Hellworld And The Broken Labor Map with Phil Neel

What if “reindustrialization” delivers fabs, data centers, and subsidies—but not the jobs? We sit down with Marxist geographer Phil Neel to unpack Hell World, a sweeping account of how deindustrialization, gigified services, and AI deskilling have rewired the global labor map. Drawing on years of on-the-ground research and a panoramic read of supply chains, Neel explains why factories employ far fewer people, why service work resists productivity gains, and how rents—especially real estate—shape cities and politics more than we admit.

We follow the trail from Foxconn’s peaks to muted booms in Vietnam and India, from “Chinese investment” myths in East Africa to the very real power of trade networks, wholesale warehouses, and e-commerce hubs. Along the way, Neel dismantles comforting periodizations—neoliberalism, monopoly capital, neo-feudalism—that blur structural continuities in accumulation. The state is growing, but not as a cure: military contracts, healthcare complexes, and subsidized tech now anchor a reindustrialization that largely bypasses wage earners.

So where does strategy live? Neel argues for a Promethean, developmental communism that treats production and complexity as political terrain. That means credible plans for electrification, clean water, durable housing, and transit—paired with the organizational muscle to win space: assemblies, strike capacity, and the willingness to cross today’s legal tripwires that have long neutralized labor. Electoral wins can blunt repression at the margins, but they won’t substitute for power built in services, logistics, and the everyday circuits where value and control actually move.

If your city’s future looks like a shiny battery plant and an even larger rent bill, this conversation offers a sharper map. We trace commodities back to ports and smelters, expose the limits of jobless growth, and sketch a politics that aims higher than nostalgic compacts and faster than the next subsidy cycle. Listen, share with a friend, and tell us: where would you place power to make material gains possible today? Subscribe for more deep dives and leave a review to help others find the show.



About Phil Neel
Phil A. Neel is an author and researcher known for his "communist geography." Raised in the rural Siskiyou Mountains, his work is grounded in the material realities of the American hinterland and the global logistics industry. He is the author of Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict and Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory.

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

Chapters

• 0:00 Introducing Phil Neel And Hell World
• 3:32 Painful Theory, Literary Method
• 5:07 Automation, Output-Led Booms, Decline
• 9:17 Dual Labor Markets On The Ground
• 12:57 Informality And Global Peripherization
• 17:32 Narrow Imaginations Of The Left
• 21:47 Deindustrialization’s Global Rhythm
• 25:57 State Expansion And Social Reproduction
• 30:32 Reindustrialization Without Jobs
• 36:47 Services, Cost Disease, And Productivity
• 41:47 China’s Peaks, Myths, And Trade
• 48:17 Premature Deindustrialization In The South
• 53:17 Liberal Development And Its Appeal
• 58:47 Periodization, Neo‑Feudal Myths
• 1:05:17 Rents, Real Estate, And Power
• 1:10:17 Party Forms, Militancy, And Tactics
• 1:17:17 Electoral Gambits And Hard Limits
• 1:22:47 Policing, ICE, And Civic Courage
• 1:27:47 Fragmentation, Empire, And Time
• 1:32:47 Breaking Methodological Nationalism
• 1:38:17 Where To Read More From Neel

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:48

Hello, I'm here with Marxist geographer Phil Nil. Communist geographer Phil Nil. Should be careful what I say. And we are talking about his massive tome Hell World, which I will start by saying is both incredibly literary for it for a theory book full of stuff on manufacturing and the structures of a factory, but is also, and you warn in the introduction to your book, painful to read. I will admit that I treated this book like I treated Finnegan's Wake, which is I just kind of rode with it and just dealt with the fact that I thought it was both immensely interesting and terribly unpleasant. But that's the point. And I know that's a weird sell for a book, but there you go. And I wanted to talk to you about this. This seems to be a culmination of a lot of different work I've seen from you over the years, including some of your stuff on organic the organic capacity of capital. On you seem to be picking up on parts of Jacques Kamat's domestification and reruting thesis. I started counting the Bordergo references at one point. So I wanted I wanted to talk to you about this. In some ways, I feel like your book picks up a little bit where Aaron Benevev's analysis of you know automation and work leaves off, but on a much larger scale. With you know, what do you, you know, what do you think is driving this these new superstructures that emerge and this kind of interplanetary fragmenting and decayed factory that you're describing?

SPEAKER_01: 2:44

Yeah. Well, let me show first of all, I think a lot of people haven't seen a physical copy of the heft of it. And then also kind of notify like just you know, reminding people, this is like the the weird library copies that historical materialism puts out first. And so I've had people, you know, message me and say, why does the book cost$200? It doesn't. It's just the retail version is not out yet. So that's just like something I like to kind of mention before for you know the audience, like looking for the book and then finding this weird library edition that costs it's listed for like, yeah, like$200 something dollars, I think. Um you can order it through a library or you know find it through the usual avenues. Uh, but there will be a retail version out like later this year. But yeah, as to your question, this definitely follows from some of the stuff that Aaron has written. I wrote an earlier piece with the actually one of the chapters in here is somewhat modeled on it called Broken Circle. And that was with ILWCH, uh, Internet International Labor and Working Class History, the journal. And that was in a special issue that was edited actually by Aaron. And I wrote it at kind of his invitation. And it was an attempt to elaborate, you know, a lot of like what these dynamics he sort of talks about in the automation book, talks about elsewhere and other work with this kind of process that he sort of refers to as output-led industrialization or something along those lines. Um and he documents it especially for these the sequence of developmental booms in the higher income countries. And I am exploring, like in that piece called Broken Circle, I am exploring how that looks in the lower income countries and how it leads to this phenomenon called premature and deindustrialization. So there's a whole section of the book that elaborates on that in a little bit more detail. So it definitely engages with and draws from the work that Erin is doing. But at a more fundamental level, as with many of the things in the book, a lot of it draws from the just day-to-day experience and kind of like life history, you know, within the working class, trying to find work, seeing work, you know, dry up in these various sectors, kind of one after the other, and then getting a sense from that of how kind of the labor structure actually works in many of these cities. So I would say that maybe the most important, you know, initiating point to asking some of these questions was actually working in the low-end service industry in a city, initially in a like right in downtown Seattle as a food worker and in the immediate kind of periphery. And from that, really observing how, like this thing that academically is called the dual labor market, this bifurcation of service work into basically a majority of low-end services, people who are doing, you know, they're taking out the trash, they're making the food, they're doing all those minor administrative tasks, they're, you know, now a bunch of the gig labor stuff is a key part of that. And then a minority of high income services, right, that have traditionally been classed as like professional managerial work, right? And that the interesting thing now, and one of the projects that I'm currently working on, I people have seen a sample of it. If it followed the Substack that I started where I'm posting kind of advanced drafts of future things, is on the impact of basically machine learning technologies in essentially de-skilling another segment of this professional managerial strata. And we see on this with the rise of AI gig labor and stuff like that. But the basic idea is you know this topic, you know, I'm exploring it because of initially because of like those sort of experiences of seeing how labor actually gets like how those kind of labor markets actually bifurcate and how and living through that bifurcation of being, you know, one of these people just kind of serving that bowl, slop food that the tech workers like to eat, of serving that I was, you know, putting it in the bowl, making the salsa that you put on top of it, like that sort of thing, right? And then realizing like that this this is part of a much more much larger and much more general trend, right? It's not really about that conservative myth that says, well, yeah, these liberals fucked it up in these coastal cities, right? Because it's these democratic mayors who fucked it up, right? Which isn't true, of course. Like now I live in in a red state and uh in a conservative city, and it's the same, it's the same everywhere, it's the same globally, right? It's you you've got you know a couple tech workers, you've got a couple of admin admin people, you have government employees, right? And they go and they buy the bowl, and the bowl is full of the slop food, and then you have like eight, ten guys, you know, scooping that that slop into the bowl for every one tech worker you have.

C. Derick Varn: 7:50

And yeah, I mean, one of the things that I am seeing is this is penetrating even like government employment, which has which I have told people has been resistant to a lot of the things that you see in deindustrialization that my friends over at Jacobin refused to admit, which is, you know, for example, that you it's very hard to organize things that even when they're not franchises, because no one's successfully organized those, are so balkanized. And then when you look at the entire planet, you realize, oh, this is this is everywhere. So, you know, you know, people will be like, oh, well, there's you know, people who have quasi-third worldist ideas and don't know much about the development of uh economies outside of the United States or Europe, will like imagine that there's this formal industrial proletariat in Mexico or India or China, that in the case of China kind of existed for a little while but is disappearing. And in the case of the other two, has never really been the case in mass. And that's even when the like individual Mexican economy is good. So you you start wondering, oh, okay, well, what are you basing your dreams off of? Because it seems like a lot of these kind of what I would see is not even reformist reformisms. I've I've talked about this a little bit, you know, I always talk about not you know non-reformist reforms, and I'm just like, they're not even that, like they they are basically Fordist social goods that were provided by either a Keynesian, a Fordist, or some kind of hybrid model state for about a generation in the middle of the 20th century. There's there's actually not anywhere on earth where I've seen that sustained for a very long period of time. And it, you know, the first thing you see is, oh, well, that's happened in the US, but it's like your book documents, it's happening in East Africa, it's happening everywhere. We have an uh a proletariat that is increasingly informal, increasingly gigified, and we see those trends. You know, some people have even, you know, some people in the world systems will say, Oh, it's the peripherization of the core, but like increasing in every place that they can. So government work, we we, you know, tech work. No, AI is not replacing the senior tech workers, but they're removing the need for junior ones, etc., etc., etc. And that is the goal of machine machine learning, even if it's slot field and error-ridden. One of the things that your book also kind of documents is even a kind of mid-sensory concern for the commodity product quality doesn't exist really anymore. So, you know, I felt like I was reading like 800 pages of proof of decadence theory. So I wanted to get into that though, because I've heard you talk uh recently, I believe in a panel in Woodbine, about the kind of you know, people respond to this book in a lot of your other writings as it's extremely depressing and almost, you know, doomer-pilled. And you've been responding to that with we call the like well, the the so the social democratic or even the Marxist imagination has been gotten incredibly narrow. Would you like to talk about that in relation to the book?

SPEAKER_01: 11:16

Yeah, well, so one of the things I think what we started with there with your comment is actually a really good way to discuss this. And it's sort of how I approach it in the book, because I agree with you, like there's this weird thing that happens where people take as sort of the norm, especially within labor organizing, but also as you know, within that broader like social democratic left or whatever, they take as the norm this very brief period, which as you say, like barely survived a generation of sort of Keynesian social contract, mass manufacturing employment at a good wage, just happens to also be after a war, just happens to be when the US is, you know, an apex power that's more or less unchallenged, especially in industrial capacity, et cetera, et cetera, has all these overseas, you know, not quite colonies, but effectively neocolonies. But the interesting thing that I point out in the book is that a lot of the conditions that then we are told are kind of new, right? Informalization, gig labor, the applicate, rapid application, like the decomposing of these kind of community structures, those things are actually all familiar conditions within capitalism prior to that brief stretch of post-war, you know, post-war Keynesian liberalism with mass employment. And especially, and in they're especially similar to that kind of like earlier, earlier period of like very early workers' movement organizing, which was prior to a lot of the conventional kind of Fordist structures of labor deployment, which really didn't take full form into like the 1920s. You had large levels of industrial employment and growing industrial employment, right, in the Gilded Age, but a lot of the forms of labor deployment and the forms of kind of concrete, like the ways that that individual companies would be interacting with workers, right? Those are actually a lot more similar to what we have today than they than they were to what would be the classic working class movement of that like 1920s to 1960s sort of period, you know, that barely a generation of like the classic workers' movement. In fact, most of the workers' movement was more similar to was operating in conditions more similar to those today than in the past, with a few caveats. Also, when we look at the global picture, even in that classic workers' movement era, like the 1950s, we actually see a completely different picture when we look at class activity in the global south, right? We see who's leading the charge of these general strikes that are taking place in Ghana, in Kenya, in all across the post-colonial Africa, right? And we see it's logistics workers, it's civil servants, right? It's it's all like teachers, it's these kind of classes that now everyone is saying, oh, these are the new leaders of working class militancy in in the US or whatever. But it's they've always been actually like crucial uh sectors, like ports were key areas of early working class militancy across colonial Africa and then post-colonial Africa, right? So these have always been kind of true. Now, what are the differences? The differences, the key difference, if I had to choose like one real one, right? I like to be very conservative and trying not to say everything is new and different and that we need a new, completely new kind of approach because of it. But there is one really important key difference, and that's the process of de-agrarianization or depeasantization, right? And then on top of that, it's what we've already been kind of talking about, like the progress of deindustrialization. But the interesting thing is that the progress of deindustrialization also does induce industrial booms that have a somewhat kind of classic character. And this is where you kind of gesture like, well, China maybe sort of had something like that. And it's a lot more mild. One of the key points that the books make is that every time you have that new industrial boom, industrial booms, first of all, it's kind of a bunch of different areas competing for a shrinking share of that pie. It's it's it doesn't have to have as many employees in a relative sense. Even Chinese industrial employment basically never actually reached what it its peak that it had been prior to the uh corporatization and uh layoff movements in the early 2000s that created the rust belt in Dongbei in the Northeast. It basically never reached back to those levels, or it almost just barely did before declining again in in like the mid to late 2010s, or actually that would be uh mid-early mid-2010s is when it hit its peak. It never went back to those levels, right? So you get those peaks of industrial employment or manufacturing employment specifically, as a share of total employment, those get lower over time, and then as kind of an increasingly zero-sum competition over where that next industrial boom or constellation of industrial booms will occur. Um, so even the places that maybe do get some of it, you know, like we see Vietnam has it's ongoing now in Vietnam in a in a style that was similar to China, but again, is more muted. They don't have as much labor to kind of offer. And then we see it kind of existing within this more complex constellation that's kind of emerging across South and Southeast Asia. But the key thing is that we have to, I think, be a lot more cautious when when, you know, there's this common approach where people really like to just say, well, we had Keynesianism and then we had, and then everything changed. We had neoliberalism, and now everything's changing again, and we have state capitalism or something like that, right? I there's a lot more continuity underneath this than people usually acknowledge. And then it also is something where that means that, you know, even though there have been changes, we have to very carefully distinguish where those changes exist and where they might inveigh on like political strategy versus where what we're dealing with is just similar to other periods in history, right? So it's like, yeah, a lot of the approaches where you're going to go into a factory that employ like a factory in an industry that employs 30% of the population of a city, right? That those conditions don't exist anymore. But like anywhere, right? Yeah, anywhere, not in China, not anywhere, right? But they also didn't exist very long in the entire arc of capitalist history. Like that is not how cities worked prior to that brief period in which they did work like that for a while, from like 1920 to 1950, 60, whatever. You know, when you go back farther, you see actually conditions that again are much more similar to ours, with that difference that I'm talking about with the peasantry and the kind of level at which deindustrialization or the technical complexity of production, like those sort of things are clearly secular trends. The other secular trend that I talk about toward the end of the book is that you do see this increasing involvement of basically social reproductive tasks become more and more essential, larger in scope and complexity. And that also entails larger state involvement in economic activity as a whole across the board. So you see like larger shares of government revenue and expenditure as a share of total like GDP, you see government employment direct and indirect growing, you see increasing dependence on government inner, not even intervention, but like think of like military-industrial style, like contracts, right, that pump up and and basically support entire regions, right, in different countries. And the US is a great example of that. Like you have these areas that are are sustained almost solely through military-industrial contracts, right? Yeah, those sort of things become more important.

