End of Liberal Dreams with Nicolas Villarreal

The foundations of modern liberal democracy weren't forged in the ideals of freedom and equality alone, but in the disciplined halls of Prussian military academies. In this wide-ranging conversation, Nicolas Villarreal reveals how the professional military education system that emerged in 19th century Germany created the bureaucratic apparatus that would spread across the world and enable liberal democratic capitalism to function.

What emerges is a fascinating dialectic that shapes our current political crisis: the tension between the "universal class" of professionals (bureaucrats, educators, administrators) who manage society through expertise, and Bonapartist strongmen who consolidate power within smaller cliques. Neither offers genuine democratic participation or addresses fundamental contradictions.

This historical analysis exposes blind spots in Marxist theory that continue to hamper left analysis today. Marx, focused primarily on England and France, missed crucial developments in Germany that would shape state formation globally. This oversight left Marxism without coherent theories of military power and bureaucracy—a gap that remains unfilled.

Our current economic crisis differs from previous eras. Rather than a straightforward decline in profitability, we face Soviet-style problems where increasing investments yield diminishing returns across education, healthcare, infrastructure, and technology. Professional bureaucracy grows more expensive while delivering less value, creating conditions for reactionary backlash.

The conversation ultimately points toward the need for developing an anti-professional politics that doesn't simply tail one bourgeois faction or another. As the educated professional class fractures along partisan lines, neither defending institutions that perpetuate oligarchy nor embracing reactionary populism offers a path forward. Can we envision social organization beyond the professional/Bonapartist dialectic before the increasing contradictions of capitalism lead to further crisis?

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 1:38 Introduction to Nicolas de Villarreal
• 4:02 Prussia's Educational System and Modern States
• 18:20 Military Professionalism and Liberal Democracy
• 31:03 Bonapartism and the Universal Class
• 44:23 Marxism's Blind Spots on Military and State
• 59:11 Professionalization and Social Atomization
• 1:20:11 The Crisis of Liberal Institutions
• 1:41:15 The Tech Elite and Trump's Coalition
• 2:02:15 Fukuyama and the False End of History
• 2:18:11 Decadent Elites and Institutional Dysfunction
• 2:36:43 Towards an Anti-Professional Left
• 3:02:33 Closing Thoughts on Social Media

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:51

Hello, welcome to VarnBlog. And today we are talking to Nicolas de Villarreal about the return of history, maybe asterisk question mark un-asterisk, and the nature of the state and the nature of the state. Nico has been working on a theory of the state that attempts to flesh out in structural terms some of what Marx and Althusser did not, and you may or may not know my opinion on Marx and the state that I agree with Al and Ryan that there are two theories of the state in Marx and they're basically his theory of the state by watching England and his theory of the state by watching France, and that they both have to do with contestation between the capitalists. But how that contestation plays out is radically different in the French case versus the English case.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:00

Um, it's. That's funny because a lot of my current research has been focusing on uh, the, the thing left out there which is focusing on Germanyany and uh, how that developed. Um, because in some you know, in a lot of ways I realized this just like yesterday or something or last night that in a lot of ways it was system um and uh. That was basically as like pretty much as soon as he left, germany started to filter to the rest of the world. Um, because, like this is something that um is kind of under discussed in a lot of like history of the us and history of the of modern states, is that basically the modern education we system we have now came from germany, um and in particularly prussia right and um, they like the like American Americans were probably the earliest adopters in like the 1850s and 60s is when it started, accelerated after that and then the French really adopted it after the Franco-Prussian War to catch up to the Germans, and then the rest of the world basically followed after that Because it ended up working really well. It was a system that basically, like before this caught on.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:43

The idea of universities is basically that you train up a couple really smart people and they would like if they were doing practical things they were expected to do, kind of like this research on their own and develop things out of that kind of a very aristocratic and develop like this modern idea of bureaucracy and the professional military officer, this like the universal class, in like I think it was like the 1830s or something is when he starts talking about it and he was there, of course, in Jena when Napoleon swept through and kind of saw this transformation happen of like the professional bureaucracy and military officer corps take form in Prussia and that's like that model spread everywhere in the world.

Nicolas Villarreal: 5:04

And my hypothesis is basically that this is what facilitated liberal democracy, liberal democratic capitalism, to become a thing in the first place, because prior to this point, basically the only place in the world that existed was the US and when France tried it it seemed very unstable and of course in the UK they really I mean like they had elections of the small number of people the universal suffrage didn't happen until well after and it really seemed like liberal democracy wasn't a system that worked until the second French Republic. When they did these reforms to make sure that the military, which was like the source of instability before, of like the National Guard and the proletarian side and the officers on the Bonapartist side, was a big space of contestation of politics in the earlier French Republics and that ended basically like they worked very hard to end it in the Second French Republic and basically succeeded by adopting the Prussian system of professionalization and that's basically what's allowed, like the professional militaries are what's allowed liberal democracies to populate the world more or less democracies to populate the world more or less.

C. Derick Varn: 6:35

I think it's interesting to go back to a few things. I've been reading Machiavelli and the Florentine Republican writings that he wrote recently and it became clear to me how much he thought that the universalization of military bureaucracy was actually vital to an incorporated republic. So he thought that citizenship should be granted by a massive militia which would also train the outlying Florentine adjacent peasantry who weren't citizens and people who didn't have the financial clout to be citizens, to be more invested in the republic and also be granted the rights of citizenship. And in prussia you have something similar, except it's elite. Um, and I think you're right, uh, that the modern educational apparatus in the united states is quite interesting because basically you have the anglican school system, uh, as the basis for professional training. And then in the late 19th century there's this realization that that's not going to be sufficient, even for capital, and an adoption, pretty quickly and wholesale, of Prussian educational techniques, all the way down to the inclusion of kindergarten.

Nicolas Villarreal: 7:57

Which I recently learned. Well, I figured that was always a German loan word, but I also recently learned that, like, the reason we have university chancellors is because of Bismarck being a chancellor, and they wanted to. There were some very egotistical administrators who wanted to take on that title.

C. Derick Varn: 8:19

It's interesting to me. We're talking about two things today the nature of the state, and I do think the German state is interesting. I mean Germany's interesting to Marxist thinking in general, because even the focus on Germany as the core country that is also a quasi-periphery country that would be the basis of a socialist revolution, doesn't really come from Marx. That the German bourgeoisie and the Juncker class would actually overthrow the aristocratic government in time for Germany to be able to do that.

Nicolas Villarreal: 9:00

And for a very good reason, because in the. So this kind of relates back to like what happened to that republican ideal in Machiavelli, because the first French republics really tried to adopt that. They tried to have these popular militias and they were the things that were kind of introduced all the instability. The people who overthrew the July monarchy were the National Guard, and the National Guard was always the problem in instigating the revolutions. National Guard was always the problem in instigating the revolutions. And what the Germans do, what the Prussians do in particular, which is very smart, is that they specifically create institutions designed to create this professional ideology, which is different from the ideology that we know now as professionalism in very important ways, because the point of all this was not to have, like this autonomous, like today it is very closely associated with the ideology of liberalism. But in 19th century Prussia it was all about trying to create a basis, like an ideological basis, of the feudal nature of the state, of the aristocratic nature of the state, of fealty particularly to the king and the king alone, and trying because it wasn't just like they always kept trying to make sure that the social class in the officer corps was in particular aristocratic, that it was junkers. But they couldn't guarantee that. After the Battle of Jena they started to let in the middle class, the bourgeoisie, and in order to make sure that the bourgeoisie would not become a revolutionary force in Prussia, in Germany, they created this ideology and this very strong discipline to get the middle class bourgeoisie to emulate their aristocratic peers in the specific quasi-feudal ideology and this basically meant like if you look at what happened in the revolutions of 1848, like the bourgeoisie are very radical forces all over Europe, but not particularly in Germany. Like within.

Nicolas Villarreal: 11:35

Like the like let me like be more specific is that in basically every other country where the 1848 revolutions were happening, except for Germany, parts of the military defected, even if it was small parts, like in Austria. In like the corps it was only one unit, but in Prussia there were basically no defections in the officer corps and they fought. The hardest battles of the 1848 revolutions of the state with its domestic population was in Berlin, where they actually had street-to-street fighting on the barricades and stuff for over a day. This was hardcore. These were actual military battles and the military. They weren't able to resolve it right then because they weren't used to these tactics, but they never lost discipline during that time, and when they retreated from the city, they the. When the republic temporarily happened, um, like the, the parliament that was created was never able to get control over the military in germany, and this is probably why marx so pessimistic about it, because there was no breaking hold of the military stranglehold, which had very reactionary officers at its top.

C. Derick Varn: 13:05

I think that's a key point and one that I've noticed too, when Marx was afraid of the degeneration of the French republics and the Bonapartism. Because he was afraid of the degeneration of the French republics and the Bonapartism because he was afraid of the militarization of general society, which I think is something people miss about Marx Not that he was against universal militias and all that he wasn't but that he thought there was something inherently chauvinistic about this kind of officer core and universal class, and I think it's another thing that you pointed out. That's important. And we can actually tie this back in the Fukuyama, because Fukuyama actually writes a lot about this, not in the book we're going to discuss, but in a book, in a series of books called the Origins of Political Order and Decay, which is two books that he wrote.

Nicolas Villarreal: 13:51

I'll have to read those.

C. Derick Varn: 13:55

Which are about I, which are his kind of non-Marxist, materialist attempt to explain how Western Europe developed an administrative class that could compete with, like, the Jansen area administrative class of the Ottomans, et cetera, et cetera, and it goes all the way back to clerical cell to see to try to explain it. But to get back into this topic, when people think about, when people read the concern over the professionalization of the professional class, they do read it as liberal, and by liberal we mean specifically less left liberal, like you know, progressive, effectively. And that's a misreading, even in stuff as late as the 1940s, because, for example, if you read james burnham, people think that he's talking about the same group of people that barbara and john aaron reich were talking about in the 60s. But the managerial class for him were all ceos, managers and and generals. They were not college grads or professors or academics really, although he did see academia becoming more important, particularly after the GI Bill, and he saw this as a class that was necessary to rationalize society and that there would be competition as to which managerial class would dominate.

C. Derick Varn: 15:14

And if you read his later literature not the managerial revolution, but, um, the machiavellians are, as it's now called, the new machiavellians. Um, it becomes clear that he sees this in the military brass and he basically thinks that the future is going to be a thousand eisenhowers, which he's right about for the 50s and wrong about ever after. But but it's interesting to think about this notion and the way this professional administrative apparatus ties into the military and thus the state, and what this says about Marxism. Because there are two things where I think Marx, orth orthodox marxism, has a historical blind spot. One is theories of mind, because they're very clearly pulling from german idealist theories but trying to materialize them without modern psychology, which is why you get all these hybrid marxisms to try to come up with a theory of mind and class consciousness. But the other thing it seems to miss is a coherent theory of the fucking military and that's the state Cause I don't think it's in Marx. I've kind of looked and it's not there.

Nicolas Villarreal: 16:23

Like the, the relationship between the military and the bourgeoisie is really underexplored, not just in Marx but in Marxism period well, in part, I think, that because the period that he was writing in was the period where this was all changing dramatically and that it was, and he probably didn't want to admit that what he saw is like the reactionary character of the Prussian and then German state becoming the universal of like liberal democracies, because their whole hopes were kind of premised on like the pre-professional democratic state being, like making possible like a, a democratic path to socialism, basically, um, and that kind of gets, I think it gets a little warped as like social democracy comes up, because they don't really they never really update that either.

Nicolas Villarreal: 17:27

Um, they don't really conceptualize how that professionalism has changed everything and if social democracy, of course, was very tied into these developments too in Germany, because of how important, like I mean, in a lot of ways the social Democrats as they emerge are like a product of the same system and, oddly enough, like the military, like for the military, the education was always about ideological discipline rather than expertise, which was kind of not always, it wasn't always a good thing for them, but it was also, like you can see, almost like the precursors to Hitlerism in this, like they in the culture that develops, because they're very anti-intellectual and even take on speech patterns that are designed to be to sound unintellectual, because intellectualism was associated with the SPD. All those A-heads.

C. Derick Varn: 18:27

we were going to crack on the concrete, basically with the SPD, that's what they were referring to Right. Crack on the concrete basically with the espada good old, that's what they were referring to right. I do think that's interesting. There's two reasons why I think it's interesting. Uh, that there's this blind point of marxism around germany, in particular one.

C. Derick Varn: 18:45

The socialist movement really develops in germany and we think and I hear people talk about, you know, germany is a core country, but we have to remind ourselves that in the context of mid-19th century capitalist europe, germany was a fragmented periphery, um, with no real empire. I mean, you know it tries to develop one but is not very good at it. Um, and italy is the other place. It's a fragmented periphery with no real empire that unifies late, so missing. That is interesting when you're talking about all these national revolutions and this new universal bureaucratic core of monopoly capitalism that was developing. And by monopoly capitalism I'm using the Baccarin definition, not the Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran definition. By that I mean that there's more and more integration of state management with corporations, and sometimes they're almost indistinguishable from each other, like the establishment of the Raj is actually formally not by the crown but by the East India company, and then the crown takes over and this military element to this seems to be kind of an elephant in the room and I think it's interesting to think about why.

C. Derick Varn: 20:15

You wouldn't see that if you were focusing on Britain and France. Because while there's a military character to Bonapartism, bonapartism at first for Marx seems to be actually a deviation from the norm. Um, and then when you look at, uh, england, you have the military being furnished by a weird collaboration of excess nobility and subject peoples in the empire more than people in the core of england making up the base of the military. It's not that there wasn't, you know, a strong military component of the native English population, but it, but the militarization was much larger in, say, scotland or Ireland or in other subject areas, um, and there wasn't a clear, there wasn't as clear of a rupture between the bourgeoisie and the lower level aristocrats who kind of merged together in the english case anyway, after the re-establishment of the monarchy and the restoration, which kind of gives England also a different case it's kind of actually the odd person out here and the way that the military is developing.

Nicolas Villarreal: 21:42

They were like the latest in like doing these reforms. They always did some piecemeal after like Crimea and stuff, but they were generally the latest and tended to have the worst military education and also part of it was the legacy of Cambridge and Oxford as religious schools that didn't change up until very late and like in France, I mean, they had like the technical emphasis and then finally brought in like the general liberal education for the military. But it's, I think, that like Britain kind of suffered from its own success early on and didn't really catch up until quite late and honestly, like I mean, like Lennon was talking about Britain's decline in the early 1900s, Like by 1900, it was already like a declining empire severely.

C. Derick Varn: 22:43

Yeah, this is the thing about empires is usually they're declining even before we have acknowledged their peak. Their peak is only like obvious once they're in decline and like the british empire is declined. It's about 120 to 140 years long, I feel, and even like the raj, even though it seems to be like a combination of british strength that actually partly comes from the fact they picked the wrong dog in the US Civil War.

Nicolas Villarreal: 23:14

So and that's the funny thing is that colonial administration was basically when they did develop the bureaucratic apparatus was to manage India rather than to manage the UK, and that's where people like Keynes came out of. Uh and so on.

C. Derick Varn: 23:35

that's actually a keen insight to think about how much, how much of the people who are modernizers um, left and right in in the british, you know, early 20th century come out of the I'll come out of the raj and the african colonial uh administrations like I could name after name, keynes, even Orwell, I mean like you can just go through and be like, okay, they got these skills, not trying to manage Britain but trying to manage India and Nigeria and intervene in Egypt, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Nicolas Villarreal: 24:11

To go back to France for a second. I mean, like this, like Marx, that's probably where he does his most like thorough political analysis, and he like and he talks about, and then, like the Franco-Prussian War happens and all of his attention is on the Paris Commune, basically, and that this is the, this is going to be the future, this is the communism that works. But then, like, the Second French Republic happens, and there is, like, the left parties there, but they're not like as important as in Germany, the like recognition that what, how the Second French Republic is transforming is more like what was, like what seemed like the most reactionary elements of the German system, never really gets mentioned or brought up. And I think that there's this dialectic that is very pertinent now between Bonapartism versus like the universal class. Basically, um, that, like you have these two tendencies within liberal democratic capitalism of one is that, like you have, like the idea of the universal class I said it is a subservient to society and therefore can act in its general interests, and there are periods of expansion of this in the history of liberalism FDR was one Second French Republic. All these different points when, like, the bureaucracy really expands and so does professionalism in general and professionalism seems like everywhere. Now it's and um, but then like. The other tendency is like, like, the problem with that is that, like the, the universal class is defined by its subservience, and if you universalize that, then there aren't any like leaders basically anymore. There is no like people taking their own initiatives.

Nicolas Villarreal: 26:22

Because, like when liberalism started, it was like in like there was this expectation of large factions, of like institutions and society, of like private government and society of like private government and authority, like spheres of authority that basically collaborate together to make this larger society, and then, as those institutions kind of dissolve over time, because a lot of them are premised on like pre-capitalist forms of authority, all that's really left is professionalism, authority, um, all that's really left is professionalism, and so the counter to that was always um, this very like traditionally authoritarian logic of like consolidating power within a clique, um or click, however you say it, um to uh, get to get around the problems created by that um and and generally the problems created by the contradictions in capitalism. Because the first time it happens there is no universal class. Really it's not that important, but as it keeps happening, as the Bonapartism keeps emerging, it's trying to shift power away from that universal class to a small clique that runs things in that traditional clique logic of we're just going to get us like a smaller and smaller base that can like it's as long as you control, like as long as the people with guns are on your side, you can continue to run things marginally. And that's the logic of lots of dictatorships all over the world. Like like saddam hussein originally he had a specific ethnic base and then he had a section of that base. As things went on, the base kept getting smaller, but so long as those people were the ones that backed him and had the guns, then things kept running Right, right and basically, as I'm seeing it now, there's kind of this like like.

