in like my town when I was a kid and outside of Maconia, but like they would not come out in public like like much less have a massive rally. And then don't give me this shit that there's no like racism, when I see as many stars and bars in in ohio, which has no excuse yeah like there is that, like you know, you could be an idiot in the south and not realize what you're, what you're signifying.

C. Derick Varn: 2:14:40

You really you can't really now, but you could in the 80s and 90s.

Connor Harney: 2:14:43

Um, you can't say that in an ohio or idaho or any of that shit like oh yeah, there's only one thing that you possibly see that in upstate new york, I mean, you know, like jesus christ, yeah, yeah, like no, and yeah, I think, yeah, there's a certain resentment there. I think there's also, just, uh, when you send that culture that we're, that we're talking about and so like it's just a non-starter from the beginning. So, building up organic people who know, I think, like probably you and I know this, as you know very educated people, is that there's a lot of code switching that goes on Like I, you know very educated people, uh, is that there's a lot of code switching that goes on. Like I, you know I, I can talk to just about anybody, uh, it and I interact with people like of all walks of life. So I and and part of that is just being exposed to all that.

Connor Harney: 2:15:50

But like, if you don't have that ability to do that because you're, you weren't brought up one within the culture of the South, but also to, like you're just, you're not necessarily aware of, you know, um, the one of the bigger differences between, let's say, urban areas in the Northeast and the South is, like, you have these massive, you have that massive suburban sprawl of the South, whereas you know, if you live in an urban area in the Northeast, uh, yes, there is sprawl, I'm not saying like everything's compacted, but there is a more centralized city in this in, in a sense, that does not exist in the south, where I can be driving, you know, in my, from my house and you know be surrounded by, you know, basically civilization. And then I, you know, 10 minutes on the road, it's you know hog farms, right like it's. You know, 10 minutes on the road, it's you know hog farms, right Like it's you know. That's something that I just don't think people who live in that part of the country understand. If you're not from here, you won't get it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:17:08

Yeah, it's hard for me to explain, like, okay, so in the Northeast cities have like historical neighborhoods and they're they actually belie a weird, a weird history of informal segregation but nonetheless they exist. Like there's little egypt and new york, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like those don't exist in the southeast. Like even the black and white parts of town they're like intersecting in weird streets where the street name changes and like it's very not like, if you're imagining, segregation in the South is like there's a black part of town and there's a white part of town and and there's a rich part of town and there's a poor part of town.

Connor Harney: 2:17:45

It's by street not even by, like by street yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:17:50

Yeah, it's not even by like sector of the city anymore and hardly ever was. And like I remember thinking that downtowns were things that small towns had, because in the South, like small town, like downtowns existed in small towns, but like Atlanta, or even a place like Macon, like the, the downtown core was dead for most of the. I mean it's been revitalized now as like a commuter apartments for people in Atlanta, but like in general, like there is no city core. There's like nested peripheries within these cities and when you move to, like even to somewhere like I'm going to pick a working class town, I suppose New York, that's not true. It's very clear like centers of life and and uh, the west is a little bit more like the south, like fuck if there's a center court of phoenix, arizona, like right like it like, or or even um, even some places in california.

C. Derick Varn: 2:18:49

But like, um, the dominant model seems to be based off of, like, basically mid-century new england assumptions that also the fact that we're highly captive in, like, like, the us left is basically strong in four cities new york, chicago, um, seattle and the large conglomeration of southern california. I know we associate the bay area with the left. I think the left there has largely been priced out, to be quite honest, um, so you know that that's a, that's a different scenario. Um, and I guess portland, which you know, is weird because portland's weird, um, in this, and when I did I don't mean weird and it's cool, I mean weird. And then like it's a liberal enclave and what is otherwise greater, idaho and also um has, is one of the weirdestly whitest part of the countries because it's literally off of a white supremacist colony that was has a relationship to the clan, how it's founded, so like it's a very strange place for progressivism to kind of, so I guess I'll include it. But in general, like, outside of like those eight or nine urban areas, there's a lot of left sentiment, particularly in urban areas. Um, there's a lot of left sentiment, um, uh, particularly in urban areas, but there's not a lot of left organization because there's not a long historical tradition and institutions for these people to join in on easily. Like, like and so um, it does lead to interesting things.

C. Derick Varn: 2:20:32

Like I've made the argument, the dsa in the south was always more radical than the DSA and the DSA strongholds. Because, like it has to be, it can't imagine that there's a way to manipulate Democrats into power. And, like New Orleans or in Atlanta, they know better. But well, maybe in Atlanta you can get confused now. But historically speaking, whereas in New York the DSA has been a caucus An unofficial caucus in the New York Senate Since the fucking 80s, it gives you a very different picture Of what the pathways to power are, and I just have to remind people that, even though there might be more people in new york and california, you live in a, you live in a federated republic and if you want to undo that federated republic, you still have to deal with the fact you're in a federated republic, which means you cannot be limited to popular appeal on the two coasts or the two coastal cores of capital, like that's. That's just not going to work.