C. Derick Varn: 19:01

I grew up in a place that that that became one of the most urban blighted areas outside of Detroit in the aughts because the military base was shrunk. It wasn't even closed, it was just shrunk because all the industry was downstream of uh of military. I used to refer to this as like uh the you know, people talk about oh, the poverty draft is real or not real. It isn't real right now, it was real in the past. But like, I'm like, it wasn't it was a way to keep a lot of the the areas of the of the country viable when deindustrialization happened, you know. Gabe Renat talks about the other one, which is the medical complexes and uh around that. But I think people missed that a lot of what's driving, you know, you talk about this in the hinterlands too, but a lot of what's driving that is the shrink up of this of these military bases, and that again is due to technology, that's a technological development issue. And people will will then like extrapolate from that that that's only happening in the United States because it's got the biggest war machine, and it's not, it's it's it's it's everywhere. It's not all, I mean, other states don't all do it through the military the way we have mostly done it, but it it's very much the case, like even in say tech. I mean, to tie this into something that's going on right now, there's uh Trump pushing for a$1.5 trillion military budget, which to me even seems like it's a backdoor bailout for AI. Well, what you know, why is that? Because you increasingly look at these tech things, and they began by you know, how all your tech oligarchs became what they are is government contracts. Every single one of them. I can't find one of them that didn't. And so all that industry, even before AI is tied into that, people are paying attention now because of the flashbend of AI, because it's affecting professional workers and people who actually have some skills, although as an educator, I can I can tell you I don't know how long they will. And that's that follows models that you can see in the the quote developing world. I really liked your point. I mean, your point about this, you know, this is actually the more common stage of capital, is interesting because it does tie into both conflicts and the Marxist International. I mean, if people look at like the Bernsteinian revision crisis, it was actually about this. That they never hit what they predicted they'd hit in terms of industrial proletariat. Former labor didn't work that way. And to agree with an essay that I have a lot of problems with, but otherwise, and in notes volume four, History of Separation, that if you looked at where the revolutions happened, they were largely led by the peasantry, kind of self-abolishing, kind of not sometimes self-abolishing, sometimes being forced to abolish. But that's happened all around the world now. Again, like people tell me, you know, I was talking to some Maoice about protracted people's war. And I'm like, what peasantry do you have for that? Like it just doesn't exist. And what I find interesting about your book is it ties in some things that I've seen. I have seen some of this discussion about the norms of the working class and some Maoist literature. I have seen a lot of this discussion in communization literature, but it hasn't been tied together. So one of the things that you you seem to draw into this theory, though, is we're, you know, this increasing dominance of the state is probably going to lead to more fragmented and violent states and kind of the liberal norms that the West has been able to propagate. That's not they don't have the capacity to allow that now. And, you know, I was reading this book also, and this is my own unique obsession, in light of Joseph Tainster's work from like 40 years ago on the class of complex societies, and and like thinking about what he says about attempts to simplify societies through increasing strongmen states and how they like usually completely and utterly fail, but also that we're seeing this kind of a glow on a global scale. I mean, you kind of give a structural reason for Mike Davis's late observation that states were increasingly abandoning any kind of collective leadership. Would you like to go into that a little bit?

SPEAKER_01: 23:37

Yeah, yeah. And I think that on the one hand, there is like you kind of gestured at it at the at the end, this kind of complexity of explanation. And I draw on you mentioned earlier, like I quote Bordiga a lot, which is true. But I also actually quote this guy, Bonanno, Alfredo Bonanno, the Italian insurrectionary anarchist thinker. But I'm not quoting him. Most of the time he gets quoted for these bombastic, you know, insurrectionary kind of statements, and he's really stuck. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But he but his really interesting stuff, in my opinion, is he wrote all this stuff on deindustrialization and on the social and kind of political strategic consequences of deindustrialization. And he talks about how society is increasingly becoming this thing where it's divided between this, like the inside of this Teutonic castle, where you have the people who know how production actually works, and then the people outside the castle who either don't have any access to it and don't engage within it all, or to the extent they do, they're just kind of what he calls like pushing the buttons to make it operate, to make it run, right? They're they're running a machine, they're pushing a button that goes, makes a machine go, but they don't know how the machine works, right? And the interesting thing is you hear a version of this kind of again and again. And I would say that a lot of these, there is this whole species of sort of liberal or left liberal theories of societal collapse that are rooted in a complexity explanation that basically says, well, it becomes kind of too complex to kind of manage, and then the parts begin to break down and no one knows how to fix them, and then it starts to degenerate and kind of the you know the gears start to gnash and then it starts to fragment, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the like so I add a couple of things for this sort of account because I don't think that account entirely is quite sufficient. Because on the one side, it's not purely kind of an overcomplexity of production. The technical complexity of production is an important aspect of it, right? But what we really have to ask is why hasn't why has there not taken why hasn't a social practice taken shape to accommodate that complexity in an adequate fashion, right? So it's not that there's not people who could do that or who could be trained to know those things. It's that those people are not given those skills. They are explicitly excluded from obtaining those skills for the vast majority of humanity, right? You aren't going to be able to get that sort of education, you aren't going to be able to get that sort of hands-on experience, right? And then there's a certain enforcing of a social order here that's kind of in the background, right? And that that order is an order of social domination, and that's sort of how I discuss it in the book. And that's really the social logic at work that's actually preventing that from from from, you know, preventing a social order from taking shape that accommodates that complexity with an empowered human species that's capable of rationally taking it, you know, taking the reins over this complex system of production, which inherently from this point out in history, production can be and will be complex, right? So it's like we have to learn how to deal with that. And that's a huge component, you know. Nick Chavez and I wrote this article on what communism kind of looks like. That's an in that's an incredible, incredibly central component of like what communists are basically arguing, is that there is a different way to do this that actually is able to embrace that sheer level of complexity and kind of reinvent it toward better ends, but doesn't do so by eschewing the complexity of production and eschewing modern technology, et cetera, et cetera. So that then kind of leads to this second part, which is what you were getting at. Like there's this tendency, you know, you you've kind of siloed the people with this high level of expertise. A lot of your political credentials are built on satisfying those people to a sufficient extent, right? But you're also trying to satisfy, you know, the people above them, like that shareholder kind of level. And that's always intention. So then you are rolling out AI systems that are deskilling part of that professional class, but then satisfying this other part or potentially making them richer, et cetera, et cetera. And then at the same time, right, you're in conflict with these other factions who are doing similar things at either a different level of the supply chain or kind of lateral uh segments of the supply chain. They're in competition with your firms, right? And it's all fighting over, again, this kind of shrinking share of the pie and in a fashion that excludes more and more regular people from any access to any of the trickle-down effects of that, right? That structurally prevents them from access to it. I think the really interesting thing then becomes like how do you kind of square this circle politically, or how do we see people trying to do that? So, what do I mean by that? If you look at the saga of this like reindustrialization attempt in the US, right? It doesn't really get talked about uh prior to Trump's first administration. It's sort of, you know, people give vague, you know, pronouncements about, yeah, offshoring is maybe bad. They will do the classic military industrial thing of, well, how about we just give you this factory that can only be profitable and it's not really even that profitable, but like can only be be a going concern because we're pumping all this government contracts into it. And so then if you would do that, then we'll create a little political fiefdom and you can elect us. We have that stuff. But with Trump's first administration, what we really saw is the first attempt at a high level within the political class to address this kind of core problem. We just call it the problem of employment, right? The problem that the employment structure is now inherently bifurcated such that the vast majority of people are not really necessary to keeping that core kind of technical complex, financial technical complex kind of running, right? They're necessary in these ancillary kind of capacities, right? Of kind of moving the goods, pushing the buttons, feeding the slop to the the workers, et cetera, et cetera. So there was this idea, right? What the Keynesian, the classic kind of Keynesian thing was, was well, why don't you just go back to how it was? You just you just pay all of those workers more, then they can buy more stuff, right? Et cetera, et cetera. And that, you know, I kind of talk a little bit about why it doesn't work in the book, but that really doesn't work for a bunch of different reasons. But one of the core reasons is that, first of all, you actually don't even have a good means to pay those people more in most cases. And that's why that has had to shift to like these weird local minimum wage kind of battles. But also, you know, there's less consumption, less of total kind of output is even being consumed by this kind of consumer goods kind of industry in the classic sense. Luxury consumption has increased, but so has kind of corporate consumption, state consumption, like those sort of things. But on top of that, the the more the crucial thing is that a lot of those industries that do exist, right, they they those those those industries, low-end services, a lot of those are low wage because they actually are fairly narrow profit margin industries. Anyone who's tried to like run a restaurant kind of knows that they just are you know narrow profit margin industries.

C. Derick Varn: 30:57

So you have run a restaurant and it's the profits are terrible and people don't understand that.

