Popular Or United Fronts Explained with Brandon Lightly

Coalitions promise power, but what if they mostly deliver blame? We dig into the sharp difference between a United Front and a Popular Front, trace their roots from the Second International through the Comintern, and confront the hard history behind antifascist coalitions in France, Italy, and Spain. Along the way, we separate romance from results: Allied armies defeated fascism; Popular Front cabinets rarely did. That sobering fact reframes what “winning” looked like—and why so many movements grew fast, entered government, and then unraveled.

From there, we bring the analysis home. The United States isn’t Europe: our parties are private duopoly machines, election law is fractured across states, and governing power is fenced in by bond markets, courts, and bureaucratic veto points. That’s why the CPUSA’s most significant advances—interracial union drives, Southern organizing, voting rights fights—came through oppositional power, not shared ministries. We examine how the postwar purge erased that base, why ministry-without-hegemony plagued South Africa’s tripartite deal, and how today’s left populism keeps rediscovering the same brick wall in city halls and Congress.

We also tackle China’s “United Front,” New Democracy, and why that path depended on peasant majorities and civil war conditions absent in developed economies. The throughline is clear: coalitions without control invite contradictions. United Front tactics—independence, coordinated action, refusal to co-govern without command—were built to avoid that trap. Popular Fronts trade clarity for breadth; breadth without hegemony turns victories into boomerangs. If you care about socialist strategy, labor power, and actually shifting policy, this conversation offers a sharper, historically grounded map for what to build, when to join, and when to say no.

If this challenged your priors or clarified some foggy distinctions, share it with a comrade, hit follow, and leave a review telling us where you stand on coalition strategy.

About Brandon Lightly
Brandon Lightly is a policy researcher with a background in International Affairs and History. His work focuses on investigating the intersection of ideology and contemporary global crises, providing deep-dive analysis into the historical roots of today’s political challenges.

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

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Terms: Popular vs United Front
• 6:17 Why U.S. Parties Break The European Playbook
• 18:17 Defining The United Front: Above, Below, Both
• 28:47 Third Period, Popular Front, And 1936 Pivots
• 39:17 Spain, France, Italy: Wins, Losses, Myths
• 50:17 U.S. Peculiarities: CIO, CPUSA, And Red Scares
• 1:00:47 Popular Front’s Core Problem: Governing Without Power
• 1:12:47 Class, Culture, And America’s Uneven Development
• 1:25:47 Postwar Drift: Eurocommunism To Postmodernism
• 1:36:47 Left Populism’s Limits: DSA, Squad, And City Halls
• 1:48:47 China’s “United Front” And New Democracy
• 2:00:47 Why Right-Wing Coalitions Often Outmaneuver
• 2:11:47 Anti‑Fascism, Resistance, And External Forces

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:51

Hello and welcome to BarnBlog. And today I'm here with Brandon Lightly, who works as a policy researcher, which is a wonk job. Yeah, unfortunately. Um, I say with a mixture of admiration and scorn. And you studied international affairs and history. At least you didn't study political science. And his focus is on investigating ideology in the context of contemporary crises. We do contemporary crises here. That's like, I can swear to you, Brandon, in the last four months, seven titles have had crisis in them. Even the philosophy ones, which are not contemporary, is like the concept of crisis in in in German philosophy.

SPEAKER_02: 1:39

And you do need you do need that history of crisis because you actually have to understand what people are talking about when they're talking about crisis to have any understanding of contemporary crisis, unfortunately. Also, this is my dog barking. I'm gonna let my dog in real quick.

C. Derick Varn: 1:53

No problem.

SPEAKER_04: 2:09

Sorry about that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:17

So today we're talking about something I mention in brief all the time and have trouble explaining to people. And that is the popular and united front as concepts. You are coming on today, and you've done a lot of research to kind of bounce stuff off me. And I've seen recently a return about every four or five years, I see a return of this of the idea that we need a popular front. So I'm gonna start off with some basic definitions and some clarification. And today I think we're gonna focus mostly on the early history of the popular front, where it comes from, how why so many people see it as successful, and then we'll talk about some other some other issues that come out of it, because frontism is a very broad concept, and some of the distinctions seem really fine-grained. And I'm gonna lead with with the cart before the horse. None of them are possible in the United States because of the structure of our government.

SPEAKER_01: 3:39

Yep.

C. Derick Varn: 3:40

Um so whatever we talk about popular or united fronts in the United States, they're actually analogous forms, uh, are metaphorical forms, so they're strategies based off these ideas in Europe, but the European limitations around them are specific to European-style parliamentary democracies, particularly the Westminster and the French systems, not the American congressional system, which is the the American congressional system is in some ways a nightmare form because it was designed initially for a non-partisan government. Washington had the same problem with factions that Lenin had. And he was just as idealistic, and you know, I tend to agree with Marxist Unity Group that one of the only errors Lenin, well, it's not one of the only, I think he made many errors, but one of the big errors that he made is the faction ban, even though it made sense in the context of the civil war, but it was never undone. And but anyway, so when the the American, you know, cartel party system developed in a weird way, in a way different from the mass parties of Europe, and also for a different system where look where election law was decided at an intermediate level at the level of the state that interfaced with a federal level that said what was and was not okay for states to do, as that changed in the after the Civil War into the civil rights era. But the two parties in America, which are extra-governmental forms, i mean, they're literally private corporations, and their subsidiaries, which tend to be NGOs, are a strange mixture of like the cartel parties of are the cartel factions really of the British uh pre-modern parliamentary system that developed, you know, with the establishment of the of the estates and was really got kicked off after the English Civil War, so the birth of capitalist politics. But those were not mass parties, people like individuals outside of government were not in the Whigs or the Tories, these were factions of parliamentarians. The United States is weird in that we've never really had mass parties in the way that say the SPA Day was, but we've also not really we our parties aren't catalized and limited to membership of Congress people because you you registering for parties is part of most state election processes, so party identification and thus a seeming masseness is necessary. But unlike you know mass parties in Europe, there's no dues, there's no former membership structure, it varies dramatically from state to state how it works. So I'm putting this all up front to say when we talk about the popular and united fronts, it's gonna be very hard to actually see how they they relate to the American system, even though socialists like to throw these terms around as if they could be. I mean in Britain, still, there is an aristocratic class that still exists, so the middle class could be actually richer than the upper class. It's it's you know, it can be a little bit confusing.

SPEAKER_02: 8:20

Yeah, the income spread when you leave the United States into these like more older areas like becomes a lot more complex, and you have to actually have a more production class-based understanding to understand what these alliances actually are.

C. Derick Varn: 8:35

Right, which is why also Americans, even like Marxist Americans, often talk out of both ends of their mouths about what a class is. Like if you talk to Jacobin, they'll talk about the productive working class, but then they will use liberal definitions about education to figure out who is blue-collar and who isn't.

SPEAKER_02: 8:53

Yeah, this is like the Brahmin left merchant right kind of thesis, right?

C. Derick Varn: 8:59

And that's both older but also not particularly helpful sometimes, because sometimes you'll have people talking about blue-collar workers and white-collar workers who are in the same job making the same amount of money because somebody's credentialed and somebody isn't. And technically, the white-collar blue-collar worker can promote hire, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna do so. And all this makes all this a hash when you try to like use American statistics to talk about Marxist class concepts, and it it's a mess. And like, you know, you see Jacobin magazine pulling into this thing, and you like have to like parse what the hell they're talking about because they're they they will change their definition of working class in the same article without even seemingly knowing it. So those are all my caveats. So before we get into the history, what is the popular front? We spent that as the any coalition of working class and middle class parties. Formally, the term is first used in Europe in the mid-1930s with cut with communists who buck the trends of the what we call third periodism, where the common turn itself took what is often associated with the ultra-left position, that the only acceptable front at all was a united front from below, otherwise, it was communist alone. Like this is the abandonment of the United Front strategy. Now that means I have to explain what the United Front strategy is because the Popular Front is both older and newer. And the reason why I say that is formerly the Popular Front is is newer than the United Front. The United Front goes back to the 1890s. Arguably, the formation of the SP Day is a United Front between the All-German Workers League. I mean, the uh the all-workers, the German All-Workers League. I've translating that in English is a pain in the ass. And the and the Eisenhocker faction, which is the Marxist. And that is in some ways the the the joining of two factions create a united front, but technically speaking, it isn't a united front because it's it's a it's a it's a uh coalition that becomes one party. So let's get into what united fronts are.

SPEAKER_02: 11:31

Yeah, I think this is this is actually probably good because when I I feel like I first reached out reached out to you because you were you had like written a thing that was specifically like can I need people to explain to me the difference between the United Front and the Popular Front. And in that moment I realized I was like, oh, I think I have a pretty elementary understanding of this where it's United Front, how I understand it, like a United Front, not the United Front. It's almost like this alliance of communist parties or disparate like communist groups. Popular front is of course the alliance of middle and working class, and then you have national front. But I'm also starting to realize like the more research that we're doing for this kind of stuff, that there's a united front, there's the united front, there's a popular, there are popular fronts, there's the popular front. And especially even today, as more of these words get like mixed around and the tendency of it grows out, these are actually like kind of dividing lines of ideology where MLs will like say they support a popular front, where people more on a Maoist tendency will say they support a united front, even though they might actually be talking about the same thing, or the popular front supporters might be talking about a united front. So yeah, getting these terms down is very important, I think.

C. Derick Varn: 12:42

Well, the reason why Maoists will say they support a united front is that's actually the political strategy of the kind uh of the of the Chinese Communist Party. Totally.

SPEAKER_02: 12:51

It's the petty bourgeois peasants and working class.

C. Derick Varn: 12:54

Well, no, that's new democracy.

SPEAKER_02: 12:57

Oh, my bad.

unknown: 12:58

All right.

SPEAKER_02: 12:59

See, this is this is why the this is why this is important, right?

C. Derick Varn: 13:02

So and the United Front in China is actually in Western Europe after new democracy, what effectively you would call a popular front. Okay if you go to look up, if you go to Wikipedia and look up United Front, it's actually gonna not give you the second international definition, it's gonna give you the Chinese definition. And there's some differences because China excludes like China's term for the middle class, it ex it does exclude the comprador petit bourgeoisie and large bourgeoisie. So the comprador petit bourgeoisie is people who have interest with trading in imperial powers and trading outside of the nation. The Chinese tend to favor the the national petite bourgeois, as long as they're not rentiers, the the peasantry, the work, the industrial working class, and the quote the non-enemy classes, which are sometimes people we call lumpins, sometimes they're people just in the informal economy, and that is their united front, but also originally their united front was actually about the fact that the comintern recognized the Guamandong and not the Chinese Communist Party as the official party of China. So when Stalin was alive, it was the Guamandong that sat in the Comintern for China, not the CPC. So the CPT played a subordinate role because it was not seen as mass enough at the time, particularly amongst the industrial proletariat, to be the official representation. And to make things worse, and it's very complicated because there were so like Sun Yat-sen considered himself a socialist, but he considered himself a mutualist socialist. Like he he actually talks very highly about their socialism as that of Perdon. And so there is the left end of the Guamandong, there is the right end of the Guamandong, which is like the national front. Uh we'd almost consider them parafascist. And then there is the Chinese Communist Party, and the Chinese Communist Party gets double bound because one industrialization was largely forced on China, so it was associated with the Comprador bourgeoisie. Two, a lot of the industrial proletariat was massacred by the Guamedong. So the party's mass base was actually more amongst the peasantry, which really throws everything out of alignment. I think that's why the the the the the the primary and secondary contradiction thesis emerges in Maoism, etc. etc. etc. But to bring this back to the United Front, the second international United Front, right? Yeah, the United Front and the Second International, which is also maintained by Trotskyist parties today, and was maintained by Marxist-Leninist parties before 1936. Except that they actually had a stricter definition. So I have to go through and explain the the United Front. So the United Front is an alliance that presupposes the following. That you can join in political or military structure structures carried out by volunteers and revolutionaries, including revolutionary socialists, anarchists, communists, and other groupings, that work together in geographic locales, usually nations, but also some regions, depending on where you're at and what the dominant languages are, that fight against a common enemy, but do not necessarily sit in government together, and they will not govern together. All right. Now, this is formalized and in 1917 by Trotsky. So it's now Trotsky, it's it's why it is Trotskyist doctrine, it's something all Trotskyist parties agree on. But what is often missed, and if you again go on Wikipedia and look this up because most of the sources for this are Trotskyist, this was also the formal strategy of the second international by interpretations of letters from Marx about not sitting in government with bourgeois parties, that you are to be abstentionist with them, you can you can join with workers' parties, but even then you have to be careful, and you do not sit in government unless you can subsume government cleanly. So there was like strategic opposition and abstention. So there are times that like the if so if a the if a uh if a policy was going to help the working class, the SP Day, for example, would not oppose it, but they didn't necessarily endorse it before 1914, anyway. If they weren't able to sit in government because they didn't control the implementation of the policy, and it would probably help the bourgeoisie in some way. So this early socialist thing was a united front. So we would we would join with other workers' parties and workers' groups and workers not in them. From this, you get two forms of the united front, and and they imply a third, all right? The united front from above, which is joining with parties that are formerly workers' parties and workers in other parties, but that are not necessarily socialist. But notice I said workers, and and so you got workers' parties and socialist parties, you can form with them. So, like a labor party or the chartist. If you actually see this, you can see this in the first international, right?

