From Dawn To Decadence, Part 6: Aufheben's Decay

In Part 6 of our series "From Dawn to Decadence," we examine the intellectual trajectory and eventual "decay" of the Aufheben collective. This episode explores the group's early contributions to Marxist theory, their critique of the state, and the internal contradictions that led to their decline.
We dive deep into the specific criticisms leveled by the Aufhebung Collective against previous thinkers, including their critiques of Rosa Luxemburg's "objectivism" and the perceived "automaticity" of capitalist collapse. We also discuss how their work interacts with broader Marxist debates on over-accumulation, under-consumption, and the role of the state in managing the "common ruin" of society.

Key Topics Discussed:
The Roots of Aufheben: How the collective emerged within the landscape of radical Marxist theory.
Critique of Luxemburgism: Why Aufheben rejected theories of automatic economic collapse in favor of a more nuanced understanding of class struggle.
The Decay of Theory: Analyzing the shifts in the collective’s perspective that signaled a move away from their original radical foundations.
Theoretical Implications: How these debates on the "highest stage" of capitalism and the "rentier state" remain relevant in today's shifting global landscape.

Link:  https://files.libcom.org/files/Aufheben-%20Decadence.pdf

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

Transcript

Predictions, Tariffs, And Managed Democracy

C. Derick Varn 0:48

Hello and welcome to From Dawn to Decadence, a regrettable century and Vaughn blog co-production that we do about every six weeks. Last time we made a bunch of predictions about decadence, and then a bunch of shit happened that we were absolutely wrong about. So we didn't have war in Venezuela, but they did take Maduro, who knows what the hell was going on there. I still haven't figured it out. Yeah, something like 32 Cubans were killed and like 70 Venezuelans.

SPEAKER_02 1:23

So we could commit a war crime. Yes. Without really having much of a war.

C. Derick Varn 1:31

And I can't remember if we predicted, I think we predicted he was going to threaten World and not do it because he'd been threatening it for a year and just bombing boats. The most pathetic form of state sanctioned murder I can think of, since there's no evidence that they were engaged in any crime whatsoever, and it should have been province of the Coast Guard. But we're not here to talk about the news, although there's plenty of decadence to go around there, too, as uh Trump just got his tariffs handed to him by his own Supreme Court. Seems like government may be in shutdown again.

Regrettable Jason 2:04

I mean, that is one of the funnier developments, the the tariff stuff.

C. Derick Varn 2:10

And also obvious. Like, is a right wing Supreme Court not going to like support capital?

SPEAKER_02 2:21

Duh. Right. Like they're they're siding with their class over the buffoon that leads their class, you know? Yeah. Well, I mean, nominally anyway. He's the one sitting on the throne. So far.

C. Derick Varn 2:37

Who knows? Every day I see left, I think we're never gonna have elections again. And I'm like, well, I mean I think we definitely are. Yeah, I I think they're gonna be a I think they're gonna be a mess. Yeah, yeah.

Regrettable Jason 2:54

But you know, like okay, so like you lived in Egypt before. I lived in Turkey, like we know what it's like to live in a managed democracy. It's it's much more stable, much more normalized. We live in Texas now, yeah, exactly.

C. Derick Varn 3:08

Yeah, I live in Utah, it's also pretty similar.

SPEAKER_02 3:11

Yeah, I mean, it's like you look at the have you seen the the Texas like congressional district map? Yeah, it's it's some wild shit. Like I've seen some insane gerrymandering, but there's one that goes like from Houston, I mean not Houston, from San Antonio up in the rich outskirt areas, the and then just hugs the the corridor all the way up I-35 until it gets to Austin, and then it goes back into Austin, but neglects the formerly not so much anymore, poor areas of Austin and just hugs around the outside of Austin for all of the rich areas, and that's a congressional district.

C. Derick Varn 3:46

Yeah, so I I am in the same congressional district as St. George. Now that's actually been ended, but it's the the Republicans are trying to reverse it through a very sketchy attempt at getting signatures to reverse the popularly passed referendum. But for you who don't know, St. George is literally on the border with Nevada. I live in I live north of Salt Lake. Oh well, yeah, that's insane. So um so we should have we we should have one, only one, but we should have one democratic district for the for the congressional map, and we don't.

SPEAKER_02 4:29

Yeah. If we if we had regularly drawn maps that just were by you know geographic area, we would be uh probably just be a blue state because all of the population centers generally are blue.

