From Dawn to Decadence, Part 5

Start with the symptom: everything still moves, yet less gets done. We unpack decadence as a live condition—where empires posture with airstrikes instead of strategy, markets float on bubbly valuations, and everyday obligations dissolve into choice and churn. Rather than predicting apocalypse, we track how capabilities thin out while systems grow heavier, and we ask what it would take to reverse that pattern.

Our conversation maps the terrain across geopolitics and political economy. We examine military hollowing, Trump-era incentives, and the shift from global projection to regional coercion that masquerades as multipolar “freedom.” We dig into Brexit’s exposure of Britain’s productive weakness, the EU’s turn to securitization, and why faltering Belt and Road ambitions recalibrate power rather than replace it. On the economic front, we separate real profit rates from rent-inflated revenues, explain how administrative bloat and litigation fuel cost disease in sectors like education, and show why fictitious capital turns asset inflation into the only viable growth model. Elite overproduction and de-skilling aren’t just memes; they’re structural forces that capture institutions while eroding competence.

Culture mirrors these dynamics. Tools like standpoint epistemology and intersectionality began sharp and specific, then inflated under attention incentives until they explained everything and clarified nothing. The attention economy rewards maximalism; conspiracy offers coherence on the cheap. Meanwhile, social reproduction falters: loneliness rises, trust collapses, and the language of total choice encroaches on domains that need durable obligation. You don’t have to be religious to see the cost—families, chosen and given, remain our basic infrastructure of care, and population decline reflects deeper social illness, not just private preference.

We don’t offer a rewind button. Renewal means rebuilding capacity: sectoral strategies that let unions scale across fragmented workplaces; simplification that cuts compliance labyrinths; investment that privileges real production over valuations; and a civic culture that re-centers duty and measurable outcomes. Decadence is a diagnosis, not a fate. If this resonates, share the episode, leave a review, and subscribe—then tell us where you see decay turning into growth in your own world.

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

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Decadence
• 4:17 Empire, War, And Military Drift
• 16:17 Multipolarity And Regional Spheres
• 26:47 Brexit, The EU, And Decline
• 34:17 BRICS, Belt And Road, And Limits
• 43:47 Standpoint, Race, And Category Drift
• 53:17 Elite Overproduction And De‑Skilling
• 1:03:47 Fictitious Capital And Bubble Logic
• 1:12:47 Unions, Production, And Cost Disease
• 1:22:47 Morality, Obligation, And Social Reproduction

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:48

Hello, and welcome to Varmblog and the Regrettable Century. And today I am here with the Brothers Regrettable, or as I like to call them on public airstreams, Chris and Jason, last name with Held Chick.

Regrettable Jason: 1:01

Um so that works. I went back and listened to like an earlier version, uh, early form of this. And you you referred to us as the uh the the outreach department of the regrettable century.

Regrettable Chris: 1:18

Yeah, yeah, that that tracks, that's good. I like that. That's also true.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23

Um so we are talking about decadence today. We were in the middle of off Heb's kind of infamous late 90s early odds essay, which was specifically aimed at the international communist current theory of decadence, which is a theory of decadence that is primarily about various forms of the rate of profits to fall. Now, one right, um, I can't figure out if the authors today would even agree with their conclusions to that essay because I think at least one of the people involved with off Heboon Collective would now say that there is a rate of profits, there is a tendency of the rate of profits to fall. Uh, we can we were confusing a bunch of technical stuff. Two, I think it's also weird when we're talking about decadence in the broad sense. We mentioned two other essays. One was Samir Amin's, uh, we spent two episodes, and the other was two different kind of classical views on what decadence is um that were helpful. Uh, decadence is a metaphor to organic living systems, and decadence implies uh more than collapse. There's a reason why I like decadence better than collapse. That things do grow out of these problems. But the two things I don't like about collapse is it's it's a ventil and makes it sound like there's one or two things you can pinpoint, and and that'll tell you when you've entered the moment you know of the crises or whatever. Um, and two, it's um it implies an end, whereas decadence implies an end and a reformation and something new, right?

Regrettable Chris: 3:18

Um, yeah, I like pairing decay with decadence, calling it saying decadence and decay, because decay doesn't necessarily indicate that anything is happening anytime soon, and from decay grows new all new all sorts of new things. Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 3:34

Well, it's it's like telling right now. For example, I'll give you an example of this. Um, I think like talking about decadence, you know, I don't think we've had a discussion about decadence but once since the Trump election, and god forbid we've seen at both the Democratic Party's decadence and hindsight, and whatever the hell is going on now.

Regrettable Chris: 3:58

Um and and just the I mean uh Imperial the the Imperial ventures that we've been involved in in Trump too are a really good illustration to me of the decadence of uh of the Imperial Armed Forces.

C. Derick Varn: 4:15

Oh, that we're literally using like more warships to just bomb fit uh fishing boats that may or may not be doing some illicit activity that would definitely not count count as terrorism under even US law, much less international law. Uh and that capacity is like 20% of the naval forces or something, and like it's literally three times what we did a war in Granada with. Um just people know huh? I said is that right?

Regrettable Jason: 4:48

Yeah, I looked it up. Like I mean, it's it's not surprising, but it kind of is.

C. Derick Varn: 4:56

Well, I mean, at the same time, if we look at what's happening with the with the Imperial Project, like you have the gutting of the leadership of the armed forces, which I didn't think would be allowed to happen, right? Right, like like this is another proof of prior decadence to me, is like in most other societies, with the kind of thing that Hex F is doing would lead to a civil war almost within a few months, yeah. But the core of uh of the of the military no longer has the ability to act out of term with its own bureaucratic initiative, like there's no way for a non-bureaucratic emergent power to like countervail these forces from within the military itself. Uh or if there is a way, we haven't seen it yet. I mean, I shouldn't say there's no way, I wouldn't be predicting that, but like and you would have think you would think that given our past experience with how militaries work, that this it would have at least led to an officer's plot if and it we don't have any evidence of that. Um but then you even look at like the uh another way we can talk think what think about this is about the about people talk about blowback, but this isn't blowback. Like blowback is just like the people confuse blowback with with with uh Empire Coming Home. But what we see here is like this the peripheralization that you guys and I have hinted at about parts of the United States being applied to the whole thing, and so we are we are no like the core of capital is peripherizing itself in the deepest parts of capital, so it is not just like in the hinterland anymore, it's now in California and New York, right, and Chicago. Like, um those are all interesting things that that's very much a decadent society, but it I I want to bring this up because I think a lot of this is gonna be oh, but that's the US, that's the US Empire failing. And I'm like, yeah, that's true, but that's not the only thing that we're seeing going decadent right now.

Regrettable Jason: 7:08

Um yeah, I think that anybody who says it's just the US Empire, or it's just the US whatever, culturally or it's just the West, even it's like you there's some fundamental misunderstanding or intentional blindness when it comes to the totality, when it comes to the global social and political order. It's all decadent.

Regrettable Chris: 7:30

In as much as it still exists as any kind of order.

Regrettable Jason: 7:34

Well, yeah, uh I mean that's the reason why there is uh an emergent BRICS attempt. That's the reason why there is at least some quasi-philos philosophical discourse around multipolarity. That's there, there's there's partial um recognitions about this.

C. Derick Varn: 7:52

Yeah, I'm gonna push back on you a little bit though, because multipolarity A, I think has been a thing since the end of the Bush administration, if we're completely honest, the best Bush too. Yeah, but B um emergent like what we see now is imperial multipolarity. Yeah, what you're moving away from like the stupid shit Trump's doing is actually in line with what the multipolar polaristas uh don't realize that they were advocating for. Because you know, us bossing around Latin America is what a multipolar world would indicate. A failing, uh declining empire turning back to its zone of influence and justifying that is what that looks like. Yeah.

Regrettable Chris: 8:38

Um yeah, our sphere of influence has always been the western hemisphere, with the exception of Venezuela and uh Cuba. And uh, I guess that's flexing. It's also the case that we can't flex in China and in the South Pacific in the uh in the Western Pacific, and we can't flex in the uh um or the eastern Pacific. Sorry. Wait, where the wind doesn't turn over, flip over to the Western Pacific. Yeah, it's also the case that like Indian Ocean.

Regrettable Jason: 9:07

I don't know how like the Sao Paulo Forum and the Mercosur, and there's the you know, the whole pink tide was premised in part at least on a different conception of multipolarity. Right. So there's it's kind of like what I what I what people what what there is to say about like um the role of Napoleon Bonaparte is like there's there's the promise of the bourgeois revolution, and then there's the then there's what happens with the bourgeois revolution. Right. And so I think the both things can be true at the same time. Multipolarity doesn't it has meant this, but it wasn't doesn't necessarily mean this.