SPEAKER_02: 19:38

I was about to say this is this is very this is very similar to the first international.

C. Derick Varn: 19:43

This is more formalized than the second international because the first international is not primarily political parties, the first international is radical unionists, political groupings, anarchist groups, national national liberation groups, particularly the you know, Garibaldi International Unification of Italy. There are so many there like one of the things that get your head around with the first international is it's not a coalition of parties in the governmental party sense, even in the mass party sense, even though the first international is huge, all right? But like the blanquiist and the proudonist and the chartist and the Marxist and the Bukuninist and and and and these people are not do not necessarily see themselves as political parties in the way we think about them. But this strategy is formalized in the second international, and then it is really formalized in the first communist international in the third international. So by the time the comintern this is elaborated in the third and fourth congresses of the comintern. Formally, it's an informal tactic in the second international. You can see it in practice. Kotsky actually, before 1914, organizes this way, but it is not formally put down and worked out until the third and fourth congresses of the Communist International. And it is held to until 1922. But it is not really totally repudiated until later. So when Stalin takes over, the United Front strategy is modified to what we now call the United Front from Below. Ironically, when it comes to left communists, and we talk about Amado Bordiga in this in this.

SPEAKER_02: 21:38

I was about to say Bordiga supports the United Front from below, right?

C. Derick Varn: 21:41

But yeah, only the United Front from Below. Although a lot of left communists seem to miss this. Like they pretend like there was no Bordis. Bordega formally supports the United Front from below. When Damin separates from Bortiga in the 50s, when he comes back, it is this that's why he separates. So believe it or not, even though Bortega gets purged in 1928, what happens is third periodism is actually the same policy as the Bordeaux's policies. Now there's other differences about them, and Bortiga gets purged for different reasons. The Bolshevik, the Bolshevication of the various communist parties, his refusal to say that opposing fascism was any different than opposing any other capitalist party. You know, and but he accepts party discipline even in leaving until he comes back in the 50s. And when he comes back in the 50s, parts of the Italian left faction break from him because they don't hold to the United Front from below. They're close to the council communists and thinking that you can't join with earlier workers' movements and earlier unions. You can't go in official national andor sectional unions andor you know trade unions, industrial unions, etc. That only communist workers' unions count, and then you have some council communists even go further than that. And it's like, well, we shouldn't have formal organization basically at all. Um that's quarter. So that's that stands until 1936. Now, what makes it the the the the instantiations of the popular front strange is third periodism ends in 1936, but the Mollantov Ribbentrop Pact happens after the beginnings of the Popular Front, which is really a problem because if you're forming a Popular Front to fight fascism, when the Comintern officially has a detente to fight again, a detente with fascism because they think they're gonna fight the uh the capitalist powers first, the popular front gets kind of stall, but it's maintained in three places Chile, France, and Italy. Now, there were proto-popular fronts before that. There were an anti-fascist uh conglomeration in the 20s in Italy, and in fact, Bordaga was really separated with the socialists. I mean, he'd already separated the socialist party, but he really really separated with the socialists because he refused to participate in with bourgeois parties to oppose the fascists as they came to power, and that was when he was still the nominal head of the of the of the Communist Party of Italy. I say nominal because he's the founder and he was a major influential, but I think the first general secretary is technically Gramsci.

SPEAKER_02: 24:41

Yeah, I think so.

C. Derick Varn: 24:43

So but the general secretary is a is a position that grows in power after Bolshevik. So it it's it's kind of hard to to to take all this out. So what you have then is the United Front, there's the United Front from above, the United Front from below, and then this implicates the the third, which is the United Front from above and below. All right. I can't think of an example of someone just doing the United Front from above, which is like you can join with workers in different non-socialist workers' parties, and when they're in other parties, but you cannot join their unions, that would be weird. Um, but theoretically, it is possible.

SPEAKER_02: 25:29

There was something like this in American organizing to a certain extent, like in in US organizing to a certain extent, with like the L U D, right?

C. Derick Varn: 25:37

Yeah, the LUD, which that's a that's a the L U D is weird, yeah. And the T and the T U E L is also weird because the T U L is actually kind of gets written out of American history because it's tied to the Marxist Leninist parties, and so everyone talks about the IWW, but a lot of IWW people actually go into the TUE L and the TU UUL, and that leads to like William Z. Foster moving from syndicalism to Marxist Leninism, etc. etc. etc. So that's a lot of the name. We'll come back to the the United Fronts because this is confusing, but the long the the the T L D R on this is you join with workers and multiple parties, some of which are not socialist, you join with other socialist and communist parties in a geographic area, but you are largely abstentionist to the government unless your faction can control it, and you don't sit in power with other parties. All right, the popular front is you are willing to join coalitions that will even sit in government together. So you will have communist members and a socialist government, you'll have Marxist, Leninist, and Trotskyist, and Frankfurt School people in the in the uh FDR administration, which even Democrats try to erase happening because they're embarrassed that the Birchers didn't make that up, but it's true. Like when people were coming after Marcusa for being in the OSS, I was like, how many monthly review authors and members of the Communist Party were in the OSS? Because I tell you, I promise you it was not zero.

SPEAKER_02: 27:26

Yeah, yeah. We were allies with the Soviet Union and in the Popular Front.

C. Derick Varn: 27:30

It was part of the Popular Front.

SPEAKER_02: 27:36

I will say also this Popular Front method is pretty not uncommon even today. Like large countries like South Africa, the tripartite coalition is the ANC, the Communist Party, and the trade union party.

C. Derick Varn: 27:47

Which is being broken up because the Communist Party now wants to do a united front and not a popular front and is leaving the ANC.

SPEAKER_02: 27:53

Exactly. And so go ahead. Oh, literally just because of the problems, and I'm guessing I'm putting the card a little bit ahead of the horse here. Like a main problem with specifically the communist party in South Africa is that like they're kind of they're they're not they're put into minute like ministerial positions, but they don't actually like control like the change power. Like they're put into positions of government but can't actually change anything. So they're getting like they're not only getting blamed for the things that aren't happening due to like structural and systemic problems with like the pre-like the post-apartheid government, but they also like don't have any ability to actually like organize against the ANC, which is why the two like the burgeoning political party right now is actually like the liberal democratic party rather than any kind of like left opposition movement.

C. Derick Varn: 28:41

Which is pretty unfortunately what this what Marx predicts would happen.

SPEAKER_02: 28:48

Exactly. This is this is this is why the United Front was a strategy to begin with.

C. Derick Varn: 28:52

Right. Because the the fear was you're gonna have to control a capitalist government that you can't change the structures of, and you're gonna start acting like them, and you're gonna you're gonna be blamed for it. And since you might not even stay enough in power to matter, the ministers can be changed at the whim of the parties in power, you may not even oversee the policies that you advocated for, which means that they can be subverted andor just poorly managed. And I I when people talk about like Mondani and betrayal, like right now, we have he hasn't even sit in office ship, but they're already like he's appointing the same people as Eric Adams and de Blasio. And I'm like, of course he is. You just changed the executive officer. He's not just an elected for the DSA, he's elected for both his constituency in New York City, of which the DSA is maybe nine to eleven thousand of a city of six million six to nine million somewhere in there. Have it looked up recently, that's why there's variability. I just know that the largest chapters are all in the greater New York area, and even with that, since there's only 90 people, I the upper estimate of DSA members in a mortgage would be 11,000, larger than any other socialist organization that I know of right now, larger than most historically, totally, but not enough to even be a major constituency in New York City. So I say this because no shit, you're having this problem. People in the Popular Front have these problems.

SPEAKER_02: 30:24

We have we have nearly 90 years at this point of Popular Fronts having this exact same problem that we're just pretending to ignore.

C. Derick Varn: 30:32

And what I want to point out today when I talk about the early period of the Popular Front, I think we're gonna get to 36 to like 51 today. But the Popular Front already was tried in the French Revolution, and it was already tried in the populist movements in the 19th century. All right, and I'm gonna explain that. The the People's Party was a popular front effectively of different groupings representing petite bourgeois interests, such as black freedmen to a very small degree, sharecroppers, and and the early, early industrial proletariat. But you got to remember that in most of the United States, the industrial proletariat didn't exist yet. I mean, we always we think about it, the United States is an advanced economy, and it was industrializing quickly, but it it was even industrializing its agrarian economy, it was not really outside of Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, New York, an industrial haven. New England kind of was, but the South was deliberately kept out of that, and when it was industrialized, it was industrialized for like textile mills. Follow the textile mills for where the shitty part of capitalism is at, by the way, you can still do that today.

SPEAKER_02: 32:05

There's a reason that Marx, when writing like right after the Civil War about the American situation, was most hopeful about the potential of like a black Yemen class being born in a line, and then they could join an alliance with the industry, like the white industrial proletariat in the north, and that would be the basis for some kind of movement.

C. Derick Varn: 32:23

And they actually thought it was gonna happen in the Republican Party because the Republican Party had two factions, a proper bourgeois faction, and then the radical faction, which was for free labor, which could which had vaguely socialistic tendencies, but that the radical faction is actually completely destroyed by the Hayes compromise, which Marx didn't see happening, by the fact that there wasn't a mass industrial base for it, because you know, sharecroppers aren't quite peasants, but they're closer to peasants than not, you know, etc. etc. etc. And that you know, Werner Sumbart saw this, but so did actually so did Ingalls. The American worker was not really a worker in the sense that they were mostly yearmen yeoman on imperialized land, and the way Marx and Engels felt about the imperialization of that land varied greatly. It's actually interesting that they're so acute with this with Ireland, but they're not actually particularly acute with this with the United States.

SPEAKER_02: 33:27

I do feel like this is a problem with not just Marx and Engels, but just Marxists in general when looking at the United States, is that very often Marxists get the United States wrong in like very big ways that you wouldn't really expect, but that's just part of the fact that the US is, I think, a lot stranger of a systemic, like of a structure than I think a lot of people living in the United States realize.

C. Derick Varn: 33:50

It it has a weird history. We don't have an aristocratic period really. We have a quasi-aristocratic period, but we don't have a formal aristocratic period because we start too late. We're a settler colonial society that's based off the English, the English model and not the Spanish model, which means that we're exclusionist and exterminationist, not inclusionist and extractivist.

SPEAKER_05: 34:16

Yep.