C. Derick Varn 4:44

Yeah, you know that's actually not true in Utah. Utah is this weird thing where we have urban conservatives because of the influence of the LDS church, because of the the municipal theocracies there, yeah. Although the Utah is no longer majority Mormon, which is gonna make that even more interesting. Oh wow, interesting.

SPEAKER_02 5:03

I didn't know that.

C. Derick Varn 5:05

Yep, that's the problem with uh having an economy that's worth a shit, is people come to it.

SPEAKER_02 5:12

The live um descending like locusts.

C. Derick Varn 5:18

But yeah, so as far as theories of decline, though, we're talking about off heaven's essay. Uh God, wonder was this essay written?

SPEAKER_02 5:26

I'm guessing in 2005, so it I believe it came out somewhere before that.

C. Derick Varn 5:34

Oh ah 1993 and 1994. Oh wow, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:42

All right, so years ago, 33 years ago.

C. Derick Varn 5:46

Wow, yeah, it may it makes sense a little bit more when you put this in the context of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of history, the end of history, and also how bad people were at predicting economic cycles between 1950 to basically 2007. Um there were economic cycles, we still had a business cycle, but like everybody was kind of bad at predicting it, and it was always less severe than the Marxists were claiming. I mean, Trotsky famously predicted the end of capitalism after World War II was over.

Regrettable Jason 6:32

Yeah, that's why James Cannon said uh obviously the war's not over because capitalism still exists, right? And uh for some reason he was uh allowed to stay the G.

C. Derick Varn 6:44

He was allowed to keep saying things.

Regrettable Jason 6:47

Yes.

C. Derick Varn 6:49

I mean, to be fair, the the Soviets thought that too until like 52.

SPEAKER_02 6:54

Yeah, Stalin was always preparing leading up to the second world war, he was preparing for a war with the West, not not Germany, but the the capitalist West, and thought that the the war with Germany was just an interlude and that the real war was going to be coming soon. And that was the real second world world war to Stalin.

C. Derick Varn 7:15

And he and he thought that that was he thought that actually because of economic predictions. I think people actually need to like remember that.

Regrettable Jason 7:21

I mean, he was kind of right, like the cold war is a version of that, but not quite what he was thinking.

C. Derick Varn 7:29

Well, sure. So just to remind people of the core thesis of the off-heborn articles, and it's a series of three. You guys have talked about them before, I have read them a few times. And they they argued that decadence, which I think is interesting that they use decadence because the only people who call what they are calling decadence decadence, and not crisis theory, breakdown theory, uh, which aren't really the same thing either, but real subsumption theory, which is how it gets picked up later on by endnotes, etc. That pretty much it was only the council communists successor organization, the ICC, uh, which used the term decadence for this. So automatically, it just talking about this as a decadence theory strikes most people who aren't in the ultra-left in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, even as off. We've already talked about that multiple times, but I do think we have to deal with it. Although was was basically arguing against you know what other groups like the various neo-kowskiists and a lot of Trotskyist-Leninists would say we would call it economism, right? Negative economism as opposed to positive economism or Bernsianism. So negative economism sometimes comes up with accelerationism, but it's a theory where breakdown theory is another one. Uh, you see, uh, you know, people like Kuhn who repopularized Henrik Grossmann and Ted Reese, who's kind of picked it up after that, are big on breakdown theory. But Offibun argued that this was just an excuse used by various left groups to to um deal with why the revolution hadn't happened yet. Just like the mysterious why has a revolution happened the way we predicted question, which I almost and I think god, it would have been almost 15 years ago now, where I was gonna write an article called 15 ways of looking at a lack of revolution, of which I included like most of the malice stuff too, like labor aristocracy one, they didn't do it, labor aristocracy two, the west didn't do it, labor aristocracy three, whitey didn't do it, etc. etc. etc. And believe it or not, I think there's actually some merit to every one of the theories, which tells you that they don't really explain much. If I can find a reason to defend all of them, um and this is one of them. The other thing that that they said is it is that the capitalism we didn't do need do much about it because it would automatically corapse. This was the normal critique of breakdown theory that you hear throwing at grow grossmanites. So the the this essay traces this back to the end of the second and then to the third internationals, and it really plays a lot in in volume one on the forces of production and relations of production, as interpreted by Lenin and Luxembourg, to mean that capital after 1914, which is weird that it's a date that has to do with the world war, but you know, when we talk about our socialism, our barbarism stuff, 1914 has to come up over and over again. That's when we chose barbarism and not socialism, in so much that any choosing was to be had, and most decadent theorists hold it after this point capitalism has become a fetter in human progress and no longer has a progressive character, which also may agree with, but not for economist reasons. Um then goes on to critique the objective seemingness of these ideas since they keep on making predictions that are wrong, which also fair, they sure as hell did, and we'll get to some specific ones, and thus they downplay the importance of revolutionary subjectivity and building consciousness amongst the working class, and then they also pick on traditional decadence theories, which assume the goal of socialism is just to unleash the productive forces that capitalists are just stifling, yeah. And offibung almost sounds like proto-de-growthers in this, although I will get to how theory communists and some other left communists responded to them in the beginning. Now that's the broad summary so that we don't go through line by line. I'm now gonna summarize parts two and three very, very fast. Parts one had to do it broke it down into the following categories. Okay, they talked about Trotskyists and left communist, they kind of left malice out of it because I get the feeling that the Alfibum guys don't consider malice Marxist. Oh yeah. And the reason why is new democracy and the and like the idea that the peasantry was the most revolutionary class, they would, you know, to quote William Bowlman of all people, that that's Mao pouring acid on the bones of Marx.