C. Derick Varn: 9:49

I think the peripheralization of the core, like what I meant with the military, is the only reason why we're not seeing proxy wars all over Latin America. Yeah, and we are like and uh yet, right, if like like if someone gets their shit together, we are going to. Um also I think Trump is a weirdly contradictory figure on war and always has been, but people have missed this because it's like seems so against the prior form of imperial modes. He really doesn't like uh he he likes using force. He'll uh he doesn't have any problem with killing people, that's not the point, but he really doesn't like risking uh the state's resources uh in a war because it means he can't loot it. Um and um and he really does seem to be averse to um a bunch of young Americans dying, which makes sense when you think about our population rates if you also don't want to have immigration, yeah. Um which means that he's gonna like to threaten wars because I mean for domestic things, for for international influence, it's a very mobbed-up thing to do, if nothing else. But he's terrified about his pedophilia accusations and stuff like that. Yeah, but it's gonna be very hard for him to deliver on them and also complete his domestic project at all. Like, you can't deploy the national guard all over the United States. He can barely do that now. He definitely can't do it if you're actually in a war, right?

Regrettable Chris: 11:28

Like, I mean, and on top of that, I think that he has based on his uh actions in the uh in the Red Sea against the Ansar Al Allah in uh Yemen. Um the he has this mistaken notion that a lot of people who don't understand the military have, that you can win wars with airstrikes, right?

C. Derick Varn: 11:49

Yeah, you can't.

Regrettable Chris: 11:50

Um yeah, you can't. No, it it takes boots on the ground. Infantry wins wars. Airstrikes are like you know, a a softening up measure, and that's that's pretty much it. But yeah, so I think that he thinks that he could just airstrike his way into getting what he wants. He's that's probably what he's going to try to do in Venezuela. He I mean, that's what they tried to do in uh in Iran. They tried to airstrike their way into regime change, um, which didn't happen, and that's probably what they're gonna try to do in Venezuela. Um, yeah, I don't know. And maybe I they I I know they have a contingent of Marines on hand, and that's probably like for once there is a regime change, like the forces that they're counting on in Venezuela have risen up and overthrown the government, that they could like help them out by sending in Marines to back them up. But uh, I don't think that uh he is planning on doing a full-scale war against Venezuela.

Regrettable Jason: 12:41

Well, it's funny because that's definitely what's going to have to be the case, but he's definitely does he doesn't want that to be the case.

Regrettable Chris: 12:48

And uh yeah, it's not going to happen, I don't think. I mean, I think they'll do airstrikes, and I don't think that that that's going to cause regime change because as unpopular as as um Maduro is compared to Chavez anyway, he's still not less pop, he's still not um less popular than Trump and the United States is in Venezuela.

Regrettable Jason: 13:08

I mean, that's that's one of the reasons one of the uh the effects of Chavismo is that Maduro is is uh such a disappointment. But the Yankees are the worst thing that can happen to us. So like Yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 13:23

And they're right about that, to be fair. Yeah, so yeah, it's it's very true.

Regrettable Jason: 13:28

So like honestly, the the worst thing that Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and the and the Gusano community can do for their their own purposes, for their own cause, is precisely what they're doing right now, which is turning all of Latin America uh against them again.

C. Derick Varn: 13:47

So so to make this an illustrative point about decadence and not just about Trump, though, because um uh with the military, there's a couple of things we can notice, right? We talked about the like Trump's military incentives are all over the place, but if you want to do the kinds of even local imperialism that he wants to do, very Munro doctrine, isolationist 19th-century American imperialism, you cannot be doing what you're doing to the military's brass, and also what you're doing domestically, and also mistaking uh counterinsurgency tactics are pre-war tactics, and this is a this is a conflation of both, and this is not unique to Trump, this is actually endemic in the military itself. Um, with fighting a traditional war when people go, oh, well, we're not in Klaus Ritsian times, like when you're fighting occupied forces that have a place to go, like the occupiers have a place to go, um, like in Iraq, right? Um third generation warfare means you can take uh fourth generation warfare means you can take um uh the the occupied forces can take uh four times the losses of an occupying force and be viable. But one of the ways you break them up is airstrikes. Uh but you know what you can't do with that, you can't actually reconstitute anything, right? So you just have you you have a basically a vacuum for chaos, which if anyone wants to like like actually read counterinsurgency theory and then look at what happened in Iraq, it's totally predictable, right?

Regrettable Jason: 15:35

Or it's just like at best, at most, you could hope for uh Korean war outcome, right? Like well, which in the north that we the we've leveled it, the US Air Force dropped so much ordinance that there was nothing left to bomb, didn't win the war, just didn't do anything. There was there's still they just built everything underground.

C. Derick Varn: 15:59

As I tell people, you can annihilate the population with with enough of a bomb. I mean, even even now, but with them, what's the point of a war at that point? There's no resources.

Regrettable Chris: 16:08

There's like and even annihilating a population with bombs, uh, unless you're not unless you're using nuclear weapons, it's gonna take a really long time and a lot of ordinance. Because look at what Israel's been doing to Gaza, and there are still a shitload of people in Gaza, you know?

C. Derick Varn: 16:24

Yeah, well, as I as I have well, that there's a bunch of other problems there. Gaza's also like tiny, and if you blow it up with nuclear weapons, which is the Israelis could they would, it would also destroy like half of Israel. Yeah.

Regrettable Jason: 16:36

Um, you can't go back and settle on a radiated landscape like that, right?

Regrettable Chris: 16:43

Um, well, with hydrogen bombs, there's not uh the half-life is a lot shorter, I think.

unknown: 16:48

Yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 16:49

It's still not you can't just go back tomorrow, though. Um my my point though about all this is just like why has this happened? Well, you know, somebody was like, Aren't you afraid of all these ex-military people on the right? And I'm like, I I hate to tell you this, but unless you are dealing with Vietnam vets who would now be in their 60s and 70s, um uh I am not dealing with people who are traditionally militarily battle-hardened. So, no, yeah, no, I'm not afraid in the same way if you're talking about a civil war. Um, you know, why it's just like nobody in America is that kind of battle-hardened.

Regrettable Chris: 17:33

Like, no, and the veterans aren't uh wholesale for Trump. A lot of them think that Trump is a traitor. A lot of them side with the Democrats because uh the Democrats are better managers of empire. You know, I mean, Trump's Trump's uh waffling on Ukraine uh has really turned a lot of veterans and the military against him.

C. Derick Varn: 17:57

Trump's Trump's waffling on Ukraine has basically turned all sides against him. Yeah, like Russia anymore, the allies don't trust him anymore. Like, nobody like go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Um this is classic decadence stuff, though, right? Because let's talk about what it's trying to do. All right, it's not just the military stuff. I mean, like, I've been predicting, and anyone who's been paying attention has been predicting since the Bush administration that the Empire was gonna Hadrian's wall itself. I mean, for three fucking Sakaria wrote about this in 2007. This is not like new, it's not even unique to uh to Alexander Dugan or any of those people. Um that's been obvious for a long time if you've been paying attention. I've been following BRICS as a quasi-thing for like almost 20 years.

Regrettable Chris: 18:46

Yeah, um, it's it's had some uh rapid development since Trump came to office, though. Absolutely, in a way that it never would have if he didn't try to strong arm India, strong arm China, strong arm Russia, you know.

C. Derick Varn: 19:03

And it's such a ham-fisted and stupid no, he's done he's done something that I have never thought was possible, which was get the Japanese and the Indians to work with post-commune uh post-communist PRC, right? Even at all.

Regrettable Chris: 19:18

Like, yes, they were all in bricks, but they were undermining each other in bricks, like like uh if uh if he keeps pushing though, he might even end up making Pakistan and India uh bros again, again, which is really there, that would be quite defeat.

C. Derick Varn: 19:38

Bringing people together, man. To uh to look to local consolidations of power everywhere on the planet but North America, yeah.

Regrettable Jason: 19:47

Like bring the North and South in Korea back together, bring Pakistan and India back together, bring every everybody back together.