C. Derick Varn: 34:18

And and if you read Marx on Ireland, you would have think he got that because he does get it in Ireland, and he seems to kind of see that in the United States, but then he like you know talks about how you know the Mexican American the Americans running the Mexican-American War is progressive and stuff like that. The thing is, Marx's positions on these questions do change dramatically throughout his life. By the time he like leaves Europe and he writes the ethnological notebooks, you do get a very different picture of what is going on. Like, you know, he he and Ingalls reverse their position on the colonization of India, right? So, and he also, despite the fact a lot of like vulgar Marxist didn't, he also talked about the fear that capitalism could actually incorporate slavery as a prior form and you know spread slavery throughout the world. Like he was really like he was actively afraid of that as a possibility if the South won the Civil War. So even though I used to, when I was a young vulgar Marxist, I used to also think that Marx did, you know, didn't think that Southern society was capitalist, but he does. He just thinks it's a it's a potentially re retrograde hybrid form that you know takes it takes elements of the other stages, recapitulates it for capital, but in the like worst way possible.

SPEAKER_05: 35:50

Exactly.

C. Derick Varn: 35:52

And later Marx is much more attuned to the bourgeoisie, not just you know, in modes of production like reappropriating rents and all that. You know, he writes a lot about that in the Grand Jassa and a little bit about that in in uh Capital Volume Two. But also like that in the Brumaire, they can take on not they can basically betray the values that they instantiated to maintain property and take on positions that were priorly against their own interest. And this seems to like if you read early marks, he doesn't seem to think that's well, it's just not clear if he thinks that's the possibility or not. But after the American Civil War and Bonaparte and Napoleon Bonaparte III, he definitely does. So it's it's an interesting thing. So and you might go, well, his writings on the on the American Civil War seem like that's a popular front. And I'm like, well, yeah, but he's writing in an he's riding in a place that does not have a developed proletariat yet. It it's a it like the US is weird because of the theft of land. Now, you know, Marx didn't talk about settler colonialism in the way that we do now. I mean, neither does Stalin, actually, neither does Mao. They talk about things that rhyme with it that you can get the theories from them. Um, you can even get the theories from someone like Werner Sumbart, who eventually flips sides and advocates for it in with Germany in the Slavic land. Because he's one of those, he's one of those German historical school term Marxist term Nazis, which is why many such cases, yeah. There are a lot more cases than people are comfortable with. Um Nazis are weird though. I mean, like, because not Nazi coalitionism is particularly strange. Fascist coalitionism in Italy, in Spain, it's also different, but fascist coalitionism in Italy does have the sectional unions and the national syndicalists as a strong portion of its base, and that's a unfortunate thing for Marxists to try to say that like it's just liberalism in crisis. Because I'm like, well, there's a lot of fucking actual socialists who flip sides. In fact, including its leadership, right? Its leadership comes from the maximalist faction of the of the of the socialist party of Italy, you know, Mussolini was a was in the maximalist faction, which was the closest to the communists. I mean, actually, in some ways, was the most ultra faction, particularly after the communists left, in the socialist party. And that's a fascinating problem for socialists, because they're like, you know, when the people go, when someone like some dumbass like uh Jono Goberg goes liberal fascism, he's actually not completely wrong, he just doesn't uh like recognize that there's a lot of different motivations. And if you read the right of the second international, there were explicit German imperialists in it. Like they actually thought that we needed to conquer the world to turn it to socialists, and if we have to subject subjugate some non-Germans, non-white people, we don't care. They're not historical peoples anyway.

SPEAKER_02: 39:24

Like this was a major blind site throughout the Second International. I think Otto Bauer describes it as like thinking imperially, which is a thing that Otto Bauer even did when trying to figure out like national uh identity.

C. Derick Varn: 39:37

Right. Like so what are you doing with that? Okay, so but the reason why I say the popular front is older because if you look at the spectrum of people in the the first and second French Revolution, particularly the second, I mean you have pre-Marxist socialists like Louis Blanc's people in coalition with bourgeois parties. In the first one, you have Nrajays who are basically proto-socialists, they're lumping proto-socialists kind of, but they are pre-communists, but they're there. And even in the English Civil War, you have the diggers and the levelers who are religious proto-communists, like they're not they're not communist or socialist in the way Marxists mean, but but they're actually a little bit more worker or proto worker or early worker, pre industrial worker driven than even the utopian socialists are. That you have always had with popular fronts, and I think we see this pretty early. But the reason why people always go to them is one, they do make a good fighting force if people don't turn each on each other before the war is over. And what happens in in Spain is like is like an example of this. Like you have a popular front in Spain fighting the phalange, that's the Republicans, who are led by like syndicalists, you know, with strong elements of of Bolsheviks and other kinds of socialists coming in. But they turn on each other, particularly during the third period, and divide the force in a way that's probably not the only reason Franco won, but it sure as hell didn't help.

SPEAKER_05: 41:31

Oh, for sure, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 41:34

So that United Front strategy doesn't work, and then the Popular Front is often said to have beat the fascists. Problem with that is that the Allies beat the fascists. The Popular Front in any country that's in actually is not the people who defeat the fascists, they only come to power after an outside power defeats the fascists for them, but they are the basis of a large enough resistance to make communism seem popular. And even in the United States, it's very interesting. The big organizational wins in the US are during the third period. The third period actually is a disaster in Europe. It's good in the US. Like the TUL, they organize women in black labor, they do all the you know, the uh they do the hammer and hoe wrote about this in Alabama. They're much more successful than even the IWW is.

SPEAKER_02: 42:28

Yeah, like 30 years. Uh and hammer and hoe, I think I just actually finished a reread of it recently. Like they're doing voting rights, like work literally 30 years, 40 years before the Civil Rights Act.

C. Derick Varn: 42:40

Yeah. Like there, and that's why, for example, the ML parties have always had a better relationship with the black community than they have with most of the other communities in the United States, because they really had their they proposed, they proposed a black belt thesis. Now, the black belt thesis was never popular amongst black people, which is kind of funny. Weirdly, it was way more popular amongst communists, but uh they proposed that, they proposed they did voters' rights, they did they did universal surfage, they would organize white and black workers together, and even after World War II, they were good about like kicking a racial chauvinist out of the party in the way the SPA was not. At the same token, however, the height of membership is in 1947-48, where the communist party reaches the same place the DSA is right now, between 80 and 90,000. Depending on I've seen two different numbers, I don't know which one I trust, but it's no more than 90. But I always tell people, okay, you call that a victory, but what happens? Henry Wallace gets sacked, Truman turns on the communists, you have state-level Red scares, some of them led by Democrats, before we even get to the national red scares under the Eisenhower administration. And the Communist Party is decimated in less than a decade to 5,000 people, a fifth of which are probably feds. Like that's amazingly quick. In people always, you know, one of the things that uh the the Trotskyist RCP, guys, pick another fucking party name. Like, there's a Maoist RCP, there's like seven Trotskyist RCPs, there's another Grantite, formerly IMT RCP. There's there's creative.

SPEAKER_02: 44:38

There's 12 RCPs and 11 people in all of them.

C. Derick Varn: 44:42

Uh the Grantites, I mean the Grantites have have won the game of Trotskyism. There's no other Trotskyist really left. Everybody else is liquidated in other parties.

SPEAKER_02: 44:50

Or the DSA.

C. Derick Varn: 44:52

Yeah, I will I was uh in the United States it's the DSA, in other places it's like Delinka, and then our labor or whatever. Like I think that was probably our party in the you know, and yeah, in the UK, in the UK, which is a joke. But um, sorry, any any our party supporters, but I don't know a single person who's following that in Britain who makes me feel like they feel good about it. Um but so the popular front develops really quickly. It also leads to the CIO, which is Communist Left, joined with the AFL, which is Gomper's old own group. The CIO also, even though it I say it was Communist Led, it was actually led by rat by fairly radical Republicans like John Lewis. John Lewis, no, what's his name?

SPEAKER_02: 45:38

Yeah, John O. Lewis.

C. Derick Varn: 45:39

Yeah, John O. Lewis. I'm making sure I got my names right because there's lots of John Lewis's yes. The John Lewis, you know, who were so you have these like Republican socialists basically switch sides on the FPR. LaGuardia is the example of that at the municipal level, you know, of New York City. And this makes everything seem math, it makes socialists feel like they have a future. But Henry, and you know, there are progressives like Henry Wallace who want to maintain this, FDR's first vice president, but Truman does not. That is very clear. Truman, for example, even though he opposed Taff Hartley is the first president to really use it. So and what the Popular Front does in America, we've talked about this a lot, is set the communist organizers, not even the party people, but the communist organizers in the unions, to getting purged. And so not only do the communist party shrink and down to about 5,000, its major project is basically it basically continues its its development of the black proletariat. It's really good at that, but it even starts to lose them around the mid-60s. I mean, we think about like Angela Davis, but if you like talk about the number of black ex-communists who came out of the of the CPUSA arts movements, Lorraine Hansbury, I don't well, she dies before she gets out, but Baldwin, Wright, Harold Cruz, like many of the leading figures of the Black Power and Black Arts movements leave the Communist Party. I mean, it's even a chapter in Raf Ellison's Invisible Man, basically. And then these the fully instantiated Black Power parties, I think the late Assad Hayder was very good on this. Like they have a weird relationship to the Communist Party, even people like Amiri Baraka. You know, the Black Panthers are separate because they're Maoist. Although the Black Panthers are also weird because even though they're Maoists, they have their own theories which vary widely. Like Hampton and Newton and Cleaver don't really agree on who their base is going to be and how you orient towards nationalism. You know, Huey Newton sounds like a class first guy, and Cleaver sounds like he wants to want to lead the lump in, even though Newton was Newton and Hampton were both willing to do that, they didn't think that was their only turn. So make of that what you will. So popular front becomes the dominant mode, but I can't think of a single case. You know, we were talking about the RCP. Let's get back to that. You're gonna have to wear a man, be that be the guy's like Varn, you forgot to finish your point. You can do that. Yeah, the RCP will say postmodernism destroyed the left. The problem you have to deal with is that why did postmodernism happen? If you read Baudrillard's notebook, you read Leotard's notebook, you even read Foucault, they get frustrated with the various communist parties, but both the kind of French one, uh, because in some ways the socialist party starts running to the left of the official communist parties. Yeah. Um, and then also when the when the socialist parties run, the communist parties are really timid and sit in these governments and these popular fronts and don't do anything, exactly like with the ANC. And instead of separating out, a lot of these people also saw all these like ultra-left and various Trottist groups and Maoist groups, Mao Spondeks, all these, you know, this plethora of different, you know, Western Marxists develop from this. Again, whether or not I agree with some of the stuff with some of the facts in Gabriel Rockhill's thing about the CAA and the various intelligence agencies being involved and key theorists, some of that I think is true. But my point is that that's not why that happened, though. I mean, the one of the reasons why they would have had so much power is there was such a response to the Sino-Soviet split, there was such a response to the stagnation of the communist parties in the Popular Front and their inability to do anything. And the fact that they seem to get about outflanked by both the socialist party and by just college radicals on a consistent basis in Europe led to a kind of fragmenting and discrediting of the official communist parties that that if you read what the postmodernists are frustrated with, they don't start questioning the doctrine until the parties start failing. It doesn't happen before, it happens after.

SPEAKER_02: 51:02

It's a post-mortem rather than a critique while it's alive.

C. Derick Varn: 51:07

I might think it's a dumb post-mortem, like post-Marxism and Eurocommunism is kind of a disaster. Yes, but it's not the cause, it's the result, it's the symptom, not the disease. The disease seems to be the actual popular front. Because going all the way back to Marx saying you're gonna be limited by these things, you're gonna be you're gonna be you're gonna take the blame for bourgeois government policies that you can't undo. This happens over and over and over again.

SPEAKER_02: 51:38

Well, I this is this is where I feel like the big confusion about like the the insistence upon the popular front has been like very confusing to me and has convinced me time and time again that maybe I don't quite understand what they're talking about when they say the popular front, because I can't really find a point in history where the popular front has been successful. Like it's it's it's like you've like parties have grown. I think we have plenty of examples of like a communist party, the socialist party growing in numbers. Like you see, membership increases for a little bit, but then the membership collapses into everything else.