SPEAKER_02 13:10

Jeez. I mean, and also there's like some seriously class collaborationist aspects to Maoism that are I don't know, just very hard to reconcile with Marxism.

Regrettable Jason 13:25

Sure, but it is kind of odd that if you like, I just did this, just did like a search, like a control F on the parts one and two, and the word China and the word Mao just don't occur at all. Nope. Yeah, yeah. Which is funny because like I I I remembered this, but I didn't I didn't mean it, I didn't think it was literally the case. It's not just that they act like that's not really Marxism, it's like they act like that doesn't exist.

C. Derick Varn 13:56

Yep, which is weird, yeah. Since by 94, so I mean the 90s are when China neoliberalizes the most extensively, even China defensists like Adam Tus and Jason Hinkle have been pointing that out recently, and they're they actually sound like Dung Ping Han on um on on Dong Ping Han on Dung now, which is uh dung was actually a really big regression, which is interesting because I'm wondering if they're sounding that way. Is that because the Xi's government is about the toner on dung? I don't know. But it'll be interesting to see.

SPEAKER_02 14:42

So um yeah, that's that that will be interesting to see. I I can't imagine what that would gain J politically, but you know, I'm not as familiar with the inner workings of you know, I I guess there was supposedly a coup attempt on Xi recently.

C. Derick Varn 15:00

Yeah, that does not seem to be the case, but it does not, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:04

It sounds like he did he did purge some generals though.

C. Derick Varn 15:07

Yeah, but I I will say this about G speculation, Twitter's becoming a wild place for it, and even I've been fooled by people sharing stuff, and they're asking Chinese speakers if it has any basis in them going no. And I don't just mean anti-Chinese, I also mean pro-Chinese, like supposedly China was gonna stop investing in Israel. That didn't happen. It was based off of uh of a misreading of a lawsuit by an Israeli company that the that produced no evidence for the claim. So it wasn't totally made up, but it wasn't what people were saying.

Regrettable Jason 15:43

I think it's is it was a big case of that's definitely what people wanted to be the case. Hell, even I wanted it to be the case. Yeah, I also want that to be the case in like Denmark and in Turkey and in everywhere, right?

C. Derick Varn 16:01

So in the first part of the off-heaping I said, they talk about the influence on on left communists, which they say that this theory of decadence tended to reduce their political activity to purely propagandizing the decadence of capital and standing aloof and waiting for economic chaos to make the working class receptive to their message. And I will say that I don't know that left communists do that much after the 1970s, so maybe there's a point here. It seems like to me, all I see them do is argue with each other and not even with the with other Marxists who they will just call the less of capital and not even engage with. So um uh and then Trotskyists, who, while involved in day-to-day struggles, uh still operate on the assumption that capitalism was in the death agony, and I find that interesting too, because I think that would have been true in '94, and it would have been true for a lot of the Trotskist groups that kind of fizzled out in the 80s. It was not true for the Cliffites. Yeah. And I wonder if there is a point to the fact that you know, I don't know, for some reason I've been trying to figure out why did the British Trotskyists come to America and like survive here when all the American Trotskyist groups pretty much they didn't die, but they they stagnated to the point of like almost non-relevance in the or they just turned into tankies groups, yeah. Yeah, or well, I mean, that's how they got relevance again.