C. Derick Varn: 19:56

Speaking about management of empires, this is another good one. Um, we managed to make uh liberal Canadian nationalism cool in Canada again, despite the fact it's feckless, weak, and has no real answer to Trump policies. Yeah, like so you know, and people like, oh Mark Carney's such a depression. I'm like, dude, Canada needs uh Ironship America. Um by and I don't mean ironship United States, I mean North America, right um, to be cooperative for its economy to make a lot of sense. And um Trump has disrupted that, and you everyone's gonna pay a price for it, including a lot of the people in the United States. I'm not, you know, this is not without I mean you would talk about self owned. Lately. But um in a way, this is like Brexit on a bigger scale. What Brexit showed you is if you couldn't use uh the the British economy outside of empire have been running on vapors. Sorry, Corbinistas, you're because that your your policies were never possible either. Um and that it had been able to play a share of game with labor cost and investment to hide the fact that it wasn't a productive economy in a way that the United States actually is still kind of a productive economy. Like, as bad as things are here, we're still actually a major producer of real materials. Britain is not, we still make lots of stuff, right? Um Britain is not. There is and Britain is now, I think I was seeing that like the GDP is going to be surpassed by fucking Ireland soon. Like wow, it's just but but what that was is basically there's a there was a shell game, and the British realized that they were getting screwed, but by removing the international context for playing the shell game and showing the profitability crisis and the manufacturing crisis and all that, um they actually made their problems a lot more acute. Um, which is not to say they shouldn't have done it, they were gonna get screwed either way. I mean, the British public. But uh I mean, I'm not here to like say, oh, everything'd be fine if Brexit hadn't happened.

Regrettable Jason: 22:24

Um, I mean, very clearly, I I don't think so. I very clearly don't think so. When it comes to the EU, staying in the EU is not the solution.

C. Derick Varn: 22:33

Right. But ripping off a band-aid over the fact you've been eviscerated makes the little bits of your guts that are still there fall out faster.

Regrettable Jason: 22:45

Yeah, I mean, I I I really do think that the solution to the crisis that culminated in Brexit it well culminated, it's still ongoing to the Brexit problem is the same as the solution to the the Greek um uh European banking crisis. Uh and it's the same as the solution to Cuba's crisis after overthrowing Batista. You have to go all the way. That's it. So like Brexit would have been good in the same way that Grexit should have been good if everybody was willing to, you know, uh how do you want to how should I say this? Be uh socialist.

C. Derick Varn: 23:30

I actually completely disagree with you. Oh, if they're socialist, yes. I but the thing is they also need the raw imports on this, like the geography of where you're at still matters, and Grex and Brexit are both a problem because like the reason why the British are so imperialist is their island kind of sucks.

Regrettable Chris: 23:44

Well, yeah, you don't really have anything there. You got a bunch of people, right?

Regrettable Jason: 23:50

And like you have to cubify yourself, and that also does mean um being isolated from the world economy, being isolated from the world economy, suffering a lot, and also making trade deals with uh less than revolutionary states like Russia, right?

Regrettable Chris: 24:07

And if you if you look at like what's happened since Brexit, it's I mean, I guess Keir Starmer has been trying as hard as he possibly can to reintegrate uh the UK into the European uh into the European sphere. Like I think that's his his whole plan. And that's that's why he's double done on Ukraine so hard. That's why he's uh I mean that's why Europe is double done on Ukraine so hard, is because they need that as like a coagulant to keep them to keep them together. They need the big scary bad Russia to keep the their project together and why they're like shifting towards a a military footing, a mil trying to become like a military alliance, not just a you know uh a trade or I guess a trade sphere, right? Um because that's that doesn't offer anything to people anymore. Being part of the European Union is uh not necessarily going to make anything any better for your country. Not anymore. Nope.

C. Derick Varn: 25:09

I mean, so if we you know when we take this about take this apart, we can start seeing some international trends. One, and then we can like deduce some rules for decadence, and we can talk about both external to states and external to states, and maybe this will make this a little bit clearer. Um so what we see now is blue water trade is declining in general. There's no real set, like the other thing that happened that counteracts some of this stuff with you know um the the inability of the Belt and Road to pop off the way it was supposed to pop off, partly because of the tensions between Russia and Ukraine, partly because of some other things in Central Asia, actually. It wasn't really the United States that caused that to fail. Um meant that BRICS becomes a more important road for building an alternative capitalist modernity. Right. Um the Chinese communists people will get mad at me, but the Chinese communists think that they need to develop capitalist modernity over to the West because I think they think they're nowhere near like the Chinese experience with its specific collectivization periods and all that is not replicable anywhere else on earth now. Um, you just can't do it again. Um it's if for no other reason there's not enough peasants in most of the fucking planet for that to work. Um but it's also like what dung's reforms work because the collected period happened, the collective period happened because of the Sino-Soviet tension, etc. etc. etc. Those aren't repeatable. You can't just be you can't like repeat the the the 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s Maoist experience.

Regrettable Jason: 27:01

Like it's not the same way you can't repeat the the 20s and 30s uh Soviet experience. You can't repeat uh the 19th century uh British experience. You can't repeat what's already happened, doesn't matter what you're really talking about because it's because it's happened and it's developed and it's changed things, and the things that are now happening are downstream of that.

C. Derick Varn: 27:24

So people who think I hate China are wrong, but just to pick this up, but my point is like they think you need an alternate cap capitalist modernity that may be something like a communist international, in so much that they're even interested in it, which I'm not which I do believe there are factions in the in the in the PRC that are. I mean, certainly are, yes. But there's not they're not dominant. There's also a Han nationalist faction that's not insignificant, and some confused neo-Maoists who play both sides of this. Um, plus also we have to admit that most of us in the West don't really have a good grasp on regional politics in China at all. Like even those of us who follow China, we just we don't I don't we'd have I think you have to both read Mandarin and also physically be there to get a real good. I think that if you're going to be uh a watcher and commentator on another country, you should probably read their language, or at least we people who do read their language, like yes, and I also think that you have to have some connection to and some long-term connection to uh the less tangible complexities and fluctuations in their cultural life, and you have to have you have to have some understanding of the rhythms of life overall.

Regrettable Jason: 28:49

Like, I'm very fascinated by a couple things that happen in the world. I wouldn't say that I know enough about you know, I I don't know what it's like to be Russian, I don't know what it's like to be uh Slovak. I know some things that are happening, I think maybe that's it.

C. Derick Varn: 29:09

Yeah, well, I mean Jason noted down point epistemologist. No, I'm kidding, I'm joking.

Regrettable Chris: 29:18

Um, I mean that that I see where you're coming from, Jason, and but I mean I don't think that should ever stop us from trying to understand and commenting on uh on things. And if if that was the case, then we would have to just only talk about what's going on in the United States at all times. Or maybe even what's going on in Texas. Well, I'll tell you one thing, as I get really tired of listening to other people try to talk about what's going on in Texas.

Regrettable Jason: 29:45

Yeah. What I was saying uh before we start recording was uh I think this is true uh at every in every kind of discussion. If like if you um let's say you live in if you if you live live in El Paso, you can't really quite tell where does Mexico start, where does the United States start. Culturally, it's very, very similar. Uh linguistically, even it's very similar. And you could make the case and you wouldn't you would not be incorrect in saying borders shouldn't exist because nations don't exist because we're all just people, man. And there's some truth to that. But then if you live in Maine and you take a trip to the Yucatan, you could see very clearly what Mexico is versus what the United States is and uh what a tortilla tastes like compared to a bagel, and etc. Right? Like, yeah, if you zoom out far enough, it you can you can see, and if you zoom in really close, you can't, and they're both right.

C. Derick Varn: 30:40

I was actually uh fascinated by this because I almost gotten uh uh a mild spat on Bunga cast when I was visiting them recently. Uh when when they said the United States is really homogenous, and I was like, No, you're just an outsider, right? Yep, like like like like we are culturally really, really distinct. And if we actually like what a race is in is our media culture and our economic culture, uh does erase culture, but like like I can tell you as a person who's lived in in the upper midwest, I grew up in the deep in the deep south, not the Texas South, which you guys aren't part of the deep south. Sorry, kicked you out. Um, yeah, I've always said this.

Regrettable Chris: 31:23

Yeah, you no, Texas is its own liminal space. Um part of Texas is deep south, part of Texas is Southwest, part of Texas is North Mexico, and part of Texas is the lower Midwest. Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 31:38

Um which uh was why I break it up into five states. But um one of the things I think about this a lot, seriously, is uh I live in Utah now, which is also a place that people talk about completely cluelessly. Um uh and not nearly as I actually really like Utah.

Regrettable Chris: 32:03

I've I do too. Always enjoyed the time that I've spent there.

C. Derick Varn: 32:07

And it's funny because uh, you know, people like, oh, you don't know New York, and I'm like, Yes, I do. I realize that like there's massive poverty in the Bronx, but you have social goods that massive poverty in say Mississippi doesn't meet.

unknown: 32:21

Right.

Regrettable Chris: 32:22

My point in all this the poorest region in the entire country is the Mississippi Delta, still, right?