Nicolas Villarreal: 28:28

The problem is also because, like the like the professional class, the universal class, those things are seen like they're not.

Nicolas Villarreal: 28:32

They are is a particular ideology, and the fact that that ideology is not, like, actually universal, that is actually a particular ideology created in a particular set of circumstances, is a big problem.

Nicolas Villarreal: 28:46

And this is what, like how I started on this path, is that like what is is Huntington's book, the soldier in the state, and the whole book is about like oh well, um, because of the various cultural factors around um, professionalism and education at the time which was like as a part of this, like um, because there was a lot of controls over who could get an education. Um, it was a particularly conservative ideology that came out of this, and particularly in the military, and he said that because of that you could only have military autonomy with a conservative government in general. And now we kind of have the opposite, because now liberal education is identified with liberalism in the colloquial sense of the term and the conservatives now feel like they can't like that. Things are out of their control now and so now we're kind of getting like well, what do we do with that? We have to enforce like a particular clique of control over academia and the bureaucracy and the military so that it's no longer doing that.

C. Derick Varn: 30:04

I think that's actually kind of key because Samuel Huntington's the Soldier in the State, which is an early book I believe it was published in the late 50s it's not written that far after the later Burnham books. So we are seeing the development of a liberal consensus but the liberal consensus is still, broadly speaking, small C conservative at the time and there's a want to maintain that. And we also have to remember that until uh, william buckley started got a man at yale and the idea of the university as a liberal, small l modern sense of the word force emerged, that higher education was associated with the children of the bourgeoisie in America and with aristocrats in Europe and clergy in Europe historically. So the university was seen by and large until the 1960s as a conservative institution. Now there is like a sense that Germany was ahead of the curve here right and large until the 1960s as a conservative institution.

Nicolas Villarreal: 31:13

Now there is like a sense that Germany was ahead of the curve here, right Because of social democracy, and this is kind of like in some way, in a very unfortunate way, that fascism was a preview of like culture war for the rest of all time in liberal capitalism.

C. Derick Varn: 31:33

It's all culture comp now, motherfuckers. Yeah, go ahead.

Nicolas Villarreal: 31:36

Yeah, because it's because it is the same conflict.

Nicolas Villarreal: 31:39

It is the same conflict created by these particular sets of institutions which have, like these, like the, like, the like, the intellectualism associated with education, like, creates um, certain tendencies of certain of ideologies of um like the like.

Nicolas Villarreal: 32:03

Since the beginning, like, there's been a sense of like of liberalism and democracy as, like the most reasoned form of government, and this goes, and this is a tendency that Fukuyama represents today, now and and then, like the socialists were like, taking that a step further and the, but at the same time, like liberal education was also a means of ideological control by the state and and not and in like a lot states.

Nicolas Villarreal: 32:36

For most of the time up until very recently, that was still in certain ways, was enforcing a specific reactionary ideology. And in the case of Germany, it was very explicitly reactionary ideology. And in the case of like Germany, it was very explicitly reactionary because it was like a reinforcement of, like, what was thought of as feudal ideals. But like now, like things are all like, now that we're so far beyond that, that like that liberalism is like the thing that it is, it's ideologically enforcing. We have this certain situation that and this can lead us a bit more into Fukuyama himself, because the problem of the thing that professionalism does is it allows you to have a systemic way of creating um civil society institutions without uh having to worry about specifically like voluntary associations in the way that it existed before.

C. Derick Varn: 33:52

Voluntary associations or trans-international clergy, because I think we have to remind ourselves that in some ways the first trans-national corporation are churches Sure, corporation are churches and that they were. They were the basis of of um imperial uh governance after the empire had fallen apart, like, like, if you look at particularly in the case of western europe there's a huge literature on that as a defining thing in the middle ages and that leads to like multiple systems of law and incoherent uh polities and political rights from place to place and and things that actually we still have in america but largely europe has gotten rid of um uh and we have it for different reasons. It's our federalism fetish, but that the quote, rationalization of bureaucracy, capitalist, our military um is hard won and kind of late in most these cases. Um and and ironically I think it's an observation that you've made that Marx didn't, and I think Ingalls kind of hints at it but doesn't fully work it out the earlier you had the bourgeois revolution in some ways, the more behind you would be Now. That makes perfect sense when you think about that in terms of technology, right, the first person to adopt the technology is ahead in the beginning, but 10, 15, 20 years down the line. Other people, other nations, other companies have leapfrogged over them, using their initial advantage to launch themselves and then develop upon that. We see that in internet infrastructure between the United States and the rest of the world. The United States has a kind of archaic internet infrastructure because we kind of developed it first.

C. Derick Varn: 35:56

And I think we see that in capital relations. I mean it led to a whole debate between Perry Anderson and EP Thompson. Ep Thompson keeps coming up on our discussions, interestingly enough, about why Britain was so damn weird in the 1970s. So and this has to do with the fact that the bourgeois revolution was incomplete and Britain still is, technically there are still feudal land holdings. Technically the richest man in Britain is still a landowner, not a capitalist, and Technically the richest man in Britain is still a landowner, not a capitalist, and that the locus of management developed from liberalism really develops in the settler economies and primarily the United States, but to a lesser degree, in like Mexico and Argentina and places like that and Argentina and places like that, and then in the periphery of the core, which is Germany and Italy. And I think it's telling that the peripheries of the core is where fascism comes from, as a particular mutation. I think you know my theory is, when people throw the F word, what they really mean is the B word.

Nicolas Villarreal: 37:11

So when they're saying fascist a lot of time, what they actually mean is Bonapartist um I mean here's, the thing is that, like the, it's always been bonapartism when you have, like, a strongman appear in, like in liberal democratic capitalism, um, but it's like it's always a different set of material conditions. Right, they're responding to. The funny thing about Italy is that after Prussia, it had the most advanced military education. Funnily enough, which I think is related because you could see, I read this whole book about the Prussian military education system and it's so obvious after that that like, oh yeah, I could see how the failure of this would lead directly to fascism.

Nicolas Villarreal: 37:55

Because, like, hitler's whole ideology was more or less a caricature of what they were preaching in, like the in the military officer schools and what the whole ethos was. And, of course, the military officers like didn't really respect Hitler when he came into power, even though he had a really high opinion of them beforehand, because they had this particular professionalism that he lacked. But if you saw all this and really bought into it but weren't a part of the professional professional core, um, you would like. This is what, like the natural evolution of the ideology would be uh, because anti-semitism was all there, the uh, the incredible, like just pure obedience to authority, um, the like the, all the vitalistic and masculinist aspects of it. Uh, all of that was there in the ideology of the German officer corps before World War I, way before that.

C. Derick Varn: 39:03

And I think, if you even look at the differences in the material conditions, it explains why Italian fascism was less given to racialism than German fascism. Because of where it is, just literally geographically, it's a lot harder to be like. Let's make our core the Aryans, when you can only really claim that for the north of Italy, kind of it's just like okay, we got some Visigoths that made up the Northern Liga, but we don't have the rest of it, so, uh, integrated state. But I think this this is actually this is important because it explains some things it's hard to explain otherwise, one of which is barrack socialism coming out of germany as part of what can be assimilated into fascism and its other other movements, is because, as a universal class um, if you really view the bureaucracy as a universal class, the bureaucracy in the military sees itself as authoritarian, but authoritarian in russia and in germany, based off of either former aristocratic privilege, but as that is democratized it's based off of either former aristocratic privilege, but as that is democratized, it's based off of what is seen as meritocratic privilege. So you're no longer just an aristocrat, you are, to use Thomas Jefferson's phrasing, a natural aristocrat, which seems like a massive step up if you're one of the people fighting in the trenches because have ever so slight a chance of becoming a national, a natural aristocrat by merit, in the military in a way that it just does not seem like you have in other material relations, and I frankly think that was a large part of the U S system for a long time.

C. Derick Varn: 40:49

People today talk about how there's no poverty draft, which is true today, but I think people need to look at the numbers.

C. Derick Varn: 40:58

Before we started using drones and before we started outsourcing a lot of military functions to private corporations, in the second Iraq War, before 2005, or really probably before 2012, there was a real uh poverty draft.

C. Derick Varn: 41:19

Um, it really doesn't exist anymore because it's not as necessary, although recruitment's getting so bad that both a poverty draft and a real draft might become possible again if there's any state core left to operate after Commissar Musk gets finished liquidating everything Argentina-Malay style. But it does lead to an interesting contradiction when watching modern conservative parlance, and I think you kind of got to this. You have a military that is still, I think, functioning on traditional military grounds, which is not going to be copacetic with left liberalism, but it's protecting a liberal constitutional and professional order which manages its ability to access money, which is how they have all those pretty guns and wasteful boondoggles. So there's an inherent contradiction in the officer corps of the military that also puts that at odds with the rank and file of the military in a very real way, but in a different way than in the 19th century, where the military officer corps was a bunch of aristocratic children who were not particularly competent.

Nicolas Villarreal: 42:37

Yeah, I mean in some ways, I mean the German system had to leave Germany in order for it to be perfected, but there is these weird similar dynamics of like the um, like the. Something that isn't always aware of is that the aristocrats that were usually going into the military were not that well off, is that they didn't these like they had like this official status, um, but oftentimes not that much money, and they didn't get that much money from the military. They were expected to marry someone who had money so that they could support their military career or if you were like in New Spain, you were expected to pillage it in Germany.

Nicolas Villarreal: 43:26

There weren't really enough regular wars in the 19th century to do that, but it was even allowed for, like, a military officer to marry a jew if, like, she had enough money to bring in and something like that. There was all problems with like, like, uh, with get military officers getting into debt, um, and not get like and getting stuck in that um, but in. But what happens when the education system leaves germany is that it can, like, the whole idea of it was like creating this, like standardized, um, bureaucratic officer corps and also bureaucracy generally, um, that could generally have individuals be replaceable from each other, whereas in France it was all just assumed oh, we'll have another genius like Napoleon come along and lead us. But the emphasis was on replaceability. And when you bring it into the US, which is really the first place, it takes off and there's a whole actual tension between the US and Germany as the US becomes a full industrial power that the German academics are going oh wait, maybe we kind of went too far in collaborating with these people, too far in collaborating with these people, um, but the idea is like, uh, like the, the like it. It really takes this like education system to be in the us to really emphasize like um, like full liberal democratic values. Uh, when you look at like the military officer corps, now it's not I mean, it's all those things that you mentioned, but it's also just the fact like, why is what? What's this big tension going on between, like the military brass and the new um, like incoming uh dod chief? Um, it's about like, uh, like dei and all that stuff and all these like um, like groups of for like african americans and whatnot, um and the. The reason all that's a problem is because, basically, like the, the universities that the military officer courts are coming out are liberal universities. They have the same kind of tendencies like, if they wanted to, and they have. Like the conservatives have found all sorts of like stories of like social justice out of control in military schools and whatnot was because the like, because universities were always a place of generating ideologies and reproducing them and the like, the full autonomy of that like that Huntington talks about, like the um being able to uh, um, do this kind of ideological creation, which can't just be entrusted to anyone, which has to be subject to a certain sort of discipline.

Nicolas Villarreal: 46:42

Um, like the like, it can't go too far or else it threatens to undo the system, um, but it does like, it is able to uh, incorporate all sorts of like, these seemingly radical critiques, um, by its like, very nature of like.

Nicolas Villarreal: 47:02

Is it because the whole, it's an application of reason, it's an application of intellectualism, um, of trying to understand things and incorporate it to the specific mission which is like, which can't be undermined, which remains no matter what, like intellectual freedom or what have you, and like the book Discipline Minds which I brought up before.

Nicolas Villarreal: 47:26

It's really good explaining this is that there's all this creativity, which is allowed to go a lot further in America than it was in Germany, like, even though there was like a lot of like education, like freedom of thought, so on, like in certain periods of Germany, there was also this like official censorship. There was also this particular control in and diminishing of of like like. You couldn't question anything in the German military officer core If it was from an officer, if it especially like, if it's like an officer teaching something like a class. But in the U S it was possible because it was a liberal, democratic society was possible because it was a liberal, democratic society, and I think people not understanding the interrelationship between the officer corps and um college is actually interesting because you become like I.

C. Derick Varn: 48:26

If I had entered into the unit to um the military, which I thought about doing at one point, I know people would be surprised by that, but I had a good ASVAB score. I almost got into West Point at one point off of ASVAB and SAT scores. But my point is that I taught at a military college for years and the frustration with the non-commissioned officers because of a perceived difference in ideology was pretty clear. But I want to point this out, it was not, when I was covering it during the first part of the Iraq war, just kind of talking to students at a military college, all of whom were actively in service, many of whom would come back from at least one tour in Iraq. You did not hear this quite clearly along partisan lines and I think this actually explains some of the interesting things about the military rank and file or the non-commissioned or the or the, the infantry and the non-infantry but non officer. Core of a lot of the different military branches is that it is kind of seen as a class distinction now and that function of liberal education, even amongst somewhat conservative officers, became increasingly pronounced during the obama administration because it was a scene as a way to sort of embrace a maybe wiss vision, but without the racism. And this leads me to a couple of observations. I don't want to run past you before we get to Fukuyama. I have a strange feeling you and I are gonna be talking for a long time tonight. Heads up listeners.

C. Derick Varn: 50:27

I've been thinking a lot about Michael Sandel's kind of cry Partite description of America, of the American state in particular. He did this in Democracy's Discontent and he updated it in 2022. I think maybe it was 2024. I don't know when he released the updated version of Democracy's Discontent, but I read it recently and it's a relatively recent release, and he notes that in America, legitimacy first came from civic republicanism, which was very federated. So you view your local government as self-government. You have representative government going up from self-government. You have strong civic consensus in relatively small communities, except in big urban areas where you have to consolidate consensus, and relatively small communities, except in big urban areas where you have to consolidate this and political machines.

C. Derick Varn: 51:18

And then around war, war one with the massive expansion of the federal state as the great insurance and killing program which you know my joke, which is not really a joke. That's pretty much what the U S federal government does is kill people and or insure things. That's kind of what it does, um and Tate's taxes, but it's not even particularly good at that Um. So, uh, nonetheless, um, my point here is that this expansion of governmentality meant increase of professionalism exactly what you're saying based on this Prussian model.

C. Derick Varn: 52:05

But this is particularly embraced by both sides of American politics. It's embraced by the liberal side because it moves the maintenance away from ideology and makes progressivism seem like a natural outgrowth of industrial progress. And it's embraced by the conservative side because they see the military brass and figures like MacArthur and even Eisenhower but particularly someone like MacArthur or Patton as a check on the university eggheads that make up the professional core. So they're kind of an alternative management system. But as competence gets harder and harder to do and you start neoliberalizing even the military because that's one thing I want people to note, neoliberalizing even the military because that's one thing I want people to note Neoliberalization starts in earnest and I think you can actually start seeing it begin slowly in the early sixties, but it really starts in earnest under Carter.

C. Derick Varn: 53:02

But neoliberalization of the military is held off for an awfully long time. We don't start private contracting everything until the late 90s and we don't really see it accelerate to the extent that we accelerated it today, until the aughts. It really happens in the reformulations around the second uh iraq wars. One of the things that runfeld was doing was like we're outsourcing everything to blackwater, like I mean yes, but also I mean there were precursors to neoliberalism in the military too.

Nicolas Villarreal: 53:37

I mean part of it is that like everything was much more centralized and government led in the military so that it had further to fall, but like there was Mac, the mayor was doing like pre-neoliberal stuff in the 60s.

C. Derick Varn: 53:50

That's true. I think we have to always remind ourselves too, whenever we declare demarcation, when I'm saying neoliberalism really begins in the 60s, that you're going to see beginnings of it pop up pretty early. I mean, the love of public-private partnerships that defines neoliberalism really actually starts in some ways as early as the fucking new deal, um. But the military seems to be hesitant to embrace it because the officer corps likes controlling everything, um. And it took a long time for the likes of people like McNamara and Donald Rundfeld actually succeed in neoliberalizing most of the functions outside of the actual fighting core, um.

C. Derick Varn: 54:44

But that also meant that we had this weird thing in America where we kind of had a military cast that was very popular until relatively recently amongst both liberals and conservatives because they were seen as beyond partisanship, and we had a military core that was seen as relatively meritocratic because if you were black or white but you were from a poor ass part of, say, georgia, it was a way out of de-industrialization without going to prison, which was, you know are moving, which were your other options.

C. Derick Varn: 55:21

So are going to university and then hoping to get a, a job that you got hired out. Those were your options, right, and university was expensive. So I think that's interesting to think about and I also think we have to ask ourselves we always talk about the gi bill as this massive expansion of the professional class and this real boon to working class americans, and I think that's true. But we always have to remind ourselves, why were they doing that as a reward for serving in the military, but also as a way to strengthen the military that that second part of that's not asked like oh, why do you want to see all the soldiers to college?