C. Derick Varn: 52:13

Maybe China. The thing is, if this is true, then it and the case of the popular front only works in not developed countries, which is a problem for us today because who's not relatively developed capitalists, at least compared to the early 20th century. Like, I mean, like you know, I talked to Mao's and like protected people's war. I'm like, you don't have a peasantry anymore anywhere on the fucking planet. Yes, there are still peasants, but they're they're not a majority class anywhere.

SPEAKER_02: 52:41

Like most most peasantry that exists is also very clearly on the path to like the small, like rural, petty bourgeois, right?

C. Derick Varn: 52:51

Like, you know, the kulags develop everywhere, right? Like, and if they're not on that path, you know where they're at, they're now an informal labor in the cities, and Marxists don't know how to deal with that. Now, I will say this is not Marx's fault. When Marx is writing about the proletariat, most labor is piecemeal labor, it's paid in a variety of different ways. Um, sometimes it's paid like yearly. I'm not joking. Wow, sometimes it's paid by day labor, like it's all day labor. That you you have you don't have the formalization of employment, you don't because that's kind of tied to income taxation. And so you don't have these formal organizations that are be that are pre-prepared for you in other ways during the height of the workers' movement around 1848, etc. They just don't really exist, and where they do exist are not the most revolutionary areas, so you know they're the richer areas like the richer parts of France and England. So I I bring I I say that because this leads to a real big confusion because in the second international, there's this focus on the formerly employed industrial proletariat. This actually causes the first revision crisis. I know people don't really because revisionism is used in two radically different ways. One has to do about your opinions about Stalin, it has nothing to do with economics, and the other is an economic debate and a strategic debate about developing the bourgeois, and even you know, Hilfredy Mikotsky eventually go over not to Bernsteinism, but this idea that monopoly capital is going to lead to enough socialization that if you just take over the democratic apparatus, because of the monopolies' dependence on the states, you can just like basically seize them by formal fiat because they're basically state agents anyway. And so facto, you had a relatively nonviolent, completely democratic socialist revolution. That's the that's the problem that was like Hilfording's strategy during the Weimar and even during the 1920s. I mean, you know, during the Weimar period. But that also falls into the same problem on the popular front because you have to sit in governments with bourgeois governments. You you often, I mean, Hilfording had to, he was a finance member of a government that was suppressing strikes, trying to suppress inflation. They did an okay job of it, but that's not popular amongst the workers, which made particularly amongst the unemployed workers, which actually is where a lot of the communists pulled their ranks from. And then there's stuff that wasn't supposed to happen. Like there were, like, I've seen one set of stats that said, you know, areas that were Catholic tended to go communist, and areas that were Protestant tended to go socialist. And then you had all these, what we might call the laboring poor. And I say laboring and not working because they were mostly petite bourgeois, but some of them were day laborers, some of them were service sector laborers who went into the fascist who became the working base of the fascist. Now in America, the these classes are just coalescing at this period. I mean, American industrialization kind of really spreads out out of New England in the 20s and 30s. One of the reasons why, like, it's hard to have talk about like non-neoliberal progressive projects in California or in the South, is because they never existed. They didn't go through a Fortis period because they weren't industrialized enough to do that. And that was as late as the 1950s. I mean, like, parts of Appalachia don't get power till the end of the Johnson administration. Like, this is not, you know.

SPEAKER_02: 56:44

Even today, if you're in the like, even like the disparity of access to power, of access to internet, even in the United States, is absolutely it's it's the the it really it spreads the entire breath. Like going down to like the bayou in uh Louisiana, you're gonna have a completely different experience of what the United States is compared to going to New York City.

C. Derick Varn: 57:08

When I went the first time I went to New York, even in the 90s, I thought it was rich. I mean it was rich, but like I thought it was really, really rich. I I talk about this a lot. I come from central Georgia. People who made 100K and 1995 money, which would be like 200, 300k now, but like I thought they were rich, not upper middle class, the height of luxury. Now I was technically middle class, lower middle class, you know, but technically middle class. Blue-collar parents. I didn't even, I think by the time that I went to college, I didn't even qualify for the Pale grant. But during there were times where like we were on food aid, like you know, it was it was wild like that. And so my experience of America of the American poor, in I also grew up near black neighborhoods where there were still people who were who were very much alive during Jim Clow, who didn't even have birth certificates because they weren't issuing them to black people at the time, no shit, who had trouble accessing services because they didn't have those birth certificates as late as the 1980s. All right, I don't think people always understand how divided this country is. Or like when I was talking, I remember when a stupid show Lovecraft Country came on, and people learned about sundown towns. I was like, motherfucker, there were still sundown towns when I was a kid.

SPEAKER_02: 58:38

There are still like I mean, I grew up in India, I grew up in Indiana, and there are in the Midwest, there's more of them. Yeah, yeah, sundown towns are a bigger problem now, probably, than they were. Like, and it I mean, Indiana was the beginning of the second iteration of the KKK and everything as well.

C. Derick Varn: 58:52

Like, yeah, no, it's when you get although the second KKK is weird, it's like a racist multi-level marketing scheme.

SPEAKER_02: 59:01

Well, actually, it seems they've really predicted what what the reactionary movement has turned into.

C. Derick Varn: 59:06

I mean, kind of I I the third clan is more neo-Nazis, the first clan is more outright Confederate, Revanchist, and the second clan's fucking weird. But also, people don't realize that Indiana. I'm like, it's not even tied to the south, it's tied to the border states, and I saw like I saw more clan stuff in the late 90s in Ohio than I did in Georgia. Oh, yeah, and but even though in Georgia, I knew that people of my grandparents' generation, I knew a lot of them were clansmen at one point, I knew that for a fact, and it you know, my Jewish Catholic ass was always like but I say that to people they like think I make it up, and I'm like, No, in the 80s was when this was dying, and like it would, you know, just to remind people, we didn't get rid of this the stars and bars on the flag until 1999. My entire high school career that was a flag that flew over my high school. Like, it's just like I don't like people don't seem to understand how fucking reactionary the 20th century was in America. Um, because they're like, oh, it's changed. I'm like, no, it's actually just kind of what's different is there's no code around it. And the reason why I think there's no code around it, maybe we can tie this back in, is that there's no need like now, like when everybody is like tacitly involved in white supremacy and they know it, but they also want to maintain the visage of a pluralistic society, you Speak in code. Exactly. When you really think you're under siege, actually you don't.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:54

So yeah. Totally. Yeah, this is this is definitely it. You you speak in code, you're more secretive. You put on a face when you're just trying to like be in like a polite society in a pluralist society.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:06

I'm like, when people talk about Christian nationalism like it's new, I'm like, motherfucker, everybody was a Christian nationalist where I grew up. Yes. You didn't talk about it in terms of Christian nationalism because that's what they thought being American was. Like it's just like it was like we've we progress because we allow Catholics and Mormons. And and Jews were a little bit shifty with, but we're supposed to like them, sort of. Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:38

Yeah, there's some dispensationalist stuff over here that we're gonna like hope.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:43

Right. So I grew up in that world, right? And and what I find interesting is there was a legacy of popular frontism even in that world, because like my you know, both sides of my family, both the Republican side, which were Catholic, and I could get into why they were Catholic because of stuff that has to go all the way back to civil war, they were conservative anti-racists, they're very conservative and very nominally anti-racist. But I think they were pretty serious about it, and then like the people who were kind of soft on segregationists, and they were like, Well, slavery was bad, but the civil war that wasn't necessary, we would have got rid of slavery eventually, anyway.

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:36

Yes, like the it would have ended in 20 years thing, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:39

Yeah, and people didn't have to get so uppity during the 60s. That group, they also worshipped FDR. Like F I mean, like literally, like my grandfather, um, both my grandfathers, the the the Jewish, the the crypto actually was crypto-jewish, he was he would tell people he was Methodist, the the Jewish convert Methodist, brickmaker, and the and worked his way through the factory back when you could do that in Fordism became a little over management, probably clan member, adopted adopted grandfather of my mom both had FDR portraits in their house as late as 1980. Like, like it's hard to like get people to like understand this, but I'm like the Democratic Party dominated my state until 1999.

SPEAKER_02: 1:03:39

Yeah, the current the current existing political map is quite new, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:43

And not not only most of the people you think of as the old guard conservative Republicans, they were Democrats until 1999. When Zell Miller lost and um Sony Purdue won, they flipped their their party registration, and it took that long, and it was very strange when you do like when I was in the in the early alt score into like young democrats, because you meet like radical progressives who were anti-war, and then like there are these old Dixiecrats who are still around, and then there was like the people who inherited the Dixiecrat apparatus, and that we like were like the like the black the black congressional caucus, and they did a lot of weird reeling and dealing in the aughts about like making sure that like historical black neighborhoods stayed historically black, even at the cost of Democratic Party seats. So it was that was where I grew up, and but this popular front mentality was very much there, but there's no history of unions there. The communists were never really strong there. I mean uh only in the black community were they're strong. My my my grandparents were not anti-union, it was just not even on their fucking radar, right? And so when we talk about that, yeah, and for those of you who don't know, I'm 45. My grandparents were also born in the 30s. But when we talk about that, I have to like remind people that what Hammer and Ho represents is a much bigger deal than you think it is. If your model for this is like New York in the 90s, or if you think the post-Bush administration world was normal. Because even the in the in 2000, even the Republicans, even though they passed very racially antagonistic policies, seemed like they were racially progressive. Like, look at who appointed a lot of the first black whatever is actually usually George W. Bush. And I think you know that yes, there, yes, that's also true in the Kidding and the Johnson administration. Yes, it's actually true in the Knicks administration, too. So the way that we understand this and the American the weirdness, I have to like emphasize the weirdness of the Popular Front, though. Because guys, both the Popular Front and the Popular Front had kind of already pre-existed when William Jennings Bryant really took the populist party and had them join with the Democrats. Why the Democrats, it had to do with religion and like the stronger powers down south, because that's where he was from. But it doesn't really make sense because when you think about who the reactionary party is in the 19th century, it is unequivocally the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, like for the communists who are doing all this great progressive work on race to join the party that supported segregation in the South until the end of the Kennedy administration.

SPEAKER_02: 1:07:15

Yeah, significant.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:17

Yeah, is a weirder deal than you think it is, and that is a legacy of the Popular Front. And the fact that progressives all are Democrats today is hard for people to really understand. Because the other thing about the progressive movement is it's completely separate from the communist movement, even though it does have some socialist ideas in it, but very mildly. And it was a bipartisan movement until the 1960s. There were progressive Republicans and progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans and conservative Democrats until the ideological sorting of the 60s. And so I'm going through all this American history. None of the Popular Front strategies or the United Front strategies seem to speak to this. Plus, we don't have coalitional parties at the national or even state level, and they really made sure of that twice. After Ross Perot got 15% of the vote, really is why you have Bill Clinton for president, people. I hate to tell you, he really was a spoiler. For all that the Democrats complained about spoilers, the only actual spoiler I can prove was a spoiler was Ross Perot against the Republicans. After that point, and then a lot of the guy, a lot of the states that had like parties that weren't the Democratic Party, they just kind of became subsidiaries of the Democratic Party, and like the people, like the working people's party. I forget there's a couple of states that have like Democratic parties that aren't the Democratic Party, but they are.

SPEAKER_02: 1:09:01

Yeah, there's like the Farmers Party in Minnesota, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:04

And like the the Working People's Party somewhere that's really like really a subsidiary.