SPEAKER_01: 31:02

Yeah, and that's the the whole thing that the book really talks about this idea that like when we're talking about like productive versus unproductive labor, uh really what we should be talking about is types of activities that are susceptible to productivity increases that are initial, that are like both like initially quite fast and then also kind of sustained over time. So what we think of as traditional manufactured goods, those are susceptible to those sort of productivity increases, right? But when you're talking about services, uh what are traditionally conventionally referred to as services, those are the sectors that have proven resistant to that. So some of what has happened is that certain services have become effectively turned into sort of like manufactured goods. Like a lot of the advances that we see in logistics, like Amazon, has been basically about how do you do packaging in the way that you would do an assembly line to produce a good, right? And that's where the productivity increase came from. So there's these kind of few sectors that have been susceptible to it right now. But the general thing, and this is this there's this economist called William Baumell who talks about this quite a bit, he calls it the cost disease. You eventually kind of run out of sectors that are susceptible to these easy productivity increases, right? Even with AI and stuff, we it's very been very minimal so far. So what you see then is that you have all these sectors where labor costs continue to be a much higher segment of uh the total, you know, uh of the total expenses for a firm. And then over time, that that share isn't changing. So traditionally, the way that you get those wage dividends that are then given to workers increasing wages in the fourth sense is because if you look at the at the graph, right, that labor share is actually decreasing per unit because productivity is increasing. And then from that increase in productivity, you can give more to uh some of those workers. Now, people will also point to that graph that shows the divergence between wages and productivity in the US, right? But that graph is a lie. It's a very classic example of a statistical kind of bit of a bit of statistical malfeasance. Because where are those productivity gains coming for, coming from for American firms, right? Well, a lot of it is because these firms are international affairs, right? These are global supply chains. So that productivity increase isn't localized in the US. The American workers have become quote unquote more productive, largely because a lot of those costs have been cut in going overseas, right? So it's not about the workers who have been producing that stuff being so much more productive in the US case. They haven't been. I mean, most of those factories were like closed down, right? But then Nike is hyper, hyper productive because it's it's basically doesn't own any of the factories, but it gets all the money, right? And so then that creates a huge productivity boom in the in the kind of statistical series that are used to create those charts. But what you don't have is that traditional kind of thing that people refer to when they talk about that traditional working class Keynesian compact, which is that localized production that is growing more productive, and that then that dividend can be given in the form of increased kind of wages, at least for a while, and at least when it is subtended by cheap raw materials, inputs from the third world, et cetera, et cetera. Right? Those conditions are the things that don't really exist today. There's certain places where they do for a while. You see rising wages in China, right? That it's associated with mass mechanization of factories. Um it's associated with deindustrialization, but you do see those average kind of wage rates going up, but the skill level is going up too, you know, as technicians rather than assembly workers. But you do see little, you know, bursts of this where it's possible. And in China, it's part of what is funding the increase of social services and state construction in general, I would say, like infrastructure, but also you know, building a social security system, building a unified national healthcare system, like those sort of things that are standard in in Europe or whatever, kind of being rolled out. And they're using that productivity dividend to do it. But in the US, the puzzle to get back to this thing that we started with, right? This puzzle of like reindustrialization, how would you do that? First, Trump actually initially accepts, right, that classic social democratic and Keynesian line of thought. He says, no, we do need to bring back mass employment industries. He tries to attract Foxconn to Wisconsin, and then it all falls apart because it's just, of course, it's not gonna be profitable to employ 10,000 Americans making LCD screens at American wage rates with American costs. It just, of course, it isn't gonna work, right? Those plans all fall through. Biden administration then begins to do this subtle pivot that I don't I think a lot of people aren't uh weren't really paying attention to, which is these reindustrialization efforts got geared toward things like data centers and battery plants, which are extremely, extremely low in terms of the total numbers of employees that they need, but they create this huge boom in construction jobs, in temporary jobs affiliated with them. And then there's this kind of side sector where it's like, oh, well, we can have an American EV industry. And then it says, well, like these plants employ 3,000 workers or whatever, which is maybe true on paper, right? But that's A, globally a very low number. But then B, it's also actually less, it's less, it's fewer employees than are employed in combustion engine uh vehicle plants, right? That's the key thing about the EV supply chain. It's a further mechanization of the production of vehicles, right? So you start to see that pivot. And now you see the same thing in Trump's second term has really pivoted very hard in this exact direction, taken that kind of Biden addendum and just run with it. And it's being done through these new military industrial ventures, these new chip plants, many of which were attracted under Biden, right? But now more are coming under Trump. The per the government investment in Intel. It's coming through this massive shakeup in the military-industrial industry that shifts from legacy military-industrial firms like RTX, uh, formerly Raytheon, uh, Lockheed, Boeing, et cetera, et cetera, to this new cluster of silicon defense firms, uh uh Palantir, Andoril, SpaceX, like all of those companies, right, are now giving tons of these contracts. Trump just threatened RTX with being stripped of its government contracts, which will go probably to Andoril, these other companies. Um, it's it's giving massive infusions of massive deals to other tech companies, Meta, OpenAI, scale AI has been a huge player, central part of like what I'm writing right now. But also these other firms that people don't really know about, this thing, this company called Hadrian, which is basically like they buy robotic arms from China. They design AI software to kind of run them. They're these high mix, low volume production, which is very good for military industrial use, right? And they employ maybe like 100 people at like a factory like this. The biggest of any of these plants are like the biggest SpaceX facility employs like 3,400, I think. Andoril's new arsenal plant in Ohio, which is going to be all government contract dependent, right? That's probably the biggest. I think around 4,000 workers, which is about like a single auto plant of the last generation. So these are not big numbers, right? Compare that to Foxconn City in Shenzhen, which at its peak had 300,000 workers. Jiangzhou Fox Foxconn has about 200,000 or something like that, right? So these are small potatoes numbers for employment. And no, so that's the key thing, right? Is that we we've got the reindustrialization engine going, right? But in order to do it, we sacrificed the employment part, which was the entire argument of why you would do it from this kind of classic Keynesian standpoint. And so then no politician has really even attempted to explain how you might accommodate a situation like that. Like, how would you get then that dividend of increase in global productivity, the whatever imperial rents, if you want to call them that, of these US firms over the world? How would you then take that out of the hands of the shareholders, right, and distribute them generally across the American populace, right? Through some sort of UBI or, you know, so like no one's even talking about that stuff anymore.

C. Derick Varn: 39:21

No, no, I mean most of the UBI schemes are basically based on the idea of uh of a vulgar form of modern monetary theory where you just print money. Yeah. And hope inflation doesn't happen. You know, that's that's that that I mean, you know, I mean, that's what I've seen on offer. Um, I mean, one of the things that I I talked about was like a lot. I was like, oh, you know, when you see these people propose this one, you know, yeah, we I agree with you that the focus as a, you know, you had an area of tech finally focused on tech, area of the government finally focused on this explicitly and Trump won. Although, if you look at actual developmental friends, this goes to the end of the Bush administration and definitely through the Obama administration. You had the reassuring of a lot of American manufacturing industries with no real employment boom at all. Like that's actually a story that's like I think now two decades old, uh, two and a half decades old, roughly. You know, and your book goes into that, but it was not acknowledged anywhere, really. And the other thing is that you know, the stats back up your story. If you look right now, manufacturing jobs are declining still, and manufacturing throughput is declining still. So neither the export stuff that Trump focused on, even the beginning of this administration, nor the nor the the jobs have come and what you increasingly see is I mean basically he's he the you know he can keep 20 or 30 percent of population somewhat engaged by just outright lying you know proposing affordability things or our stimulus checks or whatever that that never will come through and I think we're gonna see a lot more of that and I don't just mean from Trump or this administration I think in general you're seeing people make promises that can't be delivered on at all and they there's not really a dealing with or accounting for why they can't be delivered on. Another thing I'd like to to talk about is like your book explains something that I've been trying to get people to understand for a while which is yes Virginia there is a tendency of the rate of profits to fall you're computing you're confusing profits and revenues because of these downstream brief booms in construction and stuff in response to to something leading to a very temporary economic shock which you can't do forever. I mean you know and if you look at people trying to extract stuff from like Chinese developmental policy they'll talk about all those you know ghost cities not being that big of a problem ultimately even though they created a a lot of excess capacity but they have been a problem the Chinese state has been able to deal with it but they it has actually led to stuff like real estate valuation problems you know there's a reason why China you were talking about Chinese corporate tech it doesn't in your book you mentioned it doesn't really do the investment is that a lot of you know the investment and financialization stuff that a lot of the other capital powers do part of this seems to be tied into that but another thing that you addressed in this for a lot of people who talk about China as a hope for the developing world is that Chinese industrial production when it comes to some place like Africa does not actually lead to internal industrialization for the reasons that you talked about like it it one you know the skilled labor tends to come from China but two the the just the amount of of jobs that are come off even a very productive factory just isn't there. I mean we've even talked about this before I think when we talked about this your development for this book.

SPEAKER_01: 43:07

So it just seems to me that you know if a more successful planning state like China can't do it, I don't know why we think we can without any of that you know yeah well the it so one of one of the important distinctions I do make in the book is like a lot of the stuff that people talk about in terms of Chinese investment in in East Africa in particular and in Tanzania the case study that I really specifically look at was actually just kind of a mirage. It was announced in the news and it never it never came to fruition right so that's the the first thing to keep in mind and then a lot of those things that were like you know Chinese infrastructure projects they're not really Chinese in the sense of receiving the majority of their investment from Chinese capital. They're Chinese in the sense that they subcontract a lot of work to Chinese construction engineering firms and so the people on the ground doing engineering and work et cetera et cetera are Chinese right but they're not like the capital often comes from more traditional multilateral agencies. A lot of times the head contractor is you know a different company like this big dam, the Julius Nereira dam in Tanzania the head contractor is the what's called Arab Contractors Co, which is an Egyptian uh company. And then you have these much more complex kind of chains of financing that involve like the South Korean Development Bank, uh Japanese aid agencies that have maybe like an Asian increasingly Asian character to them in this very broad sense, right? Asian including like the Omanis and the Saudis and you know um these large kind of chains of capital. So there's a couple things I think to to stress here. Yes overall the conditions are that if you put a modern factory even you know in places that because it's a modern factory it does not employ the same large share of population doesn't create the same employment effect that it did a hundred years ago or even 30 years ago for a lot of these industries. So that's part of this conditions of premature deindustrialization that I talk about. This isn't to say that it has no effect and when you do get clusters of these they do have a developmental force. Again we see that in Vietnam we see it in a much messier way right now in a much more conflictual and uglier way in places like Indonesia but we do see an industrial boom that is taking shape. The gains though, right again it's this shrinking share of the pie. So the gain there's less gains to kind of be had especially in terms of employment and notably all these places they're being more narrowly kind of distributed. I think India is a great example of this. It really isn't like this broadband industrialization in India in the same way that it was in China for a bunch of different reasons. But you like you have these new industrial clusters that have been very important right around the the capital complex you have these new um industrial clusters that are doing things like you know phone production and whatnot. So in in a bunch of respects what you see actually is more employment being associated with growing trade relationships. And this is something I talk about in this this article called the Tale of two ports in Spectre magazine where I talk about how really a lot of the Chinese relationship with these places has not been investment, has not been debt trap diplomacy or whatever right wing conspiracy thing they want to get give the name to it has been very concretely what you would expect. It's been in trade right because China produces most of the stuff right now like anything China will produce most of it for most cases for most types of commodities right and therefore most of the interactions with Chinese firms and with Chinese capital come through these trade relationships. So I talk about in the book if you go to I I go and I do these surveys right of these industrial districts looking for Chinese factories and I really don't find that many and the ones I find are minimal kind of sectors not that much employment et cetera et cetera but where do I find a bunch of Chinese influence? Well it's in these these markets like Karyako and downtown Dar Salaam where there's all these African traders who go to China and buy a bunch of stuff and then come back and sell stuff. And then the Chinese started to open more routes to like wholesaling within Tanzania right they opened these like little warehouses that they'll fill with stuff so people don't have to go all the way to China. They can go to the warehouse and get stuff and they started e-commerce kind of links those sort of things I think are where you are going to see a lot more a cultivation of local clusters of capital in the trading sectors. In Tanzania this was huge actually because this was a route for in Tanzania there had been this traditional divide between basically the old Asian population which referred to mostly people of like Indian and Arab ancestry but mostly India and the local quote unquote African population. Now both at this point were citizens of Tanzania both were African right but that this is how the term terminology came from the British colonial regime, right? And the African traders were not doing the international trade for the most part but then the intervention of Chinese trade has allowed way more African traders to get involved much more directly in international trade as has challenged that position that was traditionally dominated by what had been the colonial commercial class, which was South Asian and Arab predominantly. And so those are huge changes right and those are changes that do create clusters of trading capital. I think there's you know you have to even though I disagree with a lot of these accounts that see in China this massive you know new type of socialistic kind of um advance right and I argue very very systematically and very intentionally and repeatedly this is traditional liberalism in every respect. And we've seen developmental booms like this before um it follows the same pattern including people from the old cores calling it non-capitalist because it's a challenger, you know, calling it state capitalist state socialist or something like that. And we've seen this again and again and again but the the the the other side of that is that there is you know liberalism itself is a dynamic system and it does have this developmental side of it even though it also has this massive destructive side of it. Those two things coexist and they occur simultaneously and they're unevenly distributed geographically but what that does mean is that there is like this actual aspect where a lot of those things on that progressive side of kind of the liberal developmentalist side are desirable things. And people see that they are desirable things. Like it is a desirable thing to advance electrical systems, right? And get people into better housing and things like that, even if there's all these other kind of issues with it. I will say that the ghost cities thing is actually very over exaggerated in terms of like the actually being ghost cities. It's not over exaggerated in the sense of being overcapacity and overinvested and now that's being felt in in real estate prices but there were not fast ghost cities that were not occupated like they got occupied you know over time. And that a lot of that capacity was was necessary. And it did it has led to a situation where a lot more people are housed right in much better facilities than they were in the past. Like those elimination of extreme poverty stuff in China that's all legitimate. That's real happened. Yeah then that's it's and it's very admirable in in a certain level where you have to you kind of have to give it to them like oh yeah that is the biggest elimination of extreme poverty um at scale probably since um it was done at a similar scale for its historical context in America right it probably is it's similar to you know what happened in Japan South Korea et cetera but those were all kind of smaller cases this is this is very large it's very substantial it probably has not been done you know since that kind of classic boom that began with the American Gilded Age and it kind of ended in the 60s or wherever you want to wherever you want to put it you know and that's what people see. That's why people look at it and say okay China can serve this kind of progressive force the irony is that when you look at Chinese economists they're actually much more conservative in those statements. They say don't take us as a model you have your own unique conditions. They say well we have to protect the interest of Chinese firms like if it is profitable we will do this you know there's they're much more restrained I think than the the people who are China supporters from a distance if you actually read Chinese economists talking about it if you read Chinese political theorists if you read the the theorists of socialism with Chinese characteristics you know a lot of them are are actually making much more restrained statements.