C. Derick Varn: 32:27

Yeah. Um my point in all this is actually to make a few points about decadence and what we can know, but to go back to what you were saying, Jason, we talked about this in terms of like capitalism too. Like, you know, we've done both ends of the capitalism debate. I did on the on the Patreon version of my show, I've done the Brenner Books or the Brenner debate book, and then several articles with uh responding to it. And I came to the conclusion that the liberals are right about a few things, but they take the wrong and they they take the con uh their conclusion becomes there is no meaning to historiography because it's effectively imposed and arbitrary. And then I go, like, but how do you explain that after the 19th century you had productivity rates like triple? Right? Like, yeah, so there's no difference, huh? And then I look at it, I'm like, well, it emerged over 400 years, and if you read Marx, that's clear, actually. Marx isn't deluded about it, like like the bourgeois revolutions are the instantiation of of how late that mode of production is in a given nation state, uh as being able to come to power and be a mode of production with a with a seemingly separate political project. But the mode of production could have been developing within something else for three, four hundred years, which also is kind of one of the harring things for socialism and trying to deal with what the demarcation between socialism and capitalism will be will be similarly difficult, I think. Although Marx's gambit is that we would do things early enough, and this is related to this, that we would be able to be self-control enough to control what comes out of capitalism, unlike the birth of capitalism itself or most prior forms. Now, this brings us back to the i mean the um the uh Samir Amin theory of decadence, which we ended up kind of chucking because it has this tributary mode of production thing, which I do think has some basic truth to it. Like you do have to like feudalism does seem weird when all the other empires are like way richer and more successful. Um, like Europe is is the world's backwater in the in the 12th and 13th century. Um but uh and I agree with that, but it but my problem with Samir Amin is that it made it seem like that's like the default mode, and like capitalist Econus is just gonna bring us back to a tributary mode of production, being very big about what that means. And I'm like, Yeah, but we're not serfs, and this is my same problem with neo-feudalism. There's no you like clicking tokens on the internet does not actually produce that much value, even in terms of revenue, not much less in terms of commodity production value, and there's no way that it produces a lot of use value so that people can eat or even build their fucking server farms, right? So you are just looking at the very superficialist end of the way the economy works. Now, our overlords might be doing that too, which is a problem, but it's it's a misunderstanding of like every step of this chain, yeah.

Regrettable Jason: 35:38

And that's that's uh our overlords have that problem all the time, though.

C. Derick Varn: 35:43

Right, right. So this leads me to why would that make a lot of sense though, given what our overlords are doing seems to seem to look like it, and I think there's like four things, two of which are Marxist, and three of which I take from other things, and then what these are mostly national, and we can talk about the international repercussions of it to like give this some shape. Um, one, there is a decline in rates of profits, Virginia, like in real commodities in Pacific. And the reason why it's hard to figure out is there's so much revenue tied in with rents that get mixed in with real commodities that make profit margins look larger than they are. But profit rates, if you actually look at the productivity of anything and why things are so low investment right now, people go, they're not low investment, everything's in the stock market. No, you're not professing, you're not investing in anything, but maybe a few server farms for people to farm at NVIDIA chips to, you're not actually building new jobs, new production, or anything like that. It's a low investment environment with high financial assets to look like investments, and bourgeois economics can recognize a difference.

Regrettable Jason: 36:51

Yeah, you could call it decadent.

C. Derick Varn: 36:55

But even in the way it's decadent, and like if you read financial reporting and the Wall Street Journal 20 years ago, they under they they understood the difference between revenues, profit rates, profit margins, um, and wealth transfers. If you read even the economic section of the Wall Street Journal today, they don't. They don't they don't make that clear, which means the capitalists don't really understand the difference either. So it's not just the general public, it's not just the dumbass left. Um it is also the overlords.

Regrettable Jason: 37:33

Um yeah, it's everybody. Nobody, nobody knows, nobody knows things, right?

C. Derick Varn: 37:38

We're breaking all of our information systems because we can't control them. That's a highly decadent move, but it's a common one. Like you don't like the reporting, you don't like chlamydia. Let's just not test people and hope that that's the the the chlamydia goes away, right?

Regrettable Chris: 37:55

Like, like um, yeah, like the I guess the the the newest jobs report that they just refused to ever release.

C. Derick Varn: 38:02

Like they're saying they're not gonna release a jobs report during this administration now, ever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Regrettable Chris: 38:08

That's gonna go very well, very well.

Regrettable Jason: 38:11

Uh um how bad does it have to be for that to happen? It's worse than I think that we know. I want to just want to say something just to for the whoever's listening, just to be very, very clear. I guess I thought about this a little bit. I'm I'm not at all in favor of cultural relativism. I'm I am very universalist in my thinking. I'm Catholic, I'm a you know, communist. I just like Hegel. I said, I want to tarry with the contradictions. I recognize that it's everything and it's also nothing. That's all.

unknown: 38:44

Oh, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 38:44

So don't don't like to help you say you being uh uh uh a thing. Qualia and qualia and structure actually do explain this, and this is in the this is in the internal contradiction as stated in Hegel between the universal and particular. Um which is why there's both a universal church, but there's still different languages if you're a Christian. I mean, uh I'm not a Christian, but I can explain Christian logic to people much better than your average Protestant huckster. Um, and uh that's not really saying much though. No, it really isn't. Um, and I'm not saying all Protestants are hucksters either, but like Ray Comfort.

Regrettable Jason: 39:25

Yeah, like not all like not all Anglicans are, but like I do think that all assemblies of God preachers are.

C. Derick Varn: 39:31

Yes. Okay, you guys can go out there.

Regrettable Jason: 39:34

Um, I got no stake in this fight, but the I'm sorry to our assemblies of God listeners.

C. Derick Varn: 39:40

The universal in particular problem actually is a problem because um and it's a it's a universal problem. I mean, it's why Marxists don't have a good answer to the workers of the world no no nation, but we also believe in national liberation, and we kind of always have, and it's never completely been able to square.

Regrettable Jason: 40:00

Well right, I think that we don't have a good there's no good answer for that question because I think that that question shouldn't be asked.

C. Derick Varn: 40:07

Right. Well, um, and so when we talk about things like the qualia of being Serbian, like I got no fucking idea. I do think there's a basic humanness that we could probably figure out. Um but I again in a decadent collapse of terms and and conflation, both an expansion and contraction of meaning, though. This makes it this makes a lot of this make sense in theory. I see a lot of theory as decadent, right? So people like our standpoint epistemologists. Now, where does standpoint epistemology come from? I can give you a long lineage. Basically, it's a bunch of Marxist feminists who read Lukash and applied it to the female experience, and they dropped the Marxist part and it got vague. And vaguer and vaguer. I actually listened to a podcast that you did on that.

Regrettable Chris: 40:51

Yeah, like a long time ago. I guess at this point, like eight years ago.

C. Derick Varn: 40:55

Right. And then and then I actually discovered recently this happened with intersectionality too. That intersectionality had a very limited meaning about dealing with things in a legal context where you're looking at where two different forms of oppression come together and it creates a new form of oppression that's not legally recognized. And somehow it became like code word for solidarity, but also makes solidarity impossible, which is not implied by original theory at all. And what you see is a category expansion. And the reason why you see a category expansion is a decadent expansion of claims of authority in an academic field, and then a category collapse. So we now say, okay, so and to bring it back to standpoint epistemology. We now say the standpoint of the working class gives us some unique visions into uh the way working classness is experienced. This is important to Lukash. He gets kind of mystical with it, in my opinion, but I get where he's coming from. Um the standpoint of other peoples are also that way. Qualia is always going to be standpoint-based. So you only can know what it is like to be a worker by being a worker, and you can only know what it's like to be a revolutionary worker by being a worker, participating in a revolution. Um, however, that is not even for Lukash the same as structural or gestalt or universal knowledge, it just isn't. Right. Right, like um, and I'm not gonna get into the Montin Bailey thing, but basically, people expand these categories. I give you another example. You can talk about the history of discussing racism, like by about 2009, racism had been broken down from its like 90s pop counterpoint answer to classical legal racism, which is active bigotry or active legal discrimination against a particular group according to their racial status. All right, yeah, it got expanded in the 90s, and people might remember this to power plus privilege equals racism, which is funny because there's not even race anywhere in that definition. Um, but it's a way to say that like black people can't be racist, all right. Then that that's obviously a non-starter for anyone who's trying to think through anything technically. So you see a response to that that's actually a refinement of the categories, and so you see racism get broken down into systemic racism, which tends to be economic. Um, so like being foreclosed out of economic markets, not having accumulated wealth, um uh household provisions, a higher cost of debt, uh, which can even be fed back into like actuarial tables and legal things, which leads to perpetuating group that people don't even have to be bigoted to maintain. Implicit bias, uh, which is like associations I have with other cultures, and yeah, we always focus on race, but like I don't know, I don't trust people from England. Um like I'm racist against people from England, right? Um exactly uh Anglophones in general, yeah. Anglophones and Protestants just like no. Um and I I know this is an implicit bias. I am not structurally racist against against people from England. Um, I might not even be good, though. I might not even be uh bigoted against people from England. I am, but I could not be. I might not be. I am, but I might not. But I could not be. Um so there's implicit bias there, right? Like um, and then there's explicit bigotry, but that's people start using those terms interchangeably, so then you have CRT advocates in their late decadent phase go, well, let's just call everything racism because it's clearer.