SPEAKER_02 17:29

Like with you remember the you remember the 90s and or sorry, the 30s and slow motion thing?

Regrettable Jason 17:35

The 1990s are gonna be the 1930s and slow motion, yeah. And I don't remember whose formulation that was. I I feel like it was Michael Kidron, who's in the uh in the ISC in the British SWP. And I don't remember what his argument was.

C. Derick Varn 17:50

That was wrong. Yes, in fact, I can't even figure out what fucking element of society would that even be parallel to.

Regrettable Jason 18:00

No, the 1990s was the biggest explosive growth of capitalist production everywhere. Because well, yeah, because of the neoliberalism of China, the opening up of a whole huge, I mean a fifth of the earth's surface to new investments, and major extraction from both the former Soviet sector and Africa, yeah, like complete looting of the the former uh eastern bloc by western corporations. Yeah, it turns out that it was actually the exact opposite of what they said it was, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 18:40

Although somewhat consistent with weirdly, with both Kotsky's super imperialism and Lenin's imperialism, you wouldn't think it could be consistent with both, but it is, in that you saw you saw imperialists cooperate with each other to cannibalize the former Soviet Union, and then also that create a boom in markets, even though trade with the Soviet Union was never particularly high. But I still get why this would make sense if you're looking at Trotsky as talking about capitalism's immediate death agony because they're just repeating the transitional program predictions by Trotsky, like like they're whipping themselves to it and wearing a hair shirts.

Regrettable Jason 19:52

And yeah, it's funny because I think a lot of people they kind of forget or else they don't know that the transitional program is is the the name of a document, and its formal name is the death agony of world capitalism. Yeah, that's what it's called. The entire I first of all, I like the idea even, but it's predicated upon an a prediction, a conception, a method of analysis which turned out to be just not true, just turned out to be wrong. And uh Trotsky wrote that, you know, when he was alive. He he didn't write it afterward. So uh oh yeah, so it's been a long time since it turned out to be incorrect, like a very, very long time.

C. Derick Varn 20:33

So it's interesting that you have the various breakdown theories that come out that come about Kotsky's, Luxembourg's, and Lenin's Bernstein's initially a breakdown sterist, then he becomes uh a different kind of economistic thinker, which is the evolutionist. But weirdly, they're both actually forms of a common of economism. Lenin's I I think not actually as economistic as this article accuses him of being, but I don't really want to go into all that today. I do think Luxembourg is though. What they think is ironically, the breakdown theory allowed for reformism to flourish because socialists felt like they could just you know wait and do reforms while capitalism just fucked itself.

Regrettable Jason 21:19

And ironically, that would even make a little bit of sense if they didn't also then manage austerity regimes when capitalism started to slow down.

Breakdown Theory And Economism Critiqued

C. Derick Varn 21:29

I was about to say, then they actually do manage the austerity regimes themselves, see Hilfording as finance minister and having to be saved by Mac, who was later on become a Nazi. So I you know, good luck on all that. So that's theory one. That's that's kind of my summary of part one. I'm gonna summarize part two, where we get into what I call keeping score with the ultra-left, or I'm more ultra than you, haha. And they go on socialism or barbarism, particularly on Cornelius Castoratis. And they do like that that SRB like tried to deal with the fact that capitalists had managed to stabilize the economic crisis through Keynesianism. But they said that SRB, in rejecting the idea of economic laws altogether, which also people like Barron and Sweezy kind of did too with their monopoly capital, like claiming that we no longer lived in an era where the business cycle was gonna matter, was wrong, and it meant. Of class analysis, which I actually do see with socialism or barbarism. Socialism or barbarism goes weird in a thousand ways. I mean, it kind of leads to left populism, it leads to negationism, which is all the people who decided that the popular front was bad, therefore the reason for the popular front was bad, therefore, no Holocaust.

SPEAKER_02 23:07

Socialism or barbarism being the group discussing the uh yeah, which I don't think we've we've we haven't mentioned them in you know six months at this point. So just to anchor what we're talking about here.

C. Derick Varn 23:18

Not because it's a French group of ultra-leftists who were a mixture of like Council Communists and Trotskyists, I think. Right. Um initially, yeah.

Regrettable Jason 23:27

That was uh that was um Sartre's foray into Marx. No, I don't know if it was his first one, but he was a part of it for a while.