Nicolas Villarreal: 56:05

Well, it's funny Cause like the, because the other side of this, the progressive side of like, why this was adopted, is like there was like as it was being standardized in the late 1800s. It was also this great opportunity for women and minorities to have class mobility for the first time, have class mobility for the first time and to actually like engage in the full society. And it's directly actually related to this Prussianization, basically because all of the like the first women and blacks who go through higher education, where they going? They're going to germany right to get their education.

Nicolas Villarreal: 56:56

Uh w dubois going to germany trying to complete his, trying to do a phd, um the the first, uh woman phds as well. Um, and uh, like the which, funnily enough, the Germans didn't let their own domestic because it was basically where all the most elite people were going. But because of that and really this connection between the professional education system and much like the, everybody was going to college after 08, that that was seen as the only way out, that and the way that, and now actually that it's mostly women going to college as well. And but because of those like historically contingent factors, um, like people like really hooked on to this as like the like um progressive thing that's going on, but people don't seem to be aware of the way that, like this, this dialectic between the universal class versus Bonapartism is not a dialectic necessarily between progress and reaction.

C. Derick Varn: 58:36

No, it's reaction versus reaction.

Nicolas Villarreal: 58:38

to my mind, Exactly Because what is happening, what professional education does to people is it is not just like in instilling it in, it's not just creating a new authority in the state or whatever, of like bonapartism, it's not like a strongman. It is instilling within people the sense of obedience and the sense of discipline to go along with a certain system within society, the certain system of science of this is allows the relations of production to reproduce themselves. In the language of Althusser and there's this brilliant passage in in the on the reproduction of capitalism, where he talks about how, like the, the anarchists who talk about like killing the cop in your head, are so silly Because you can't think about everyone having their own personal cop. That's not how it works. The reason that society goes is it goes all on its own, because people have the ideas to do what is needed to be done for society to work, ideas to do what is needed to be done for society to work.

Nicolas Villarreal: 59:58

That um, education allows and socialization allows people to act in this way to reproduce the system, um. So there's there's no point in talking about like this, like everyone having their own cop. It it is you, like the, the, it is the direct shaping of who and what people are, and so what the universal class, the universalization of the universal class, does is it universalizes this sense of servitude to society as a whole, and what we're left with is basically a like, a people, a nation which is incapable of like doing things for itself, of forming relationships with people and like just carrying things on on its own. Everything that the only things that exist anymore, are professional groups and professional institutions and the market. That's it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:56

Right. I mean this is one thing that I think people need to take away from this is that it affects social reproduction. That's why we have a marriage crisis. And the marriage crisis despite the fact that it's betrayed, it means being educated women who are now too upwardly mobile to get married. The actual stats don't back that up. The actual stats say it's actually mostly working class women who can't marry, increasing feminization of education, which which had happened before.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:33

In fact, I saw, weirdly, these Harvard scholars I can't remember who they were and I'm not going to look up the study right now, but people can look it up and if I remember it I'll put it in the show notes that talked about how, from 19, 20, 19, like 40, there is an increase of women in college, and they pretend that that's a historical norm One. It's not a historical norm because you still have a lot way larger percentages of people going to college. I mean, you're talking about five percent of the population versus even that. Even in this declining period, you're still in the upper 30s going to college, even though it's increasingly feminized. But to that people miss the reasons for that. That was elite women going to college to have marriage prospects and to acquire skills as a useful spouse in the elite, specifically Since women weren't being quite used as family negotiating tokens in the same way anymore, this became more important and I think that that return should tell us something about where we are.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:45

But I agree with you that university education could be liberating, but its particular structures often are not. They are highly authoritarian. When people talk about the equality of education, they are really only talking about tenured faculty, not even all faculty, specifically tenured senior faculty. Everybody else is in a kind of quasi medieval hierarchy that has been rationalized according to the market and rationalized according to military expectations, and that's partly from the prussian system. That's also partly from the fact that our entire fucking baby boomer educational apparatus was built during the cold war to fight the Cold War. That's what it was built for, and it started having crises immediately upon the Cold War ending. It's not surprising that Reagan coalitionism starts seeing education as a problem a lot more when the primary enemy doesn't exist anymore I think this can.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:03:56

Let us lead into fukuyama a bit. Because what? What does fukuyama say is the cause of the fall of totalitarian communism? He says it's because social atomization, um made it so that there was no mediating institutions between people and the state. So there was nothing really creating legitimacy for the communist states because everything was so top-down controlled. Nobody was actually being directly shaped or had these like um voluntary associations that were really creating ideology um for them to buy into and um.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:04:42

But the thing is is that fukuyama notes that there's these, these tendencies of social atomization in liberal capitalism too, but he doesn't connect it to this same phenomena, he doesn't think it to this same phenomena. He doesn't think that it undermines legitimacy in the same way, because he's not thinking about it in that terms that, because he doesn't think liberalism can be a totalitarianism like that. He's so when, like the, the problem that we have is in very many ways like, identical except like. Instead of the problem like, instead of civil society being destroyed from the top down, it's being destroyed from the bottom up by basically market relations and commodification and just people not being Like people, like it was capitalism, liberal capitalism was built off of the assumption that all these voluntary associations of society already existed and so there.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:05:39

But in previous societies it was like these were the things that you had to get people to do. Is that you didn't like the reproduction of society wasn't just like a voluntary thing, it was. It was the most important thing, and so resources were allocated specifically to make that happen. But because that comes as is like an external cost to creating surplus value, that's no longer something that enters into the equation anymore. So we see all sorts of things like uh, for example, um social reproduction costs being exported to third world countries. Um, and uh the like the the total destruction of um institutions of civil society being replaced by these very threadbare like NGOs, being run by educated professionals and basically acting as a scar tissue in society, as these other kinds of voluntary associations just fall away.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:49

Right, I mean. So we are in Burling alone land, but not for the reasons that people, not just because we magically ended up there by voluntaristic reasons, a la Putnam, but because the entire social reproduction apparatus, including the rearing of children, has been problematically dismantled and there's no social wage or anything like that dealing with the social reproduction costs. Now I will say that historically, that's gotta be a big crisis for capitalism, because neglecting your social reproduction costs is a good way to not have workers, which we are seeing in most advanced capitalist societies. Which we are seeing in most advanced capitalist societies the imposition of all those costs on individual households has, and the change of the nature of the economy, making kids no longer I mean, for most of human history, having kids was an economic boom. Like you got more hands to work with you. Yes, there's an immediate upfront investment. Um, and yes, you do. Really, I'm not. I'm not saying that people didn't love their children. This is not. I'm not arguing that like, loving your children is a modern phenomenon, but they were additional help around the farm. They were additional help, uh, for household management. They took some of the labor off of, off of adults and their burden was spread out over the entire community, because most of the adults in your community were potential allo parents who would help you parent. And you know, even in 19th century America, even if it wasn't the entire community, it was at least your greater extended family, which was a pretty large production going back several generations, often in farmhouses and stuff that are huge. And we think, oh, why did people have such huge houses back then? And I was like, because like four or five generations of people lived in them. Um, oh, you know, uh, in addition to if they were rich servants and other things, so like there's a reason why they were the way they were. I think today we have cut that off.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:01

Now I was mentioning Sandel's description of this in civic Republicanism and he talks about the development of the administrative state and competence as the driving force of the 20th century, being invested by both professionals and the military. Um, but he actually indicates that as late as the 1980s that was already a problem. And then what he says in his update to the book is basically the state of emergency has more or less replaced even administrative competence and morality has replaced administrative competence. Now, that's obvious with woke liberals, but I think it should also be obvious that this is what's going on with like right-wing populist grifters, frankly, because they're appealing to moral visions of the universe for what they're doing. Um, the other thing I think is interesting that you indicate here is that there's thus a kind of material reason for something I see as a fundamental contradiction in American life, which is conservatives personalize the systemic and they see their interest often subsumed in a person, but a person who often does not represent them.

C. Derick Varn: 1:10:11

It's not unique to Trump. We saw this with George W Bush too. People like oh Bush is a relatable guy, he talks like a working class person and I'm like he's a Brahmin elite from New England, but he just is good at faking it. And Trump is like you know, yeah, he's nouveau riche, but he's still not, he's not self-made and so but, but he's still not, he's not self-made and so but again, he talks, he has, he has a. I think he we have to admit he has a, a lizard brain mentality for understanding what people want to hear and and giving that out, and that is its own genius and I think we should acknowledge that. But that kind of papers over the ideological and class and coherence of the conservative movement and I think for liberals, that's obvious. So you see, like a ban in talking about uh Musk and you know, basically implying he's an illegal immigrant who's just sucked off the tit of the government and uh Musk is like you know, ah, but you know doing the whole near reactionary thing. But basically you're like white nationalism is too forgiving to white trash and we need educated H-1B visa holders to come in. These are all in very reactionary terms. That's obvious to progressives and educated liberals like us. What is not obvious to a lot of people in our position, however? That our relationship to institutions is just as incoherent.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:35

When you're critiquing oligarchies and yet you're defending institutions that not only suppress the Palestine protests like that's actually, it's terrible in world history and it's genocidal but also in the shitty things they do domestically, it's actually rather small. Um, the things that you should focus on is the fact that the educational mission of universities is not the primary mission of universities anymore, because their endowment is on tax and this is something that I actually agree with trump on, which is bizarre, uh but because their endowment is untaxed, they've been able to amass mass amounts of ralph that they use to become the major landholders in the cities in which they end. If you look at it in la and uh and in and making georgia where I'm from, but in new york too, private and large, public, large endowment universities tend to be the largest land holders in the fucking city, and not just of like land, grant lands Okay, fine, that's what they were given but also their landlords, their, their many of the corporate holders of houses that we have that make things impossible to fix today. So if you're critiquing oligarchy but defending that, you're not really critiquing oligarchy. And so there's this way in which the fundamental realization of the horror of our social apparatus is only partly seen by either side, because both sides are complicit in it. For reasons having to do with the state developmental project, um, and because we think of the military and the educational apparatus as separate, we often miss this because they're fundamentally not.

C. Derick Varn: 1:13:18

And, as I've said, until recently and I've actually been surprised at how recently this has changed and a lot of the development of real technology has not just been done by universities who, frankly, can't get enough grants to do that well and have too much oversight I got. It's another thing I'm sympathetic to. Trump administration is learning that some Ivy who don't know indirect costs is where, when you get a grant you're allowed to charge so much for, like lab fees and janitorial staff, and often they charge these regardless of the nature of the grant. So you could be doing a philosophy development and they charge the same thing. But some of these ivy league universities are are are putting up to 60 percent or 65 percent of the grant cost into these indirect costs. Uh, the trump administration wants to lower it to 15 percent. 15 is a little low, but you know I'm not here to like beg over pennies, but I'm just saying like some of the conservative replaints that liberals are just ignoring are rooted in something real.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:14:36

It's just that they're all partial yeah, this is what I was thinking about the other day. Is that, like what? Like in the in the 70s, like the, the crisis of profitability was pretty obvious, and that was what reagan was responding to. Right now, we have, like we're not living through a particular crisis of profitability. Um, neoliberalism has actually done a pretty good job of stabilizing profit rates in the us, but what we are living through, um, and what was kind of partially which was a direct consequence of neoliberalism, is a very soviet style problem, um, where we keep investing more and more money into broken systems that no longer produce, like, the proper use values that we expect to get out of them. Um, and this is true whether we're talking about infrastructure, whether we're talking about movies and video games, whether we're talking about, like, private equity tech startups, education, healthcare, private equity, AI I mean like everything.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:15:35

But also education, as you were just talking about, and part of that is that it's this like there's these bureaucratic hurdles, but also just the bureaucratic costs of the bureaucracy itself, of the professional education and the staff, of the professional education and the staff and the problems that that creates is that, like you, like in the sub-union it was different because it wasn't expressed in prices. We experienced it as prices because, like, so, like the price of education keeps going up, the price of housing. I didn't, like I created a graph that showed how much like housing gets built per um, like the real investment we put into it and just kept falling from the 60s. It's like half less than half what it was in the 60s um for every dollar of like real investment we do um and like the this is something that, like the the right is responding to is like that, uh, elon musk is responding to. Like the right is responding to is like that Elon Musk is responding to.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:16:33

Like even billionaires experience this problem and but they also don't have like a good understanding of why it's happening, what's going on, and really are just like what does going after the CFPB have to do with lowering those sort of costs? Nothing, what does like, like a lot of the things they're doing have are not going to have any effect on that and that, because of the entrenched interests associated with these, things probably are not going to affect them that much either. And like and I think that will probably blow up in their face a bit as the like, the more obvious it becomes that, like, certain insiders are winning out from this.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:19

Um well, I think we're already going to see MAGA start to divide when people realize that the, the productivity promise of of of MAGA from the first trump administration has not actually been carried over to the second. Like we're not focusing on reshoring jobs or anything like that anymore, we're focusing on the same kind of shit the democrats used to focus on, just in a much more harsh and and deleterious way. And it's partly because, I think, in some ways they know that they have a population problem, that they have an aging population. I mean, gen X is about to be 65, starting soon. The baby boomers have largely exited the market and started to die. Millennials are getting into their late 30s and are the largest generation by a lot, but have a lot less resources to show for it. Generation by a lot, but have a lot less resources to show for it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:16

I think this, also this professionalization problem, has led to a lot of misidentification on the left of who the enemy is. Like, like I, I still see people fighting the last war against the, the university, pmc, and I'm like that's frankly handling itself. And even the conservatives, who want to do this gram stream march to the institution, frankly are doing it too late, like, like trying to conservatize universities doesn't really make sense, given the systemic problems of universities. Men really aren't going through them anyway. Um, the reasons why women wouldn't be attracted to that are as obvious, etc. Etc. Etc.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:56

The smaller universities are already in massive decline, which actually is not going to lead to the large elite institutions that everybody hates I mean right and left. Today, most people hate them. It's going to lead to them actually having more power over society because there's less alternatives for anyone to follow these systems through. I mean, you really do kind of have to go to a major state school or NYU or you might get fed AI slop or nothing. So I say that, to say that like this is a major crisis of the elites, and the question in the room for a lot of people who are Marxists has been where the fuck is the bourgeoisie? And what I think we actually find is the bourgeoisie is highly divided amongst itself and a lot of it's living on denividends. It doesn't really care what happens anyway, so it doesn't have a historical mission because its social reproduction needs are not obvious Until they are when you try to do a startup or we have baby formula crises, or you try to realize you don't have enough people to grow food.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:20:02

I mean we are kind of seeing a bourgeois response right now with Musk and his allies, right, but it is obviously just a faction of the bourgeoisie and one that didn't really exist until like a year ago. Um, like, I mean, there were like bits and pieces of it that existed but wasn't really coherent, wasn't a real political force until a year ago and it's a particular bourgeoisie bourgeois faction too, because it's interesting.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:35

I'm not a believer in the techno neo-feudal thesis uh, jody dean has failed to convince me, but, um, I will say one element of it is interesting. Um, we have to note that the the accession of tech rentiers and they are mostly rentiers. Even Elon Musk, who does produce real commodities, has mostly gotten his wealth from rentier speculation. If we look at those businesses, they were not profitable until QE conditions quantitative easing conditions for the most part and they were able to leverage that to get monopsony power in certain fields to then build real physical infrastructure and have monopsony power over that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:26

But not that there's ever like pure non-state competition in capitalism, even in early capitalism, and there really hasn't been since World War I. But this group of people particularly have a very schizophrenic relation to the state. They're dependent on government contracts and neoliberalism for their wealth and existence, but they view government as a cost that could just go to them. Um, so so what's going to be interesting about that is a lot of the coalition that's empowering this government, uh, including some bourgeois elements like local, local boards of commerce are actually going to be threatened by this, not over like dismantling things like usaid or uh, even coming up with agricultural interests.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:23

But right, yeah, oh, it's the. The american agricultural interest is going to be interesting because it's like okay, you got rid of the cheap labor and you got rid of subsidies and you have a worldwide food crisis now. We have tons of the cheap labor and you got rid of subsidies and you have a worldwide food crisis now. We have tons of productive land here, but you have no reason for them to be made productive. Why the fuck are you going to do that and what the fuck are the the consequences of that going to be, particularly when you made a promise initially to tackle inflation and then you throw the tariffs and that on top of it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:54

It's like no, you're going to lose legitimacy pretty quickly, at least with the outliers of the coalition, because I know that liberals like to pretend that everyone who ever voted for trump is all the same and that they're all somehow mega core people, which is fucking stupid, because at most, those are like 20 of society, but uh, which is still pretty large.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:16

I mean, if you look at all progressives and all leftists together, they wouldn't quite be that big, but um, my point is that it's still not nearly even a plurality, much less a majority, and so not delivering on the promises. You'll probably buy a year or two of public sentiment for that. But let's say, for example, one thing that's crossed my mind that could happen is that they really do sell off all this government real estate when they start liquidating these industries and you already have a commercial real estate market that's flooded um, that that is very close to collapse and is only ironically kind of holding on because you can use it as a tax write-off for profits as a loss to hold on to non-productive commercial sector buildings, and the tax benefits actually outweigh the cost of maintaining the building, which would otherwise flood the market right now and since and that's part of why we haven't had a commercial failure. But it's like that can't go on forever.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:24:22