Regrettable Chris: 45:02

Right. Yeah, like everyone is racist, they always have been racist, and there's nothing you can do about it. So you just just need to feel bad all the time and talk about how bad you feel as much as possible.

C. Derick Varn: 45:15

And also you everything you do have to be explicitly about race. If you fix things that that are racial, but it isn't about race, it's still a racist policy because reasons.

Regrettable Jason: 45:27

Yeah, I Chris, you can't talk about it too much because you're taking up too much space in your way and let us in Oregon are considered people of color because Slavs are in Oregon for some reason.

Regrettable Chris: 45:38

But anyway, a point that we've made on the on the podcast many a times. So please, when you speak to me, you're speaking to never mind.

C. Derick Varn: 45:47

But only in uh only in the only in Oregon.

Regrettable Chris: 45:50

Um only in Oregon, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 45:52

Um but uh and maybe in Britain. Um so the point I I am making is that these categories get confused. This is not just in the United States, by the way. British and European people will occasionally use American frameworks for race and apply it to their frameworks of race. I mean, in the case of Britain, sometimes directly, in ways that make absolutely no sense. Right.

Regrettable Jason: 46:21

This is one of those places, this is an example of what where I would insist upon the particular because the American experience is not universal, it's nobody else has it, it's just an American experience.

Regrettable Chris: 46:33

Yeah, it's try to convince people and um people that uh the Ukrainians are as a general rule incredibly fucking racist. Uh and it's like, yeah, but they have a Jew as a president. It's like, oh yeah, but that doesn't really mean anything. Not the way that we uh because we're not there, they don't conceive of race the way that we're conceiving of race in the United States, right?

C. Derick Varn: 46:59

Also, like the British Empire had a Jew as a prime minister, even though he was an Anglican convert that doesn't actually say what you think it says, like because it was he was he was the conservative prime minister at like I don't know the birth of scientific racism, yes. Um, anyway, uh but I I think this gets to a decadence model that Marxists often miss. All right. One of the things I get frustrated with, yes, Virginia, I do believe in a decline of racist profits, but two bureaucratic overreach and elite overproduction are real. Marxists don't really deal with them because they're not between classes, they're within classes. Eliteness is actually often an inter an intra-class stratum as much as an inter-class stratum. Um, that's what labor aristocracy is about. It's not that labor aristocrats aren't workers, right? Like, um, I mean, classically speaking, they're just people who benefit from uh either leadership in the labor movement or imperialism. I mean, Engels uses it both ways. Um, and it's not that unlike later theories of third worldism that not even all third worldists believe in, but was very popular about 15 years ago, it's not even that labor aristocrats aren't exploited, they just have an advantage over over workers and have an incentive to act in the interests, uh, as if they were petite bourgeoisie, actually, um, most of the time. Although we miss the division in the petite bourgeoisie, like the professional bourgeoisie, uh, petite bourgeoisie and the and the uh and its associated class strata and the working class and the petite bourgeois are at odds with each other all the time because one needs state patronage and the other is hurt by it. Like, but again, why does decadence matter for this? Because it leads to the overproduction of these highly complicated systems that sap off of other forms of production, it leads to uh um what what libertarians call cost disease. Like, how much does it cost to educate a kid today uh with less outcomes for it than it did even 30 years ago? So I can give you some numbers on that, and this is something I actually know, and so I'm using this example. Um uh the average cost of educating uh educating a child has almost tripled in 30 years. Uh 93% of all uh a percentage of all things spent on the dollar is spent on labor in education because it's a high labor field, even though it doesn't seem like it is because it's white-collar labor, but it's a high labor field. Um, it takes a lot of people devoted full time to doing things to do it. Um, it is not profitable. You can actually see why there's never been really for really profitable for profit education firms because it's so high labor, it just the way it is. Um so then okay, well, then why is it double? Because teachers make less than they did in real terms, uh even after all the rages, uh the raises they got in the aught teens in most states than they did 30 years ago, like in actual purchasing power, right? So, where did all this go? It went into an administrative bloat, but people go, oh bullshit jobs, it was just bullshit jobs, wrong. The administrative bloat exists to deal with increasing uh documentation needs and regulation needs, and also to deal with being sued. Because this administrative voice is uh uh bloat is the worst in the US because we handle everything, not uh even violations of regulations, not by criminal court, but by le by civil lawsuit for the most part. But also, you see this everywhere, you don't just see it here, you see it in the UK, you see it in France, right? Um, so what's happening? Well, this one institution is not profitable, intersects with other institutions that have growing needs of regulation and also growing needs of production, and it increases the the cost of everything you need. I'll give you an example of that. Uh, to be legally compliant, to do any kind of education research, a school board now needs to have its own committee that acts as an IRB, it needs to have uh uh a bunch of lawyers on staff, it needs to have um people to ensure compliance paperwork is done, it needs to have more and more uh people to comply with federal mandates, it needs to have people to enforce censorship rules imposed by Republicans. Um, all these things are cost of labor. So now you get it cost double or triple what it you depending on the state, that's why I'm using vague terms here. Um, what it used to cost to educate people. There's also all this rent-seeking and forms of technology, but that's actually not what's driving the cost increase.

Regrettable Jason: 52:18

Um no, those that's attending to the cost increase, right?

C. Derick Varn: 52:23

Um, and then you go, well, how do we how how do we simplify this? You have to blow up the system and start from scratch. There is no way to reform that system without reforming the entire society around it, because it's responding to that society. That is an over this is what we call the um overcomplexity problem um in institutions, and people are like, oh, that's a metaphor. It's not a metaphor, it's literal, and it literally eats up calories of people to reproduce themselves to do is something you have to control for. This is I actually think this is part of why um dealing with apparatchics and uh middle party officials is such a problem for communists and has been in every communist society that's ever existed, because this tendency is not just a capitalist tendency, but you combine that with capitalism and you're gonna accelerate the problems really quickly. Um that leads to three, the overproduction of elites are actually this should be restated because that's not true. It's not just that elites are overproductive, it makes it sound like it's all fail sons. Although it is all fail sons, but that's not applying like the fact you and I have a I don't know what your class background is, but my class back was brown with blue collar. The fact that I have a have a degree actually does indicate that the overproduction of leads does reach down into other classes, it does not right now, but it did in the 80s and 90s.

Regrettable Jason: 53:56

No, right. You are right. It's when I say it's all fail sons, it's just because I I think that's funny, but it's not actually literally not all actually all fail sons, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 54:05

But the number of fail sons leads to four elite cap capture and deliberate inefficiency, which leads to de-skilling of elites, not just the common people. Now we now we throw back in some economic stuff that Marxists do know about. The centralization of production does something that Marx didn't actually predict, but actually is logical in some of the logic of capital. It's the centralization of production through automation because of the need to lower socially necessary labor time. And why do you want to uh lower socially necessary labor time? It reduces costs, which temporarily jukes your profits. The problem with that though, is that the temporary jukes and profits that also enable more people to enter the market, which drives prices down, which drives profitability down, which there's only two ways to fix monopsy power or common immiseration. We're getting both, but why not both?

unknown: 55:05

Right.

C. Derick Varn: 55:06

We're getting both, but the fact that, for example, 50, I said 90 on something recently, I was wrong. 50 of most consumer spending plus 2024 is actually of the top 90, uh top 10 of households. And if you even look at that, it's even more disparaged than that. It's like most of consumer spending. And I'm not talking about economically productive spending, it's just consumer spending, it's like tied into basically people who have like we live in the revenge of the Nepo baby trust fund people who literally are the only thing holding the economy up. Um the consumer economy up, uh, plus it's holding NVIDIA up because you have all this excess revenues to throw into um asset investment. But here's the problem we don't know what these assets would be worth if they were all being made to valorize now. This is what people laugh at Marxists for fictitious capital. This is what this is what Marxists mean. Yeah, this is capital actually means it doesn't mean counterfeit uh it doesn't mean counterfeit money, it means valuation is not equal to actual value if you had to sell the thing, but you don't know that until you sell it.

Regrettable Jason: 56:19

You can't see right like how um valuation. That's like when you have like companies like uh like Uber how long did it turn it take them to actually turn a profit?

Regrettable Chris: 56:30

And yet uh 10 years, I think they were uh before they finally turned started turning a profit. Yeah, and yet they definitely have not made their investors any of their money back yet.

Regrettable Jason: 56:42

That's true, but you know, they were valued uh in enormously.