C. Derick Varn: 52:00

Well I've I've noticed this for years even from like statements from the from the CPC formally from Jin down and then what you read I don't know in red sales or what you see on Twitter where or even now some of the the quote Marxist mm tiers are making claims I'm like the Chinese government does not make that claim you are claiming more than they are you know I mean you know Xi's not even clear that he considers China currently socialist although yes I know technically in the 1982 constitution it technically is but you know according to itself but but you know that's always getting pushback as you've noted and I've noted you know one of the reasons why Xi is legitimately popular in China is you finally and I do mean finally started seeing developments towards American and European style welfare systems in the middle of the 20th century but it is not doing development the way the Soviets did or even China did in the 70s and don't be foolish about that. Like yeah so you know I I guess one of the things that have came up in your book you've written about it on your Substack more recently for something that you're working on now in regards to the many many debates about what I consider personally the dumbest theory and Marxist developmental historiography which is these periodizations of capital like I do think we can talk about Fordism we can talk about neoliberalism but like monopoly capital current neo-feudalism which weirdly sounds exactly like monopoly capital certain kinds of state capitalism which is something that I think has more basis but then when you look at the if we actually looked at the history of you know even the new left was aware of this when you actually looked at the history of developmental capitalism state capitalism seems to be what everybody did including you know the people we now consider the imperial core not what they told people to do. So is it state capitalism or is it just the normal developmental period uh you point out ironically when talking about supply chains and stuff you know you can read a Rigi both of the both Giovanni Rigi and a Riga Manuel and Waller seen in the in the world systems people as actually giving you a developmentalist path to capitalism and that a lot of the you know a lot of the supply chain people actually use their work to build capitalist supply chains and so I wanted to talk to you about that why do you think there is an attempt to periodize this as somehow either a unique phase of capital that the rules of capital don't apply anymore monopoly capitalism going back to Barana Sweezy or which was ubiquitous in the 60s and 70s both and people will complain about Western Marxism it was ubiquitous both in the Soviet Union and outside of it and then the the more recent neo-feudal stuff which I you know I always just immediately just hit with like well memes aren't food and Facebook is not profitable off of you surfing it are generating content for it. Or that have you forgotten that 2022 happened I mean like so I wanted to get your take on why do you think this is happening?

SPEAKER_01: 55:33

What what does this obscure about the hell world why why is this so why are these trends so hard for socialists to look at yeah I think so on the one hand let's think first of like where is because yeah I hate periodization as well I fucking hate it I think there's a lot of there's reasons that we can determine like anthropological reasons I think that we can determine about why this this fetish of periodization becomes so prominent like we see it with you know neoliberalism it and part of it is this this very raw anthropological explanation of like it helps you mine citations as an academic if you put an adjective in front of the word capitalism. You get more citations it helps your career that's it right that's my like real politic explanation of it it makes people's careers just put a stupid adjective in front of capitalism. And we and neoliberalism was like the first example where the the marketability of that was proven very clearly right so you can build a career if you can market your ex-capitalism well enough. That's the kind of real politic explanation but it also accommodates folk politics right because people can have their own weird bespoke definitions of capitalism and they could say well I'm opposed to neoliberal capitalism which is just them saying I'm opposed to crony capitalism which is just them saying I am not opposed to capitalism right I am not opposed to capitalism. I'm opposed to whatever this weird thing is and it's very funny because I remember being very young in like high school early community college and I was out in this rural area and we had a lot of uh libertarians right like classic libertarians not so much the kind of lame ass libertarians you have today but like really the ones who had a little bit more of that. Yeah the ones that you actually did they actually had their compounds that they would actually shoot at the feds right like these actual libertarians now but it was really funny because I talk about them and they'd give me all these explanations and like and they talk about capitalism I'd be like that's not like what capitalism is like you know and then they'd be like well that's because we don't have capitalism. And I'm like okay wait what is your word for the currently prevailing global economic system and they say socialism. And I'm like okay yeah I get it you know like we both oppose the thing that exists I think that the thing that you propose as libertarians is actually going to turn into the thing that we have now like if you were somehow to impose it but you know that was those are the key differences. The fetish 18th century artisans is strong there but yeah yeah and there so there's these folk political uh things that helps the helps the marketability of phrases like neoliberal capitalism this over periodization the idea that everything is different now and we see those folk political things coming today with neofeudalism people talk about the tech barons right the tech lords they're they're these techno-feudal forces just mining these kind of rents from us et cetera et cetera so we see this folk appeal so let's return and think okay what is the reasonable application of periodization I think that you have there's that book The New Finance Capital by uh Stephen Marr and oh god the other guy's name starts with an A I think it's mayor anyways it's called the New Finance Capital and they do something like this they have a periodization in it and they have you know they say like there's a kind of a classic finance capital and there's this managerial capital and there's this sort of like neoliberal period and then there's this new finance capital right now. But their periodization I think is very sober and is a very limited case where it actually is it makes a lot of sense because what are they saying? They're very explicit they're saying we are talking about these specific patterns of organization that you see within high level financial structures of the American kind of national fraction of capital linked to the American state. It's this very very limited case of prioritization they're saying you do see these sort of phase shifts in that structure based on high level macroeconomic dynamics in where kind of like how finance is oriented, how it relates to the central state treasury and the Federal Reserve and you see these differences and they document you know these differences and I think they make a fair enough case for the periodization right and that I think is a very good and accurate use of periodization. They don't try to make big claims that there's a new type of capitalism across the world right they're just saying there's this very distinct shift in you know these types of macroeconomic management and the financial system those things I think are fair. We also do have ideological shifts in in how capitalism is talked about and how it presents itself to itself through the work of you know the great mythmakers of economics, right? How it talks about what it's doing. And we do see a recent shift today similar to the shift that we saw to like the neoliberal period the neoliberal period was all about saying well actually maybe we don't need all these Keynesian government kind of infrastructure industrial policy things the market can lead and it has this ideological character interacting with folk politics it's all about US interventions and setting up growing military power et cetera et cetera it doesn't actually match what's going on at all right it doesn't match the actual underlying dynamics are Not privatization. They are increasing growth of military industrial interests, right? And then now we see a shift again to saying, well, maybe just this kind of talk about purely privatization. The market wasn't so good. We do need industrial policy if for these geopolitical interests, for these to prevent these kind of social crises, et cetera, et cetera. The way that we talk about it, it's certainly shifting. So all of these things I think are kind of acknowledged. They're acknowledged shifts. I think the most sober theorists, like if you look at Alami, the guy who does state capitalism stuff, he actually is pretty direct about talking about it in this fashion. He's saying like this is kind of how it's being talked about, but it doesn't, like this thing has always been around, and we can talk about long histories of state capitalism because of that. Those are all, I think, are like relatively kind of sober, you know, ways to talk about it. But you have to be, when you start to get at that level where you're talking about these kind of global shifts and how it gets talked about, you have to actually be really, really careful and really intentional in arguing against saying it's some new type of capitalism or even that it's like this is actually what's happening. You have to say it's going to be different than what's actually going on. It's just ideological kind of discussion. So what do we have with like bad types of periodization? Well, we have the kind of folk politics one that I was talking about, but the worst, right, is this idea that it's no longer capital, like the fundamental laws of capitalism have somehow shifted. And that's the classic monopoly capitalism argument, which has now again reared its head with neo-feudalism. Those arguments again recur again and again and again. I have this other post of this article that I sort of didn't have time to finish. I gave up, it's up on the sub stack, though, about these new medievalist kind of themes and the neofeudalism argument. And one of the points that I make is exactly what you were saying. This is the same as monopoly capitalism. That's like it's it's very similar. It's not clear how these are different than other monopolies, and it's not clear how the argument is actually different than the monopoly capital argument, which is basically that you know these firms are increasingly reliant on some sort of rents and they're breaking the price system because of that, et cetera, et cetera. And then at the global scale, it's imperial, imperial monopoly rents via Samira Me, right, who applies it at this global scale. So, but the the interesting part of that question is again, why do these theories have have this purchase at the folk political level? And I think there is where Hellworld really explores that idea in some depth by saying, look, you do have these secular trends. You do have these secular trends that change corporate structures over time. Every time you have this new developmental wave, one of the things that happens is you get new forms of corporate organization that occur at larger scales and with greater complexity. You have the American trust companies, and then you had Chinese, or then you have Japanese Zaibatsu and Kiretsu, the new kind of corporate forms, and then you had the Korean chain, and now you have the Chinese Ji Tuang, which are like group companies, the Chinese group companies, basically. Every time you get these new scales, right, of production, and every time that happens, someone points at them and says, this is no longer capitalism, in the exact same way that during Marx's day, people were pointing at joint stock companies and saying, these this is no longer capitalism. And Marx was saying, no, of course it fucking is. It's just the further socialization of capital, right? So that's one of the things that makes it attractive every time it the claim gets made, is like, no, there's these new new styles of corporation. That's no longer capitalism. And a lot of people see that and they experience this in every life and they think, oh, yeah, that makes sense, right? Because they are these new companies and they don't work like the old ones and you know, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, but then you have these underlying trends as well. The the growth in the state and socially productive apparatus is a big one. And also, because you get this shrinking segment where the actual uh engine of productivity is occurring, where like the value is being kind of produced at these increasing kind of rates, and then it's kind of in this larger kind of ocean of like moderate kind of value production that's kind of at the smaller scale. A lot of what happens then is that the in the actual flow of revenues within firms, things take on increasingly rent-like form over time across the board. And that's where you get the claim of like political capitalism, of neo-feudalism, all of this, because so much more by either via the state and state industrial policy or whatever, or via these new massive corporate structures, right? A lot of their revenues are actually taking the form of rents. Ground rents become increasingly important because of the underlying, you know, the necessity of kind of a landlord class, but it exists in this conflictual relationship with uh the productive kind of apparatus. And that's that's one of the weirdest things to me is that the neo-feudal theorists today actually don't talk about classic ground rents that much. But like that's really where I see if you really want to make an argument for that, like you all like that's probably your best bet, right? Is rising asset values linked to real estate. Like, you know, and that's a very classic kind of case that you could make for a feudal type relationship because it has landlords involved. But again, if you've read marks, you know that those landlords and those ground rents are subsumed within and subsidiary to value production, right? And the class structure that comes from that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:12

Well, I that's this sort of leads me to maybe talking about you know some stuff that's implied by the book they've been working on since then, like your piece for ill will personal theory of the party, your priest with Nick Chavez I believe in one of the end no supplements. I think I'm trying to remember, I've read a lot of your work recently about you know what communism could be. It seems like right now this this decay of the of the the world industrial superstructure, and I don't want to get too psychological, reflects the superstructure, you know, because I don't I can't prove that shit. That's not something like I don't even know that you could prove it. But it does seem to me that like a lot of this comes from a myopia and like not being able to grasp all this at one time so you grasp onto whatever element seems to be possible for you. And I don't just think, I mean, we could talk about you know, my I'm a I'm a labor rep in the teachers' unions. I've now worked with unions, I've I've been talking, I've helped shops unionize, but I've been talking about people like quit lying to people that us unionizing a Starbucks are even the UAW growing because of teaching assistance in universities who don't stay in the union because they're not teaching assistance for more than five years. Is this anywhere remotely like a return of the labor movement? If there's a labor movement in the United States, it's actually frankly mostly outside of the unions. It would have to be. And it does not look anything like the classical labor movement, even pre-unions. Like, and you know, that's one of my major frustrations because I'm just like, you keep on telling people that like there's this boom, but there's no increase in union density. In fact, every year I look, it's worse. The new unions, all the growth is in new unions and they're small, are in unions that are going into sectors that are not what they traditionally organize, not even downstream. Like I've talked about this, like the UAW is not trying to organize franchise shops and and whatnot downstream of its own production cycle. It's going, you know, unionizing TAs, which is also, by the way, another failing industry that's going to be shrinking. So it's it's this this element of it super frustrates me. But I also have this when we talk about like modern theories of third worldism, or when people start doing the most vulgar forms of anti-imperialism and just like take state statements by, I don't know, Russia or China completely at face value and yell at you and call you an imperialist slop dog, uh, or say that you're secretly supporting the United States when you're like, that's just not that that's not what you're arguing for is not possible. It's only possible in the short term. You know, what you're what you you were taking, you're metaking immediate, quick development as some kind of new developmental model, and you refuse to look at, you know, I've I've actually for years come to similar places here. I did not work it out to the painful minutia you did, but that like so much of what we call new development stuff is like they're just doing what we did in the early 20th century. It's like transparent, even down to social norms, like and and whatnot. So, and it seems to me like your argument and my argument is like, yeah, you might see some growth in China, yeah, we're gonna see some deduction in poverty. No, we're not primitivists. I don't think anyone thinks we're gonna go back to the woods. I'm not even totally sure I'm a degrowfer because I'm when I read what people mean by that, I'm like, well, that's not particularly useful. Um, but I I am sort of just like, I don't think this is maintainable. You know, I mean, Wallerstein, for example, used to but towards the end of his life, used to say that, you know, if if you get India and China trying to live in an American standard, it would ameserate the world very quickly. Which I think people don't like hearing. I mean, people, you know, we always hear stuff about, well, there's plenty of space on the air for everyone to live a comfortable life. And I'm like, yeah, that's actually somewhat true, but not a middle class life the way we understood it in the late 20th century in Europe or America. No, there isn't. So, what I mean, what do you make about that? Do you think some of the socialist shrinking of horizons is like you can't look like it it the kind of imagination you'd have to have to look at this and go, okay, what is communism gonna be now? Not what did we say it was in the middle of the 20th century? How can we quit making concessions to necessity to the point that we are basically lying to ourselves? Or, you know, maybe maybe we do have to take a black pill to get to, you know, some to paraphrase Benjamin Sudebaker from a completely different context. You have to like give up on hope to find any. I mean, what do you make of that?