C. Derick Varn: 2:21:34

Um, so, uh, I've been talking a lot. Uh, I've really enjoyed this conversation. Uh, connor, I'm going to probably have you back to talk more about, uh, these strategies as they happen, because one thing I think that you and I've been hinting at this entire conversation is this is still an ongoing process. We are still living through this. This is not over by any stretch. If this new round of unionization is going to matter, it's going to have to come up against this bulwark of the Southeast, otherwise it's kind of dead in the water. Yes, this has been the shores on which the labor movement in the water. Yes, and this has been the shores on which the labor movement in the United States has washed up on twice in the 20th century. So let's not make it happen a third time in the 21st. Like you know, it's I mean in a real sense, the graveyard of the labor movement keeps being the Mason Dixon line, right, like it really has been.

Connor Harney: 2:22:43

Yeah, and I mean I just you know, just to you know, jump off that point. I mean in my mind there is no socialist movement in this country without a labor movement and there's no labor movement in this country without the South. So answering this question has basically become my life's work. It's a little bit on hold at the moment, but you're bringing me back into it, eric, and I appreciate that. You're bringing me back into it, eric, and I appreciate that. So I definitely need to keep the eye on the prize for this, because this is the question to answer how do you unionize this up? And I think, understanding that history, our shared history, culture and a lot of it's unearthing history, that just is there but just you know it's been obscured by myth-making and a lot of other things, absolutely.

C. Derick Varn: 2:23:55

And I think when people look at even the demographics of the country, where you see where there's growth, I'm like, well, you're going to have to win, like, if nothing else, you got to win Texas, you need to win Georgia and you need to win a couple of the Western states, otherwise you're in states whose population are just declining, like maybe not California, but New England, right, definitely, and that's been like a generation and a half long trend. So like, uh, you know, um, to me, I guess, like the one place where I draw hope is that the industrial midwest is sort of where this intersects and and that is weirdly when the organic Workers radicalism tends to happen, both Like when BLM starts as like a black urban movement that's also tied to labor, it starts in the industrial Midwest and those issues Do speak to southerners, for good and ill, like sometimes it scares the shit out of them, but like it does speak to themherners for good and ill, like sometimes it scares the shit out of them, but like right, but like it it does speak to them in ways that like struggles in california and new york, even even when they're about foreign policy stuff that people in the united states are in the south, are broadly sympathetic to um, it's not going to have the same resonance. You got to tie all that together, otherwise it goes nowhere. And you know, that's my big thing with this Gaza protest right now is like it's good that the Gaza protests are forcing us to reconcile with the, with a lack of foreign policy in in, you know, engagement during the teens, like during the Bernie, like during the Bernie period, like we kind of talked about foreign stuff, but it was always like minor Um.

C. Derick Varn: 2:25:40

But my point has always been like that's going to resolve itself one way or the other. You can't build the left in a country off of a foreign policy issue, um, forever, cause it will be resolved one way or the other. And that means we somehow have to get labor and international concerns back together in dealing with this and I do think that might be a way that you get past the Southern stuff. It's like you have to work, you know, like I said, illegally, because also in the United States international solidarity striking is kind of illegal. So it's stuff that we need to be able to do, otherwise you're going to have like rapid capital flight, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

C. Derick Varn: 2:26:28

So you know, anyway, thank you so much. Where can people find your work, Connor?

Connor Harney: 2:26:35

So you can find my sub stack. Like you said, that's dormant. I've written for Cosmonaut. I've worked, I've written for Jacobin, the international journal of Cuban studies, a few, a few other publications, but I'm working on getting some stuff out. I'm actually been working on a piece for a very long time on suburbanization. So, like that's, one of the key pillars of my intended project was going to be was on suburbanization. Hopefully I have that within the year. It's been hard to write recently, but that's that's where you can find me.

C. Derick Varn: 2:27:18

All right. Well, that gives me. If we get you back on the show in the future, like in the winter, maybe we'll talk about suburbanization. I'd also like to talk to you about Cuba, because Cuba is a fascinating case study for me, as, like you know, I always talk about like.