SPEAKER_02: 1:09:10

There's the United Party in Colorado that is like some reactionary thing, I think.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:15

Right. So you have the weird like historical Western parties, but most of them are actually fronts for the and then the third parties are also basically there, they have been since the Bull Moose Party, which was the Republican split under. I mean, if you think about man, the last time we had a truly multi-party election is like 1919. Sorry, 19, what this 1918, 1918, where you got the socialists, the Democrats, the Wilson Democrats, the Bull Moose Party, and the Republicans all running. And all like this is a that's the other time where you start seeing laws change because you have two parties that actually, if you combine them together, if the socialists and bull moose were together, they had a bigger share of the electorate than either the Republicans or the Democrats. So laws were changed, they were also changed in the in the late 19th century when the populists won, and there were literal shootouts at state houses over it.

SPEAKER_02: 1:10:18

Like people think that right now is like a really turbulent time, but I do feel like people forget the like early 20th century just entirely.

C. Derick Varn: 1:10:27

The early 20th century, the late 19th century. Fuck man, I mean, yeah, when I listen to baby boomers talk about how divided we are now, I'm like, I I've read your history. Have you forgotten your childhood? Like, how many political figures were assassinated?

SPEAKER_04: 1:10:46

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:10:47

Between 65 and 72. Like, and it really only slows down after the attempt on Reagan's life in in what 81, 82?

SPEAKER_02: 1:10:58

Yeah. We've lived in a relatively calm moment, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:02

I mean, so I'm like, this is actually like what we're experiencing right now is more of the normal American history, frankly.

SPEAKER_02: 1:11:10

Which is bad news for everybody saying that this is the revolutionary moment.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:19

And what in what way is this like a revolutionary moment? There's no organized working class, there's there's no party, there's no corporate, yeah, there's nothing. Like, you do have a lot of people who identify with communists and and and socialists in a way they have not since the 1990s, but like honestly, we're about the same level as the 1970s. Like, if like if if if what's his face? Guy who wrote Revolution in the Air. Sorry, my face was beginning to kick out.

SPEAKER_02: 1:11:53

I got you from Revolution. Who is that?

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:59

Max Elbaum. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I remembered it when I thought about it hard. If he's right, there were a million communists in about 60 different groups. That was from the new communist movement. That's not even the new left, that's just the new communist movement, which is a kind of specific quasi-post quasi development out of the new left. And they, you know, they oversee a transition to you know neoliberalism under Carter and Reagan. So and then they all kind of disappear and no one even talks about it. Like, I mean, my big question is what happened to all of them? And I was like, Oh, they, you know, I'm like, they didn't even become liberals, most of them just became normies. But then a lot of like people like, oh, oh, AOC or Mendania, if we just have a socialist candidate, I'm like, do you not know anything about the 70s and the Popular Front in the 70s? Like, Gene Kwan, former mayor of Oakland, was a member of one of the most radical Maoist factions in America. I mean, fuck, look at the career. I mean, like, we can talk, we always talk about the the the Panthers that died because you don't really want to talk about the Panthers that didn't. They either became a lot of them became anarchists, but a lot of them became like Bobby Seal or Eldritch Cleaver, or you know, yeah, or I was like, you know, who who co-wrote the autobiography of Malcolm Max, Alice Godrin, a Nixonite. Like the you you don't look at where it ended up.

SPEAKER_02: 1:13:38

This is where this is where I feel like so much of the popular front, the history of the popular front is important. It like no matter if you're looking at Chile, if you're looking at I mean, if you look at Chile by 41, uh the socialist party has collapsed into the radical and the progressive parties. It just seems time and time again, it's like there's a buildup of communists or socialists, depending on the party that you're looking at, and usually both if they come together, but then they just kind of become disparate elements of other movements, and that is kind of what you have to show for the popular front.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:10

Like at best we can stay nominally socialist, like in France, they become neoliberalized, exactly.

SPEAKER_02: 1:14:16

Yeah, so to the point where you have to have like a new new left to come out to like challenge them.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:22

The the a lot of the left movements, both from workers and from students, is actually in response to failed Popular Front movements, and that means whenever we try to advocate for the Popular Front as a strategy for today, you tend to freeze time in 1948 or 1952 or the Mitterrand government or whatever, like or you know, when the Milibanks weren't craven in the labor party, or you know, like whatever. For those of you who don't know, people have forgotten about the Milibank I'm referring to, but they remember his dad, which is quite like Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg's having being also red diaper academic babies, and also maybe communists be better parents, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:15:15

Um like it's a growing phenomenon that's quite confusing.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:20

Like, why do all these why are these like neoliberal progressives have common parents that they don't seem to really like? Um so but I I do think this is a real problem. Now, you read a bunch of articles for us today. I I want to give you a chance to talk to me about them, uh since I've been really the primary person talking, it's almost like I use you as an excuse to talk myself on my own show. Um, no, no, not at all. I could totally do a solo show. Um but no one would control me. So go ahead.

SPEAKER_02: 1:15:55

I do feel like this is what we've talked about so far today, like walking through even just the history of the US like Communist Party and of the socialist movement. You can kind of see, particularly when it comes to the Popular Front, that I think the best that the Popular Front can offer is that it was the breeding ground for other movements in the future after the Socialist or Communist Party collapsed. Like, I mean, the Chilean Socialist Party is a great example. This one of the articles was the Chilean Socialist Party in the Popular Front uh 1933 to 41. I found that one.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:27

That was actually an article that I did not know the information in it.

SPEAKER_02: 1:16:29

So yeah, same. That was really informative to me. I was a big fan of it. And the actual like full collapse of the Socialist Party, because of the fact that it like within the Popular Front, the Socialist Party essentially voted to become a fully anti-communist league, essentially. That was I just I just think time and time again, in all of these popular front formations, what happens is that there's a large group that then self-moderates themselves to the right. And then what happened, like, I don't mean to be an ultra here, but it does seem to me time and time again, whether we're looking at the Chilean Party, whether we're looking at the American Party, American Communist Party, and where we have today, the CPUSA, which is to be clear, not the same CPUSA of the mid-20th century because it kind of dissolved and then was reformed. And so you have to it is not it's different, even though they try to say it's the same. But the CPUSA they have a lot of the property of the old of the old ones.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:24

I mean, it's one of the things I have to say is like the CPSA would be hard to get rid of because they have they have property that they bought with Soviet money in the 30s that's actually worth a ton of money now.

SPEAKER_02: 1:17:34

The CPUSA is a lot like a lot of denominations of churches.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:41

And there are true believers. Uh there are a lot of you know, people pass that shit down to their family, but you know what? There's never a ton of them anymore. I mean, like, no, I think the highest they've the highest numbers I've seen officially was at the end of the new communist movement, the CPUSA maybe had seven seven or eight thousand people in it. And when the PSL in the last year said they were the most they're like the largest communist electoral win with one percent of the vote. I actually look back and read up on that, and actually it's not true. The CPUSA doesn't hasn't generally ran members since Gus Hall. They tend to endorse Democrats. Oh, they tend to all but endorse Democrats, they don't technically endorse anybody, but they used to condemn Bernie Santas as an ultra, which is really funny now. Um there's some funny polemics from like 2014. Um but anyway, the the CPUSA tended to off the popular front just endorse not opposing Democrats. And they ran their own candidates. The they usually average about one percent. In the when William C. Foster was running for president in the classical CPUSA, they hit two percent once.

SPEAKER_02: 1:19:13

The PSL can say that wasn't a communist election, though, because revisionism or something.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:19

The PSL is a is a split from a Martian Trotskyist party, which also hides the fact that the Trotsky.

SPEAKER_02: 1:19:36

I said yes very definitively. I've heard this from people.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:39

I've heard this from people who used to be in the PSL, but like there's esoteric Trotskyism in there, yeah. Um which is just I'm like, so you're so defensive, you became Marxist-Leninist again, but then you kept a few Trotskyist doctrines, but you don't let that be known to your even your own membership until they're like fairly high with the organization. That's weird.

SPEAKER_02: 1:20:03

The PSL just became Gnostics. I don't know.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:07

Well, the other thing with the PSL is they are they are a frontist of a different variety, they will they will take over and run organizations without and so you don't know that they're actually PSL. They are kind of notorious for that. There's like so many organizations locally that I'm like, oh, it's a PSL front, that's a PSL front, that's a PSL front. And like, look, I don't even mind sometimes because they'll do the work, but I have them like, where do you get your money from? And they sh do not tell me. Yeah, like I'm like, how do you have so much money, Brando?

SPEAKER_02: 1:20:42

Yeah, how how'd you get that truck and those big megaphones?

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:45

And yeah, how you know. like and they're like because you know the organization that's five time five to ten times your size can't afford that so how did you pull that off um but and I how do you get gloria la riva on more ballots than I mean not that wasn't last time but on more ballots than the Green Party could get like yeah like I know how much that costs like that's a couple million dollars I actually the other day I was pointing I was pointing this out to somebody I was like to even run a to run a one or two percent national campaign like like the Green Party would require the entire operational budget of the DSA and I just want you to know that now there's like the DSA is a member run organization it doesn't have a lot of outside donors it doesn't have rich patrons I actually respect that but you want to know the limits and why they run as Ds like yeah that's it it's partly that I say this as someone who's now joined to vote against them doing Democrat stuff um it's like specifically what I joined for be like you can run you can run you can do fusionist ballot lines I guess on legislative but you better not be trying to be a mayor anywhere because you're gonna it just makes this look bad over and over and over again.

SPEAKER_02: 1:22:20

And I mean we have seen the surge in in the DSA and like popularity of the DSA in the last like year and a half two years. Yeah but I have I have a distinct feeling that just as it happens in every single popular front where an executive is put into a position that they can't actually do anything in when like it's it's happened over and over again where AOC can't actually do anything. Taleb I like to leave a lot she can't actually do anything.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:45

But here's the thing the squad strategy at least if you hit critical mass that's true would make sense the executive does not there's no way in which you hit critical mass for that like like the bond market's gonna always be your wall the state legislature is going to always be your wall the city council is going to always be your wall and I'm gonna hear the same people over and over again say well they they didn't have the city council then why did you run for the executive first and now I'm like AOC this is a cadre DSA person.

SPEAKER_02: 1:23:17

This is not an outside indoor C exactly so this is a bigger deal when it's not an if but when the policy priorities don't like don't come through the way they should come through it's going to be a problem and this has been the problem and again this is going back to all the popular fronts if you look through going through the popular front in Britain and France even like I mean these are different it's not just an American problem is what we're saying. And it's absolutely not it just keeps happening over and over again and we keep trying to do this strange coalitional format. And again one the popular front is different in the United States I feel like we've talked about that plenty where we don't have we can't really do a popular front here because of just how the structural systems are set up it just doesn't work.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:00