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:19

Yeah, I I mean part of it is is basically I think people need to stop looking for those kind of you know, looking for these kind of hopeful examples of communism in either like these kind of small-scale kind of localist, everyday utopia type things, or in this very kind of distant example of just classic, you know, developmentalism, and begin to really critically appraise the material limits of of what like what would be faced in a revolutionary process. And then also like what basically start to actually think about production right as a as a political problem, um, and not as this neutral kind of technical apparatus, right? And not as something just to be completely eschewed entirely in favor of returning to artisanal kind of standards or whatever. One of the things that I really emphasize again and again is like you have to have a developmental program. Like you have to actually have be able to offer developmental outcomes to people if you're gonna be an attractive, you know, political option. That's especially true, of course, in in poor countries, but it's increasingly also very true in de-industrialized countries where you actually have to compose reasonable and and actually like materially feasible form of like development to get people basic developmental outcomes, such as you know, access to healthcare is usually the the one that's widely acknowledged. But I would say this includes like, you know, like fixing all the bridges that are falling down, like those sort of things. And that's actually quite a large thing. Like I really think that communists, in one sense, have to precisely because we've been we've given up kind of a hope in any of the existing examples of things that are going on in the world, you know, as it is today, whether they're these localist experiments or these big liberal development projects, it kind of opens a space that we haven't had in a long time, which is more the sort of imaginative space that I think you saw manifest with some of the like early Soviet experiments, right? Where there was this idea of like, let's actually imagine mega projects, right? Like let's imagine these kind of Promethean scale reorderings of the social metabolism with the non-human world, right? I think we actually do have to think about that stuff. Like, how would we, you know, how would a communist society, how would a communist revolutionary force propose that people across the the enormous continent of Africa have access to electricity and clean water, right? Like that's a simple question in one sense, but it's like liberals actually have an answer for that. They may war over the details of it, right? Whether you're talking about like this new Chinese liberalism, this socialist liberalism, right? Or you're talking about this kind of classic developmentalist liberalism of like the aid agencies and whatnot. But like a lot of communists do not actually have an answer for that question. And if they do, if they think that they do, they are actually proposing one of those liberal options. They're proposing, well, you have an export zone, and then you use the money from the export zone to fund the development, and then you keep control of your financial system and you kind of do what China did, right? They're too they're proposing a liberal action. Very few people actually propose, even on the left, even propose the things that actually at that level, even if they had a bunch of problems with them, did actually succeed in like mass electrification and like the Soviet Union, right? Like they they did do it without having an export zone. Like the and we have you know early examples of thinking about how to do some of this stuff at a different kind of technical level. But I think one of the things that we don't do anymore is have this kind of burst of imagination of like how actually would we politically do this in a politically adequate fashion if we were to be in a situation where you could, right? Like, and it's totally like a thought experiment thing and it's kind of utopian, but I think it's kind of this functional, very useful thing that we really have to start thinking about because people put that question aside very easily. And that I think is really not tenable, right? And how would we do this in a very poor place? How would we do it in a in a wealthier country? Like what sort of resources would you actually have to mobilize to do some of these things? What kind of forms of labor deployment would you actually want? You know, what kinds of you know, forms of of education would you want? Uh, how would those things be kind of integrated? This is something that, again, yeah, that that essay that I co-wrote with Nick Chavez, we sort of talk very generally about, but I think a lot more people have to be having those sort of discussions and not falling back on this idea of well, we just have these local federated communes that do everything kind of locally and somehow maybe interact with you know each other or whatever. You know, I can that's just that's not going to be kind of feasible.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:15

Though we do development forever, that's the other common like we just pretend that we can run the developmental process that of early, you know, state capitalist cases, whatever you want to call it, social development in perpetuity. Which is just that seems to me just actively insane. But um I I agree with you.

SPEAKER_01: 1:16:37

I'm an anthrop well with the degrowthers. I don't think that they uh they give an adequate. I mean, like, I I I have the same kind of attitude that you do is like like when someone kind of generally explains it to me, I'd be kind of shrugging, like, oh yeah, okay, like that seems correct. You don't have growth in the same way that you do, like the capitalism or the capitalism you know relies on growth in this very particular way. Communism, one of the core things about it is that you know you are destroying the social logic in which accumulation of capital is primary. Like that's the kind of core thing, right? Bingo. But but the degrowth stuff, first of all, it actually doesn't say that. It's too mystified by its own terms, by the terms of the capitalist world, the terms of growth itself, right? It's it's just trying to invert those terms in this really weird way. And then because of that, it often ends up at very weird conclusions. And I don't really like how they talk about it. And then I also feel like it, you know, it's it's had these accusations of kind of racism with regard to people in the poor countries, which I think are legitimate in many, many cases, because you know, it it the smarter ones now kind of combine a well, degrowth for the first world and then developmentalism for the third world. But really, I think it's it's a matter of getting out of those frameworks of growth and development that we've been in inherited, like the terminology of those things that are you know the prevailing idea of them within capitalism, and saying, what are we actually talking about, right? So, with like developmental outcomes, what are we specifically talking about? We're talking about everyone should have electricity, right? And that has technical requirements to it. And those technical requirements mean that we have to be running copper mines somewhere. How are we gonna fucking do it? Right? That's a political question. And then we have other questions that are like these things that I think growth, degrowth people get right correctly lambasted for because they don't make this distinction well enough. And some of them err on the side of saying, actually, yeah, you will cease to have growth in the sense of productivity increases, in the sense of innovation, right? Or these ideological terms that we have, which I think is bullshit and is not true. We will continue to have growth in the sense of productivity increases, in the sense of innovation, in the sense of advances in fundamental sciences and in our productive process that allows us to produce more for less, and in fact, may uh consume more raw energy produced in a better fashion. And there will be also these sort of productivity increases in the energy industry uh itself, right? So I don't think that on the one hand, you're gonna have a halt in growth in the sense of like productivity increases and you don't want it, right? It might slow, it's not gonna take the same form or whatever. But in fact, the people who think that accept too much of the capitalist propaganda about these productivity increases, saying that, well, scientific innovation and invention it requires economic growth, i.e., capital accumulation. So if accumulation stops, then you no longer have scientific advance, you no longer have new technologies. That is bullshit. Why do you study history and say that?

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:54

I'm just like, do you think non-capitalist societies didn't have fucking technology?

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:00

Exactly. A lot of times you read this stuff and you think that that actually is kind of close to what they're arguing. They say, well, we have to really rein it back, rain it back. I'm saying, like, no. In fact, I think that having communist uh social relationships kind of embedded at multiple layers, layers, all the layers of society, right, will in fact unleash scientific knowledge in a way that it like it free up our ability to conduct new scientific kind of journeys, right? And new scientific investigations that will unlock new ways to produce things, new forms of energy, new forms of just raw everyday production, new technologies, new fundamental advances across scientific fields. And why will it do that? Because you don't have to fucking work at Chipotle, you you can go. Go and you just spend your time researching this weird scientific shit because you enjoy it, because interesting, there will be a thousand times more scientists, a thousand times more people with higher levels of engineering knowledge in a communist society because we are socially supporting it as part of sustaining that complex social metabolic relationship, right? And I don't really like, of course, this isn't premised on capital accumulation growth in that sense, but it will see uh many things that you know today are ideologically falsely associated with growth. Things like, you know, producing large amounts of food, things like producing things in a way where you can produce a lot with less labor, uh, things like scientific advances, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm not entirely confident. Like, I think that initially, you know, you'll see like a plateau in energy usage and a drawdown of it because so much production today is is superfluous and is very wasteful. But I think over the long term, actually that's not going to be the case. I think that you know, energy production will resume after that plateau on more solid grounds, a more conscious and rational grounds. But I, in that sense, I'm very kind of Promethean.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:04

Promethean, but with you know, different I talk about this a lot. This is something that I got, I have my internal hate spots with Jock Kamat. I'm not gonna go into them, but it was something I used to think about also when I was arguing with the primitivist, a group of people that, you know, by and large have gone away or become right wingers. It's just, you know, they're not they're not an active concern the same way they were even 15 years ago. But I do like to remind people the best selling far left book when I was in college was Derek Jensen's book. But anyway, also dating myself severely, I do think that we have to acknowledge that the tele law, the teleogy of of the tech we have is not innate, is not innate, but it does exist. It is not neutral. You talk about this in your chapter on technology as ideology, but changing that changing that teleology would change with the ideology of society itself, and some of the stuff would be recuperated and some wouldn't. Just like there, you know, Marx talks about this with the feudal stuff being recuperated and not. Although I think a lot of people today, partly prompted by certain kinds of people trying to make excuses for AAS, will read this part of Marx and say, well, I mean, I you know, Dominico Lacerda does this explicitly. Uh, communism has every single aspect of capitalism, uh, markets, state, nations, wage, rage differentials. It's just controlled by a people state. And I see more and more of that actually. That that's just like where where we're at. And I'm just like, how are you like, how is any of that kindness? Because you haven't changed the T the teleological direction of either technology or society when you say that. Um, it's it all you're doing is changing whether or not a board of a joint stockholders vote on it or a committee in a state votes on it. Like that's all you've changed. And I guess you can call that a worker state if those committee is elected by mostly workers, I suppose. You know, I mean, how do you argue with that even? Because I I mean, like, I just sort of like walk away. Like it's just like I like, yeah. You know, I almost consider argument anti-communist, frankly. But go ahead.