C. Derick Varn: 56:50

So you could buy stock and you can speculate and you could trade it, and that's we see that with Chat GPT, which is transparently able, not uh unable to turn a profit by a lot. It's like 80% of the entire economy now, or not the entire economy, but uh uh no NVIDIA, the physical production core of it is 80% of the entire yeah, um, but but chat GPT seems to be like the most valued form of stock. This is fictitious capital because it's based off of potential earnings that people are learning aren't going to come, which is why we have a more and more bubbly economy. Uh and these bubbles get bigger and bigger, by the way. Like, because also there's no like traditional investment isn't profitable at a rate that can outstrip inflation, even low levels of inflation. If you're only making one or two percent, then that's a problem. So what do you do?

Regrettable Jason: 57:45

And so you just you have one you just stop printing out the uh jobs report. Yeah, that's that.

C. Derick Varn: 57:53

But but the other thing you do is you start chasing quick and quick things that are seem like that seem like investments, but are just like assets that it can inflate and deflate rapidly, like Bitcoin or whatever. Um so there's people go, well, how that's related to this other problem. Okay, well, it is because one um you now have a de-skilled proletariat in the sense that they are skilled for jobs that they no longer are needed for. It is gonna take about a generation to reskill them. Um so add that to a lead over production, and you have a you have a socially destabilizing problem. This is why you get all these ch you get people who talk like like people imagine that the average MAGA lunatic is some like blue-collar chud, but like some of the worst ones have law degrees from Cornell. Oh yeah. They're they're fuck ups, uh, but they got the degree and they have elite backgrounds.

Regrettable Chris: 59:02

Like, yeah, it's like the like the people that were in the SS, they're all lawyers and PhDs, right?

C. Derick Varn: 59:10

Um, and people go, Oh, it must be like I'm like, no, this is not, this is not your chuds are not like blue-collar mechanics. I mean, they might be like some of those people might be down on that intellectually for any number of reasons, but that's not where they come from. They're overproduced elites. Um, and then people will say stuff like, well, the overproduce, and you know, Freddie Debor says this about social justice, and uh um Fume Otayo says this about uh identity politics. Although with identity politics, I think it's a little bit of a stretch when we can get to why, but it's not really a fuck bizarre thing today. You have another problem is elite capture. I think you see this in the left and left populism too, and even in workers' politics. Um, which means you have people speaking for the experience of being a worker who frankly don't know what the fuck they're talking about and are alienating workers by doing it.

Speaker 3: 1:00:05

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:05

Um, which means that it's which means now in three different ways, it's harder to have a coherent working class response. It's harder to unionize because we no longer have large industrial shops. Like I support Starbucks unions as much as everyone, but they don't mean the same things as GM unionizing, it just likely doesn't.

Regrettable Chris: 1:00:25

Um that's still at the point of production, but only at the point of production of lattes, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:32

Um, so so this is not me shitting on the baristas. I I think what they're doing is fine, but also shop sizes of 16 are not shop sizes of 7,000. Yeah. Um, which means they don't. Scale up in the same way, those unions are gonna have a harder time providing the benefits of the traditional unions in terms of negotiating contracts, in terms of providing uh other benefits. Now, still a lot of workers there, but you know, but what about the traditional unions? We always talk about Sean Fain in the UAW, and not you and I, but socialist world. Bosh Karasankara was actually suggesting he should be president, and I was like, no, he should run the fucking union. But two, why why why is the UAW still trying to get people as TAs because the American car industry only survives by keeping what would really be socially beneficial to Americans, which is cheap electric vehicles from China and supporting equipment, uh or hybrid vehicles or whatever, into the market to drop the price of artificially inflated American cars. Now, I know I sound like a neoliberal when I say that, but the reason why that is the case is it is very costly because of the value of the US dollar and because of the the supply chains to continue just production here.

Regrettable Jason: 1:02:02

Now, if I was to identify what you're doing, what you're doing is you're talking about the consequences of the neoliberal structure of the world, and so you're talking about like this is what we should do, what needs to be, in order for whatever it is. You're not saying this what uh what how do I put this? You're just you're just acknowledging the reality, you're not talking. It's not a prescription, it's just this is how it is.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:28

Well, I said this the other day about food. This is a surprise people, Mike. The more you actually have to pay the full price of food, the more people will starve. Food is a labor-intensive industry. If you pay people a living wage in agriculture, it's gonna be a problem. That's why every culture on the planet subsidizes their food production, right um, uh all the way back to the ancient world, right? I mean, this is a pre this is a pre-capitalist problem.

Regrettable Jason: 1:02:55

Um this is the reason why uh public private partnerships are only half good, it's only the public half.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:05

Right. Well, I mean, public-private props partnerships to me are the worst of both worlds. I mean, because you you have everything that capitalists would describe as uh moral hazard, and none of the efficiency benefits of actually working directly through the state. And if you don't believe me, look at the Trump administration. Holy shit! Yeah, um yeah.

Regrettable Jason: 1:03:24

So the it's funny because this despite being despite being heralded as the end of neoliberalism, they're neoliberalism in one country, which is an impossibility, but go ahead.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:36

No, that's exactly right. That's awesome. Um so it's so we we are looking at a bunch of deep, deep problems that are not structurally easy to fix. Um, and that's decadence. Now, I guess this brings me to the last 30 minutes, uh, and I've been talking a lot, and I'll let you guys talk here, but why I think we shouldn't scoff at the moral elements of decadence, even if we're not Catholics or believe in uh uh um uh like traditional moral values. I don't even know what the fuck that means, but you guys get what I'm saying. Like, I don't care uh about um about people if they're monogamous or polyamorous. I don't care about a bunch of these issues uh on on a deeply moral level. I'm I I'm a moral thinker, I don't think these things are super moral questions, but I'm gonna I'm gonna actually complicate that when I do think decina still matters. Right? Read the way people talk about um relationships, not just family. I know we're all supposed to be about family abolition, although as I pointed out, that meant something entirely different in the 19th century than it does today. Um, and also when done to oppress communities was really bad. Um, because it was. Um, but there's there's a kind of contradiction in capitalism that people don't want to look at. They only want to look at one side or the other. Bronko Milovich, I can't remember, it's not mistake, it's not Michavis, that's the that's the Jackam guy, uh, who says that you know, um on one hand, capitalism is deliberately destroying one of the few institutions that is a source of most people's socialization, which is a family, meaning people uh open to full commodification, including over their sex lives. Uh on the other hand, it is actually true that Melinda Cooper and Co. say that capitalism is dependent on the family as a way to bypass social goods for a long time and over-relying on the family to do that, because it is still a relatively socially alienated form that is easy to control and stuff and breaks down other forms of social solidarity. Both things can be true, and that seems to bother people. Like they don't seem to have a way to reconcile.

Regrettable Jason: 1:06:03

Whenever both things of whatever the things might be, when both things can be true, that bothers people.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:10

Yeah, yeah, they don't like it.

Regrettable Jason: 1:06:13

Um but that's my that's my that's my main shit, you know. Yeah, I both stay true. Yeah, I'm of two minds about this. What is this? Yes, everything, yeah. Right. What is this? Yes.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:27

Like I am a I am a big I'm a big supporter of like um well, I'll tell you, it's like I am a big believer in chosen family, but I also say part of the definition of family is you can't get all you can't always get out of it.

Regrettable Jason: 1:06:40

Right. I think like if you if you value social cohesion, setting aside uh some of the other arguments I might make, considering where I'm coming from, because I am very Catholic, but forget all that. If you value social cohesion, you have to acknowledge that there's something in the in the breakdown of um social uh values and social responsibilities and social uh obligations that is directly detrimental to what you value most, which is social cohesion, without without some some faily to the past, which is you know tradition, without some faily to your uh you know, your family and thus and your neighborhood and so on. Community, family, etc. Yeah, one's gonna break down too. So people drive really awfully in LA and in Atlanta, and it's not just because they just happen to.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:40

This this all they also drive really awfully in Utah, weirdly. Well, and go go go ahead. Um, my my point, my point though, is to tie this to to defend your point and actually make it a little bit clearer. Um my point is not that we need all these traditional family modes forever. I'm not like some Freudian or I I don't necessarily think that the Catholic mode of society should be enforced on people, but I do think that obligation is really fucking important, yes, yeah. And if you don't trust people enough, this is where the breakdown comes. So I've talked about like a lot about the crisis of male loneliness, and people think I'm only looking at it from the man's point of view. Um, and I'm like, no, there's a crisis of female loneliness and a female lack of trust, too, because yes, they're dealing with man children um who have been poorly served by their communities and alienated for a long time with no social roles, not even new social roles, just none. Yeah.