So we have to do like weird simulacra simulations of what we think a popular front was back in the 1930s which is more like just left populism which also has not worked anywhere on the planet yeah so people get really mad when I'm like it has not worked like oh look Sweden and I'm like they are neoliberalizing they've been neoliberalizing since the 80s the Mettner plan failed like can you quit bringing up stuff that you know failed I'm gonna say like like as much as dingists annoy me they're literally the only group of people that have something that technically is actually happening and has not collapsed that's true yeah like like you know I don't necessarily agree with their argument like I I think China's a super responsible and progressive capitalist nation but uh like and I'll defend him against liberals oh I'm a defensist against liberals but when you say China socialist I'm like they don't even really claim I mean they do in the 82 constitution but if you like read the Politburo speeches they're like we're gonna be socialist by like such and such years they moved it back a couple years recently right yeah it was like I think in 2019 they moved like 20 and and like the red new deal was basically like un like when people talk about dung jiism like she is different like she has actually implemented like rural rural welfare reforms and like the beginnings of socialized medicine like in a very kind of rudimentary way even compelled to the Republic of Korea um but yes I mean like that's why he is legitimately popular it doesn't really matter if he's popular but he is it's not it's not just state propaganda like that he has done particularly for the countryside in in in China he's done a lot and but it means he's actually like one of the things he's done is moderated the extremity of dungish liberalization because Dung did shit like we're no longer providing public education for rural girls. Like a complete reversal yeah yeah I mean like it's just like it's like it wasn't neoliberalism it's like ordo liberalism of the 19th century variety and the only thing that made it not a disaster I think really was as much as I bitch about class collaborationism is the fact that there is a lot of working class cultural temperance in China that pull people together over the people who live through the collective period and and all that. But all those people are gonna be dead soon yeah and I'm I do worry about that. Like Michael Sandale talks about like the the communitarian spirit of China but it might be going away because it really doesn't exist amongst the Chinese young in the same way although it might end the working class but then it's hard to gauge because you know in China yeah yeah and while I have plenty of friends that speak Mandarin and plenty of I actually have friends from when I lived in East Asia who live in China who I talk to but I you know I'm like I got like four people's perspective trying to explain to me the complicatedness of internal Chinese politics and I actually can't really tell you either I I can tell you that a lot of what I read on red sales seems naive as hell but but but I'm not saying that like there aren't factions in China who really believe that and some of them may be attached to the poly bro like but they're also reoccurrent Han nationalists in China and like and that's a growing movement right now. Yeah it really is and that shit scares me so that's like the stuff Nick Land really liked about China like it you know so I bring all this up because like even China where I think we we have a united front that merfs into new democracy which is more like a popular front protracted people's war is popular frontist that's like when you talk about the united front in China it's very confusing because it creates more like a popular front but not quite because there are different limits that's the like the whole comprador bourgeoisie that's not a thing in in classical Marxism there's no reason to favor the now in fact in developed countries the national bourgeoisie is like probably the most reactionary bourgeoisie. Yeah so why would you favor that in developing countries I do see kind of the argument but what you're really arguing for is the classical Lenin position that you have to go through the period of state capitalism to develop the productive forces since you didn't allow it to develop and maybe you shouldn't have because that would have made the bourgeoisie too strong. So now you have to go through a bourgeois period under communist rule which I do think is the basic supposition of dungism and that's like the way in which it is consistent with the historical Leninism but Lenin also has counterthesis to this Lenin one of the problems with Lenin is like if you really read him he changes his mind a lot I've seen people argue about Lenin and quote Lenin against Lenin two completely yeah against Lenin yeah no no completely different points yeah the the the socialism in one country debates between 1922 and 1927 all sides had legitimate Lenin quotes all of them did what what Trotsky also had was Marx and Engels quotes which which Stalin kind of did not Eric Van Rennie who was I think at one point was a Stalinist but was like wrote the book on this actually talks about this and then says like yeah basically Trotsky had and if you think if you think Marx and you have to admit if you're citing against Trotsky that you think that Lenin is preferable to Marx and is not and is actually deviating for necessary for scientific socialist reasons which I'm gonna also say I actually admired back in the 60s when Marxist Leninists admitted this now they don't by large they're they're true Marxists now yeah yeah I'm like but you but like no you you're not like like there's nothing in Marx that that talks about the primary and secondary contradiction like that's not there. There's nothing even Stalin that talks about that that's not implied like I guess you can you like Lenin thinks imperialism is concurrent to capitalism which is what I think too not and universalizes it and becomes a bigger problem as capital develops but like he they he doesn't think that it that like colonialism is the same thing as capitalist imperialism and Marxist Linus malice basically do. I mean you know they they think they they think that colonialism and imperialism comes first and I'm like okay it it this gets actually very very technical but there's a lot of debates about this right now I mean Schiber and the Brenner school thinks it comes way after yeah yeah they also date capitalism beginning like earlier and everybody else except for the Animal school who they said in like the 12th century are libertarians who date it at the beginning of time at zero like the first time a person exchanged with another person you had capital I'm like read Aristotle you know that's not true. Yeah these are the same people who say that uh Athens was a like mercantilist empire like like ancient Athens yeah that had more square miles under its control than all of New York state yeah they're funny but funnily enough they've all become nationalists now so we don't have to have these stupid debates anymore well they haven't all I mean I actually kind of admire the three hold out true libertarians um like because they're very alienated by like my former friend Michael Rettenwald like that's like wait like you're just a nationalist spreading like anti-Jewish and anti I'm like yeah man this is what you guys have become like the opposite of what you said you are even in the conservative coalition but yeah I mean this is the problem of popular frontism but I do think maybe my last point though I do think there's an ambiguity like I talked about United Frontism I can trace the letters specifically it particularly the letter I read all the letters around Kritika program like the ones back and forth and it's very clear that the United Front strategy is consistent with what Marx was telling Babel and the elder liebnicht to do but there are there are points where it's where the popular frontists do have legitimate grounds. One is Marxist writing on the civil war in America although I've complicated that by saying he didn't really think America was anywhere near developed enough to have that kind of proletarian revolution but he wanted to make sure that that wasn't going to be the case like that we weren't going to have like slavery capitalism. Yeah that also goes back to your point though that the popular front might be only an effective strategy in an undeveloped country right because because it was effective in China we cannot I mean the United Front that kind of sort of is a popular front but isn't who was effective in China it seemed fairly effective in early India but the moment if if if the it it doesn't seem to work elsewhere I mean Sarisa which is a party is birthed out of a popular front a lot of these left populist groups are are like post Marxist developments of popular fronts but like isn't Melon Sean some kind of popular front as well yes it's the front popular although it's it yeah this this is the problem our own episode on them because because fronts unbound and the front popular doesn't actually fit the pattern of either and it's like its own mutation of left populism with with I think some progressive internationalist but also some bonapartist and class collaborationist characteristics that make me really uncomfortable and I've also found it interesting that like outside of my friend who's an editor of the New International no one in America fucking talks about France unbouded even though it's the the only left populist movement that still really exists any with any success at all and and to some extent until like this year was like gaining it was like gaining support until about this year right but it has the same problem because the front populaire got kind of kind of slightly stabbed in the side by by the socialist party so and definitely by Macron who they can't seem to unseat even though he's like what like 14 15 popular mean he is hated yeah I think I know more people out of fans who respect him than in France who respect him kind of like Merkel was at the end of her tenure too yeah where you like you had American liberals singing Merkel's praises and I'm like do you remember who she is like you singing Margaret Thatcher's praises what the hell's wrong with you but liberals love to do that too yeah they do they do I mean to be fair sometimes they even have a dialectical point like uh it is true that although Mexico has now disproven this as the as a universal tendency but in general the first female president of a country actually does tend to come from the reactionary side of politics Vinny Sirbuto Margaret Thatcher Western Fation Japan is very consistent with this I can't remember her name I'm sorry people so you see a lot of this stuff I guess this actually should bring us to uh we're gonna have to do a self point episode on modern popular fronts and pop and left populism because they're not technically popular fronts because they're looser because there's sometimes barely parties involved um and then you mean if you look at like Vincent Bevan's work because he's like you know Vincent Bevan's like oh you know you have all these like loose left populists and they were too informed by anarchists and blah blah blah and he he was on the ground for some of this and I get why he feels that way but I always remind him like but why did they come up because those those Leninist parties that you want they already existed and all these they were stronger in the countries you're talking about than here like why did they fail and like he hasn't written about that I'm like you're just not looking far enough back you're only looking at the period that you want to deal with and I remember this debate between Charlie Post Trotskyist not a guy who I often like to be completely honest and Bosch Carson's cara and people should read it because it's really you should read it before we talk about where Boschkar was like positing a popular front with the social basically what we actually do see in the DSA which is you have a bunch of Marxist Leninists and Trotskyists and all kinds of groups whatever neo Kalskiism is I mean those are the people I like the most but like I don't know what they are either they're not really Kalskiist they they're like they're like pre-1920 Leninists so you know their window is about three years of Soviet history but anyway uh my and like the second international you know when it didn't suck for uh also ignoring and they know it too ignoring all how how craven the right wing of the second international yeah um but all that aside you see all these people with basically the social democrats at the helm that's what Boschkar was arguing for and if you look at the DSA right now even though the left factions are more popular and they're bringing more people into the DSA that's actually true it's groundworks policies that tend to win and that's been consistent yeah and like so I've been like I feel good about like the left faction but I'm also like guys guys you guys like Lenin you know what Lenin had to do right why is there no RS like Russian Social Democratic Party why are there Mensheviks and Bolsheviks just saying yeah and I mean and the Mensheviks split among themselves there's the red Mensheviks and the right Mensheviks I mean like because there are Mensheviks like Martov who weren't really hostile yeah they were hostile but they weren't truly hostile to the Bolsheviks like Lenin still respected Martov and then even though he was put even though he was in self-exile and then there was the the the Mensheviks who fought with the whites which I think I'm like that's unforgivable. Yeah but that also happens in these popular fronts I mean the Socialist Party of America did it they were they did anti-communist shit they were all over the place in the 20s they were kicking people out for being I mean in the 30s and 40s they were kicking people out for being communist they kicked Victor Verger's wife out for being sympathetic but then they were also pro the popular front with the communist this this happened as well in Chile and in Italy and in Spain.

SPEAKER_02: 1:39:52

Right like this happened in every single instance that we have of a like actual like coalesce popular front this is exactly what happened.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:00

Right and it's it's socialist to do it which which is why like like you know a lot of the MLs you did you meet today like they're like Popular Front that's from Trotsky's bullshit but no it's not it's absolutely not you don't even know what you're fucking talking about. They're basically third periodists and I'm like but you're repudiating Stalin after 1936 and you're definitely repudiating Mal and like when you talk about the masses and the people and not the proletariat you're doing it on purpose yeah yeah that's a that's a that's a very distinct linguistic shift right which to be fair this is also what this is what Melanchon does as well.

SPEAKER_02: 1:40:44

He explicitly is a mass party or masses and the people. Right

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:47

No, he does. Yeah, he talks about the people generically. Um, and France Ambaud is like six times larger in a smaller country than a DSA is. You know, I think it's like 600,000 as opposed to 90 or whatever. But their their polling numbers have plummeted in the last year. Um again, even though they were Kalan was more popular in Melchon, I was like, oh my god.

SPEAKER_02: 1:41:16

It's the perfect, it's the example again of that. Like, even though they weren't like they weren't able to get rid of Macron because Macron made an alliance with the right, but at the same time, France Unbowed was given like a lot of popular support, and they weren't able to do anything with it. And so once again, like once they hold this position of government, they're not able to do the things in the government. It's the exact same, like it's just same thing with Corbin. Yep.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:39

Same thing with I mean, everyone told me I had all these MMTers and and what I would consider right DSAers. And I know that they're still left-wing people who are confused, they're still very left-wing by the American. Like, groundwork is still the left left of the Democratic Party. But all these people telling me, well, now that he's got, I forget it. What's it the finance committee or which committee was he put on as the head of the I think it was it Labor? Yeah, or it wasn't Labor, it was it was something that had a power of the purse behind it. That we'd have like progressive stuff done under Biden because the because the Senate Finance Committee, or whichever one he was on, I'll make sure we look it up. We wouldn't get all these like progressive things done through this committee work. That did not even kind of happen.

SPEAKER_02: 1:42:38

I get I the thing that I have to remind people about the Biden coalition is that like we had we had socialists defending a rail strike, uh breaking a rail strike.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:50

Yeah, I know. That was when I broke with AOC, by the way. Well, actually, I've never been an AOC fan. I've never trusted her because she was a Kennedy staffer, sorry. But I when people are like, oh, you have to defend AOC, and I'm like, well, like Nancy Pelosi comes from a similar movement in the 70s, guys. Like, and she took power in in like 2006 in an anti-Bush turn. Like this has happened before, in almost the same way.