SPEAKER_01: 1:24:37

Well, I mean, i i I think it's a very individual kind of thing when it comes to that. I think those those people who call themselves theorists and who are arguing that, they you know, they are kind of bad faith, they have a lot of kind of murky connections, they have, you know, whatever is going on with them, maybe they're making money behind the scenes, maybe they're kind of weird, neurotic individuals, you know, who knows? Like these older kind of theorists who are making those sort of arguments. They have some sort of horse in the game, they've got some bets on polymarket or something. They're they're they're cashing in on some of what they're doing. But the people who just kind of believe in that, I think a lot of people are attracted to it for a lot of reasons. And I think that we do them a disservice sometimes when we completely exclude it out of hand because we don't really try to explain like why is this stuff becoming more popular? Why is this the current kind of form that this is taking? And you know, I said in, I think it was in that Woodbine interview, and and maybe elsewhere too, like one of the things that we have is that we have a lot of people who, for an entire generation, for multiple generations in some cases, have really not seen development, right? And they're in like these wealthy countries, but all they've seen is a crumbling infrastructure, things getting shittier and shittier and shittier at every level society. And and the thing that is called development, if if something gets developed, invariably what it produces is something that is flimsy, cheaply made, and vastly, vastly overpriced, and then called a luxury, right? Like a luxury apartment complex. And that is their experience of capitalism locally, right? They're taking this local example of their life experience and they're saying, well, that's capitalism. I've been told I'm in a capitalist society, America. That's what it's like, you know? And then they look in the distance and they see these shiny cities rising in China, they see them rising elsewhere in the world. They see actual development and they say, hey, why couldn't we do that? Right. They see China implementing the kind of global norm among middle-income countries and social welfare stuff. And they say, well, why can't we uh implement like a universal healthcare system, et cetera, et cetera? They see all that stuff, right? And they're being told that is socialism, right? They're being told that their whole lives. The the that form of liberalism now calls itself socialism, right? So that that's a key kind of distinction, I think, to make is that the term socialism, the term socialism, both there and among like the so-called democratic socialists here, when they talk about what socialism is, and they say, well, it's like Norway, it's like Sweden, it's like the US in the 1950s, right? It's it's it's you know, this post-war liberalism is what they're talking about, basically. When that has become socialism in their mind. And they see, well, there are these developmental outcomes. Why can't we have that? Why can't we have that nice stuff? And then some of them will go to places like that. And, you know, at that surface level, I think it's shocking for a lot of people. I think it's really shocking because they'll go to like a real, a real city, right? From from the American countryside, right? It doesn't matter if you're in a city in America, you can call it, I'm like well known to them, you can call it the American countryside. It's like this kind of your internet doesn't work all the time, your connection's shitty, your roads takes forever to get everywhere you have to drive. And then you go to downtown Guangzhou, right? You go to uh Chongqing is the big one that everyone's obsessed with, right? And I mean, you see, like, yeah, it's lively, it's amazing. It's it's got like all this stuff going on. It's easy to get around. There's some the difficulties if you're a foreigner getting all the phone stuff to work, right? But like once you get that stuff to work, it's it's convenient, it's amazing. Like it's always this thing that you know, you know, my partner and I complain about. We'll talk about going back to China because she's uh she's from there, and then we'll always complain about little things in America in that respect. Like, man, if I was in China, I could just fucking do this. Like a return to Amazon or something. Like if you're in China, you just go downstairs. There's a million logistics facilities, they send something back and you get something the next uh the later the afternoon or something like that. Something like really, really simple daily life stuff. You know, I want to go out and eat some noodles after 9 p.m. And you can't fucking do that in most of America. You know, anything like it's all of this stuff, this this really basic stuff, people will go and they'll be shocked by this, be shocked by people being outside and looking happy and having like a nice walk, right? And grandma's working out in the park, like just this kind of basic human stuff. You can see it if you go to other you know places in in Europe or wherever, like, but people kind of do that, and then you'll have these people, and it's not just a left-wing thing. I remember this TikTok of this woman who went to she was in Kuala Lumpur, like she goes to Malaysia, right? And then has this TikTok of just like like the airport and just like roads and skyscrapers and stuff, and it's like upper middle income country, right? And it's it's one of the most developed economies in Southeast Asia, short of Singapore, right? And then she's like her TikTok is all about like why did they lie to us about what third world countries are like? And it's and it's laughable because you're like, okay, no one would fucking call Malaysia a third world country since like 1965, you know, like it's just not like it's not in that kind of orbit. But actually, for a lot of people, and this is you know, Trump's been talking about this. We're gonna ban all immigrants from third world countries, and he's talking just about brown people, right? But like that's the kind of logic at work here for a lot of these people, I think, is that they really don't know what the world looks like. They don't know what capitalist development looks like because they've never experienced it. They haven't traveled much. When they do, they're absolutely shocked by the things that places that have had growth booms have been able to achieve and develop, which are just conventional developmental outcomes, but in the contemporary era. Um, and then they can go and they can see, like, look, all these technical advances, all these kind of social services, these nice sort of things. And for them, it doesn't add up that that stuff actually coexists with and requires all the other bad stuff that they're complaining about, that those are part of the same system, right? That those productivity booms were in part generated, in large part generated by the investment of firms from that first shitty place in America, right? That investment created the export boom that then was used as the financing for the big stimulus infrastructural developments, the creation of these national cores of capital, et cetera, et cetera. So when I I talk about people, like you ask how to engage with people, I think at that level, uh, in one sense, you you can't you can't veer immediately into like, well, that's not really communism, it's not all that stuff. It's like, okay, like you're interested in China, you're interested in this sort of so stuff, like why don't you like I think you actually should learn Chinese? I think you really should read this stuff. Read what the Chinese economists actually are writing. Because if you read them, you know, I I helped translate and proofread this book by this guy Wu Jongmin, who's like the a scholar who's employed at the Chinese, like the party school, where they train uh people within the like internal party apparatus, um, and sort of create the nor ideological norms about how like all of this stuff with like Chinese socialism, social market characteristics, whatever, how that's talked about. And this guy is a very interesting author. It's very boring in some respects, but he's very interesting, right? And he's a Rawls scholar, basically. He's he's really into Rawls. Um, it's all about taking these elements of classic American liberalism and pragmatist thought as well, and kind of fusing it with the surface image of Marxism-Leninism taken from you know certain texts, but not reading too deeply into capital or anything, and using it to create this new language of socialist liberalism, which I think will become the dominant language of liberalism over the course of the next century, personally, uh, because you kind of have to talk about it in that way, because the state has to be more involved. You have to have some solution for some of these social uh welfare issues. You know, and it's it is this really interesting cutting-edge form of liberal thought, but it is liberal thought. It has nothing to do with communism. It is not the same project as the communist project because it is premised on retaining the fundamental social logic of capitalist production, which means retaining the fundamental forms of social domination inherent to capitalist production, regardless of whether you have some social welfare programs on top of that, as capitalism always has had. So that I think is kind of the key thing is engaging in a way that encourages people just to A, read more, but then you have to, I think, accept at a certain level that there's going to be a lot of people who will become liberals ultimately. You know, they they are not going to be interested in the communist partisan project, even though it seems on the surface level like they maybe they are because they're talking about socialism, they're complaining about the current world, right? But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're, you know, they are in line with kind of actually wanting to change that world. They want to maybe get marginal improvements in the same way that you know you would be around progressive Democrats or whatever who would argue the same thing, but you wouldn't really think that they, you know, are advocating for the same type of world that you are. So I think that's an important distinction to make is just like separating out these things and figuring out where that space for those discussions are, but also not being like kind of weirdly hostile to like children on the internet, which I think a lot of like left communist types will tend to do. They just immediately be super hostile to these kids who've just been radicalized, they don't know what the fuck's going on, they kind of vaguely accept all this terminology that they've been sort of fed their whole life, and that's how they're articulating politics and they are searching for something better. And a lot of those people now are a little bit older, and I've seen this progress that many have made where they're like, Yeah, I did. I went through and I joined the PSL or or the CPSA or whatever. And then they get disenchanted with that and they realize actually, this doesn't make a lot of sense. There's a lot of holes in this theory. This really sounds like liberalism. And then they, you know, or they go somewhere and they actually engage with people in other countries and they're like made fun of, right, by these other people for thinking this. Like that's a huge one. I uh there's people who would go and talk to comrades in China, they're like, but you are all are so lucky in China uh that you have, you know, this like people's state and stuff, and then just like people is looking at them like, what the fuck? Like, why do you think that we're doing this underground right now and no one used their real name? Like, you know, that sort of thing. I think those experiences are really what uh converts people.

C. Derick Varn: 1:35:24

I I mean, I'm sympathetic. I I have gone from being a raging lunatic on some of these things to you know a lot of Marxist-Leninists, liberals, social democratic liberals. I even go, I mean, I I vote in a DSA chapter locally. At the same term, I I mean, like I have, I still do point out, like, hey, what you're asking for is like not even what progressive non-socialists were asking for in the 1980s. You know, when you like if you actually look at the you know, the the the massive transformatory thing of Zoram Mamdani versus Bill de Blasio, it's rhetoric and executive orders, it's not any real big structure, and even like big victory events like he had this week on childcare, like he's got two years of dedicated support from the governor. It's not like he was able to just manifest that out of the own city budget because it would immediately be stomped down by by bond legality. And I just think we have to be honest about that. At the same token, I also have just found you know, I've also talked about like you know, left communists are are often right, but they're some of the most hard and annoying people to deal with on the planet. Particularly if they're like partisan left communists with some organizations, just like they don't even like each other. So I find that really interesting because what I will I do think that our attitudes socially alienate people uh a whole lot from some of these projects. Uh, your point about travel is really interesting. I had that experience. I was hell, I had it in the United States. I was from I'll just say one from I'm from Macon, Georgia, which is a post-industrial shithole in the in the deep south, where the city's like collapsed it in half over the last two decades. You know, I don't live there anymore, I live in Salt Lake. But when I got out of the South initially, when I was very young, it felt like the way you're describing people going to Gangzhou. Then when I went to Seoul and Guangzhou and Beijing and Incheon and even Tokyo, I was floored. And I went to the same thing you're talking about. Like, I said it wasn't quite socialist coded because it I was like, well, but like the the Republic of Korea, which has weird work hours and insane work laws and is very sexist towards women, but they got this, and we don't. Like this entire state, I didn't have to take a car, I could afford to take a bus, a taxi, or a train anywhere for years, you know. However, if you stay there long enough and talk to people and you learn even the beginning of the local language, you don't maintain that for more than a year or two. Like it's just you start seeing like, oh, there's hidden rule, there's hidden poverty everywhere. I just don't see it. Oh, these people all have like all the Chables have deals with American companies, and they're gonna it's gonna happen the same way that it happened in Japan and and blah blah blah. The roads are cleaner, the social services work better, but the parts of it are still a nightmare escape. And then, you know, I went to the I went I I traveled a lot around Mexico when I lived in Mexico and did some activism there. And like, even like it occurred to me like people think of this in terms of states, and they really shouldn't. Like you go to Monterey or District Federal of Mexico City or even like Oaxaca City, and it's like great. You go to a Socalo, you know, 40 or 40 minutes drive outside of that, and at first it seems like idyllic early 20th century, late 19th century life, and then you stay there for a day, and you're like, oh, okay, this is not actually, you know, that different. Or you live in some place like Cal Row where there is only a tiny section, I mean a super tiny section of the kind of like around Katamea and you know, the the government head complexes outside of of Cairo are like where they built the new Egyptian museum. But even in in a relatively affluent neighborhood where I used to live with all the Chinese engineers that we were talking about earlier, you're just like, oh my god, like social services just go out, they just you know go out. There's people huddled everywhere, you know, and and you're like, this coexists, it's not you can go to these places, and particularly as an uh English-speaking, well-educated American who can get there. Because the other thing I'd say is a lot of Americans can't, you know. I got lucky, someone else paid for the meeting to do this. Thank you, international teaching. But when you when you actually go out and you know, this probably does blow a lot of people's minds. But you also realize it's totally integrated. Like you're like it's completely integrated, and that's also true here, like automation, import, exports, offshoring. Well, I mean, as Trump has ill has illustrated in what Some of the more vocal parts of his second term, that stuff was only functional and profitable because it was integrated. And the moment you start breaking the integration down, the supply chains like immediately fall apart and can't be easily rebuilt.

SPEAKER_01: 1:41:01

Yeah, exactly. And it really talks too, I think we were saying kind of initially, with these, you know, concrete kind of political uh programs and you know how kind of minimal they are. I think the other thing that we have to keep in mind when we talk about like engaging with kind of people on this, on one side is this thing of like, yeah, kind of encourage people to actually really just learn more about the world and that'll fix a lot of these problems. But I think the other thing is that we also have to, and this is where the left communists are actually awful. The worst thing that they they do is probably at this level of kind of understanding the kind of different tactical tiers that you're operating on at any any given moment. Because what we're really talking about a lot of the time is like even if we really thoroughly disagree about a lot of these things, are we actually opposed in the immediate term in what we might do locally about political stuff? And I think a lot of the time the answer is to that is actually no, not at all. Sometimes it's yes, or they're minor divergences, right? But sorting out those tactical differences is the key thing. That's the other kind of final thing of the book talks about quite a bit, is the primacy of these kind of tactical orientations in the moment of struggle. And that I think is really where a lot of this stuff is going to be sorted out ultimately. And a lot of it seems so vicious and so different because it has no stakes. You know, it's just kind of voices on the internet uh talking about this sort of stuff. And if you go to the places where it does matter, you're immediately disenchanted of those kind of views. Then you're you're actually turning into living politics. But in the US, I think we're going to run into a similar thing of like, what is the key difference here? And are we allied in this moment or not? And what is the nature of us of our divergence if we have a divergence? And I think here, in many respects, the reality is that no one really knows what to do. A lot of people are experimenting with different forms of political organization. It almost certainly, I think the building of any kind of partisan organization, like you talk about this recent piece on ill will that I have. I have a forthcoming piece on Heat Wave magazine that elaborates more on this idea. When you talk about forms of partisan organization, we're inherently going to be talking about multivalent forms of organization that include things that seem on the surface to be somewhat reformist, right? And that also of necessity will include things that are like highly illegal activities on the part of, you know, radical militants or whatever, like that kind of mythic idea of this like militant. But you but you're going to need uh both of those things if you think about worker organizing, for example. One of the core things of like why have these things been so unsuccessful? Part of it is union bureaucracy, stuff like that. But the other part is that so many aspects of what made traditional strikes even work are illegal today. They have been illegal for many, many years. And so the first group, right? The first people who figure out how to get over that hurdle and just do them anyways, and figure out some way that is workable enough to avoid enough repression on the part of the police state, will start to win actual concrete victories in these kind of weirder settings, right? And we'll start to actually see, you know, these these reconfiguration of that kind of field of organization and that field of possibility for people where they kind of realize, like, oh yeah, I could just do that, right? So those sort of things are where I think we have to have a lot more of this intentional kind of mindset of saying, well, let's really broadly think about what we should do. Like I'm just saying, Mike, I'll uh like I think we need to push. Like, I I'm very much not behind like this high-level idea of what socialist liberals think the society that they will implement is, right? And very wary of the ones who are going to immediately get into power and then just kind of go to the democratic norm. But you have to admit that having people in like even local elected office who are somewhat sympathetic has a huge impact on like how many people get prosecuted when rebellions happen. It can definitely have like a very concrete effect on really specific things like that. And the core thing, if you want to have an electoral thing, right, if your whole thing is electoral politics, really what you should be advocating for is the expanding the scope of activity through the re-legalization of basic things like going on strike, drawing down police state stuff. And then these politicians should be thoroughly, thoroughly attacked by people by their own bases when they refuse to do those sort of things. Like the new Seattle mayor, for example, just said that she's actually not going to take down all these surveillance cameras that she, you know, said that she was like as a central kind of mobilizing point in her campaign uh was to take down all these evil surveillance cameras. And now it said, well, we're not gonna take them down, you know, those sort of things, right? They should just be kind of jettisoned by the parties that supported them when they they give up on those things. But I think it's also naive to think that they can't, you know, that they can't help when it comes to making those kind of core decisions about, you know, rolling back or not passing like the worst type of of punitive kind of laws. It was a huge benefit in many cities in the US where you had all these administrations at the local levels that had made these progressive promises that then were kind of actually faced with a rebellion. And they had to, they were also kind of overloaded with how many people came in. And both of those things combined to like throwing out a whole layer of subsidiary charges that if you went back 10 years before, that those were all charged, right? Those all people all got criminal records, they all became felons, they all got into the system. And then it was this other tier, right? They were still prosecuting people, they're still doing that stuff. But there's all kinds of stuff, I think, for this kind of multifaceted um approach where, yeah, you'll have some sort of electoral element that's kind of moderate and always dangerous, but it's gonna be there. You know, you might as well see if you can use some of it. You're gonna have the the formation of local kind of independent like assembly assembly structures, you're gonna have these weird militant groupings that are doing like illegal stuff and they, you know, it's gonna be controversial. You're gonna have like all of this stuff going on. And so, how do you actually create institutions in the midst of this great diversity of partisan organizing that has these kind of many faces and that allows it to retain that partisan character? And then how do you win that internal power struggle, that internal struggle within the field of competitive control against socialist liberals when it comes time to actually be in positions of increasing power?