Well, ironically, if, like the uh the, the budget cuts are high enough to cause a risk like a normal recession, um, the real estate industry might be saved because they would get the lower interest rates, which is more important to them at this point than the demand.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:45

This is absolutely true, and I think not only is this a condemnation of Musk and Trump, but I think it's also a condemnation of the liberal over-reliance on tax benefits, regulation and tax policy as their administrative apparatus for doing pretty much everything. I mean, when we talk about neoliberalism, it's obvious when conservatives do it. It's not obvious when liberals do it, but liberals do it. That's why there's an NGO industrial complex that runs everything, and you can really see the difference when you look at this on a state level. I tell people to look at New York versus California. New York has a fortis infrastructure that even the bankruptcy of the city didn't completely break, and thus it handles things like homelessness a lot better than California, which spins more but has much less to show for it. It has NGOs that get rich off of it and little else much less to show for it.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:25:30

It has NGOs that get rich off of it and little else yeah you know I am actually a little bit pissed directly at Trump for that. I had to pay $8.50 for a carton of eggs. For a dozen eggs they were free range because they were out of the normal eggs which are in shortage right now and they could be doing something about that. They could be vaccinating all of the chickens for avian flu or whatever, but they're not because they don't know how to do anything.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:00

Right, I mean basically. Basically we have the problem. Liberals always say the conservatives are, you know, encouraging competent to undermine the state, and there's actually some truth to that. But I have a corresponding response to them. We just lived through two administrative apparatuses. I think most of us are old enough to remember Obama and Biden. Neither one of them showed an increase in administrative competence at the bureaucratic level.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:26:31

It just got worse. I get it's incredible, because everybody was talking about, like state capacity and um like doing and doing big investments and stuff like that in biden's term, and very little came of it because they didn't know how to spend the money. Um, for the most part, uh, they didn't know how to um like do any of the things that they were totally incompetent in basically every method. Part of that was that they lacked real leadership, but part of it was just like the people, that none of them know how to do anything.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:02

And I think we also have to admit the complexity of the situation now is harder than most even traditional experts could have easily handled. I'll give you something I think about in this today. Why are the tech billionaires and billionaires all defecting to the Trump camp? All of them I mean even Bezos kissed the ring. Why is that? Well one.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:28

I read Robert Brunner's thesis on Bidenism with what he wrote with Dylan Riley, and I think most of it's actually kind of bad. But one thing he did point out is that profit rates are stable, kind of low, but they're not declining but complexity costs are, and so he talks about well, how do we handle this? He doesn't mention the complexity costs in this way. That's me interpreting him. But how do we handle this? Well, you have politics literally picking the winning, the winners and losers over who's going to be able to have access to the profitability, because it bypasses certain complexity costs.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:08

And the Democrats, frankly, we're fucking incoherent on this. So they threw. I mean, people don't think about like the, the, the inflation reduction act and the whole chips. After they're like oh, that's for labor. The pictures are parts of labor, but they were definitely trying to keep tech on board. At the same time, biden was actually interested in this Walter Mondale school of being a Democrat where you throw all the coalitions some favors actually interested in this walter mondale school of being a democrat where you throw all the coalitions some favors. And he empowered lena khan and lena khan uh took trump era antitrust things like on google and made it clear that under biden they would be willing to actually impose not just fake regulation to make to make you know like, like, uh, like zuckerberg called for in 2020, but like real regulatory inroads to reapplying um monopoly protections and stuff against big business.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:29:08

I mean monopoly uh provisions against businesses in a way we haven't seen since the Carter administration, and this was a big reason why this like high bourgeois coalition formed for Trump in like his last campaign. Because of this.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:24

Right, because it made it look like, frankly, that the Democrats had incoherent policies. Now, some of them is a direct impact on these people's wells and, of course, they're responding to that, but some of it it's also just like you have policies that these people can't plan or negotiate for. You Like, okay, you have anti-monopoly policies, fine, but if we know what they are and they're clearly stated, we can adjust for them. Businesses do that all the time. But if we don we know what they are and they're clearly stated, we can adjust for them. Businesses do that all the time. But if we don't know what they are, because you're running an incoherent policy regime, we'll bail. And I think that's interesting because that's also why I think Trump lost a high bourgeoisie and 2019 because it was happening again right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:09

um well, I think what's going to happen is this is going to turn the bourgeoisie even more against itself.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:30:16

Um, and part of the problem is that there is no I mean there is no real class consciousness among the bourgeoisie anymore. I mean not in a rigorous theoretical sense. They kind of have this sensuous empiricism of what's going on, which is why they're acting the way they are now, but they don't have a better idea of how to get out of this than anyone else. They don't have a theory of the case of what to get out of this than anyone else. They don't have a theory of the case of what to do.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:53

Right. And so this brings us back to Fukuyama, I think Fukuyama, I always tell people you need to, before you talk about restarting history because of wars or whatever, you need to actually read the end of history book and the Last man to realize A, even conservative Fukuyama didn't think all this was good. And b? Uh, the reduction of individuals to like mere atomization he saw as almost universal in modern society, saw it in soviet case, but for some reason he thought that liberals could reintegrate this and kind of keep everyone together through mutual atomized self-interest. Um, and that's why he was part of the Reagan administration, that's why it was a neoconservative until 2006. He abandons neoconservatism in 2006. Um, because he thinks that we need a Wilsonian soft power worldview, you know again. So Wilsonism without the racism kind of like the military, and and that maybe we're getting a little bit too harsh on the working classes and destabilizing society that way. He also thinks that you know, for example, he the reason why he said he was not voting for bush in 2004 was that they overstated the threat of islamist extremism to the world system into the united states. Uh, which you know, I think is undeniably true. In fact, they they overstated at the point of encouraging it. They failed to see that damaging multilateral institutions would actually have negative consequences at home. Basically, he diplomatically said the quiet art part loud that you know, all those multilateral things were to make imperialism work and so we didn't have to just bomb the shit out of people all the time. Right like um. He doesn't say that, but he says it um and then and then he says, uh, that we have been over optimistic about social engineering, of western values imposed from above um. But I want to point out his current views are also kind of weird, because I I tend to agree with his accessions of of the problems of neoconservatism in the context of american conservatism, but what he says now, for example, is quite interesting because of how this seemed true in february of 2022, but now all seems completely false. And I'm just going to read it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:28

This is all from a magazine article he wrote on Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the American purpose One. He thought that Russia was heading towards defeat. I don't know why he thought that. I don't know why anyone thought that, other than that they really botched the first part of the invasion and were a little bit overambitious. But after that, I don't know why he thought that the only way that you can think that is if you think that the Ukraine situation becomes a fourth-generation warfare thing, in which case, also, ukraine is not the part of that that is missing, and all these people's analysis is, for that to be true, russia has to win to lose, meaning they have to break Ukraine and actually own it, not just take over the parts that they think are legitimately sympathetic to them.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:18

Two he said that Vladimir Putin's rule over Russia couldn't survive a military defeat. I don't know. We're not going to find out, because they're not going to get militarily defeated unless Europe really wants to go to to start World War Three without the United States backing them Le Pen, zemmour and Bolsonaro and Trump and I think that was true in 2022. I do not think it's true now. And he said Turkish drones will become bestsellers, which actually probably is true. And he said Turkish drones will become bestsellers, which actually probably is true and that Russia would not permit a new birth of freedom. And what I find interesting about this is in 2006, fukuyama seems really president. In 1985, fukuyama seems president, but in a way that we all hate, but today he seems like a slightly stupider Peter Zion. Now why is that Go ahead?

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:35:37

I think it's because the chickens have come home to roost about within liberal democratic capitalism in the same way they did in the totalitarian communism he outlines. And that was always his blind spot. And it's so funny because he thinks that even people who correct the overcorrection of Fukuyama about how the thymotic instincts of people will undermine the end of history, uh, and like liberal democracy um, what the things he says that are? That that there are just like people acting out because they're bored is like um may 68 in france. And he doesn't see in any way what are the problems with liberal capitalism? The legitimate problems and how people do not feel connected to the state at all. This is also becoming a problem in Ukraine, especially because of their recruitment problems the people who ran out of all the really patriotic people after a year and a half.

C. Derick Varn: 1:37:02

It's a problem when you're running on patriotic people. When they join first, they die first.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:37:06

Yeah, there was a great article about this now in Jazeera about people when they join first, they die first. Yeah, and the people who are left, like who were there was a there was a great uh article about the snout jazeera, about um, like the people who are kind of outside of the metropole, um in in ukraine, are all like they basically weren't given any support at all from the state after the fall of communism. They were left to fend for themselves.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:37:29

So they're used to it, yeah, and like some guy was saying, the only thing the government ever gave me was a Kalashnikov to like try to die fighting the Russians. And this is kind of the situation that liberal democracy is in. Is that there's this core of professionals, and this is especially of the situation that liberal democracy is in. Is that there's this core of professionals. And this is especially obvious in Ukraine, where how much of the USAID thing kind of exposed, highlighted this of how much of the newspapers in Ukraine are being funded by USAID, by Western NGOs, are the core of the ideological apparatus in Ukraine, are being funded by USAID, by, um, like Western NGOs, uh, are like the core of like the ideological apparatus and uh, in Ukraine, um, and without that there's not much there, um, and I think that's pretty similar to what the situation is in the West.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:38:24

It's just not as existential right now. Um, that uh, we have like, um, people who are like have monetary incentives to be true believers and then outside of that, nobody is really engaged in, like really believes in, like, uh, the state as it as in of itself. Um, I mean, all the people who voted for Trump didn't? They were hoping things shake up a bit. They're not Most people polling. I've seen people disapprove of what Trump's doing right now, but it's like nobody's.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:07

The polling on Trump is actually quite fascinating, and I'm going to say this because we're talking in February and with Trump who the fuck knows, everything changes from week to week. But I will say this Elon is polling even lower, with lower ratings. Even amongst conservatives, as long as you're off X, there's broad scale independent distrust of the tariffs. So the independence which you need, which are part of why trump won, are disenfranchised by the tariff threats. There is support of, of, uh, of mass deportations, although that even amongst people who support them, there seems to be a strong disagreement on how the fuck you do it, um, and on how who needs to be targeted and why, um, and that really. And that means when they ask a question, it's, it's very, and so when I've seen polling, people are like optimistic about trump because it's the end of the biden order, but when you ask them anything specific about what trump is doing, the support goes dramatically down, um, which tells me that this is a fragile response, that like, unless you start seeing dividends that actually do stuff like either increase jobs and increase labor costs, which would make the Fed unhappy, or you, I don't know.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:40

Everything I know about CAPUS economics is false and somehow tariffs don't lead to higher prices, which I literally don't know an economist left or right who thinks that's true, or are something. There's going to be a strategic problem coming out of this, and I actually pointed this out that part of the blitz everyone thinks the blitz is about discombobulating liberals because they're getting it from Steve Bannon. But I've asked people to think about what if the blitz is also to discombobulate trump's own base, because he already saw problems in his base as soon as vivek and elon started fucking around with steve bannon supporters, and that to me is like a presaging of where this is probably going to go now.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:41:27

It's funny because I was reading this blog the other day. I can't remember who it was by, but it was called the Return of the Strong Gods and kind of like this anti-Fukuyama take of Trump moving fast, breaking the whole.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:49

Elon Musk. Is that RR Reno? Because I've read that book. I didn't know there was a blog around attached to it too. But go ahead.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:41:57

Maybe I don't know, I have to check but the idea was that the fact that Trump is showing that you can just do things and also the fact that it's a return of nationalism and these impassioned sentiments you can just do things and also the fact that it's a return of like nationalism and like these impassioned sentiments is proof that, uh, we're going back to like, um things actually meaning things of, of like, uh, um, in like the pre-war kind of way, uh of um, like this, this is the end of the uh 19th century, finally, um, but that really doesn't seem to be the case to me. And this is the end of the 19th century, finally, but that really doesn't seem to be the case to me. And this is related to everything that happened with Fukuyama and the Iraq War and stuff. Because what was the Iraq War about? Why did it happen? I can't remember who it was. It was Rumsfeld or whoever who said that America is an empire, we can make our own realities Right, and the that was like the ethos of the Iraq war that, like, the U? S can just do things.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:43:00

And I'm sure that that's also what Putin was feeling when he invaded Ukraine is that they could just do things and they did things and there's like this whole illusion that's been created by um, like the, those activities, um, is that, like that people still have a certain type of agency? Um, I really think is not actually reflected in the reality of what's happening here. Um, because, like that, there's still like these immense, like interests that are probably not going to be impacted by this um, and even if, like, even if they succeed in establishing, like a more secure clique of power in government, I not sure how this really like, I think people will see the other shoe drop at some point, in a similar way that we have seen other things like that. Because I don't think, because, as I was mentioning before, like the, nobody really has a good theory or understanding of what the problem is here, of how to get bourgeois society back on track, to get rid of these extreme costs.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:44:24

This really does exist, like you were saying, to really impress the space with a lot of flim flam. I mean, there might be a second order effect if people are really glad that it's making libs upset, but the main audience is not liberals and, uh, the other part of that which I I tweeted about is that I don't think that that like there's still like that whole sentiment, the whole sentiment of the anti-fukuyama sentiment there, of that this is a return of the strong gods, does not ring true to me, because these people don't actually believe in anything no, no, it's a, a Christian nationalism of the unchurched, an anti-oligarchic movement led by the world's richest man there's a strong rationalism to it, a political nihilism to all of it.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:45:20

None of these people want this whole psychological instrumentality that they've reified. But that is just nihilism when you do that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:45:33

Yeah, I agree. I mean, this is an interesting problem. I've been thinking about this the other day because I've been thinking about all these exotic new ideologies that pop up that are tailest on on democrats or conservatives. Right now, the conservative tailists tend to be the harder ones because we just went through a liberal period and the libertarian list looks stupid. But if we look at far right tailist of the center right around, are this the trump?

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:06

I will say this Trump is not far right. He's a weird amalgamation of populism and just pure lizard cunning and that sometimes helps the far right but it also hurts them. A lot of the old alt-right reactionaries all resent the shit out of Trump for his first administration, feel betrayed by him after Charlottesville, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The only faction of the alt-right that seemed to survive is the one that flattered the tech billionaires, neo Reaction, which is the one that we're dealing with today. It's not the only thing, but I've started seeing Neo Reactionary talking points picked up not just by JD Vance, but also by our own McIntyre and people who were just normie neoconservatives prior to 2020. Some of them were even anti-Trumpist Go ahead.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:47:00

The neoreactionary thing, I think is interesting because Curtis Yarvin, one of the main thinkers of that, he sells himself as a Jacobite right Of someone really trying to turn back modernity. But if you pay attention to what he's saying, really, in that he's using the fact that the petty dictatorship of the firm is like a system that works and that's why we need like monarchical dictatorship. Um, that's not an actual like reaction, like pre-modern reactionary sentiment. If anything, he's not a jacobite, he's an orleanist, he's an orleanist and a hans herman hoppa.

C. Derick Varn: 1:47:46

I like but yeah, yeah, but I mean like, like the the orleanist and a Hans-Hermann Hoppe-ite, like but yeah, yeah, but I mean like the Orleanist, like being like the first bourgeois monarchy of Europe guy who was wearing a suit as a yeah, yeah, so it's an Orleanist, and also like which kind of makes him smell a lot like a Bonapartist.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:48:07

Well, of course, but honestly, I like a Bonapartist. Well, of course, but honestly, Bonapartism is too popular for him. Right, right, right right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:15

Right, right, right, which makes Trump a paradoxical figure for him, because Trump is legitimately popular, at least for the moment, although, again, we haven't even got through two months yet, so who the fuck knows? So, yeah, um, he's also legitimately. Here's what's fat. I was telling I was talking to a conservative friend of mine about this. I'm like trump is the most popular politician in american life. He's also one of the most unpopular politicians in us history. Upon entering a second term which is non-consecutive, which we've only seen one other time in us history, um, and that, to me, says a lot more than that he's the most popular politician. It's like he's actually not that popular, but no one is.