SPEAKER_02: 1:43:20

Oh, he was on budget and uh finance.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:24

Yeah, budget and finance, which is huge, right? Reconciliation bills go through that. And yet, it did not happen. We did not get, I mean, you could argue that uh every I mean, you know, everyone's like Biden's been more progressive on, you know. I I see former Cliffit Trotskyists like Eric, I'm maybe I'm throwing too much shade out in public, but Cliffit Trotskyists like Eric Blanc do this popular front stuff saying we need to sort Biden for these for these uh presidential appointees to the NCLB. And I'm like, those are really easily undone. And we've seen it, and yeah, we saw it happen in real time, and we also know that he was putting real limits on what they could do then. You know, we could talk about like Lena Khan, and you know, you want to get on me fighting with with Marxist, Marxist, like monopolies are more progressive than petit bourgeois. I'm like, not at this point, you're you're pretending like this is industrial labor and it's not, this is no longer leading to the socialization of labor. This is this is market capture, it's monopsony power. That is not in anyone's benefit. But they have a very 19th-century understanding of it. However, they are right that that one of the things about neoliberalism and busting up the Fordist monopolies is that they did semi-petite bourgeois a whole lot of industries. But it which enabled them to get around regulations, actually. But my point about all this is maybe there isn't a good side in picking which bourgeois is more progressive at this point in capital. Like maybe they both suck at this point, yeah. Maybe like maybe there isn't a good side here.

SPEAKER_02: 1:45:04

Like maybe allying with the bourgeois right now is not a great idea.

C. Derick Varn: 1:45:08

Like any of them. I mean, I do admit that private capital, like, if you look at what's going on, I think Jamie Merchant's really good on this. If you look at what's going on right now, in it's private equity versus publicly traded equity, so it's it's it's one form and they're calling private equity between laws actually completely misleading. These are massive corporations, but they're not publicly traded in the same way. So you have like public-minded corporations versus private-minded corporations, and there is a real battle, and and but that's a that's a boot, that's an air-bourgeois battle, and it's not like the big corporations are great for the workers, they are nominally better on certain things because they are less concerned about accumulation. But for all of them, who's like, oh, they'll do DEI and stuff forever. How fast how fast did they drop all that shit?

SPEAKER_02: 1:46:05

Literally like days. Like in days, they did it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:09

Like I was like, yeah, they pivoted immediately. Some of them were pivoting before the Trump administration came out because they realized that they'd they had gotten market cap from that.

SPEAKER_02: 1:46:19

I mean, I don't know how much I should be dropping, but I like I know people who worked for like progressive nonprofits who were trying to unionize who and that nonprofit was like waiting specifically for for the election results, and literally the day after the election fired all of them because they knew that like they wouldn't be able to do anything, like the NLRB would be useless, right? So, like, yeah, they were shifting immediately.

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:41

They were waiting, yeah. So, yeah, there's your popular front.

SPEAKER_02: 1:46:48

I mean, there's your popular front.

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:50

I mean, you know, left populism is like the is like the less organized form of popular frontism. Maybe we'll talk about that next time before we get into United Front. I don't know, we'll figure out what we do next because I'm gonna wrap this up. But I I do want people to think about this. Antifa is a classic justification for a popular front. I know anarchists are in it, but it's a classic justification for a popular front, it's the most compelling justification for a popular front, right? Even though if you actually look at what Antifa did, fascists are defeated by their own internal contradictions, other rightists and forces outside of their country. And no place that I can think of did the resistance win on its own. Nowhere. And you think about like the right woe society and the German resistance, they all died. The only survivors were the reactionary resistance to who stayed in Germany, were the reactionary resistance to the Nazis, and then the people who left and came back. Like, that's how you survived. So we're not anywhere near there. I mean, there were some dark days in the beginning of the Trump administration where I was like, maybe we are closer to that than I thought, but we don't seem to be the if the if the attempt to make the Charlie Kirk assassination into the Reich sat fire can be forgotten about in a couple weeks, then then the the inter but again it's the internal contradictions of the right that are taking the right out right now.

SPEAKER_02: 1:48:22

It's more than there's nothing, there's actually no resistance for like against the right. There is it's literally just the right eating itself or the reactionary versus right now eating themselves.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:32

Right. I mean, and maybe there's like people in government in the deep in the quote deep state and the administrative state, and that's always been the same thing, by the way, that are just kind of waiting it out. Because that you know, if you if you know about deep states, that's actually what they tend to do. Um but I don't know, man. I I feel like we're in a time where where we've literally seen a popular front fail in real time. It put Biden in power, it made excuses for Biden until Gaza. That's what it took for people to be real. Like the number of the number of socialists who were making excuses for the Biden administration until Gaza was stunning because the same people attacked Obama for for things that they were defending Biden on for just a few years prior. And I cannot let people forget that. Like, because it wasn't just that this was a Democrat, it was that this was a Democrat that because he had Mondale-like tendencies, they thought they had leverage over, even though Biden is one of the most reactionary Mondale Democrats that's ever existed.

SPEAKER_02: 1:49:43

If you look at every like every single terrible bill that the left, I'm saying scare quotes.

C. Derick Varn: 1:49:54

Yes, Biden's on him. Yeah, every single one. Both the bad bankruptcy bills, like you know, he did he did a few progressive things in the Obama administration because he was war averse, except not when it comes to Zionist. So, like, I don't know, man. It's you know it, it's you know, and everybody becomes an internationalist again, which is good, but you have this, particularly in a DSA world, you have this inability to walk into bubblegum at the same time, or you have people who have milked toast national politics, but who take very radical positions on foreign politics where they have no influence.

SPEAKER_05: 1:50:41

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:50:42

Like, I'm like, you don't have any influence on that. You you can't do anything about it, and you're not really willing to like I'm not seeing a beaterman like sacrifice himself to stop a shipment of uh bombs to Gaza, nor would I ask him to do that, to be fair. This is not like some kind of like totalness challenge. I'm just saying, like, that's the only thing he possibly do, and it would be futile and it would be dying for very little. It would be a symbolic death. And like, I don't expect people to do that. I don't even think that kind of politics of the spectacular works all that well.

SPEAKER_02: 1:51:18

I mean, we've we've seen multiple examples of it over the past three years, and it hasn't worked didn't change shit, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:23

Like whether it's spectacular to yourself, the caught the set yourself on fire stuff, or if it's spectacular to others, you know, killing Zionist liberal ambassadors, uh, they don't seem to have any effect. Like, I'm not, I don't even know that it have a negative effect. It's weird.

SPEAKER_02: 1:51:43

Like, it's just yeah, it's just there's no effect.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:45

Like, it's like nothing. Like, I used to think it breeded reaction, but I'm like, I didn't even see that. Like, it just like almost didn't.

SPEAKER_02: 1:51:55

It's a symptom of like, yeah, it's a symptom of like everybody, it's the same thing you mentioned with Charlie Kirk. It's like if like that's gonna be a Reichstag fire and everybody forgot about it, it's like everybody it just this it's not affecting anything. None of these like events are doing anything.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:07

Well, I mean, Charlie Kirk everyone hasn't forgotten about, but it hasn't changed anything, and the right is the right's like, we're gonna go and smash the left finally, and like they are at war with each other within a month. And I was just like, you know, and I'm always like, like, oh yeah, popular fronts don't work for them either.

SPEAKER_02: 1:52:25

I was about to say that it's like the popular front doesn't work for the right, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:29

Which you would think it is a strong right politics are inherently class collaborationist, and it doesn't even work for them. Because I we're gonna do I will tell you, we're gonna do an episode of National Fronts, which tend to be the right version of a popular front. They do not have a strong track record either. Like and again, like I said, you'd think it'd be easier.

SPEAKER_05: 1:52:59

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:53:00

Like their politics is actually more in line with collaborationism, explicitly, but for it does it just fundamentally, I think the organizational structure just doesn't work, like you can't you can't actually have that cohesion for long enough to be effective for any of these individual groups to be effective in the thing they're trying to do.

C. Derick Varn: 1:53:20

Because you know that you're gonna be at war with the very people you're fighting with very shortly, like that's the always the implication of it. The United Front, the one of the differences is, and it doesn't have a lot of stunning wins either. I'm gonna actually be quite frank with that. But one of one of the implications is these people can join you as you succeed fully. And interestingly, I pointed out rightists do oppositional united fronts more than leftists, and that's the movements that tend to come up and be the next dominant movement until they get recuperated. The tea party is the tea party, the alt-right. Uh, the alt-bite wasn't that successful, but but the warpers, which are the alt-right's weird bastard Catholic children, the the conservative fusionists, even like the the Reagan coalition, they did that. The Birchers, they did they were willing to take out members of their own coalition who did not get on with what they viewed as the minimum program of their politics, and they were successful with it. I've actually said a lot of times the consensual right-wingers, we think they're doing something like a national front, but they're doing a national united front, and like they are better at being abstentionists and even going after their own as a form of discipline, and leftists tend to not for whatever reason. I mean, some people like, oh, it's a pro-social personality trait or whatever. I'm like, I don't think it's just that. No, also, if you met leftists, we're not like all that pro-social. No, no, no, he's pro-social on the left. Like, like the idea that, like, you guys are we're the party of pro-social normies is real funny. We have never been like, like, I've gone back and looked. I'm like, when is this like normy socialist period that everyone tells me existed? And I'm like, it basically never existed. It's like it's something that you conjure up post facto.

SPEAKER_02: 1:55:21

Like it's like this weird mix of like SDS civil rights and everything just like mixed together into one thing that never happened.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:29

Right. I mean, it's basically like the VH1 version of the politics of all the bands you liked as presented to you from 1968 in the summer of love, somehow being tacitly tied to May 69 or May 68, even though they're not related at all.

SPEAKER_05: 1:55:44

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:45

And then all that being tied to the New Left, even though the New Left was mostly silent gem people who are about five to six years older. Or there are people in the 70s. I mean, like, it's it's like when you hear people talk about the New Deal and they're like describing great society programs that you can get off the ground. And I'm like, that's not what the new deal was, like at all. Like, the only thing you're right about the new deal is that there is a there is a government backstock of jobs for white people and for some black people sometimes. And like that's the and like there's bank security. That's it. Yeah, that's all you really get. Like, and yeah, yeah, you get like you get a minimum pension and and stuff like that, but like come on, like that's it, it is so like so not what you're uh you know, like yeah. It's a it's a funny thing, all that, but I do think ultimately we need to go back and look at this popular front because a lot of people from Mandani Mamdani have already gone that way, and we already see Mamdani is appointing Adams people to office, some of which were neoliberals appointed, you know, who came up under Barack Obama, and he's a DSA cadre candidate. It is not about the candidate people, like that's not the issue. Yes, personalities do matter, yes, people can betray you. I don't want to make it sound like the people are coming towns, but there was no way for Mamdani to be successful and be more than two clicks to the left to build de Blasio. That was, and if you don't recognize this, I saw this with Obama. Yeah, people forget how how like left white view because Obama attacked Hillary from both the left and the right, but you know how how vociferous that was. And and you know, I mean you guys basically have to be at least my age to remember this now, but but and how all that was like you I knew what Obama was gonna be by the time he appointed his cabinet, and I you know, the one time I was ever supported Democrats, and it was Mike Ravel, god goddamn it, who got me got me to do it, and then I and then when Mike Ravel stepped out and went and tried to take over the libertarian party, that was weird. I was like, I'll I'll I'll go with the historic the historically black candidate, at least I'll get some symbolic victory out of this. And as soon as I saw his cabinet, I'm like, shit, I got conned. And you know, I thought about this as betrayal for a long time, but I've really thought about Barack Obama's incentives and particularly what had been done at the time. Like, he there wasn't he wasn't going to be successful if he didn't do that. Yeah, now successful is not what we wanted.

SPEAKER_02: 1:58:45

Exactly, exactly. This is the thing, and this is this is actually the fundamental problem with like the DSA and like him being a cadre candidate, is that like for momdani to be successful, he has to actually break with the group that he's a part of almost. But that's not that's not a betrayal, that's not like a personal betrayal, that's just what is going like that's because like he doesn't want to be Brandon Johnson in Chicago, exactly, exactly. Which is not even a DSA elected, but like historically more more unpopular, I think, right now than the previous mayor.