C. Derick Varn: 2:27:35

I have trouble defending actually existing socialist countries, but Cuba, with the exception, with the exception of its AIDS policy in the eighties and some of its anti-homosexual policies in the sixties and seventies, I can mostly defend what Cuba does, like, and I can kind of defend, you know, about 50% of what Vietnam does and then, like, I guess China has its own special problem, but like, I do feel like those countries are kind of weirdly understudied. I think interest in Cuba has come back, particularly after like, after there was a relaxation of the sanction regime, then it was then reimposed and, of course, biden, seemingly being a massive coward on foreign policy, after Afghanistan did not try to renormalize relations with Cuba, which would have been an objectively progressive thing, and particularly since he's not going to fucking win the miami vote anyway. Um, it's just like. It's like they're not going to vote for you, dude, like yeah I mean lifting the sanctions on cuba.

Connor Harney: 2:28:46

would I mean, from a progressive foreign policy perspective, probably be the most progressive foreign policy, and God?

C. Derick Varn: 2:28:58

lifting the sanctions in Cuba and normalizing relations with Iran, even though I do not want, like I want to say I'm not a fan of the Islamic Republic. I want people to know that. But like like that would be objectively progressive.

Connor Harney: 2:29:10

Yeah Well, I think I think most people, like they, they fundamentally understand like, misunderstand. Like when you're saying, like I think most people, they fundamentally misunderstand when you're saying you don't want normalization, it's because that's part of what keeps that regime in place in the first place is the sanctions regime.

C. Derick Varn: 2:29:32

Yeah, exactly, I've never seen where sanctions regimes have ever not just in the case of Russia, where people talk about the day, but have ever done what they say that they do. It seems like they do the opposite, like if they're supposed to wreak in regimes, it seems like no dude, they totally strengthen them.

Connor Harney: 2:29:50

It turns the nation into fortress Right Like's. Basically, like you, you get the siege mentality right. Like it, we're all in this together. Uh, you know, and that's part of what, what made cuba last as long as it has? Like, if we're being honest. But there's a lot of good things about cuba. I'm not getting, don't get me wrong. I have like, like you, I'm a cuba defens. But we have to admit that the embargo has actually had a effect, the effect of maintaining the solidarity of the Cuban people in building socialism.

C. Derick Varn: 2:30:24

So yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Connor Harney: 2:30:28

It's also been terrible at a terrible cost, mind you too, but but again yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:30:33

I mean one of the things like Cubaa developed one of the best health care systems that has no fucking resources. Like it's it's uh, you know it's it's. It actually inspired a lot of ingenious stuff, however, like I don't know that it can last forever. I mean, this is the thing. Like these, these sanctions regimes, uh, administrations like they do break a lot of the times like, but not from the sanctions, they break from some other external trigger making the sanctions impossible, and then all the chaos was out from there. Like, uh, you can't maintain a siege, a siege economy, forever.

C. Derick Varn: 2:31:08

This is my kind of weird response to like Ben Norton recently talked about the people outside of the imperialist system and he was like listing, like his lists were like Syria, cuba, iran and Russia, and that's made them like blabes, socialist something or other, and I'm like they're not socialist, but also you're missing the fact that they're not in the imperial system because they're not allowed to be, not because they don't want to be. Like it's, it's. It's a very strange, you know, uh, inversion of causality there, um, uh, uh, and sometimes that has positive results, like we said. But like, yeah, you know, um in, but it tends to be limited because, well, I tend to think Marx and Engels were right that socialism in one country over a long period of time is not maintainable. Like it's, just not. Like you're. You can't develop productive forces and whatnot. Like you, just you get you flamboyant.

Connor Harney: 2:32:10

And I think, like the example of actually existing socialism has borne this out, is any actually existing socialist country that's existed for any amount of time has eventually backslid into capitalism? I mean, like that's just to me that just seems like an, an obvious thing. But I, I don't, I don't, I know I know not a lot of of the, not all of the left agrees with me on that, but I mean, even cuba has started, you know, putting in more and more market reforms and it's just, it's had to.

C. Derick Varn: 2:32:46

Yeah, the dprk has put in market reforms, it's just only aimed at russia and china, so no one in the west knows about it, like it's. It's like liberalization has been universal to these, to these countries, in a way that can't be explained ideologically, except that there's no international socialist movement for them to connect up to. If I had a critique of China beyond you know, dungest excesses and liberalization it would also be that they have not really tried to reestablish an international at all. You know, the Belt and Road Initiative is still not really an international. It's like a Marshall Plan, you know it's. It's which, again, that's not an insult, but you know, like, like weakening US blue water trade isn't. Isn't it really important to weakening US imperial capital? I mean, even Vortiga realized that but like, it's not the same as an international in any meaningful sense. Anyway, thank you, so people have a preview of what we'll talk about in the future. Thank you, connor, and I'd love to have you back on the show in a few months, so take care.

Connor Harney: 2:34:01

Great talk.