C. Derick Varn: 1:49:04

I said this, uh, to someone who was arguing me about the uk when they were saying, well, like what, what would it be if, uh, if, uh, corbin was leading labor today? And I'm like, well, he's not, and it should. You should actually think about the fact that the liberal keir starmer party was able to assume more power than corbin was with actually much less popular support. Um, I think that indicates to you there's a fundamental problem here that just arguing over who would have been more popular if actually completely misses and it also kind of damns. The whole populist left, quasi Bonapartist, bernie Corbin bullshit? Um, because it implies that the problem is deeper, in the fragmentation of the state. And I also think and I want to put this by you because, uh, this is something I got as an observation from uh benjamin studebaker, but studebaker, even though he's smart, didn't work this out in political, economic terms. Stud said well, one of the problems with populism is they view themselves as against the state, but then they use state apparatuses to do it, which actually shows you that what's actually going on is the state is far more divided against itself than it initially appears and that what you're actually doing when you're being populist is not actually being populist but basically picking one elite to counter another within the overall system. Now, I think that's undeniably true, but I've been trying to figure out the political, economic reason for that, because that's politically true, but what's the economic reason for that? And I think the economic reason for that is like uh, in the experience of the economy, for most people things are objectively getting shittier, but on a quarterly to quarterly, on paper basis, it doesn't seem that way. But where the investments are actually going, let's just say where, like a lot of biden's gdp growth was was just bullshit.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:10

Venture capital investment and the initial hope of high profitability in ai, but also since there was no real concern. This is one of the ironies of our current bourgeoisie and why you know they're incompetent. Um, venture capital uh has been throwing money, flushing money down the drain to find a way for investment to be profitable for two fucking decades and that has led to a ton of unprofitable investment. But that has also meant that a lot of these companies have never actually had real financial constraints. That a lot of these companies have never actually had real financial constraints and I think quantitative easing made that easier to do as a way to prop up and stabilize profit rates. And, however, now the bureaucratic costs of that are real drag on profits, which is why you see the response you're seeing they're not a drag on profits in terms of direct cost, they're a drag on profits in terms of complexity.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:52:14

So I think that like it's what you have to think about is is in terms of, like, use values for the capitalist class, because the capitalist class has to reproduce itself. It can only reproduce itself using use values. It doesn't matter, like, if the profits they get are not equivalent to enough use values, then they're worthless. And this is actually part of the argument that I had recently with Jehu and his gold bug guys. But the like the, so the problem that they have is that, like they, they need like that the basically the neoliberalism started is that they, they solve the problem of profitability by reducing investment because, according to the collective profit equations, if you don't invest and if you just consume, you'll have more profits for yourself. Actually, you'll maintain that profit rate because the falling profit rates caused by increasing investment and but but then you have the problem where it's not just the like who gets to be a capitalist, it's not just who has enough nominal monetary capital to do that, it's also who has enough monetary capital that, with the profit rate, is equivalent to the use values needed to reproduce themselves. And that's kind of what's at risk. That's what's when you have, like, the increasing cost of like, building housing and all these other things and I get, but, but that increasing cost is also what allows this broader capitalist class to exist.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:54:24

This is what supports the petty bourgeoisie, this is what supports all of these managers and stuff who would have no jobs otherwise. Like all the hundreds of billions of dollars that gets wasted on crappy movies and video games goes to someone, someone gets that money and gets to consume it. And same with real estate and all these other things. Same with real estate and all these other things. If you had a capitalism without excess which is kind of what they're trying to do in Argentina they're trying to get rid of all this excess that's been supported by the favorable exchange rates then a lot of people just get booted into poverty and you get, just like, an explosion of the service sector and an immiseration of that labor. Um and so if without the um, without all these cost excesses, you actually have a much more stratified society, um and uh, like, in a sense, that all of these upper middle classes just dissolve into the proletariat and the proletariat itself gets more miserated, right? I?

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:35

mean I want to talk about the PMC for a second, my favorite, my least favorite topic One despite people fighting the last war like Catherine Liu and I'm not saying I don't want to come at Kathy, like she's always wrong despite people fighting the last war like Catherine Liu, uh um, and I'm I'm not saying I don't want to come at Kathy Like she's always wrong. I just think that like focusing on elite professor right now is like they've already kind of lost. Like they've lost.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:56:03

Uh, that's true, but there's also been this tendency I've seen from some people to double down oh yeah, on the other side of that, like no, this really wasn't like the problem. It is really just like, um, like these internalized, uh, like racism. The misogyny is which, of course, but you know, and part of that plays into it is that, like the material basis of of why, um, of why misogyny gets associated with this anti-bureaucratic stance, is because of how educated professionals became a gendered division of labor thing, and all of these things are materially interconnected um, I mean, adolf reed is even right to some degree.

C. Derick Varn: 1:56:55

For example, as you're seeing, resentments at elite speaking for the community, even within quote, marginalized, unquote and I'm using that because that's a contested term, guys, I'm not using it say that marginalization doesn't exist. Communities, um, which, which was already manifesting and things that have already kind of gone away, but indicating the problems inherent to it, such as African descendants of slaves, only reparations and stuff like that, the anger at Caribbean and Nigerian immigrants over-representing black elites, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Nicolas Villarreal: 1:57:43

I think that should have been obvious is this was, in many ways, the point of DEI and affirmative action was to create like minority elites and so on, and in like a part of it. Part of it was resentment of them, but part of it was also those elites finding their interests in more conservative causes of like the Black Petty Boie, um, and voting for trump, uh, and so on well, yeah, I, I think we should actually set.

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:14

I mean, I think you're right, but I think we should separate out di, which is a late stage of them, versus affirmative action, which is an early stage of development. Sure, um, because one of the things that we can look at di initiatives is they were often used to help rich immigrants in ways that, like, affirmative action wasn't um, and the other thing that we can look at is affirmative action didn't have a whole lot of cost associated with it. I mean it did, but it didn't. Like you weren't really losing money on accepting these people. Di initiatives created whole new bureaucracies with entire bureaucratic interests that were completely separate from that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:53

Um, and I, I get that's why there's a lot of anger at it. Um, and people talk about right, was it meant? But like, if you bring it on eternalized misogyny or whatever, you're also like well, why did that ever come up? Like it isn't just because people hate themselves. That's ridiculous. Like, um, and you also have to look at what are the class positions of these different immigrant groups. Why would some immigrant groups be more given to it than others?

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:21

And one of the things I've pointed out is like, for example, the black community is highly employed in municipal labor, particularly black men actually, who have jobs, um, who aren't entrepreneurs, are subject to other kinds of uh, precaritization, for lack of a better word um, and uh, latin immigrants, who often small, poor, petite bourgeois, because they couldn't have access to jobs, because they don't always speak English, which is kind of required to do bureaucratic municipal labor. So you know, even though people love to hire people in municipal labor who speak multiple languages, you do kind of have to speak english. So you see this, you see these patterns diverge, and even leftists don't look at the material reasons for why this is case. They'll bring up oh, cubans are reactionary, or venezuelan immigrants are reactionary. I'm like, yeah, but they're small parts of this population.

C. Derick Varn: 2:00:25

You can't explain what you're seeing in terms of that, and you're not even trying to really explain it. Um, and my thing about katherine lewin, the last war, though, is that the pmc never really made sense as a unified class, except in that it had a unified relationship towards perpetuating liberal ideology. But we've seen FIRE, finance, investment, real estate, what's the E Engineering?

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:00:58

I think it might have been RE real estate.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:01

Yeah. Real estate, okay, yeah, there we go. Real estate, that end of the professional of the PMC, the management in those fields have never actually been as liberal as the university professors and media people that we all imagine represent the PMC. That, even though there is a relationship in this domination of white color fields by the university, and I pointed this out. Someone's arguing me about the pmc because they're like well, the pmc is because all college is about training management and I'm like brother man, that hasn't been true since the 80s and it's only his, it was only ever historically true.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:42

From like 1955 to like 1989. It was already over over during the period of neoliberalization. What credentialization did, however particularly in the 90s and this accelerated actually in the aughts, particularly in the late aughts, when everyone went back in the university and started getting higher degrees is that white-collar jobs started throwing up new credentialing requirements to limit candidates and possible applicants, because universal literacy was generally assumed, and so although I think funnily, after that happened, you can't assume universal literacy anymore. We've seen literacy rates decline pretty precipitously in the last decade and a half, but still most people can kind of read, and for a lot of jobs that's all you really need is can you kind of read? You don't need to be able to make strong inferences or whatever.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:02:47

I have been saying, saying to like some conservative people I know who really support vouchers it's like if you really replace the whole public school system with vouchers, I think that we would see a significant population who couldn't even sound out letters absolutely.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:03

um, because a lot of the elite schools they're like oh, they'll go to elite, religious private schools. They don't want to deal with your government and they'd have to if they take your vouchers, so they're just not going to. They're already profitable, they don't need your money and the schools that would take it would be like the most questionable private institutions that you could possibly conjure up.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:03:23

So, yeah, all of the studies that exist to support vouchers are like well, look at these people who went to these existing successful private schools. That's not what the future would be if they actually did that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:37

Right. No, all those are bait and switch studies and anyone who understands this knows this. So, yes, I do think we're going to see an acceleration of education. I also think public education is going to become more and more viable. I also think public education has become more and more viable. The attacks on public for all of Trump's talk of labor, we haven't seen the worst parts of Project 2025 even begun to be enacted, which is like destroy the NCLLB Although that's a possibility, because Elon Musk is leading a fucking lawsuit to enable that. We shouldn't rule it out but also things that we haven't seen, as the legislature throwing all labor law back to the States. Um and uh. We haven't seen that because I actually think even the bourgeoisie think that would be fucking crazy. Um, because it would make it. Would. It would make the already perilous thing of trying to navigate 50 different state laws even more perilous.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:04:36

As a bookkeeper, I can already tell you that the existing differences in state taxes are really annoying for businesses. The systems to log into these things are really Byzantine. The fact that, oh what if New York introduces this certain system or Texas introduces this mandatory immigration thing or whatever, it'll be really annoying and bullshit and increase costs 20 years ago almost exactly, I worked at an insurance company and even back then I remember having to code for different legal regimes.

C. Derick Varn: 2:05:14

And at one point I discovered, while I was doing an accounting audit yes, Virginia, even though I'm an English major at one point I did accounts, receivable accounting and legal paperwork but I discovered we were losing hundreds of. I actually don't know why I'm still identifying with this corporation I haven't worked with for 20 years, but we discovered that we were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on just coding something wrong to comply with state law. Cool, and it was one state, it was fucking Michigan. Yeah, you know.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:05:52

I have the same fucking problem with Michigan. It's fucking assholes.

C. Derick Varn: 2:05:56

Michigan has an insanely weird accounting system. It's Michigan and whenever you have problems, if you those of us who work in a worked in insurance or accounting, where I was like fucking Michigan and fucking New Jersey and sometimes fucking florida, but like, and then it's fucking california, but you'd be surprised that california is like five or six, it's not one. And new york actually rarely comes up because it's pretty rational, believe it or not, because they have all the business law that takes place there.

C. Derick Varn: 2:06:27

Right, california is a little weirder, but it actually more affects manufacturing than bookkeeping, because you have to put a warning on everything, because everything fucking causes cancer, according to California. But I mean, I say this, this and I've talked to you about this this has led to this weird irony that, like quote communist, unquote china. Uh, I'm not here to have that debate. Whether or not we can call them communist or not, they don't the most they'll ever claim a socialist and they're inconsistent even on that in official documents. Um, but uh, my point is there's less weird ass overhead in china, and china, by the way, is not like a super. I mean, it's a strong, centralized state, but it's actually provincially. There's a lot of provincial power. There's differences in provincial governments that most americans have no comprehension of, um, and even I, who do have a comprehension of them, don't really understand them. Um, so it's not a super simple system and yet sure as fuck is simpler than ours. So, um, the eu, which is a red tape generating fucking machine, is in some ways easier to deal with with ours, because at least it's more consistent moment for the state. But I also find that, basically, maybe marx needed to do some more deep history on elites and elite cycles? Uh, because I think we have a dick. I, when I say a decadent elite, people think I'm just talking about their morality, but I'm actually talking about their inability to generate competence. Competence is now now so specialized that the ability to think and the ways that we need people to think, to do more general competence is foreclosed of a lot of elite people. And this is why people are so mad at all these bureaucracies and shit, because it does seem like we're throwing more and more money to get less and less results across the board.

C. Derick Varn: 2:08:47

And I talk about this in education, since no Child Left Behind. What happened in education? Well, there was a massive expansion of administrative bureaucracy, not just at the post-secondary level Everybody knows about that but at the secondary and primary level. School board bureaucracies doubled, site bureaucracies increased by a fourth. Yet what do they do? Well, they're constantly busy. I work with them, they really are working all the time, but they're not doing the things we associate with principals. Principals aren't disciplining kids that much. They're increasingly farming it out back to the classroom in a crazy reparative justice, but with no supports and time and anything else to make that possible. Um, or restorative justice, whatever word we're using today, um and and people are like, why are the admin getting into this? Well, because they needed more time to do their paperwork and just offsites that.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:09:46

But I mean even just the most basic part of it the testing. It's that now, because of that, we have federal testing and we have state testing on top of that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:56

We have municipal testing and this, that and the other, and even when they so, even in a state like Utah, testing doesn't matter. Here, it has no appreciable effects except on the school's rating and it doesn't even really affect school funding that much anymore. Um, but we still do it and waste a ton amount of time on it, even if it's like not our primary mission focus, and there are states where it is our primary mission focus. When I, when I was teaching in georgia 2009, I gave five standardized benchmarks, three different standardized tests and two additional tests and one federal test in the same year. It was 11 standardized tests in the same year. Now I've heard that's been reduced, but it hasn't gone away.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:10:48

No, according to my mom, who's a teacher, it's just gotten worse, at least here in Virginia.

C. Derick Varn: 2:10:54

It depends. It's been reduced out here. Here's one of the things that I'll tell you, though. A lot of states, both liberal and conservative, have a schizophrenic attitude towards testing. They don't want to get rid of it, but they want to remove its stakes, because it's proof that they're ineffective, and there's a popular backlash against the testing. But what we're replacing it with, like the liberal call to replace testing with grades? As you know, I'm quoted Freddie DeBoer, but Freddie's right, I knew this before him.

C. Derick Varn: 2:11:27

If you want to talk about racial bias and class bias, etc. You think it's bad with standardized test, it is a hundred times worse than grading, because that's subjective bias all the way down. There is no check, um, so you know what the, the universities, do well, what we see them doing is relying more and more on zip code and and intangibles like letters of recommendation, which are class reproductive as fuck and also, as you implied, uh, require a certain amount of intellectual subservience. Um, and the fact I've also pointed this out this may be why you see more liberals, like people say, oh, education makes people liberal, and I'm like that's kind of true, but if you actually look at the stats, grad school makes people liberals yeah uh, it used to actually be that undergrad education made more liberals than it does now.

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:23

About 50 of the people who go through undergrad education reject, reject the liberal bias in it. Um, as it is more pronounced and obvious today. Uh, but grad school requires that and what does it take to get in the grad school?

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:37

recommendations from tenured professors yeah diversity statements that I mean I not in my state they're illegal now but diversity statements which, uh, which you have to have a lot of both cultural and real capital to be able to write correctly, to be able to do the additional right kind of ngo uh stuff and this, and I mean you have kids competing for elite schools starting ngos at 17 to write a good diversity statement, and I'm not making that up. Um so, as a as a marxist, what are we to do? And what I've seen interesting about the marxist right now is is this tendency towards tailing the bourgeois factions and pretending that somehow marxism, both entailing the progressive bourgeoisie and which I think you and I both agree, aren't actually progressive at this point. They're bureaucratic.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:13:30

Um, and I think the biden administration really exposed that, that this is right on its own terms.

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:38

But now you see people trying to tell trump and I'm like, what the fuck? I I've read four different marxists claim trump is revolutionary. And I'm like last time I checked, change is not automatically revolutionary. If all change is revolutionary, then the word revolution is unnecessary and doesn't mean any goddamn thing. So you know, like Reagan was revolutionary, like, okay, no Like, but it does seem like to me. Me, even those of us who should theoretically be intellectually outside of the system enough to mount a kind of independent political and at least an analysis of the situation. Um, it seems really rare that anyone's actually able to do that, and even when people claim to do it, they're still usually tailing one side or the other and trying to make excuses for it. Why do you see that? I mean, why do you think that's the case right now?

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:14:35

I mean, it's like this there's no alternatives, right, there's nothing. There's been no outside political alternative that's been created. I might you know my hope, my political hope, is that, um, eventually, that the left faction wins in the DSA and starts to create more of that podcast recently, um, about, uh, what like, what, what could possibly be done to reverse, like the social atomization a bit? Um, and I think that there's like, there's an outside um possibility of like. There is this incredible need that people have right now to fulfill these broader social reproduction functions, which are being totally neglected or are being made extremely expensive because of the professional, professional professionalization of those functions.

C. Derick Varn: 2:15:44

So aka how expensive is the date, not just in taking people out, but to even meet people?

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:15:49

Well, that, and the child rearing and elder care and all those, yeah, child rearing costs have now outpaced education and inflationary costs.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:15:57

It's like insane, but the idea I had and I have this, I'm planning to actually write a paper for a conference this summer is that if there was like a corporate forum for voluntary associations where people where, like, taxes on barter no longer applied, that you could begin to start seeing people reach out to other people in their community to fulfill those social reproduction functions in a non-professional way, because a lot of like I mean a lot of the people like the big problem with barter taxes is that they introduce a like a cash liability to an activity that doesn't produce any cash. If somebody was to make a full year's median wage be a barter the equivalent the bottom 40% of Americans would not have enough money to pay the associated taxes. 40% of Americans would not have enough money to pay the associated taxes. But if you do that, you can allow people to do a lot of these functions for a much lower cost. Basically is the idea. So that's one idea I had.