Regrettable Jason: 1:08:39

Um is everyone's problem, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:45

And also, interestingly, um, and I'm not saying this to make an anti-feminist point, I'm actually saying it to make a feminist point, but it's one that cuts against what people think. Uh, during most of the 20th century, the people who were most aware of their roles were women. If you look at social roles and gender today amongst young people, the people who are aware of their roles are men. It does not mean that they're the same thing as the 1950s half right if they're absolutely not. What it means is holding on to the social role is now something that is so precarious to them for a variety of reasons, most of which have not a goddamn thing to do with feminism, um, that they have to be aware of it. All right. Um, and I think that's interestingly under discussed, all right. Um, because we have valorized certain forms of of social mobility, but then we they've also been feminized, higher ed. And they get people like, oh, you're saying feminized, you like those chuds. No, no, no, but it's just objectively true that women have done better in school for whatever reasons. I I tend to think of socialization uh to be more pro-social and more oblig and more obligation driven. I also think there might be some stuff about uh zones of development that may be a little bit biological, but nonetheless. Um uh that I also think we've completely failed on, and I don't think it's just hurting the men at all.

Regrettable Jason: 1:10:25

All right, uh I don't think it's possible to just hurt the men or just hurt the women.

C. Derick Varn: 1:10:29

It's like and people think oh, this is an American internet phenomenon. Go look at South Korea. I was there when this was beginning to develop in South Korea, it's more acute there than here. Yeah, and it like if it continues, the social reproduction of Korea will cease to exist, right?

Regrettable Chris: 1:10:51

Japan is the same thing, right? Um like so like in in the United States too, it's it's at the heart of uh stochastic violence, right? Is this this male loneliness epidemic? And the way that leftists tend to treat it is like, well, maybe they should like you know, stop being such incel chuds. Like, yeah, okay, cool. Good, that's helpful.

Regrettable Jason: 1:11:17

Yeah, it's it's very similar to like, oh, look at the the homelessness crisis and the the drug addiction crisis. They should just stop. Like, sure, maybe they should just stop, but uh in terms of like what's actually going to help, you are used to that at all.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:36

So my last point about the this period of decadence, and then I'll do a recap and I'll let you guys respond. I have your last points, right? Is that the last thing that you see, uh, I think that's a sign of decadence, is that no one can look at the whole picture or acknowledge the complicatedness of the picture. That's why conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are usually rooted in something true, but they go in a very false direction that makes you dependent on someone who knows about as much as you do. Like they the conspiracy guru is usually just someone taking advantage of you, frankly.

Regrettable Jason: 1:12:08

Um has enough time to figure out how to say how little right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:14

Um, so uh, you see this rife in decadent societies. Ironically, I point out Turk Carlson knows this. He actually admitted he actually talked about this in the case of Egypt's breakdown in the 1990s in a debate with Eric Alterman, which is why I don't think Tucker is as ignorant as people think he is. Um I think Tucker is I think he's quite able to make exactly what he's doing. He makes good points a lot of the time because he's because sometimes you're unfortunately yeah, sometimes your evil enemies are actually the people who are most uh acute at dealing with things, and and Tucker is still socially minded in some way. Um yeah, like if even if it's only for reactionary Chud weirdo quasi-heretical form of Catholicism, uh, he does actually believe in social reproduction.

Regrettable Chris: 1:13:07

Uh he's a he's an Episcopalian, by the way.

C. Derick Varn: 1:13:10

Oh, excuse me. Yeah, so he's doubly heretical, yeah, triply heretical because Episcopalians religion is just liberalism. No, uh oops, I shouldn't say that out loud. All right. Um uh but anyway. Uh you know, we're we're nearing the end of or needing to wrap up where we're like, oh no, it says too honest, and just also my my bigotry gets frost if it really comes out. Um but you know, I think I think this gives us uh for the left, this relates to a hard problem because the other thing I'm gonna bring in at the end, this leads to people wanting to find subjects elsewhere that I think are valid, like the third world or whatever. Um, I think a lot of the third world is analysis is actually at least three-fourths right. I've actually said this a lot.

Regrettable Jason: 1:14:02

I think it's partially right, but I think it it's it's it's it hinges upon something which is very uh well, the it's very flawed in that there's this notion of a permanent third world, which is right. Well, that's just it exists.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:17

It free actually, I think it freezes everything in the 1950s, and then the other issue with it is like no, nobody on the planet's just gonna let people come and kill them to get rid of the capitalist off of a sense of fairness or what the fuck ever. So your project is doomed if you're correct. Luckily, you're not.

Regrettable Jason: 1:14:36

Yeah, like if you were correct, that would make Red Dawn also correct.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:40

Right.

Regrettable Jason: 1:14:41

Um instead of just a kick-ass movie.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:45

Yeah, I really do, I really do love the first Red Dawn, even though it's revolutionary propaganda.

Regrettable Chris: 1:14:51

Um I mean, I saw it when I was like 10 years old, and I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. I think it's where I got Nicaragua, one of the countries that invaded, yeah. Nicaragua, Cuba, North Korea, and the Soviet Union.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:04

I think it actually kind of made me think Stodia aesthetics was cool too, even though I was totally on the side of the Eagle Scouts when I watched it in the 80s.

Regrettable Chris: 1:15:12

But um it's like, man, those Soviets, they dress well. Oh I like I like the camo that they wear in that. I I've always wanted to have some of that camo.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:24

Yeah, the camo's objectively better than ours, but anyway, um uh my point is like so that makes sense, right? You be but my point is like, no, you have to have some like if you're a third worldist who believes there's stuff for people to do to join up with them. I actually have no truck with you. Um, like you're fine, but um, because I do think like, yeah, the the developing world's been primitive accumulated forever, it's constantly moving around and it's constantly getting fucked over in a thousand different ways, and we can go through it. Um, but what I see now is like people doubling down on that when the peripherization of the core is happening, and I'm like, it's happening here now, too, guys. Like the the barrier that you thought existed with like labor aristocracy and all it's gone or it's going away.

Regrettable Jason: 1:16:17

I think that when people talk about uh being third third worldist, and I'm not talking about Kevin in this case, but with other people who talk about this. I'm not even actually and then they also like talk about their heroes that be people like Xi Jinping. It's like you don't know anything about the world if you think that third worldism would include China, yeah, exactly.

Regrettable Chris: 1:16:39

Not since the fucking 90s, anyway. Yeah, right. Um I we had a friend once who said, uh, I think I agree with the third worldist, but I don't know what to do about it. Right that's kind of how I see myself. It's like, yeah, I mean, you're right about a lot of what you say, but the the uh to carry to carry the logic through to application would just be inconceivable to me, you know.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:05

Well it seems to me that like this is why I had an issue with Samir Amin's thing. It's like, okay, so what do you want people to do? Do you want us to join up with the workers in the developing world and help them? Or do you want us to just like get out the way? In which case, the latter it will only happen if it would possibly benefit us, and you're not saying it will. So what do you think is gonna happen? And this gets more absurd on certain things, like I believe that settler colonialism is a valid way of understanding what happened in the Americas, all of the Americas, not just the Anglo ones. Um, but are you gonna undo it? Right. Like, yeah, that's that's the problem. Yeah, like are you gonna propose a version of Landback that's possible? Are you gonna pretend that two percent of the population is gonna be able to get rid of 40 to 90 percent of the population?

Regrettable Chris: 1:18:02

Like, yeah, so like there are there are multiple versions of land back and some of them I actually like some of them. I want to be clear on that. Right. I mean, I've got I've got a uh sort of anarcho-Mooist friend who says that the United States is an illegitimate state, and you know, all colon descendants of clo uh colonists need to go back to their countries of origin. Like the the fucking straw man that I I make fun of is is like what he and the group that he's part of, which I don't even know what it is, actually believe in. And of course, that is sort of the maximalist position that a lot of people do take, even though they don't actually have so any kind of you know where would I go back to? Yeah, which which part of me goes back to where, right? Yeah, shot me in half, send half of me to the Czech Republic and the other half of me to yeah, places of northern Europe, but it also gets like when do we start this too?

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:57

Because it just seems arbitrary that we started at 1492 or 16 uh 1619 or 1620, or yeah, like um, but also it's weirdly blood and soil. Um, yes, very, very much so it is.

Regrettable Jason: 1:19:12

Yeah, um not in not not like not even like on the sly. It's just right, it's just the good versions of blood and soil.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:21

Yeah, it's race science. Yeah. Um, but I do think there are versions of Ramback I completely would agree with, like, as like fully empowering indigenous peoples over the land they currently occupy.

Regrettable Chris: 1:19:33

And no, they can't kick everybody out, but you know, they have their own political structures, giving them can expropriate like large landholders to give indigenous people enough of their land back for them to live on profitable uh pieces of land, right?