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:20

Yeah, Johnson got a brief boost because of Trump, but the last year and a half has been pulling way lower than Lori Lightfoot even did. Yeah, Dennis Kucinich as a mayor, same same problem. You know, David Deakin, yeah, actual DSA endorsed, same problem. In fact, I can't like everyone goes back to the sewer socialists, but I'm like, I can't think of this working after the New Deal, it only works from the New Deal through through the first two-thirds of it. Once the war starts, all this stuff falls apart and it never comes back because the bomb market, the city, there's structural changes, and you haven't changed any of that, yeah. Like, and like you know, and it puts people like I will say, like, it put Marxist Junior group in a weird position because like they advocate for doing this in the legislature and splitting and become a party, they kind of take the first Ackerman pen more seriously than Ackerman does now, um, although they're more partyists, they really want a true socialist program and all that first, blah blah blah. I mean, they're there, they are, you know, they're fairly radical, but like because of the fact that they're democratic centralists and because of the way things went in in New York, what do you do when you have to build up a candidate that you feel structurally like they feel structurally this was this was going to be a problem? And yet they have to build up, and then like uh literally within a month, they To critique him, and I'm like, Well, but it just makes you look inconsistent and like you're demanding everything. Like, why did you support them in the first place? Yeah, like if you knew this was the most likely way to go, and uh you know, I I've even talked to Donald about it in other channels, like you know, privately and stuff, and he's like, Well, I respected the discipline of the organ. I'm like, I would too, I would not oppose mom Donnie, but I've never said that I thought it was gonna go well. Like, in fact, I fucking joined the DSA just to tell people, hey, yeah, let's do this again. Like, we've done it so many times.

SPEAKER_02: 2:01:29

I I think this is like the overall takeaway of like bringing it back to the history of the popular front. Like, this is that the popular front will will elevate an individual or a group of individuals into power that might be a cadre candidate for a socialist or communist party. However, those people won't be able to do the things that the party needs them to do and will alienate themselves and the party, and that's not good, right?

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:55

Like, so the DSA is not gonna get what it wants, but it's going to be associated with what m mom Dani has to do. And if he can't deliver on his promises, that will be associated with the DSA.

SPEAKER_02: 2:02:08

Yeah, like all of a sudden we have a concrete example of a socialist policy not working of socialist policies not working in scare quotes, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:02:15

Yeah, even though it's not the policies we would have really advocated for in the first place, exactly. Like, you know, I'm not one of these socialism has never been tried people because I get annoyed by it, even though I kind of think it's true. But like, ah, it's actually not true. Socialism's been tried a lot, socialism has never really been completed. Um but I do think this this like we set ourselves up for this a lot, and it's not I'm not attacking the electoralists, I'm just saying, like, you should go legislature and you should be oppositional until you can win. The right does that shit all the time, and it's and it's effective, right? Immobilization is very effective. Now it's effective until the my my friends in anti-politics will say it's effective until they actually have to govern and then you have a problem.

SPEAKER_01: 2:03:08

Totally.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:09

But but like if you want to build up just like proof that we have power, stopping shit seems to actually be more effective than trying to do positive policy because we can't control the policy. Like, like, okay, like I would not oppose Medicare for All because of the shit show in the United States, but you know what? I'm just advocating for rational bourgeois policy there so that we don't all deal with like dying of preventable diseases and going into and like having the the literal medical industry, which unfortunately is the only growing sector of the US economy right now, cannibalize everything.

SPEAKER_02: 2:03:49

Especially with the coming shit show, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:51

Right. If people think it's bad now, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 2:03:55

Things are about to get really, really bad this coming year, like in the coming years.

C. Derick Varn: 2:04:00

And like, this is the first crack that they get amped up in the next two years, and I don't have any idea what the DIMs do about it. I mean, they could reverse it, but problem now is, and I know the MMT is gonna get mad at me, but there is a bomb market, and that's how you get your in your currency in the forex, which is why you can buy stuff outside of your own currency. Otherwise, the MMT only works in autarkies, and no autarkies exist on the planet. But you know, they're not wrong about like the day, like it's not like the government can run out of money, but what can happen is people can start can devalue your money when you go to purchase outside of your country. And I've I've lived in places where this has happened, all right. Uh, I lived in Egypt where it very much happened. And when that happens, the problem with the US right now is like I'm hearing like they'll scream tax the rich. One, okay, the MNT is a right, that's not actually gonna what you really fun stuff with. But two, when you tax the rich right now, if you think about what what we're doing to maintain our share of the global forex reserves is the bond market. And if the bond market is mostly the people internal to the United States and it's mostly the businesses and corporations, when you're taxed the rich, you're paying the rich.

SPEAKER_02: 2:05:14

Yeah, it goes back.

C. Derick Varn: 2:05:16

Like, you know that because you studied public policy, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 2:05:18

But like me trying to give it to like progressives and like this was the problem, maybe socialists, every single Brandon Johnson plan as well in Chicago. Like, like it's like everything you do is actually just gonna go right back in. I think we have numbers from a lot of these situations where it's like 90% of the tax income just goes right back to this like same general group, not maybe not necessarily the same people because they also hold the bond, so they'll say that's why big bouche wasn't even always opposed to taxes, because they're gonna make money off of paying their own fucking taxes.

C. Derick Varn: 2:05:51

Like, and some of them are like, you know what? The peace dividend to keep the Hoi Paloi from like totally destroying us. I mean, even the ultra neoliberals, the neoliberals in one country that take over the tech oligarchies, they all are promising. Like, you let us try to create God, and when we do, we will give you UBI, either in the form of a sovereign wealth fund or in or in a debundance dividends or whatever they're fucking promising. Uh and it's like they know that the current situation, we'd eventually get so mad we'd just tear them apart, yeah, because enough people we'll see enough people starve. But we are nowhere near that. And that's the other thing that I think Marxists always assume. They all like even like smart ones are smart Mentiers, like Michael Hudson's always predict predicting the imminent collapse of the dollar. I'm like, de-dollarization's been happening for 20 years and it's continuing to happen and it's accelerating, but it's not gonna happen overnight, yeah. It will like there's no there's no replacement currency. I mean, China's hedging gold. Like, because they also, you know, they don't want to, they don't want to do their own economy that we did either. I mean, that doesn't make sense. So it's just like, what are you gonna do? And I just felt like the popular front in America is like it's either piecemeal too, it's like, okay, like COVID would have been the ideal time to push for Medicare for all. And we did the opposite of that, and the squad went around doing the opposite of that. I mean, one of the things, like, I'll defend Corey Bush on many, many things, but I remember one of the things, like, oh, she just lost her next election, no APAC stuff needed to be involved yet. Because pretty clearly she was pushing for carbon cost without was willing to give up the subsidies for working class people, which turned the unions against her. And I was like, I know we have to fight climate change, but neoliberal ways aren't the way to do it. You need hard blocks, not taxation, not not consumer policy.

SPEAKER_05: 2:07:58

Yep.

C. Derick Varn: 2:07:59

And and if you're gonna do this consumer policy, the best way to get people to turn against you is to put it on the backs of the poor, which is what will happen. That's how the Yellow Vest protest started, not to do the France thing again, but like yeah, but it is, it's like uh, and that's why it was a coalition of both right wing and left-wing popular forces, right? And that's why it was so hard for the Americans to like grok that, or like the truckers convoys, which which were largely reactionary. But I was even explaining, like, from from like a workers' perspective, it's not good, but from a truckers, from a sectional perspective, I actually understand where they're coming from. They're not actually big riffs, they're in a truck moving across the country. Yes, they can express, but they're not exposed to that many people. It's like trying to explain why like rural people don't like the lockdown policies. I'm like, yeah, they're not near that many people, they're not seeing that many sick people, they're not seeing that many people at all. Yeah, now there is it rational ultimately, no, but like if you if you try to imagine what their incentives are for 35 seconds, you could predict that unless you're very careful and have really made strong inroads in public health, like in certain places in Latin America, they had like you had like public nurses who live in the community, community community, like and those areas fail fared way better with rural compliance because they trusted people. That wasn't even true in China, like and so I'm just like you have to you you can't just imagine this stuff from like a policy perspective and just not imagine what the other people are thinking of how they're incentivized. I mean, this is the other problem with the popular front, is weirdly, even though it's about joining people together, it has like no imagination about the way other people then you think, which is also bizarre.

SPEAKER_02: 2:09:48

This is yeah, this is really true. This is like, yeah, go ahead. People have stuff everybody has static beliefs, and we're going to join together to like make sure our like combined, like they're like where we intersect, we're gonna actually work together for that one thing, but we're not we're not we're not gonna worry about all of our differences, even though they're definitely gonna come up and we're definitely gonna argue about it, we're definitely gonna split because of it. But yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:10:20

I mean, this is the thing, like you like one of the things you have to do is like you have to act. I mean, I'll give China this. You actually have to do deal with the fact that even in oppressed coalitions or whatever, there are dramatically different both ideological, personal, and material interest. And old socialists used to know that, like, actually, your class position doesn't actually predict your politics super strongly. It's we think it should, but it doesn't. Like, they know that they talked about it, they talked about proletarianization and and proletariation had two meanings in the manifesto. It's actually clear one meaning is you become proletarianized by the economy, the other meaning is you see the future in the proletariat and you choose to join up with it. So there's one that's economistic and one that's voluntaristic, even in Marx's primary text. And you know, they knew that a lot of the socialists were bourgeois because they saw that this the bourgeois future wasn't good. You know, it was actually like prodonist and mutualist anarchists who were more likely to yell about, oh, you're not really a worker, and I find that really interesting because we haven't got beyond that, but now you hear it from Marxists too. Like, oh, you know, uh, you know, you hear about oh, all these PMC professors who are whatever, and I'm like, you're a PMC professor.

SPEAKER_02: 2:11:41

It's a PMC on PMC violence, right?

C. Derick Varn: 2:11:45

You're a PMC professor. How do you not see the irony of what you're like? One, it's not a valid category, anyway. It's like I there's so many different theorizations of it. But two, even if you do take it as violent, the people who are aware of it are of it. And they're pos and weirdly, their answers are just like, oh, you want you want like affordus compromise, is what you actually want, even though you're crouching it in socialist language.

SPEAKER_02: 2:12:13

Well, that this goes back to the left populism thing, is I feel like PMC discourse is the most popular in this left populism like nebulous sphere, right?

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:22

Although it seems really weird to be somehow pretending that the professionals dominate everything under the Trump administration, it since they got they got pawned very quickly, like they were the first people fall, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 2:12:38

They were the first people out, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:40

Like, I'm just like so the the more powerful Uber black in the center that secretly controlled everything. That that's all it took. It took Doge.

SPEAKER_02: 2:12:51

It took, yeah, it took an organization that did stuff for three months.

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:54

Yeah, come on now. Well, anyway, I think on next episode we're gonna talk about the United Front. Maybe we should cover the two classic ones. Then I'm gonna project into we'll talk about the weirder forms of the popular front and left populism, and then we'll talk about the rights national fronts and how they don't really go that well either. So expect to see Brandon back at least three or four times. So nice to meet you.

SPEAKER_02: 2:13:22

Yeah, uh this is a great conversation. Thanks for having me.

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:25

Yeah, I've really enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_02: 2:13:27

We'll actually refer to some of the readings more next time, but I think it's probably good to get like a good introductory episode of just get everything out.

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:35

I feel like so many people use the words and don't know what they mean, or they think popular front is what trots do. No, excuse me, united front is what trots do, popular front is what Marxist Linus do, and that's all I really know. Like, or I don't even know that. Like, so so and there are times where I'm like, what is the difference in this context? Because there are like the Chinese case is fascinating because figuring out how the Chinese popul United Front is a United Front and not a popular front, you're like, it doesn't really it has elements of both and neither. Um, so anyway, we'll we might have to do an episode on how China's United Front actually worked because it even still exists.

SPEAKER_02: 2:14:14

I yeah, I'd love to do that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:14:17

So we'll come back. Take care, people.