C. Derick Varn 23:35

He was yeah, he he went through there before I think ending up in more consistently Maoist circles. I think their most famous person is Cornelius Casaradas, and then the people who ended up around like Moof and Laclow later on. Yeah, then there's the situationist of Corfati Bonlightsky de Boer, or what did they say? He resuscitates the subjective spirit of Marx, which I'm like, okay, whatever.

Regrettable Jason 24:04

I mean, I I to a certain extent, I kind of think that's it's not entirely true, but it's it's it's it's kind of true, actually.

C. Derick Varn 24:19

S I is attributed, at least in this in this essay, of saying that the proletariat would not revolt because of poverty, but because of alienation and boredom, and then you know, attributed that to the society of spectacle. Avim jumps in on that and says that the revolution is a negation of the system, not merely a more efficient way of running factories, but then doesn't really explain why the spectacle would do this. And I don't think they I don't think off Hebim believes it will either, but the situationists did, and it didn't make a lot of fucking sense.

Regrettable Jason 25:00

Right. I do think that the situationists did think so, and I do think that's incorrect.

SPEAKER_02 25:08

Yeah. Or a local local situationist defender has weighed in authoritatively on how they were incorrect.

Regrettable Jason 25:16

I think that um if the PCF was a better organization, which with which made room for people like the situationists, and if the board was less intolerant and sectarian, then situationist critique which was a kind of sort of a revival of, but a one-sided revival of the subjective because I do I do agree with that. I actually think that could have been really, really useful.

C. Derick Varn 25:46

But instead there is so much in society and spectacle, and particularly on comments on society of spectacle, that are useful if someone had developed it properly, but none of the situationists did. They all went off and did weird shit.

SPEAKER_02 26:01

Yeah, uh like Raoul Vanigum became a like right winger, right?

Regrettable Jason 26:05

Yeah, kind of he kind of became an anarchist, which also didn't make it allow him to be kind of a right winger, but still maintain his like overarching critique because he's libertarian in his ethic, which is right, sort of right wing.

SPEAKER_02 26:20

Anarchism means you just do whatever you want, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 26:23

Yeah, that form of anarchism, anyway. Yeah, and I I feel like the rest of the situation's ended up doing art shit, frankly. Yeah, I think most of that's true.

Regrettable Jason 26:38

Most of them kind of just like disappear from political life, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 26:42

We get into operismo and autonomia in part two, which disengages with Tronti and Negri. Tranti is always to me the more interesting of the two because negri becomes associated with those obtuse after. We're gonna use postmodern language to just be less populist, and you yeah, and our theory is actually vague as fuck, and actually just maybe even a little bit like a dumber form of classical new new democracy Maoism, but we're not even gonna say that because we're gonna use really fucking obtuse ass words to yeah, you can tell how I feel about Hart and Negra's book. Um, you guys read what which one did you read? Empire or Multitude? Uh I've never read Multitude, but I've read Empire a few times even. Well, Empire is crazy to me because it's like it was it was on the fucking New York Times bestseller list, and it's and its actual content can be summed up in like two pages.

SPEAKER_02 27:39

What's funny is we you know, in the academy, as a historian, when you're reading Marxist uh historiography, they uh include Hart and Negri in that with and I don't think they have anything to offer uh in Marxist historiography at all. And I don't know why they are they're included there.

C. Derick Varn 28:03

I I guess maybe because it was a big book, but I'm like Hart and Negri were like the even more obtuse form of Muffin Laclau, which is basically just left populism forever, right? Um they like operismo because they like the re-insistence that class struggle comes first and the end of substitutionism. And they like that the that operismo and autonomia like did not think that capitalism declining on its own would drive the system in a crisis, but the workers had to push it into crisis. But that's about all that they really get out of that. And this actually starts to sort of you know, you can tell that off he won't be proto-communization because communizers tend to like use high Hegelian speech, but actually just to classically borrow from like different Marxist traditions that they like, but without you know making them actually make sense together. My favorite is in Endnotes, which takes a shit ton from uh analytical Marxism, but they're totally speaking in a Hegelian framework, right?

SPEAKER_02 29:16

It's like wow, that's dialectical.

C. Derick Varn 29:23

And then they talk, then they turn on Ernst Mandel, who was kind of you know, late capitalism been the book in the 70s, which asserted this.

Regrettable Jason 29:31

And uh again, and he never changed, he's never deviated deviated from that.