Regrettable Jason: 1:19:48

Oh, yeah, like if you look if you look at a map of the United States and you look at a uh and you and that map includes where all the reservations are, and you talk about what statehood would mean. You talk about uh turning the Bureau of Indian Affairs into a representative body in the same way that Venezuela has the indigenous parliament. There are ways to do this, yeah. These are ways which rely upon a constitutional republic and a nation state.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:14

Plural nationalism, which people go, oh, that's so weird. Really, China did it before it was even communists. That's Sun Yat-sen's project. Um, like look at European Union.

Regrettable Chris: 1:20:26

Well, not that that's really working, but but yes, no, it's not but there is a way that the European Union could work, just not in like the neoliberal framework that it was conceived. Right.

Regrettable Jason: 1:20:36

So when people say United States of Europe has been uh has been like the slogan for like revolutionary thinking people since well before Marx was born.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:48

Right. So my point about this is just to say very clearly that these categories are also symptoms of decadence. So if you think you got an easy answer, you kind of don't. Yeah. And the reason why there's symptoms of decadence is you're encouraged in our capitalist attention economy to take maximalist positions that are absurd if you think about them for 35 seconds, but they get attention. And we'd like to pretend that's this social media, but I don't think that's true anymore. I think that is like near universal. Um so to recap how all this is related, because this is all over the place, but one, and we are going to go back to these essays, guys. We're also going to talk about some uh some conservative stuff that we find some some actual valid complaints and discussions in.

Regrettable Jason: 1:21:50

Yeah, like seriously, when it comes to um if it if if it bothers anyone that we read read and talk about conservative uh material or thinkers, that means just do better. Left. Right.

unknown: 1:22:03

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:04

Um but let to add to add this all together. Um I think when you do have the basic Marxist dynamics of profit rates, you also have the de-skilling of the classes, plural, not just one of them. Part of that is due to elite overproduction and elite capture. Another part of that is due to the overcomplication of society in general. That is a that is a pre-capitalist phenomenon and probably will be a post-capitalist phenomenon, something we're gonna have to deal with forever. Um, you have the um the consequences of de-skilling, meaning there's less clear, coherent subjects, which leads to denhilism and lack of social obligation in the general population, which looks like immorality. It is immorality, in my point, but I mean that in a general sense. Like, even if you're a moral pluralist, there it's hard to be a moral pluralist when no one has obligation to hold morality together. Morality is fucking social. Um uh, which does not lead to just like immorality, it leads to further commodification of things that I think should not be particularly commodified, such as social reproduction, aka sex, but social reproduction is a lot more than sex, it's aesthetics, it's a lot of stuff.

Regrettable Jason: 1:23:17

I would call I would call the commodification of these things uh immoral, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:22

Um well and why would it be I would call them anti-human, right? Yeah, why would it be immoral and anti-human without even having to appeal to one of the various religions? Let's tell you why in a very simple framework. It pits people against them against themselves in ways that make them stupider. So you said these skilling, including illiteracy, which we didn't even get into, but I could have. It makes things more expensive because competition uh increases the waste of resources in order to get them. Um if you don't believe me, why did the European why did the Europeans in resonance? I got this from Ada Palmer actually, uh spend so much extravagant amounts of money uh on on tech, but also on stupid Roman bullshit that that the Ottomans and the Chinese and other people at the same time period did not do. And it wasn't just about scientific innovation, it was about internal competition amongst amongst uh fragmented powers in Europe, which was only settled by imperialism flat out. So so people who think I'm unfair to Samir Amin, there is a little bit of truth in what he's saying. Um so you see this all the time. Like I think the harder things for socialists is a lot of socialists want to believe that these problems are just capitalism, and some of them are. About half the ones I've mentioned are only capitalist problems, right? But some of them are not. I think one of the biggest ways we've sold socialism short is making it big rock candy mountain bullshit where there's no problems after we just get rid of the cats. Yes, like that's not gonna fucking happen.

Regrettable Jason: 1:25:15

The way I've always thought of it, I think it's much more helpful is to think about it not so much in terms of like one solution revolution, rather of that that the concept of socialism is about getting to start finding solutions, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:36

That's right, yeah, yeah, which we can't do right now because we're all geared towards profitability, and we're not even geared towards that anymore. We're geared to like basically I mean I think we're in cannibal capitalism, really.

Regrettable Jason: 1:25:51

I mean that's what I would call this, but and I think that the war of all against all is one in which we're all going to lose. Because even Elon Musk needs a friend, like a human friend, not like an AI friend.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:06

Yeah, I'm with you. And also, dear God socialists, please don't be using Chat GPT and make up for your lack of friends. If that's the case, we're totally oh god, like that's a species ending event. Maybe maybe that is the answer to Fermi's paradox, is is not that the AI kills us, if the AI makes us not socially reproduce. Oh like it just kills us slowly. Yeah, and but but it's it doesn't kill us, we kill us, right? But not even in war.

Regrettable Jason: 1:26:36

Like species being is a really important concept to Marxists, yeah, and that we should go return to it. And also being species, that also matters. You have to exist. Yep.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:49

I mean social reproduction actually does have to happen, guys, because yeah, and that does involve you know actual reproduction.

Regrettable Jason: 1:26:55

Like it's a huge, it's a huge component of it, actually.

Regrettable Chris: 1:27:01

But a lot of Marxists refuse to uh grapple with that, with the idea that human beings need to reproduce and social reproduction isn't is actually is it's actually a net good, right? Yeah. Um yeah, that's always that's when you have conversations with leftists, they they generally poo-poo that. Like the idea that there's a uh massive population decline all over the world, and that it's uh that's actually a problem. Um that that's just that's oh that's you know, that's uh you know, right wing talking points, that's bullshit. It's not something we actually need to worry about. I'm like, I I think it is because it's it's it's not that I think that human beings are going to die out, which they might, but I don't think that that's gonna happen. Uh, but I do think that it indicates that there is a deep, deep social illness that affects every society in the world. Yeah. Um, and that social illness is something that is horrible uh and will be and will have redound to the benefit of the worst people and the and the class deepen class entrenchments and uh you know expand the powers of the worst people in the world to the point where it makes what we want to do uh far less possible than it is right now, which is almost completely impossible.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:18

Yeah. Yep. And on that note, we're gonna end. All right. Um that happy note. Um, we'll be back, we'll be talking about the off-healing essay. I think we're only gonna devote one more. We won't go through it quite as thoroughly because I found it useful for the history. I think even its authors don't agree with its conclusion, and also it gets a little bit repetitive, even though it's tedious towards the end, really is. Um like in ways that even like the the the smear mean one wasn't, um, even though I thought the smear mean was like, give me the book so if I know if you're full of shit or not. Oh, you died. Damn it.

Speaker 3: 1:29:01

Yeah, um that sucks.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:04

Um because I feel like I feel like commenting on the on the on the introduction to a book that was never written is kind of an accidental dick move. Yeah.

Regrettable Chris: 1:29:21

That's actually what's just commenting on the uh people only read the introduction and they just have like hour-long discussions about it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:29

Oh my god. I I also think theory Twitter is like I read the summary of the introduction in the grad seminar, and then you know, people wonder why you know a sign of decadence. I have to read whole fucking texts on my on my channel just to make sure you guys actually got all of it before you try to correct me about something.

Regrettable Chris: 1:29:50

Like we've actually picked up the Varn model of uh of close reading uh stuff recently, and I actually really enjoy it as a as a method of podcasting.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:01

It A, it's it's easy to podcast, and B, you're actually teaching people stuff and they can argue with you because you provide them all the evidence right there.

Regrettable Jason: 1:30:08

Like, yeah, it's it's not always appropriate, but it's much more often than uh I think we've we once recognized.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:16

No, I tried to do uh uh Raymond Goisbert a book, uh how not to be a liberal that way. It actually didn't work because it's intermixed with like autobiography and stuff about the Catholic Church, and all of which is very interesting, but actually isn't as useful for going through that way. Um, but nonetheless, I think for a lot of these theory articles, uh it's vital. And on that note, we really are done. Subscribe at uh to uh regrettable century. Uh you can find them on Patreon. They're also they have a free show. Uh uh there are four hosts now.

Regrettable Chris: 1:30:52

Yeah, yes. Four hosts. We do two um two public episodes a month and two uh Patreon episodes a month. Oh, yeah, we do uh the weekly geopolitics roundup uh every week. Which is also Patreon. Every week on Patreon, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:08

Um uh on that note, we're done. Bye. Like and subscribe at uh uh at varblog on Patreon, or you can find me on any podcast server from the free show, or you can find me on YouTube. Uh the the zoomers like the YouTube. I don't get it, I really don't, but yeah, we'll be there too, I guess. I feel like they're watching a Zoom call, but um with better backgrounds. But that's it, that's all I can promise you. Um all right, and on that note, we're gonna stop and I'll answer your question afterwards.