C. Derick Varn: 2:17:24

Yeah, I've been struck by several ideas that have come up in our recent conversations that I think are relevant to this one. There has been a proletarianization of professionals that used to be effectively white collar petite bourgeoisie. Christian Parenti not a guy whose politics I currently like very much actually did this analysis of the PMC, where it's like, look, the pmc is quote real, but if you actually look at it, 60 to 70 percent of it is actually would classify as wage workers and working class, but they have some weird mediated relationship to the state, and that means that they are protected by state patronage. So he's celebrating the removal of their state patronage, which I think is weird. Well, I don't think it's weird. I mean, I do think these people are a problem, but I was also like but replace it with what, though?

C. Derick Varn: 2:18:17

And the other problem is that a lot of workers were effectively turned into really shitty forms of petite bourgeoisie through gig work, through neoliberal transfers, through a lot of neoliberalization involved breaking up monopolies, which, uh, we think about them forgiving monopolies, but they broke up a lot of the big ones before they got to where they didn't ignore their monopoly laws, um, and that leads to people having complex tax relationships, which I'm going to hesitate to say. Democrats actually like making regressive. They like regressive taxes on the petite bourgeoisie, which increases the petite bourgeoisie's reactionary nature. Yeah, so you know. I said this, for example, when Biden changed the threshold of generating a 1099 from about $20,000 to about 500.

C. Derick Varn: 2:19:20

Which means that, yeah, he did that. That's what all that banking thing they're like, oh, we're just going after tax fraud. It's technically true, but they're also going after a lot of gig workers who like barely make any money. Um, as a way to increase public revenue. You're not getting enough public revenue from fucking gig workers to for that to matter. That's. That's some weird ideological bullshit that has some material basis because you want the bureaucracy to have jobs.

C. Derick Varn: 2:19:49

But let's be frank, if you actually start auditing the bourgeoisie, that requires a lot more labor time and workforce and all this and the irs really to have and it's not like the that the, the democrats want to be looking to expand the irs's power dramatically over the bourgeoisie, which of course would also lead to tax problems itself.

C. Derick Varn: 2:20:08

Um, aka the bourgeoisie, which of course would also lead to tax problems itself, AKA the bourgeoisie would start hiding their money again. So I say this to say that that element of is interesting to me. When you factor that in, it makes sense. Why not just a lot of the petite bourgeois the true petite bourgeois, you know, small time bodega holders and all this are getting more and more reactionary, but also why a lot of like working class people who are partially gig workers and stuff are getting more and more reactionary because between inflation and the tax burden, um, they're getting hit pretty hard. And you know I don't love the Petit Bouffron. I think you and I, like you know, Marx thought they were going to be a progressive force. I think you and I were like they've tended to be the most regressive force in history.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:21:05

I mean this was another thing that was like very of the moment in Marx. It was never true sense right.

C. Derick Varn: 2:21:13

Well, I mean, even when he's writing about bonapartism he's like the lump in and I'm like, oh for the petite bourgeoisie, oh for the petite bourgeoisie. And later Marxists were like oh, the peasants are a problem, like, the people of the interest are fucking weird.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:21:34

But Strotsky called that out. He was very good about that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:21:38

Yeah, I'm not a trot, but his writing on the Petit Bourgeoisie actually tends to be better than a lot of other Marxist writings about their actual interest and why they're so weird. Because they have a very, if you break it down, their relationship to the capitalist state's actually very interesting. They're dependent on the capitalist state basically mitigating impossible things for them, either protecting them from competition, um, or protecting them from being a revenue source from the state itself, which, of course, the state can't do. It would even invalidate the currency if they did too much of it. So, like the demands are impossible, but it means that all kinds of people are competing for them. When you add the fact that you have this strata of professional workers who have weird relationships and servile relationships to the state apparatus and I think you see this when you know I always point out, yeah, we talk about the oligarchs, we talk about Trump and we talked a little bit about like the, the irony of like Democrats defending institutions, that it doesn't really make sense, if you're anti-oligarchic, to defend the major universities, for example. But there's another element of it that I find fascinating, and it's in the way that liberals talk. They talk even ones like artists and shit people who should know better talk about qualifications and credentials of political candidates.

C. Derick Varn: 2:23:05

Now that's seemingly meritocratic. The problem is their qualifications and credentials are institutional. You've done a number of institutional hours. You served in the right institutions, such you have the qualifications to do this. It's not about public opinion. Public opinion is assumed to be wrong. This is very technocratic. But it's not even really truly technocratic in that these credentials aren't based off of the merit of you doing much. They're based off of you going through the system and the institution itself being a grantor of merit, and most liberals today think that way. Now, as you point out, that's not historically normal, even for liberals.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:23:50

As you point out that's not historically normal, even for liberals. Well, I mean, there was like that progressive tendency that we were talking about earlier. Is that, like that, in particular like women and minorities, were able to basically petition like these organizations, these institutions for inclusion, um, and were able to like, like appeal to this authority to get, to get in, and then, and because that was successful, there was a progressive association there. Um, and I think that that's the idea. Is that, because educational institutions are about like reason and like these certain rules, that they are more progressive and like just in some way, than like the market or, um, like other forms of authority, and I think this real, I think it does go back to some very fundamental things in liberalism, um, because what does mary walson craft say is the reason that, um, women should be, uh, given like these fundamental rights in the same liberal framework? It's because they share the same capability for reason as men, and in that sense, what is really at stake here is a battle over what is counted as reason. Basically, Right.

C. Derick Varn: 2:25:25

So if we go back to our Vavarian or Frank Frisco terms, we see the domination of institutional instrumental reason as opposed to market instrumental reason as seen as meritocratic, because there's not a profit motive in the same way although there is, but it's not obvious in the same way. Um, and, and this is why, like leftist reactions, like just condemning all the pmc without looking at their internal divisions in any real way, or, uh, you know the prior to that thing that still has some hanger-ons talking about bullshit jobs. You know, you hear like if you are another richard scary poster, then you don't have a real job. And I'm like I can put any job on a richard scary poster. You just wasn't in the seven, in the 70s. I don't know why you're trying to freeze time.

C. Derick Varn: 2:26:19

I don't know, but okay, it's a popular meme among anarchists and it comes. It comes from david graver. Oh okay, the bullshit jobs thesis, and you and I pointed out that the bullshit jobs aren't actually all that bullshit.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:26:42

Like like bureaucratic drift is a response to increased oversight and all kinds of contradictions of ways to solve. I mean, this is why it's very unlikely that a lot of these problems with cost are going to get solved, even with this sledgehammer wave right now. I mean, if they are, it'll go down as a world historical disaster for the broader population, as I was talking about earlier.

C. Derick Varn: 2:27:06

It'll mean the US also becomes Argentina, which also would be bad for the entire world, including the multipolar hegemonic. But like no one really wants the U? S to do that, when people are like, oh, you know, this is what they've been able to rise of China, and I'm like, yeah, except it also removes it. I mean no-transcript discipline, and he's probably frankly right about that. But if he doesn't, then he's going to be stuck at like four percent growth forever, which is still not too bad world historically speaking, to be quite average, uh, honest and average. But it is not what the chinese miracle is supposed to produce and thus will actually have some limitations in the far-flung future. However, I agree with you, there is domestic capacity to absorb it there. Here, what?

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:28:18

little domestic capacity we seem to have. We seem to be dead set on dismantling in some ways from both sides. Yeah, I mean, like this is kind of like like it's interesting thinking about, like how Marx was talking about the teleology of like bourgeois society because this was not what he had in mind that like that bourgeois society could end with this like as I've talked about many times before, like this freezing of bourgeois relations in Amber. What does that look like? It looks a lot like argentina, that there's a mass immiseration. This is incredibly stratified society. Um, that returns to some kind of malthusian trap of some sort.

C. Derick Varn: 2:28:58

Uh, basically, it's a common ruin. Answer to the marx question, which marx considered but didn't think was most likely, right yeah, but in, but in way.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:29:07

And I think there is a sense that, like the Chinese are not necessarily communist but is like they really do genuinely believe in, like the stagist theory of state capitalism that Marx and Engels outline. Because, like that, why else would you like specifically make these moves of, like boosting the state side of the economy and suppressing the bourgeoisie politically? I mean that's, that's what the pattern that I'm starting to see out of it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:30:04

Yeah, I always say that I don't think China is a socialist society by Marxist definition. I've read their constitution and they claim it, but then it's hard to square that away, with Xi talking about socialist modernizations necessary to achieve socialism by 2050. But I do think there are some still Marxists, at least in the majority of the Politburo. Whether or not, at least now. I don't know that. That was always true, frankly, particularly during the Xi Jinping period and the Deng period, but at least now that's true.

C. Derick Varn: 2:30:36

What I would say, though, is what China is trying to do is still limited by the fact that it's operating nationally and doesn't seem to have any real means to start to ask even ask, much less demand other people join up with the socialist system. It views its own national sovereignty as sacrosanct in a way that also actually complicates any sense of proletarian internationalism that can emerge from it, and I think that's actually the real critique of what China is doing and the fact that it's it is still having to function within a national market where it can consume the national bourgeois. I mean, it can subsume elements of the national bourgeoisie, but it really can't subsume the international bourgeoisie Not really. It's still having to get foreign investment. It's still having to do these other major things.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:31:28

No I think that's true, but I think it is also a second effect here of if, like um, we get into a situation where the two models that are being tended towards are like argentina and this, like stagnant bourgeois society versus a state capitalism that can actually do things, then I think that there will be copycats eventually emerging to copy the model that works. Basically.

C. Derick Varn: 2:32:05

The question is can it work when there's no buyer of last resort to do the Dungist period with? That's the question, because that market, which Deng was able to ride to get the internal investment into China, no longer exists on the world scale, in this world that you are positing. So the middle income trap remains the middle income trap. I mean I see reasons to be hopeful about China, even though I also think, frankly, once Xi dies there's going to be some interesting internal deliberations within the CPC. I think that's undeniable. I think one of the things that consolidating all the power in one man, even though that man's been relatively reasonable, um, is that, uh, the collective rule contestation is going to be hard when he gets too old to stay in power, and who knows?

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:33:03

But I mean they still like have institutions for that? They haven't. He didn't like totally destroy them on his way up.

C. Derick Varn: 2:33:12

No, no, he has not gotten rid of all the, he has not totally consolidated power in himself, which is kind of different than, say, putin or Most dictators in Sub-Saharan Africa.

C. Derick Varn: 2:33:26

Yeah, the Sub-Saharan, uh trump is apparently trying to do to us. Um, uh, I mean, it's interesting because, uh, in some ways, this resembles the project 2025 announcements and in other ways, it is totally alien to even that. And, um, I do think if I was going to be betting on the world power, I'd be betting on china, not us right now, but I'd also say that china's going to go through a hard time because it is still tied to us. Um, we're, you know, the first among equal in a multipolar world, one of them going down. Everybody else gets a little dinged on the way down. There's no, there's no way around that, and if you're like europe, you're just fucked. Um, so sorry, europeans, I know I tell you that all the time, but it's just I, just I. I feel like, uh, you're already seeing what's going to happen when america's like you know what, we don't really need you anymore. We can like partner up with russia or whatever. We don't give a shit. Um, like, um, and it's like can they do that?

C. Derick Varn: 2:34:31

it's like, yes, yes, we can we've always been kind of afraid of the Russian resources meeting and German industrial power, and you know what, maybe we backed the wrong side of this battle. I'm trying to keep the trying to work with it through germany. So let's work with it through russia. We don't give a shit anymore. Have a nice day, and I mean that provides. I mean we're already seeing this like there.

C. Derick Varn: 2:35:02

I I hate to say that conservatives were right, but conservatives were right that part of the social democratic largesse of late stage eu projects was based on basically only france giving a shit about its own defense. Um, and that's over, like um. So it's. It is interesting. So I, I do. I mean I think we end this conversation with Fukuyama's. World is cracking up, but history has both kind of restarted and not restarted. What I would say is the long 20th century is over, but we still haven't found anything to actually replace liberalism. But we still haven't found anything that actually replaced liberalism. And you know, maybe some weird liberal, socialist hybrid thought comes out of China that saves us all. I don't know, but as I tell people when they're like, what should I get on the Chinese game, I'm like you're not Chinese, you can't.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:36:04

Yeah, I mean it's like you know, go ahead.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:36:07

Yeah, I mean, it's like I do feel that there will be something coming out of China of like this state capitalism. We'll see a revival like a more serious state capitalism, because the last time it happened it couldn't like deal with the like the it threatening the bourgeois class at all. Right, maybe something more serious there, but I do still think that even if you do that, we're still kind of at a crossroads, because what the state capitalism is is still like a different way of fully universalizing that universal class.

C. Derick Varn: 2:36:46

Right it's still. It's still bureauc bureaucrats, maybe bureaucrats who are more responsive to working class opinion. I think they are in china, like seriously, but they're still bureaucrats in charge. Like I, I pointed out that, like, the red engineers and lawyers in china do have the same kind of democratic representative tendency that they did in the liberal west. We're just gonna they're at a different point of that and, uh, the chinese communist party does put real limits on it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:37:16

I was even recently trying to figure out if china still embraces new democracy or not, because all the four stars are on his flag and, for people who don't know, the four stars represent the four social classes, one of which is the petite bourgeoisie, um, um, which I'm not happy about, but nonetheless, um are the national bourgeoisie, which was mostly petite in the early 20th century, not so true anymore. Um, but uh, in their constitution they don't they. They say that they live in there under the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasant, which is uh, quote, and this is a turn of art that I would love to know mandarin, to know how this reads in mandarin uh, we live in the dictatorship of the proletariat and president, which is, in essence, the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is them like admitting? Well, it kind of isn't, but like I don't know't know, I'm just going to say it is, but nonetheless I do find that interesting to deal with because there's also the, the CCPCC, which is the, the, the other big body that meets and governs. It's multi-party and multi-class and does seem to represent new democracy.

C. Derick Varn: 2:38:32

New democracy Cause there's class representatives and stuff in it that are not in the national assembly or the. Anyway, I say that to say that I actually have been trying to make sense of, of constitutional claims in China, and it's harder to do, and I'm not always sure if it's because it's bad translations or if I really just don't understand some of the innovations they've made to Marxism or something, and so I do think a lot of people should learn Mandarin. I guess it was one of the things I'd say here. But, and I do think also, any left worth its salt is gonna have to walk a fine line in regards to china well, what I'm more interested in is like if we can get a left that is genuinely anti-professional um in the west but isn't just aping conservatives being anti-professional?

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:39:29

Yeah, because I mean in, realistically, the, the like the conservatives are not actually anti-professional. What they are is we, we want the professionals, but we just want them to be our inside clique, um, so that they do what we want.

C. Derick Varn: 2:39:45

Right. I mean, I think you know this if you've read against Leviathan by Sam Francis, where he talks about using populism to create a counter elite and he literally just lays out that strategy, which I think paleo conservatives by and large, really, even if they haven't read him and they're not a racialist like he was, or whatever they buy, they buy in large. Do you see that, like he was or whatever they buy, they by and large, do you see that, like michael lynd also more or less says the same thing, that, like the working class, are just a force to decide? I mean, in a way, this is almost like the roman republic. But what do you mean by that barn? Okay, let me explain it to you.

C. Derick Varn: 2:40:23

In the roman republic, when they had the assembly that actually met, votes were weighted by social class, and if the elites and the center elites were contested and they couldn't come to majority because of the weight of their vote, then the petty property list, proletarii, where we get the word proletarian from would get a vote. They normally. Normally it didn't matter because the uh, the patrician votes were so weighted that, um, you never got to that point. But patrician opinion was mixed and high level, titled plebeian opinion was mixed, then you would get down to the pluritary, which are people who, uh, had no property. They literally had less than a hundred thousand pennies or asset assays or whatever the assay the smallest bronze and copper currency they use and when they were recorded in the census the reason why they're called proles and where we even get the name from is they only were counted according to their prole, their descendants. So what it referred to is the only thing you have to offer as your children to the state. Uh, but you did offer your children to the state as a member of the proletariat.

C. Derick Varn: 2:41:37

So if all the elites can't vote, then you get to, and I kind of feel that's the way most conservatives use. The working class, frankly is like well, the elites make all the decisions, and when we're at war with each other, the working class gets to say but you're make all the decisions. And when we're at war with each other, the working class gets to say but you're really just there to to divide up which elite opinion is going to win. And if you read the way michael win, for example, describes the way america works, he thinks that, like he thinks that there's professionals versus the, the, the petty, the, the, the petty bourgeoisie, and there's an overclass that makes decisions and the overclass, uh, will make the decision on who's going to win. The professionals that are petty bourgeoisie, based kind of on how pissed off the pro, the working classes like I mean this is part of the problem with them is that they like the.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:42:27

In order to make drastic social changes, the more you actually need more people to have be involved by it and like the like. This is like. The big problem with the neo-reactionaries in particular is that they're like. They think that the important part is like the monarchical dictatorship and stuff like. No, the only reason you guys are relevant at all is because of your marginal association to the actually popular Bonapartist figure, right and yeah, but you're willing to be a media apparatus for him without relying on traditional media leads.

C. Derick Varn: 2:43:05

That's the only thing anyone cares.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:43:06

Yeah, but to go back to the left for a second, it's like the struggle to have a non-professional left. I mean it's such a. It feels like threading, like a needle, basically, because historically, the left has always been professionalized. That's the other thing you have to deal with.