Ultra Left Feuds And 1990s Growth

C. Derick Varn 29:37

No, but again, Mandel was right about what happened in the 70s, it just didn't seemingly portend the end of capitalism. And then our favorite, our favorite council communist Grossmanite, Paul Maddock Sr. comes up and he gets resuscitated in the 1970s from his work in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. And Afibon likes Maddox more than they like Mandel because Maddox was more sophisticated, but of course they both have mechanical views of law and capital, where capital act upon upons a worker instead of being a product of social relations, and they basically imply that that Mandel and Maddox are both just like early Stalinists as opposed to 50s late Stalinist, which you know they don't say that, but they imply it. Okay, this gives me the part three, and then I'll then we can talk about this a little bit before we move on. Okay, part three the go after my boy Halil TikTon. Oh a whole lot of part three is dedicated to particular to critiquing Halil Tikton in particular, and particularly the critique journal. Tikton argued that capitalism had either a period of decline where the law of value was partially suspended, but had not been replaced by socialism, leading to a zombie state of permanent crisis and waste. Which yeah, fucking what's incorrect about this? Uh I mean, the the law of value isn't I I think the only thing I would reject to is the law of value is not partially suspended, but oh sure, sure, sure. But I would say this like we live in we live in a time of crisis and race where the law of value has been mitigated by overfocusing on one counter tendency or another, and that's another thing we have to talk about. Like the reason why we're not in neo-feudalism is because you still have to have production for all of it to work and you don't eat off of a bite. But I do and and the amount of land rents increased, but not dramatically. But I do think that there is some truth to the idea, though, that capitalism, because of low profit rates on traditional commodities, has tried to leverage profitability through other means, mostly by using rents and IP law. So I think that's true. I just I just don't think it's a new form of production.

SPEAKER_02 32:08

So when it comes to the industry that's keeping the world economy afloat right now, you know, like AI and advanced tech, they're attempting to suspend the law of value in order to keep us all afloat, but you know, eventually that's all going to come collapsing in.

C. Derick Varn 32:25

It's already showing severe signs of weakness.

SPEAKER_02 32:29

Yeah. So that'll be fun for everyone. Um absolutely.

C. Derick Varn 32:34

By the way, also, I mean, my MMT friends who don't think the the the bond market matters, that we could just you know ignore it. Bond markets how how currency has value outside of your own country, and it when you don't have a hard commodity backing it, which I think people are just now realizing. And when that goes away, MNT conditions don't exist anymore either. Yeah, because you actually have to start making sacrifices to pay your debts, since your debts are uh fucking what 33% of gross GDP or something. I don't know. I need to look that up before I say it. People have caught called me out on overstating our numbers or not contextualizing them. Well, like when we were talking about we were all talking about GDP between Ireland and the UK, and people are like, the UK's GDP is fine, and I'm like, no, it's not, and then they're like, Well, we you know, it's that this much more than Ireland. I'm like, adjust for population because I forgot to say it was per capita GDP.

SPEAKER_02 33:41

But anyway, GDP is largely not completely useless, but there are so many mitigating factors that we're uh I just a surface level look at the comparing GDPs is not a useful way to really determine the productivity of a country at all.

C. Derick Varn 34:02

No, but even then, like like you have you do have to look at per capita for productivity because of course large countries are gonna have more production. Although the UK is not that large, Ireland's just that small.

SPEAKER_02 34:15

But but you have to adjusting for purchasing power parity makes it like more useful, but they don't do that in mainstream economic economics generally.

C. Derick Varn 34:27

No, they also don't separate GDP from productive, to just it there's no difference between stuff that generates profits and stuff that moves revenues around, right? They're both treated the same way, which actually makes it even more impressive that people argue against the decline of the rate of profit the fall when you look at GDPs continue to decline relative, even with that bullshit. Yeah, so that should tell you something that they can't even hide it completely with the way we do accounting now.

Regrettable Jason 35:00

Um yeah, I I kind of can understand why, in the long period of explosive capitalist growth in the post-war era, why people might say, Oh, maybe there's this uh tendency the rate of profit to decl to fall. I can see why they might uh question it by the 1970s, certainly by the 1990s, I feel like it's just I I don't understand it anymore. And the fact that there still are people who who are unsure about this, but they call themselves Marxists. Like, I just I don't understand that.

C. Derick Varn 35:39

Well, I mean we also have to remind ourselves that communization in this part of the ultra-left is only half Marxist. Like when we get like half people's from the Marxist end, but like communization includes like the invisible committee and right and those were anarchists, kinda.