C. Derick Varn: 1:47:47

I mean, I I guess that's the the you know, my critique of a lot of left communists and similar yours is like you won't even play the game. Like it is a game you have to play, you know. We can and and this tendency, I mean, this is uh you know, we oh, it's college kids. This goes all the way back to Gorder, you know, and the council communists. Like it's not, you know, I mean, people who are opting out of even playing with the unions, and you and I have had more abstentionist times because you know, deep in my soul of soul, I hate Democrats with a passion. But I also saw what you saw after George Floyd that it's like, well, it was better to be in some places than others, even though even though the repressive apparatus of the state was plenty used by these progressive mayors and governors, it was not used as as severely as it was during the Bush administration. Part of that, although I also think was scale, you know, from Occupy to BLM2 after Floyd, the scale is very different. Whereas like something like stop cop city, you're gonna get crushed. And you saw that part of that's like the state apparatus is more hostile in Georgia. Part of that is you know, it the actual events are more murky. And the other point that you make is like I think this is my frustration with a lot of the socialist liberals, is this focus on a lot of these, you know, you you'll have people who come from even you know, relatively militant Trotskyist or Maoist backgrounds who are in the DSA who all of a sudden sound like Gene Kwan when she became Mary of Wind, as soon as they get a chance to even run, and the entire organization goes into that. And I think I have just been like, you have to be in multiple organizations. If you're a communist militant, you're only in one organization, you're not doing your job. And I know that's a big ask. I know it's a huge ask, like in terms of commitment, time, and money. But I mean, we already kind of know that. Like, I'm in I'm a union organizer, I'm a rep. I'd spend that's actually the biggest point I spend my time on. Do I believe that the teachers' union is going to become communist tomorrow? Absolutely not. I'm not an idiot, right? Uh, but if I don't engage where you know, an actual labor struggle with an actual valence for the state that actually has deep roots in the community in ways that a lot of other things don't. If I don't engage in that, what am I doing? You know, and I and it I think your your theory of the party, you and in Rodrigo News made me feel better about that because a lot of my you know former love communist friends like kind of talk about me as a traitor. Um and I'm like, but I'm not really, I don't really like I I know that socialism in one city in New York is not possible, and that isn't socialism anyway, by any I mean, by any by any definition that I would recognize anyway. I'm not like a idealist on words, but and so thinking about that, but you know, the other thing that I think about a lot about is we have to be realistic that like momdani cannot be LaGuardia because the social infrastructure does not exist for that now, like from that position in that place, and when he fails, and I'm putting that in quotation marks for those of you who are listening. We need to quit talking about this in terms of just like betrayal or or whatever. We need to look at you know, the intersection, because uh I think that maybe I'll ask your opinion on this, might be my last question. Is all kinds of communists, not just left communists, do this rapid vacillation between like ultra-determinism and ultra-voluntarism, and depending on who they want to pull out and why they want to make excuses for things at any given time. I mean, liberals do it too, it's just not as obvious because they don't have as like clear language for it. Uh, their language is actually way more sophisticated than ours in some ways, even though we have you know more obvious jargon. How do you help people navigate that? Because, you know, they're gonna have to, you know, otherwise it'll be this perpetual cycle that I see in a lot of these, you know, groups that are predominated by social liberals or predominated by militants or whatever, where you have like a subcultural dynamic where you got the old timers who came in and were serious and like die hard and they were just there. And then you go through you just chew through young people like it's a children's crusade. Like how like this is something I think about when we talk about this, or dealing with like some of us are gonna be able to go abroad and talk about it and like talk about what this means and have and you know, have spouses or have dated people abroad, we have relationships, but a lot of America doesn't. And like, how do we bring that home more in a clearer way? I mean, I was sort of actually super ecstatic for a while, even though I thought it was full of propaganda when everybody got on little rev book for like three days. So it's like, oh, you'll see that China is really not, you know, what you've been told it is, but also probably not what you were projecting upon it either. But yeah, what do you think about that?

SPEAKER_01: 1:53:13

Yeah, I want the one, I mean, on that that kind of final part of the question, I think that's you know, people are are inherently already kind of being put into increasing just very low-level interaction, I think, with like international stuff. In fact, I think that AI stuff is uh is going to accelerate this and really help with it because of automated translation. I think it's it's gonna be a huge thing that'll make a lot of that open in a way that it has not been, at least at a marginal, moderate kind of level. And will allow for kind of increasing kind of engagement and whatnot. There's all kinds of other things I think that are gonna increase engagement. Part of it, I think, is also just it's really not actually that expensive to travel. If you're an American, you the passport gets you into a lot of places. The when you stop paying rent in America as well, like you actually have a lot of money because that's where most of your money goes out of your paycheck, you know. So then it's kind of like this weird thing where if you have savings or some sort of source of income, like it's pretty easy to travel. I went the original time I went to China, right? I wasn't working at a university or anything. I had been working in food service and I saved like a little bit of money. And then I found out that it was going to be cheaper for me to just move, like get a plane ticket to go to China to and live in a poorer city in western China and take a class, uh language class at a Chinese university, than it would have been for me to just stay in Seattle and pay rent in Seattle and go to community college in Seattle. Like it was literally going to be cheaper for me to travel than it was for me not to travel. That's I mean, that's very true in a lot of cases, and it has, you know, being part of this kind of world that is built on these planetary supply chains, that's one consequence of it. I think people actually don't understand that they are able to travel in in some cases.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:04

It was that's more to move outside of the US uh 15 years ago than it was for me to move within it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:55:10

Just yeah, yeah, totally. I like it, it was it's significantly cheaper than people think it is. It's not, but you're not gonna get an American standard of living all the time. I mean, like you are gonna be accepting that you're you're you know, you know it's kind of depends. But uh as for the other kind of thing, I I find it it's always very interesting to me. Like on one side, on one side, I'm very interested and curious to kind of pick the brains of some of these DSA type figures. Like I'm very curious what Momboy thinks he can do because I don't really think he's like stupid. I think his dad is smarter, but I think that like you know, I don't think that he's like uninformed about this stuff. I think that theoretically, he's probably not that that well read on some of this stuff, but I really don't think he's like uninformed. I so I'm very curious in terms of like the mechanics, like the civil, the civil level mechanics of what they think that they're doing, how they think that they're going to be doing it. Because if you look at at they may have a solution, is my point. Because on the one hand, if you look at the past, the like classic sewer socialist policies, those were funded kind of ironically by these speculative municipal bonds a lot of the time. And they were all these kind of speculative bond structures that finance different types of infrastructure like that, such as the railways, right? And so they were actually doing a lot of that stuff in league with these like gilded age robber baron financier types because they weren't quite, they didn't have opposed interests in that case, right? So they were able to construct these kind of financing ventures based on that sort of thing. And I the one of the disappointing things, I think, is that a lot of the contemporary sewer socialists don't seem to actually be smart enough to figure out a way to do that. Maybe they're structurally limited in doing it. But I think that on one hand, I think that they actually are not smart enough to figure out a way to do it. I think that you could if you really wanted to and you wanted to make those dark deals, right? But I think that they don't actually even realize that you need to do it. I think a lot of them are confused about how those financing structures work, and they really do think that you could just do just do this stuff. There's like the money is sitting there in some fashion and you could just move it around, which isn't the case, you know. Maybe we're starting to see a new generation of socialist liberal type politicians who are gonna make those, gonna add that stuff up. Maybe it will be like this weird right-wing new populist nationalist uh Republicans who are gonna do gonna do it. Like you kind of pointed out, you know, being originally from the South, I did the opposite. I've moved, I've moved to the South in the past couple of years. And one of the fascinating things is that you do see these really weird new alliances of kind of populist-ish uh politicians and these, especially East Asian multinationals, to create these new boom, like localized booms in investment around a bunch of southern cities, which really don't have like a social welfare aspect, but they have more of it than you would expect in many of these cities, actually. They have more resources uh given to many of those things, and they have their own weird progressive side, which is often like these laws that are passed to pass like protect like Amish people, but then actually end up being kind of of a general benefit to people, uh, for example, in terms of decriminalizing basic like activities and like food selling, right? Um like those sort of things get passed. And so you do start to see this weird, maybe the very initial movements of like what used to be like you know, the basis of social catholicism or whatever, like back in in the or the Christian Democrat type European parties. Those, you know, someone someone eventually is going to have to be the person who figures out a way to screw over real estate interest to the benefit of uh larger groups of people in a way that also can retain some sort of developmental kind of aspect to it by getting some other constituency involved, of some other like corporate constituency involved, right? And I don't think anyone has figured out how to do that yet, but that's the the puzzle that I think everyone is is poking at when we're talking about within conventional kind of politics. So I'm very curious about what these people like Mondani think they're going to be able to do, if they understand those sort of limits that they're facing, if they understand them, what do they really uh think of themselves doing at this kind of historic level? Like, you know, you're always kind of wondering like to what extent might people feel in their heart of hearts that they actually are communists in some sense, but they just don't see a tactical path to get there, you know. I don't know. I'm very curious about it, but I also think it just is one of those things where you are starting to see an increasing number of experiments um in this regard, both popular experiments and outside of it. And I think in one sense, these politicians that are getting elected, they need to be way more experimental and try much wilder things than they are. They need to be more like Trump, honestly. I mean, in every respect. Like people said you couldn't do that, and then he just does it, right? Like, yo, you can't throw out all international norms that just say you're gonna fucking invade Greenland. No other president would think you could do that, but he just does it, right? So I think that those sort of things is kind of calling the bluff of civility. I think we need a lot more of those DSA type politicians doing that, and they don't do it because they're cowards most of the time. That's the problem, right? Where they don't actually have that gusto that you get with right wing politicians, but we kind of need that much more volatile. Volatile, much more weird stuff. Just to say, like, what can I do? Like Mamdani, for example, or any of these DSA progressive coward people, right? Like, what are they gonna do about IC? What are they gonna fucking do? They keep saying, oh, ICE isn't welcome here. And it's like, really? What are you gonna fucking do about it? And I want them to try to actually answer that question. Try to actually figure out what they would do about it, right? Waltz in Minnesota, he's like, I'm gonna deploy the National Guard against the protesters, right? Like that's their solution so far. But like, what if you had a DSA type person in there who was like really kind of committed? Like, I I it would be interesting to see. What if there's a big ICE intervention in New York? What will Mam Dani do about it? What can he do about it? But what will he try? What could you try, right? What these DSA type mayors need to get through their heads, and especially if they go into state government, is that it is imminently, it's absolutely crucial to begin to stoke alternative to to understand that they're gonna be, if they do anything good, they will be taken out of power. But also with that in mind, they they also are not the power, really isn't with them, right? You have to build some sort of popular base of power that comes traditionally in every case in the world throughout history, is something kind of like assembly structures and militias, like at your most minimal conditions, right? They have to be some sort of assembly structures and they have to be able to have some sort of self-defensive capacity, right?