C. Derick Varn: 2:43:27

That's not. You Professionals begin as a thing. When anarchists come at Marxists, like well, most of you guys are just professionals anyway. I'm like, well, okay, well, that's a dumb argument, but you're not wrong.

C. Derick Varn: 2:43:41

Yeah so you know, although my response to anarchists is like but when's the last time the working class has been in largely in agreement with you, like 1935, spain? But anyway, not to shit on anarchists. I actually kind of respect anarchists these days if they're not annoying, um, but I do think we really do have a problem. I mean, the problem that you have is twofold. Uh, leftism tends to need an educated cadre to lead the quote advanced sectors of the proletariat. That's like the second international thing. The bolsheviks didn't reject it. That's why they called for professional revolutionaries. They just wanted them to be revolutionary as opposed to reformist.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:44:36

Um, but that was still a separate thing from what we consider professionals today. No, no, no. It like you. It wasn't like you went to college to become a professional revolutionary. No, it's just all you did.

C. Derick Varn: 2:44:47

That's what it meant like you went to college to become a professional revolutionary. No, you just just all you did. That's what it meant, like you were supported by the party's dues to do that as a job. I mean, one of the things that makes it hard to talk about this is is, even though we're only talking about a hundred years, sometimes the class relations prior to war, war one are so foreign to people that you may as well be talking about 12th century France, like and I know that sounds strange to say, but I really have been like no, intellectual doesn't mean what you think it meant. It was not referring to college professors and 1890s Russia, because they barely existed. If they're referring to the feudal apparatchiks, is what they're referring to? Um, and like people being patronized in the arts to make the state look better and shit like that. That's what they're referring to. The university system it existed there, but barely Are trying to explain to people that, like when you say PMC and you start reading it back before World War II, I don't know what you're talking about and I barely know what you're talking about now, but I have a good idea at least.

C. Derick Varn: 2:46:03

But like when you're reading it back to like the 1870s, like Catherine Liu, apparently, is going to do in her next book. I'm like who the fuck are you talking about? Government apparatchiks, management? Because one of the problems of the Ehrenreich thesis is that the Ehrenreich thesis makes it sound like what automatically puts you in the PMC class is education, and it's because education quote trains you for management. But that latter, as we said, has not been true since probably the 1980s. So what are we talking about now? And I think what we're actually talking about is the subservience of these institutions, implicate in people who take to them, and we are right to be mad about that. There is that, you know, but go ahead. I mean because what did?

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:46:55

start in the 1870s was specifically that, like the, the research institutions and liberal universities became one thing that like now, that like all the things that you did, all of the practical things were now not just things that you did as an express, like you took your education and then did them. Now it was all an integrated thing into this whole apparatus.

C. Derick Varn: 2:47:20

And the universities have become somewhat too big to fail, cause even even the conservatives, in their anti-professional mode, don't really want to completely destroy them. No, they really want to completely destroy them. No, they just want to curtail them.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:47:32

What they want is the original German system. They want it to be direct, like an ideological discipline to some reactionary ideology. That's it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:47:42

Well, here's the other thing, though, is I think these new reactionaries are actually because they don't come from classes that have historical relationships to this remarkably bad at understanding the military, although apparently so are liberals, and even maybe so are you and I, because I thought the libert, the military, would stand up to more of this than it is, but then again, we're only a few months in. I don't know what's going to fucking happen. So I can tell you, uh, that my spidey sense for understanding the dynamics of liberal institutions and capitalist development has been pretty good until the beginning of the biden administration, and now my spidey sense is just like it's all fucked. I can't predict anything anymore, and that's where I'm at. I'm like we've hidden it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:48:33

Clearly, this has run out of steam and yet doesn't feel to be over, which is why I keep on talking about decadence and stuff, because I'm like something feels fundamentally broken to most people in society, in most social classes, not just, you know, the lower ones are the top ones, historically speaking, that is what we call the subjective need for a revolution in Leninist terms, and there is some objective factors tied to that even today, and yet I don't see anything, including this current reaction, really fundamentally totally dismantling this? At least not internally, and unfortunately states tend to change internally, otherwise they tend to absorb who takes them over. I mean, like you can think about the various Chinese empires and how they change all the time, and yet that Mandarin class was able to control it pretty well, but here's the thing.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:49:34

It's also is also like why did we see the cultural revolution happen in china? And like we've?

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:49:40

because like we've had all these problems with professionals now, but we've only had them for 150 odd years, yeah, we haven't had them for like 3 000 or whatever, this experience of knowing how education can be used as a means of disciplining people in society was the most obvious thing in the world to even the most remote peasant in China. Everyone knew it, but we still don't. We are behind the Chinese peasants in the 1960s. Basically, is our problem with this technology?

C. Derick Varn: 2:50:21

Yeah, I mean.

C. Derick Varn: 2:50:27

The problem that I have with the way a lot of people talk about this is that they really can't imagine an independent left independently attacking these people yeah all they can imagine is like lining up around some bourgeois force or something worse to to attack these people and then like cheering it on, and I'm like you're not in social control there. You're subsuming yourself to a force that you don't even like, um. But if we defend this social force, which a lot of left populists have lost credibility by doing quite frankly, yeah, um, we also substitute ourselves to something that we naturally shouldn't like, um. And so you know, just like I remember when you first came on my podcast and you said you had a soft spot for bureaucracy, and I was like, well, that's a problem, um, and it's not because I think bureaucracy is necessarily bad, it's because I have this intuition that's similar to you about this professional birth class being a problem. But also thinking about how to unwind it without collapsing everybody in a miseration is something that I really don't have a good answer for, because we are probably going to do that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:51:38

If, like, we actually really dismantle these governmental and and whatever institutions, it will will look a lot like argentina, with like 50 of the population impoverished. It's bad enough now, but we're like at 11, you're looking at like half and then you know 30 above that, still pretty fucking precarious. And then, like we have an uber elite and then you can talk to me about neo-feudalism, but, um, like, because then I'd be like, okay, we have recapitulated manorial relations somehow, and hans herman hoppe has proven right and that's shitty relations somehow, and Hans Hermann Hoppe has proven right and that's shitty. But for those of you who don't know, hans Hermann Hoppe was not a neo reactionary, but he kind of presaged it by saying that the most effective capitalism is just feudalism, because in Hans Hermann Hoppe's mind, feudalism is capitalism applied to the government and they still, the neo reactionaries, are still all about that stuff.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:52:38

It's like the, the patchwork thing, um, which is all like like totally utopian nonsense um oh yeah it's it's, it's.

C. Derick Varn: 2:52:50

I mean, we haven't really gone into it. I want to go into it a little bit with Matt McManus to talk about the weird utopian stuff that's creeping up in conservative nationalism that I'm just like that's just made up man, like that's never existed in human history. I don't know what you're on and I don't know how you make it either, and your machine overlords aren't going to do that for you, how you make it either, and your machine overlords aren't going to do that for you.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:53:17

So, like With the crypto network operating system of the future, which is like what Yarvin is making, that's his day job. He's making an operating system that's supposed to bring around the patchwork utopia.

C. Derick Varn: 2:53:33

Yeah, great, lovely, so something that's inefficient, uses tons of power and we don't even know how we get the power to utopia? Yeah, great, lovely, so something that's inefficient, uses tons of power and we don't even know how we get the power to run it. I mean, that's one thing you get about China. They're not doing that shit.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:53:45

And because they're not doing that shit, they even sometimes use our technology and do it better by us imposing scarcity upon them, like DeepSeek, which I really do think is efficient, because the chip ban, that biden push, made it be efficient yeah, there's actually this funny thing that I realized about, like bitcoin in particular, which is that if it actually does take off enough, that that enough people are using it, that it operates like with uh, like, as an equivalent currency, is that the fact that it is designed to permanent, to always gain value, is one of the reasons why people get it. But if that, if you have something like that, um, you basically destroy your ability to like productively produce things, because it's like every, whenever the value of money rises faster, like at a rate, faster than the rate of profit, people will just keep their money. They won't invest in anything.

C. Derick Varn: 2:54:46

Right. It leads to unproductive non-investment, it leads to value hoarding, which eventually would lead to a collapsed system, which is why most economists say you don't want I mean, even most conservative economists say you don't want a super inflationary currency, but you also don't want a super deflationary one. Um, because all it benefits is debt holders. It doesn't benefit production at all, and so it's crazy, and there's a reason why I'm like, yeah, designing your currency to be more deflationary than gold is probably a bad idea.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:55:34

If I wanted to create a meme to destroy bourgeois society, I would probably create something like Bitcoin.

C. Derick Varn: 2:55:44

Here's the thing who needs communists when the bourgeoisie are so good at destroying themselves? Literally, they have to invent communists that don't exist. We aren't doing it. I'm always amazed.

C. Derick Varn: 2:55:57

I'm like I would love to have the supernatural powers over liberals that you attribute to me, but they're mean to me on blue sky, so I don't know what you think. They blame me for every loss they've ever had, even with their objectively not possibly right. I would love to be secretly running all the liberals to do my bidding. I promise you you wouldn't get the world that you have right now. If that was the case, even culturally, like dear god, I would not have unleashed dis Disney movies on the fucking world. Yeah, so Put that shit that way. Yeah, like that's not the diversity that I wanted. I promise you so. But I mean, you know I've actually thought about this.

C. Derick Varn: 2:56:52

I'm like we've gotten to a point where people have to reinvent Cold War liberalism while simultaneously not believing it at all, so they can blame someone for the fact that bourgeoisie is catabolizing itself, which is like kind of special really, which is why I'm now a decadent theory, and it does make I will say this, I'm still a Marxist in some fundamental way, but it does make me go like, okay, we do need to rethink some things, because if marx was right, clearly a window that we were supposed to hit we fucked up with somehow. I don't know how. I'm not here to figure that out. I don't have all the answers, clearly, if I did, we would have already solved this problem.

C. Derick Varn: 2:57:32

Um, but it does seem related to even the professionalization of a large part of um, the, the working class, because one thing I I point out to people is, when you guys get into the distinction between the high end of the working class and the low end of the pmc, most of you can't give me a coherent answer as to what actually demarcates the difference. Um, sometimes you'll just say, well, it's like they're working class people with college educations and they could go beyond. I'm like, well, potential is not something that Marxists have historically given a shit about.

Nicolas Villarreal: 2:58:06

Yeah, I mean. This is why I think it's so important to think of it as like a particular ideology rather than a class, and this is I've said this before is that when you think about it as a class, then you're saying that, like you're doing this really vulgar materialism thing that every particular ideological viewpoint is created from class interest, which isn't true, and so it basically makes up every class, like every class is represented in the educated professionals. But I think that what's really important right now is that we undertake a theoretical effort to think about a program that would be truly anti-professional and, if possible, a practice as well, although it's not much room to maneuver right now just in terms of resources. But to think about the first thing is to even conceptualize what that would look like. If we can't do that, then there's no, there's no going forward.

C. Derick Varn: 2:59:16

To begin with yeah, I think that's absolutely correct and that's where we, we, we have to think bravely here, and I I do think maybe that returns. That means returning to a marxian core of analysis. But I I hate to sound like a fucking revisionist because I'm not on categories, but I have been like maybe we should rethink certain things that we've just assumed to be true Because they haven't really gotten us much fruit, and one of which, at least, is the reliance on labor bureaucracy and the reliance on universities. But then it is really hard to ask people to go it alone when you say that and be like okay now, but don't also, however, turn to the petty bourgeoisie are, to like elite, anti-elite sentiment, where you're just actually propping up some counter elite somewhere, or to making excuses for imperialism. That's's a real fun one, um, or whatever the fuck you're doing.

C. Derick Varn: 3:00:17

Maybe we do really need to go it alone, and that means truly going it alone, and I don't see a lot of people so far being able to do that. But maybe, as this 20th century ends and things get shittier, um, since the threat of nuclear war is back on the table, joy of joys. Maybe people will, I don't know. It seems to me that the one thing we can say about this Trump victory is that this whole left and counter-systemic energy saving the center. I've said that for years. I think we can officially call that over Like we're not doing that.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:01:00

I hope so. I mean do it again.

C. Derick Varn: 3:01:04

It's, it's fucking unforced so go ahead.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:01:08

Yeah, I mean like this what? Everything that happened under Biden just so totally discredited everything about that people I can already see the stirrings of people. They're going to try it again in three or four years in the next presidential run. People are going to try. There has to be people there saying no, we're not doing that shit this time.

C. Derick Varn: 3:01:34

Here's the thing I even know normally fucking Democrats who are saying we're not doing that shit this time. Well, here's the thing. I even know normie fucking democrats who are saying we're not doing that shit this time, which is like I think it's interesting because the one thing that we've seen now I don't mean that this means it's going away, but we are seeing these professionals really cartel themselves down into niches the way that they wanted to do to conservatives, um, and seemingly dig their hands in the sand, and you really see this in liberal leadership. Now I'm not sure what liberal leadership can do. I mean, clearly, the democratic party wasn't like building a militia, for all their talk of civil war and into democracy which, uh, by the way, if they really believed they would have been building a militia but, um, they didn't do that. So you know they didn't mean it, but nonetheless like and they've just kind of rolled over and I think people have felt it.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:02:25

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 3:02:26

And then I do know conservative. I do know smarter conservatives, even more than some leftists trying to tell the Trump administration who like hedge everything they say. We're not going to name names, but we know who they are. Some of the other people that we're talking about, like I'm talking to conservatives who are like these contradictions within what the current Trump administration are doing. You know, I don't know how this is going to play out.

C. Derick Varn: 3:02:50

I don't see how this goes. Well, I mean, the liberals are all hypocrites, but like I don't know what we're doing and I'm like I got nothing for you, man, I can only explain so much um and uh. I feel like you're gonna see that in a conservative base too, because they do have class bases and class interests and things may not get better for them. And after they're done with the glee of watching those annoying ass professors fall or whatever, um, they're going to have to still buy fucking eggs. And liberals can finger rag about that all day. I don't know what the fuck happened to liberals from them being it's the economy stupid under Clinton to like. No, it's racism and internal misogyny all the time, no matter what, no matter what the stats say, no matter what people say no matter what anybody else says.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:03:42

And we're going to shame you for caring about the price of eggs. Um, I mean, that was basically, uh, we can, we can just blame the, the 2016 clinton campaign for that. Um, I think, ultimately but it was a part of like the like, but the grain, the rational kernel there was this exact same thing of the professional, like, this courses of norm that existed, that people really thought that they could make a difference by getting a humanities degree and then going to work in an NGO or the Democratic Party or a government DEI office or something like that. People genuinely thought that was possible and for a while there they had a case that they looked like people.

C. Derick Varn: 3:04:22

It had not been tried. It had not actually been tried, at least not at that scale. Well, now it has, and it didn't work. I mean, that's the other thing that I promise people. Oh, why are the latin communities getting so reactionary for border control? I'm like because we've literally done nothing to resolve any of the contradictions there at all. Nothing at all, nothing, literally nothing. Um, you know and you know how, if trump goes all the way on this or not, I don't know, no one knows, but like, uh, he didn't before, but again we we've. Actually, I will say this Trump has been a black frond figure and that he seems to listen to the voices around him, and I do think Ivanka not being there may mean that we're not getting the same Trump.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:05:13

Um, I mean, I think he is still constrained a bit by the markets, that he doesn't want to see them react too badly to anything.

C. Derick Varn: 3:05:22

Which is why he's wildly inconsistent on his tariff threats, which I also think Yanis Varoufakis wrote something smart. I'm going to say I never say Yanis Varoufakis wrote something smart, but he was giving Trump too many 45-dimensional chest capacities in this article. But one thing I think he was right about is Trump is selling the tariffs like he believes that somehow having the McKinley economy is going to be good for America, which I'm like bro. You literally know what happens next. Everyone knows what happens next.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:06:00

What I want to give Trump credit for is that he is smarter than Liz Truss.

C. Derick Varn: 3:06:09

Although I'm not sure Elon is smarter than Liz Truss, so that might be a problem. But to get back to the situation a little bit, um, uh, I do think part of what the terrorists are actually about is break is making multi-polarity unilateral. By that I mean not the us making all decisions for the world by itself. I don't think trump thinks we can do that actually in that way. He's actually not as hubristic as some of his liberal counterparts. Um, I think he thinks he's going to use tariffs to threaten people to come to the table without going through the proper protocols so that he can have mono e mono deal making.

C. Derick Varn: 3:06:48

I and I think janice farrah focus pointed out, I read it and I'm like I think that's attributing a little bit too much intelligence to Trump's strategy. But I think, even if he's not consciously thinking, that Trump lizard brain is doing that and that explains what he's doing a lot better than him believing in the McKinley economy or whatever. Because you know, if you believe that the government has to be funded by revenues, you're going to have to shrink a lot more than USA ID to like fund the entire government off of tariffs, which I know he's not said he was going to actually do, but he's like flirted with it in public, so who?

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:07:28

knows Related to that. I mean, like in his inauguration it was it struck me how much more he talked about like oil than manufacturing and this is coming like. And then now with the Ukraine thing, he's like yeah, we'll give you security guarantees if you give us like half of all your minerals. And it's a very like. It's trying to take like the Russian economy as like as the model basically that you just have like the Russian economy, as like as as the, as the model basically that you just you just have like, the, like the. But that is kind of like like. He is almost in a sense, seeing the future there of like what, what does like the super, like stationary, bourgeois society, look like it is. It goes back to like the, the primary rent seeking of national resource extraction right, which leaves us with the.