Regrettable Jason 36:04

Like they weren't Marxists at all. In all but name, that's definitely true.

C. Derick Varn 36:12

So I mean the series concludes in an interesting way. I mean, if we go to the end of part three, which I'll just go into, and then we can talk a little about this, and I'll talk about some of the responses I looked up to this too. I'm just gonna there's some there's some slander on Prabahinsky and Trotsky, but I'll I'll read that. As long committed pro uh Trotskyists, there's no problem for Tikton for identifying socialism with planning. Indeed, in restating classical Marxism and developing the contradictions between planning and the anarchy of the market, Tikton drew heavily on the works of Prabahinsky, who, alongside Trotsky, was a leading theoretician of the last opposition in the 1920s. Prabahinsky, who would Bukharin actually wrote the Bolshevik program in 1918. So remember this, who was first developed the distinction between the law of planning, the law of value, as two competing principles of economic regulation, and the period of transition from capitalism to socialism. I think it's interesting that everybody fucking dropped that. Yeah, like I don't know anybody who maintained that, but anyway, uh, this is the basis of the distinction that Probahinski developed. The argument of the left opposition for the rapid development of a heavy industry at the expense of living standards of the working class and the peasantry. Because the left opposite to remind people, the left opposition wanted to outstalin Stalin on the peasantry.

SPEAKER_02 37:41

Well, when it comes to collectivization, you mean?

C. Derick Varn 37:43

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, totally things so poorly for Stalin. So imagine how if you want to even go faster than Stalin wanted to go. Arguments that were later used to put put into practice after the liquidation of the left opposition was starting. For radical chains, which is a group that I didn't even talk about because they don't exist anymore, adopting the notion that we are a period of capitalist decline and consequence transition to socialism, in which the principal contradictions between the law of value and the law of planning is far more problematic. As part of the radical change project, is their attempt to reject traditional politics of the left, particularly that of Leninism. This is made clear in the articles, The Hidden Political Economy of the Left, where they resolutely stress the importance of self-activity of the working class and attack on Leninist notions of passivity of the working class that need to be externally imposed discipline. Yet this is there undermined by their adherence to the good Marxism of Ticton. As a result, we find we we find that when pressed on the question of planning, radical change positions become so slippery and highly ambiguous. Their way of vindicating planning is virtually to identify it with self-emancipation. Now, I find this all I'm reading this because I want to remind everyone of this. I find this all weird that planning is the primary focus. Because one, we live in a fucking economy that's capitalist and planned. Yeah. Like it's weird. And it was heading this way, I think, around the nine, around the middle of the 90s. So I this is this feels like a particularly dated argument, but also like who is arguing that we don't do planning under Keynesian regimes.

Regrettable Jason 39:22

Yeah, I've never encountered that that argument.

C. Derick Varn 39:26

Right?

Regrettable Jason 39:27

In fact, I I always I've always encountered it as being proof that it's actually just socialism.

C. Derick Varn 39:36

Right, which it isn't, but yeah, of course it's not.

Regrettable Jason 39:39

Like, you know, like I I've definitely I remember like I've had this arguments with like young Americans for liberty, which I don't know if it still exists, but this is during back in college.

C. Derick Varn 39:50

They're probably part of turning point USA now.

Regrettable Jason 39:52

So yeah, probably.

C. Derick Varn 39:53

But you know, they would basically say, well, listen, but you know, Keynes and his, you know, they they really did they talked about John Manor Keynes as like a principal theorist of socialism in the in the 20th century, which I just thought was like the height of fucking ignorance, but yeah, however, a whole lot of socialists kind of believe that because Keynesian hybrid hybrid Marxists like Doug Henwood exists, and who knows about how many countless fucking MNT hybrid Marxists there are.

SPEAKER_02 40:25

So I think young uh Americans for Liberty in 2016 folded into like young Americans for Hitler, and then like they dissolved, and then now the the void has been filled by TPU aspect. Yeah, so do you remember when all the libertarians turned into fucking pseudo-fascists?

C. Derick Varn 40:41

When Trump came to uh yeah, during the when Stefan Molyneux became a hypernationalist all of a sudden, I don't remember. Pepper Farm remembers that was a fucking decade ago now, too.

Planning, Law Of Value, And MMT

SPEAKER_02 40:51

It's I know it's so wild. The first time we did a podcast was in 2016, I think. Our old podcast. Is that right? Talk about decadent.