C. Derick Varn: 2:02:14

I mean, this this is the thing that I have actually pointed out. I said this in 2019, and I haven't backed down, even though I have more relations with the DSA. I was like, I said I would take the DSA a lot more seriously if they had both open and clandestine militia. Like, um, but you know, and yeah, there are they do actually they are beginning to take security slightly more seriously, but it's very slight. Like, I'm not gonna talk about it on air, obviously, but they are there are steps being taken, but there's nothing like uh militia structure, and you know, I was even listening to like states go, you know, well, you know, ICE has bigger guns, and I was like, No, you no, they don't actually. I know you both have military surplus. Like, I've seen cops with tanks, I don't know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_01: 2:03:05

So, yeah, I mean, you just have to like people, if you're gonna say this stuff, like at least try, you know, like what are you gonna do? And their their whole solution is like, well, we're gonna sue them. And I was like, what the fuck? Like, really? Do you think that that's gonna work? Like, you don't like even if like even if best case scenario, you put this murder through the courts, right? Which you can't do already, they've said they won't let you do it, it will not be done unless someone burns down something big in Minneapolis that won't go to court unless that happens. And then also, even if that happens, even if the thing burns, and then they send him to trial, and then of course, that any reasonable jury would convict, but you know, maybe there's strings pulled, it doesn't go through the grand jury, that sort of thing. You have to keep burning things until that happens. And then what's gonna happen? Well, Trump will just pardon him if he's still alive, or President Vance will just fucking pardon the guy. Like, that's it's clear. Like, that's everyone knows that the court system is broken, it's not ever gonna work. You cannot litigate anything anymore in any of these regards. You can win maybe minor local victories, little things that aren't that important. You can push against it, you can clog up the court system, you can file the petitions or whatever, but no one has faith that that's going to work. No one has faith that if you win the house back in the midterms, they're gonna be able to fucking do anything because it's clear that Trump, the executive, they don't need the permission of Congress to invade fucking Venezuela, to put boots on the ground in Greenland. Like they don't need any of this shit. They they've sent federal troops to American cities to murder American citizens as well. Like this, the classic fear of the libertarians is occurring, right? And everyone is being completely spineless about it. There is like these people are saying we're gonna put ice out of the city, and then they don't have any plan to do it. And then they'll hold a little uh vigil, maybe, and you know, like that's that's the most that you'll kind of get. So it's very interesting to kind of see what what some of these electoral forces might, you know, experiment with. Like, how do they really kind of think you can kind of respond to these sort of things? And then, of course, for us for partisan organizing, we have this alternate question of how can you stoke the formation of kind of like assembly and self-defensive infrastructure across the populace at large from our current kind of position.

C. Derick Varn: 2:05:24

Um why are right wingers the only people with militias? Um, no, I mean, because it seems to work for them, but yeah, I I I I think about particularly, you know, I I don't know how much you think about this, but I I think I might leave the I might live to see American balkanization. Like I really do at this point.

SPEAKER_01: 2:05:44

Yeah, I I I feel like it's it's something is going to happen. I think that there's multiple pathways for it. Maybe I'll write something at some point that really details all of this. But like, you know, the most likely outcome right now, you definitely America as as is already popular on the internet. America is entering its century of humiliation, right? Or it has already entered it. It's very clear that those are the kind of conditions. It's not clear how, even if obviously, like the kind of Trumpist thing is not a solution to that. It's just reinforcing it. It's creating these spheres of influence that are not actually reviving the imperial project. The only one who could revive that imperial project at scale would be actually, ironically, some sort of socialist liberal force, like super Bernie Sanders figure who could restore the American Imperium to its uh previous position by forcing through all these kind of social things and inducing all these wars that then restore value production, et cetera, et cetera. But then at the same time, it's America's it's it's hard to actually imagine the exact sequence of events that would result in any sort of balkanization, any sort of actual open civil war. It's always it's latent and it clearly those tensions are kind of building. Something will happen, but it's gonna be uglier and messier, I think, than people kind of think it will, very less clear-cut kind of lines. And then also there's a lot more inertia than it's often kind of like you have these anarchists who've been predicting for the last 20 years that America is gonna fall into balkanization and civil war, and it hasn't, right? Um, they say it's it's five years down the line, and then the five years passes, you know.

C. Derick Varn: 2:07:29

It's just like people. I mean, I I I I chided someone who told me to read Michael Hudson and some of these like geopolitical MMTers and and and Marxist-Leninists who've been predicting the immediate collapse of the US dollar now for two decades. And I'm like, de-dollarization is happening, you are correct, about that trend, but you keep on making but it's yeah, it's incredibly slow. And I'm just like, and historically, that's how empires unwind. That's how like a lot of times when balkanization happens, you just wake up and you're not in the same country anymore. There is no big event, like like the the apparatus erodes, it shrinks back, you know, like or other or you know, like think about how this like the Supreme Courts change court jurisdictions and whatnot, and like like these regional courts, because of the legal infrastructure, could lead to local entanglements with foreign investment that just eventually become more or less semi-autonomous states, and the federal government just doesn't even like do anything about it or mess with it at all. I mean, I could see that happening pretty easily under either party's administration. But I do think the social tensions are very real. I just tell people like, you know, you think it's gonna come come about in this cataclysmic way, and I, you know, one of the things I got from your book is like the natural processes that we see, I natural is not really the right word, but let's say structural processes that we see. They're sometimes centuries long. Like, and I think you know, I I do think maybe communist I always think that the communist mind is is just as corrupted by World War II as everyone else, it's just corrupted by a different part of it. Like everyone's stuck in the 50s part, and we're stuck in like, well, we we predicted socialism or barbarism, and then you know, barbarism happened, and we haven't ever recovered from that. And I I sometimes think like, but but that leads us to believe that there will be these big events, but the 19th century wasn't like that, the 18th century wasn't like that. Most of the 20th century wasn't like that. It was a very specific cataclysmic time. Those things do happen, you know, they could happen again. Although I do always think about like, but the existential risk with the technology we have now is so great that the odds of of it happening are pretty low because the survivability is pretty low. You know, like that's where I'm at. But I do think we have to look at it, and I I do think it's interesting. One of the things that I I've been trying to tell people, like I I said to someone, like, I you know, I don't live in New York, so I do somewhat resent when I talk about the DSA, me having to care about every fucking comp troller in New York. But at the same token, if I had lived in New York, as many can as many criticisms as I had of uh Mamdani, I would have voted for him if I voted at all, and I probably would have. Because I would have thought that oh, what he's going to do is better than than what we get with a Cuomo figure. But I also it's it's hard for me to like also tell a lot of these people, like, yeah, but you're not gonna be able to replicate that all across the country tomorrow because the the structures of governance are very different in like Atlanta and like Georgia or Utah or this, and you're not always downstream of Democratic Party apparatuses that you could both be parasitic upon and also oppose. And I think that this when we look at this in the broad terms, I also think about one of the things to think about your book is like we have to start really thinking about this beyond the scope of the United States, too. Because the one thing I get frustrated with is oh, everyone talks about internationalism, but what they really mean is posting about states that they don't visit and don't understand, like are you know, are getting mad at people for their for their particular takes on what multipolarity is, which is just a fucking buzzword anyway. I mean, I've been I've been actually thinking about it. When was this uniprollar world that we lived in for like all of seven years between 1992 and 1999? Like, because it was clearly coming apart by the end of the Clinton administration, much less, you know, George W. Bush's administration. I don't know what you're talking about, like it's just weird to me that we we see this, and your book makes me think we really have to think about this in a much more global term, because uh I said the last question was my last question. Maybe this is my last question. How do you get people out of this like terminal methodological nationalism, which often just turns into just natural populism that that seems to hit these walls because it doesn't understand? Like, for example, there is no way to run the American economy in an autarcic way, there's not a way to do that without like mass starvation, and we're relatively well positioned in terms of resources and geography, yeah. Yeah, you know, other places it's even more absurd. So, like, how do you break people out of that? I think your book, you know, as a weird fugue experience, and like I said, I really enjoyed it. I thought it was literary, I learned tons from it. It is not easy to read. It's and I say this you're a poetic writer for a theorist, and it's still not easy to read. So, so like, how do we get people looking at these these things in a deeper way? I guess that's my last question because the methodological nationalism really is a problem.

SPEAKER_01: 2:13:25

Yeah, well, I think I mean, one of the just most concrete ways, I think there's there's the obvious things we've kind of already talked about, encourage people to travel, learn other languages, really read broadly, read deeply into things, recover these basic skills of manually doing things, like actually learning a language, actually learning how to read and engage with the text, those sort of things, those are all important. But also even let's think about kind of our practical kind of day-to-day experience. One of the thought experience, and if people want to do this on their own, they can do it, you know, any any day, anywhere. On any given day, just look at an object and try to trace out in your mind, like look at your little USB drive, right? And try to trace out in your mind where do all of these things that go into this come from? How did this get here? And what were all the social links that made that possible, right? So maybe manufactured in China in some facility, it's transported to me by logistics, like a last mile delivery driver. It's sorted in the American logistics facility, it's packaged according to, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And then it has all these components that come from all these other places, and then just play the game. Say, okay, what is this made out of? Aluminum? If it's aluminum in China, where does China get aluminum? Where is that aluminum smelted? Like those are sort of generic games. Play this little commodity game, right? And you'll start to see immediately these kind of social kind of links. And then in the practical sense, you will immediately run into this question, actually, even if you do very local organizing. So if you are organizing within a any capacity as like a labor organizer, you immediately run into this question, right? Because you are always, always processing and using like goods that are coming from somewhere else. And those ultimately will have international links in the vast majority of cases, right? Or you are integrated into some sort of state institutional infrastructure where obviously that has a global kind of consequence with American kind of statecraft. If you are talking about local organizing in the sense of like community-level organizing, gentrification type things, you actually immediately begin to realize these global networks of capital that are driving those developmental processes when you start to investigate the concrete issues that you are organizing on in your day-to-day life, right? So when I first the actually a lot of what the Hell World project began as were these really concrete questions about why does at the time, right, I was in the Seattle Tacoma area, like why does this area look like this? And why does it pose these particular organizing problems to us when I'm a food worker trying to organize, you know, for higher wages and better kind of living conditions in general in these sort of cities? Why do these cities look like this? Why does so much of this money go to these real estate deals? What is going on with all this port infrastructure that they're building? Like all of this stuff that's driving up these kind of real estate costs, that's that's encouraging this bifurcation of the labor market where I'm at the low end of, you know, what is actually going on here? And that actually immediately led me to these global questions, right? Because a lot of that capital, a lot of that port stuff, right, is all Pacific oriented. And then that led me to studying these global supply chains of the Pacific Manufacturing Complex and understanding these high-level global flows of capital. So these most local possible examples of organizing will become immediately global if you just continue to look into them, look into any issue, and you will immediately find global, it's global contours, and you'll have to learn about them in order to adequately organize in that space. That's going to be true of almost anything that you do. And the the key thing is just keep tracing out those connections, right? Behind the fetish of the commodity is an object, behind the fetish of the nation state is this closed space, the behind the fetish of your community is this autonomous thing. Trace out those connections, those social links, and you will eventually end up at this kind of web of kind of global things. And that will end that will lead you to these high-level and very complex and difficult theoretical questions.

C. Derick Varn: 2:17:59

Yeah, I think that's a good place to end it. Would where can people find more of your work in addition to your substack?

SPEAKER_01: 2:18:07

I will regularly kind of write for the field note section of the Brooklyn Rail. I'll regularly write, you know, I've I've got that article on Spectre, I might have, you know, other things in there in the future for really quick turnaround stuff, especially political organizing-oriented stuff. I will have things in Ill Will and Heat Wave magazine. I have a forthcoming article in Heat Wave in the issue three of Heat Wave. Heat Wave is great for other stuff too. It's kind of getting off the ground. So if you if you're interested in like communist kind of literature that's of a similar kind of character to what I'm arguing, broader base, more ecumenical, but it's a really, really good project in that regard. It's also like returning to some of these standards of like actual print production, not just like a web web magazine, right? But actually having like a print production, distribution networks, things that you can really materially feel and create networks to distribute and put you in contact with people. So I think that's a great part of the their project. And then for the fastest thing, fastest kind of turnover and the best source for like seeing all the where all the stuff I write is, is definitely like you mentioned at the beginning, the Substack, which is called the Planetary Factory. The URL is just philneal.substack. I mean, that has the majority of stuff there is just free posts about little things, like I thought this Reading Hell World series, a series of soundtrack uh posts that are about because a lot of Hellworld chapters talk about like music and cultural transits of places. So it kind of illustrates that. And then that also the only things that are really paid on there for the most part are like advanced drafts of future articles that are like kind of not complete, but are the more like refined, bigger things. And so those are all um up there in addition to like a full you know bibliography of like all the stuff that I've I've written is kind of listed out on there. Um so that's the the the quickest place. And if I post new stuff, like new, if I get like a new article up or something, I'll post it on on the Substack and link to it. So that's definitely the the the fastest place to look.

C. Derick Varn: 2:20:16

Yeah. All right. Well, people should read Hell World, get it from your library or other methods of procurement or or wait into a few months when you can buy it for like$50 as opposed to what$200 and something. It is a brick, it is a brick. You can assault people even with the paperback version. But I I I actually perversely enjoyed it. I will admit, about 600 pages in, my eyes started like glazing over and I had to refocus. But Nonetheless. Thank you for coming on. I I have found your work and Jamie Merchant's work to be some of the most useful stuff out there right now. And I mean, I like Aaron Binya, I've been a fan of his for a while. So I hope that you continue this work and people should support you in doing it. So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01: 2:21:09

Yeah, thanks for having me on again.

C. Derick Varn: 2:21:12

All right.