C. Derick Varn: 3:08:21

I guess this is what I can close with to really depress the fuck out of everybody. Um, it leads to 19th century politics with 21st century surveillance and weapons technology. Which is you?

C. Derick Varn: 3:08:32

know, kind of it's not quite stamping on a human face forever, but it's, you know, it's kicking you in the shins forever maybe. And plus there's that whole existential threat of nuclear war with doing that, and plus there's that whole existential threat of nuclear war with doing that. Our chemical warfare, our name, our AI nuclear warhead overlords, I don't know. I mean Nick Lamb would beat off to something like that. So I don't know. I mean I've read his book. I know what he thinks. We should worship the machines, our new gods or whatever the fuck that he's on. This is why you don't do meth kids or whatever the fuck that he's on.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:09:17

This is why you don't do mef kids. It's so funny that he became one of the canons in like in neo-reactionary stuff.

C. Derick Varn: 3:09:24

I mean like I want to actually point out that I think we have Mark Fisher to blame for certain things, like the reason why people know who Curtis Jarvin is is that Mark Fisher was obsessed with combating him because of his connection to Nick Land. Really, the first place I ever read about Moldbug if I ever heard anybody talk about Neo Reaction was on Fisher's K-Punk blog.

C. Derick Varn: 3:09:45

And if you understand Fisher's relationship to the CCRU and its relationship to Nick Land. The fact that he would be on that beat actually makes sense and the stuff he writes about Neo Re reaction is actually smarter than the stuff he writes about the corbett administration. So like um you know, but I I do think, interestingly it was people reading fisher who first got into mole, who first started talking about moldbark outside of the right. Um and neo reaction was interesting because it kind of seemingly came from a completely different place than the other alt-right ideologies. It had less of a long pedigree with um paleo-conservatism.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:10:26

It is not racialist explicitly, it's kind of implicitly racialist, but only kind of I mean it's because it's a Bay Area ideology thing which is its own unique stream of things.

C. Derick Varn: 3:10:40

Well, California reactionaryism is something I would. People talk about, the California ideology but I'm like, but you don't talk about the California nightmare, which is like Troy Southgate and Minchus Mulbuck slash Cody Jarvin and Peter Drinking Blood.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:10:56

Well, now we just got the, the zizians.

C. Derick Varn: 3:10:58

You hear about that, the, the murder cult oh god, this the the weird literally idealist, not not the way marxists use the term, but like actual idealist, pro trans murder cult well they they were like.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:11:15

So I heard about these guys like two years ago at an AI event that they basically were an outgrowth like ex-Miri people, which was like a rationalist AI safety institute and basically like the problem with like rationalist ideology besides, it's like fact, like errors is that it like creates this paranoid and obsessive kind of way of thinking. Um, if you, if you look at like the culture and what they've written and all this stuff, it becomes very obvious, um, and basically, I think you saw that at less wrong too.

C. Derick Varn: 3:11:50

I was into that community that's where I came from. Yeah, oh, you weren't yeah, I was in the west wrong in 2005 and then I thought they were kind of going crazy.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:12:01

Um, um, I don't know about those guys like the past, like three years or so so I.

C. Derick Varn: 3:12:10

So I talked about my journey out of out of paleo conservatism a little bit and I've I've like, I've been on one dime and stuff and gone into more detail. Finally, I don't know when that'll come out, probably out by the time. This is out for sure, um. But to go into it a little bit more, I went through this phase where I went through paleo conservatism but I wasn't particularly religious, so I kind of got, I kind of became like the Buddhist outlier to a new atheism for a little while, right Like, and I hated I've always hated Sam Harris. I've hated Sam Harris before. It was cool to hate, hate Sam Harris. I've hated Sam Harris since he wrote his in the Facebook.

C. Derick Varn: 3:12:50

But but I got into less wrong because I was like rationalist, we need to be more rationalist. And then I started seeing stuff like, uh, all the, all the weird provocations that are going going, maybe these guys are a little bit more crazy than I thought, um, and so I moved away from it. And then, years later, like, I'm like I'm hearing about the shit that came out of there and I'm like, okay, I'm hearing about the shit that came out of there. And I'm like, okay, so the, so the mythical christ people all became racist and like uh, the christ missus got into alt-light ideology around sargon of akkad and but also independently invented heaven and hell from.

C. Derick Varn: 3:13:39

They somehow rationalized themselves into like AI versions of Christian theology and I was just like something has gone wrong here.

C. Derick Varn: 3:13:54

That's why I was like I need some more materialism in my materialism, thank you. And eventually, over the period of years, that led to me because there was two weird stops on my way out of right of paler conservatism. One was the, the anti-war ring of the houston manifesto signers, and we don't talk about that. It's really embarrassing, um, and and and it was me being like, why are the left defending the at maginot regime? I just don't care. Like like I, I am anti-imperial and that we should leave those people alone, but like I'm not gonna be defending the government either, just leave them alone. Um, that was my thought on that. I was. It was not very thought out, honestly. And then the other thing was me trying to get into the rationalist community and me realizing, oh, you guys don't have a functional definition of reason that actually makes sense, so you can take this anywhere. There's no real limit to what you might call reason.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:14:55

I mean, there are limits, limits and the limits are wrong. Right, but did you read any of the like the AI symbiotic stuff that I, that I wrote?

C. Derick Varn: 3:15:04

Yes, I have, and I've gotten, I've gotten interested in it. So like, well, I'll have you come back on to talk about that, like relatively soon, just like I'll have you come back on and actually finally have that conversation on the Katika, the Goethe program, and then maybe we'll continue our debates around Althusser. I don't know, I've gotten a lot less anti-Althusser in my day, but still not totally convinced. But I'm a lot more convinced than I used to be, although I still suspect some of Althusser's ideology of the state has to do with being French. And I don't mean I don't mean the Argot in the great sort of way which is sometimes how I explain the French. I mean, sorry, this is my anti-Golic prejudice speaking, but no, I mean in like the French state's journey to the Fifth Republic.

C. Derick Varn: 3:16:02

It's particularly weird with alternating absolutism and non-absolutism. That's kind of not unique to France but kind of specific to France. I think you know Alan American Woods calls it an alternative route to modernity even. I think you know Alan American Woods calls it an alternative route to modernity even. And so I do sometimes wonder how much influence that has on Althusser's thinking. But I am sort of increasingly dissatisfied with, like the EP, thompson, marxist, humanist readings, because I just I don't know they, they, they tend to be super culturalist actually, without without admitting that, um, and so it's kind of frustrating. Um, uh, regardless, I will say I'm now recovering all those debates from the seventies between that happened in the new left review and deciding that most of them don't prepare us for shit, for what we're doing right now. So like I'm like it's real interesting thinking that we thought that this was a really important thing to argue about, um, I mean hell, even like looking back five years about the policy debates that were happening in Jacobin.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:17:18

I was like, really, this is, this is what was important.

C. Derick Varn: 3:17:23

Or seven years ago, when it was like, if only God, this was a Sam Chris article that I have never forgotten because he laughed at me at Twitter for mocking him about it. But I was like, look, I have this big socialist idea. What if George RR Martin had a positive vision instead of just critiquing modern society?

C. Derick Varn: 3:17:47

and medievalism and I'm like who the fuck cares? Who the fuck cares? This is like all those articles in Jacketman from 2018 that were like what if Marvel but socialists are? Or another one which I almost thought got to something this is a more recent one, but didn't. Was dating apps suck, let's nationalize them? What? Like you're almost on a good point about the crisis of socialist reproduction and all you can do is the same thing you say about everything, which is let's just nationalize it.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:18:31

Like I mean, we are about to see a very interesting social experiment in Germany right now, now that the Jacobin people are in charge of a major political party which seems to be working in the short term. But I wonder how that'll turn out.

C. Derick Varn: 3:18:46

Well, I mean other than the fact that they're going to get their ass handed to them by the Christian Democrats, who are stealing ADF ideas.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:18:55

They are having a resurgence, since they had the new leadership.

C. Derick Varn: 3:18:59

Which party.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:19:00

Dylink.

C. Derick Varn: 3:19:01

Yeah, yeah, we'll see. We'll see. I've heard a lot of people tell me that they are seeing a resurgence, but they don't think it's going to be able to deal with the reactionary forces at hand.

C. Derick Varn: 3:19:12

Probably not I guess Dylink is interesting in that at least it's not hard with being part of the, the pink, pink green alliance that governed germany for the last um, it helps a couple years which has been world historically fucking embarrassing. Um, I mean, germany went from a major export power power to a power for all of us. Going like oh Germany, eh, like who cares what they think? Internally encouraged a lot of reactions.

C. Derick Varn: 3:19:47

Somebody was telling me that they were trying to de-gender German paperwork and I'm like how the fuck is that going to work? Like you can't, you can't. You'd actually have to sit down and re-engineer the language and try to impose it, and I hate to tell you but historically that doesn't work to an existence. I can only think of that working when you actually invented an entirely new language, you know, like resurrecting Hebrew and modernizing it or whatever. Like um, anyway. Um, which also leads me to the other thing. You know we're talking about people going to NGOs. You know how many people I knew thought that they could go into rhetoric and composition and fundamentally change the world by controlling how people talked.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:20:37

I'm going to guess more than two, more than 50. Oh my god.

C. Derick Varn: 3:20:43

So, like you know, we need to refer to invisible disabilities as non-imparent disabilities and we need to call the homeless houseless. And you know that stuff comes out of rhetoric departments infiltrating engineering, and I'm like, I'm like the. The weird implications to all this is that the current system is actually okay and you're like what do you mean? Well, if people who are, who are houseless, have homes in the streets, then we don't need to give them homes now, do we?

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:21:14

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 3:21:19

If the poor have met us to deal with our oppressive systems, then we don't need to fix the oppressive systems now, do we Like? This is just valorizing the shitty state of capital by language and you think you're fixing it. It's fucking embarrassing.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:21:33

It's funny that there's also, like communist, versions of this, where it's the extreme historicism to justify participating in bourgeois elections as they exist. That's what the Goose magazine is all about, or is it Geese magazine?

C. Derick Varn: 3:21:50

I read them. To be fair, there's a long tradition of doing that. Going back to the popular front. Here's the thing communist, you're not special. If you live in a fucked up society, you're likely to be fucked up too. I just want to point that out to you, because that's a materialist way of looking at things, as opposed to this weird ideological way of looking at things that you think that believing the right things will somehow fix the problem. That's marxian gnosticism and it's bullshit. Um so uh, it's not about beliefs, people, it's about what you can do with it. I mean, beliefs matter. I'm not saying they don't, but they're not determined to do it like that.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:22:33

It does help to occasionally think about things, oh yeah, yeah, it absolutely does.

C. Derick Varn: 3:22:41

But like and I'm not saying like, I'm not saying that we should never participate in electoralism, obviously, if I thought that would be an anarchist or an anarchist or what else, who else believes that Third periodist ML are a board against? Yes, those are. I got my groups here. I don't know how board against think that happens. I'm actually wondering, like, like, how do you take over the planet without even the majority of the working class? But just like waiting long enough, like cause I know you have an invariant communist program handed to border go from God or whatever majority of the working class. By just like waiting long enough, like because, yeah, I know you have an invariant communist program handed to bordiga from god or whatever but uh, but like um, that wasn't even obvious to marx.

C. Derick Varn: 3:23:29

I may say it actually contradicts marx on a couple points, but um, nonetheless, uh, how do you implement that? I mean, it's like Bordigas being against faction bands but also against factions, and I'm like okay.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:23:42

So how do you get rid of the?

C. Derick Varn: 3:23:43

faction. They're like we need to do more communist work. I'm like, but how, though Like? I'm not pro faction band either, but I don't know how they magically go away Like, and they're like no more organic centralism and I'm like okay. So we need more cops in people's heads, yeah I mean it does seem to be like weirdly tactically similar to anarchist but ideologically the opposite. Yeah, like if only people just organically realize the internal dictatorship of the party by their own free will, then we would just win, and I'm like well sure.

C. Derick Varn: 3:24:34

As a hypothetical that is a possibility, but like, it clearly has never happened. Um, the only thing I've ever noticed about bordigas groups is they tend to split and get smaller even more than trotskyist groups do, um, which is, yeah, our malice groups, by the way, which we don't talk about enough but, like, also split and get smaller historically. I mean, splitting and get smaller is something that we're very good at, but anyway, we're off topic now, we're just having fun at this point. But yeah, I think it's interesting. I've been thinking about what you said on the state. I've been trying to square it with what you said about neoliberalism.

C. Derick Varn: 3:25:17

I believe in the Philip Murawski description of neoliberalism as as primarily about public private partnerships and things like protectionism or their lack were important but not essential. Gabriel Winnant also develops this. Even Chris Katron develops this a little bit that there's a there, there's a way in which neoliberalism is an extension of elements of Fordism even. But I think today we just have it's clear that we have a number of crises that make this untenable, and what I'm surprised at is people aren't noticing that post-neoliberalism actually just seems like hyper-neoliberalism. It's just like okay, so neoliberalism sucks and doesn't work, so we're going to add terrorists and protectionism back, but you know this public-private partnership thing. We're going to have fumes on that shit fumes on that shit.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:26:15

The way I've been looking at it is that neoliberalism and everything like, honestly, every time like the bourgeoisie, like every time bonapartism happens, it's kind of like about trying to find more room at the bottom of like, oh, what can we sell for scraps of like social reproduction, or like try to beat down the working class a bit to make more room for the bourgeois society as specific social relations or whatever. Yeah, it never really makes anything. It's always going to keep trying to find more room at the bottom until, basically, we're right where we began.

C. Derick Varn: 3:26:55

It's like neo-feudalism isn't real yet, but goddamn, could it become so. So like, yeah, that's where I'm at. On that note we're going to end. Where can people find your work, nico, other than here? You're probably my second or third most common guest, so you and Elijah Emery and who else I don't know, probably some other people.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:27:24

Go ahead. You can find my blog Prehistory of an Encounter on Substack. I published some stuff with Cosmonaut. Hopefully I'll have a new article coming out soon. I published some stuff with Cosmonaut. Hopefully I'll have a new article coming out soon. I have some articles with Palladium, but I haven't published anything with them recently. So, yeah, I have a blue sky. I also have a Twitter, but it's locked, so I prefer people follow me on blue sky because that's the yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 3:27:53

Oh God, I mean. I think Twitter is just going to get more and more. If it becomes profitable, it's because it doesn't work.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:28:05

Well, it's become profitable. It's profitable now.

C. Derick Varn: 3:28:09

Even though it takes in a ton less revenue than it used to. But it has become profitable because it's got a cost that deep. Okay, more power to them, I guess. Um, but uh, uh. I I think the the sad thing about blue skies. I think it's a legitimately better platform in some ways, except the if I block you not just can I not see you, no one can see you, no one can see you thing, that's not great.

Nicolas Villarreal: 3:28:36

I mean it has its ups and downs. It is just a genuinely better platform to use, aside from the people on it. Hopefully that changes.

C. Derick Varn: 3:28:47

I do hope it reaches critical mass so it does not remain true social for the Blue Maga types, because they're fucking annoying. But I will also say there are more other kinds of communities on Blue Sky, even though there are more varieties of political wardrobe on Twitter still. But I actually have a robust poetry feed on Blue Sky and that's remarkably hard to do on Twitter. It exists, but good fucking luck navigating to it now. The site barely works. You can't find it so like. So, yeah, I still have my Twitter. I also use Blue Sky, despite the fact that most of Blue Sky has some liberal yelling at me for something or other or getting non-engagement, because liberals don't even understand how I talk. Um, but uh, but I do think it's better than twitter and, uh, facebook is I gave up on that shit a long time ago it is the geriatric.

C. Derick Varn: 3:29:53

I mean, here's the thing it still has more people than even twitter. But like it really is mostly ai slop. Now, like I get so much just bizarre and in fact, when I say, show me less of some ai slop, they actually show me more of it. Um, I'm starting. I like watching whale videos on on on video platforms. I'm a weirdo. It's a thing. I like oceanography. I have hobbies People do. That's how I stay sane, working 90 hours a week in my failing professional niche.

C. Derick Varn: 3:30:29

But I started getting all these fucking AI slop like fake barnacle videos, like barnacles on sharks, and I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? I kept on hitting show me less. And the more I hit, show me less. The fact that I clicked through to hit show me less taught the algorithm to show me more. The same thing I told him show him less of and I was just like goddamn Zuck, you suck, you suck so bad you don't even have the balls to be a proper tyrant. You're totally spineless weenie. We are won by weenie nerds. God. When people like, oh, we need, we need the lions to come in and fight those liberal foxes, and I'm like, if your lion is elon musk who barely has a fucking jawline, then, like I don't know what you're talking about, man, like I don't know what a lion means anymore. That guy looks like a snake or an egg eating a kidna or something. Um, anyway, I'm glad I'm not monetized on YouTube, because otherwise I just lost it um and on that note, bye, goodnight.