C. Derick Varn 41:03

I've been podcasting in some form since 2012. So it's right after Occupy.

SPEAKER_02 41:08

That's wild. That is wild. I don't think I even listened to a podcast until like much later than that.

Regrettable Jason 41:15

I don't think I even encountered the concept of a podcast until like 2015 or 16.

C. Derick Varn 41:19

I was a podcaster early because I hated regular media that much, and so I was listening to podcasts like when you had to download them individually under your iPod.

SPEAKER_02 41:29

I remember doing that in like I don't know, when I was still in the ISO, so it had to have been before 2013. So I probably 2008-9. Remember downloading individual podcasts.

C. Derick Varn 41:39

Yeah, that's when I got into it. I was I was a teacher at the time, and I could hold like 20 of them on my on my iPod shuffle or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 41:49

Yeah, um, anyway.

C. Derick Varn 41:54

Um all right. Last part in place of conclusion. I think it's interesting because I now knowing this written in '94, because I remember when I read these, I'm like, what's this fucking weird part about radical chains? Who the fuck are they? And now I'm like, oh, I don't know the far left com groups in Britain in the in the 90s. Like, why would I because it's like 200 people involved in that at most?

SPEAKER_02 42:23

So that's generous, I think.

C. Derick Varn 42:25

Yeah. Anyway, in place of a conclusion, as capitalism in decline, yes, but okay, I can see why you wouldn't think so in 1994. Come in terms of the theories of capitalist decline have evolved coming to terms with Marxism. One essential aspect of Marx's critique of political economy was to show how relations of capitalist society are not national, are not natural and eternal. Rather, he showed how capitalism was in a transitory mode of production. Capital displays itself as transitory, its negation is within, and there is a movement to abolish it. However, the theory of decline is not for us. It focuses on the decline as a period within capitalism and identifies the process of going beyond capital with changes in the forms of capital rather than struggle against them. Decline cannot be seen as an objective period of capitalism, nor can the progressive aspect to capital be seen as an earlier period now past. The progressive and decadent elements of capital have always been united, which actually this part I think is true. Capitalism has always involved a decadent negative process of commodification of life by value. It also has involved the creation of universal class and opposition, rich in needs, and the ultimate need for a new way of life beyond capital. In fact, that last part may be what I'm actually somewhat disagree with. I do think there's a there's a class. I'm not sure that that class is universal anymore. The problem with Marxist orthodoxy is to see clock capitals doomed not in collective forms of organization or struggle of the proletariat, but in the form of uh capitalist socialization, of which is an interesting problem that comes up again and again. I've even seen some people bring this up in Marxist unity group that like monopoly capital socializes labor. And I'm like, not anymore, it doesn't. Like, that's just not true now. It imposes a linear evolutionary model and a shift from capitalism with communism. The revolutionary movement towards communism involves Russia, theoration decline of the capitalism misses by identifying with aspects of capital, as Panicuk pointed out, the real account of the real decline of capital is the self emancipation of the working class. Okay, so I when you read that conclusion, you think I agree with this essay. But I actually do think it it tends to be a little bit too optimistic about what capitalism can do. But that made sense in 1915. Because it looked like you had Keynesian manage the crisis, Keynesianism manage the crisis that emerged in the early 20th century until the 60s. Then you had neoliberalism emerge to bring back proposition profits in the late 70s, which it did do, even if those profits were meager.

SPEAKER_02 45:08

And it and it was cannibalizing the basis upon which all previous profits had been built.

C. Derick Varn 45:14

Correct. Thus making Hilfrieding's declarations of finance capital in the early 20th century seem to be true in the late 20th century. And that you know that there is periodic restructurings in capitalism, which I think is true. What I don't think is true, however, is like that doesn't mean the decline of the rate of profits to fall isn't real, and it doesn't mean we are in a decadent period of capitalism. Even in the 90s, like what you know, what was capitalism doing in the 90s, you know, even though it was a highly profitable area, and it's like IP Wall.

SPEAKER_02 45:56

Well, looting, looting, and moving around profits to make profits more profitable, right?

Regrettable Jason 46:03

And it's kind of like what what is now being called by some people uh neo-feudalism.

C. Derick Varn 46:10

Yeah, it's kind of like hey, that's always been a structural thing of capitalism, at least going back to the early 20th century, when Bukharin was writing about monopoly capital in 1910 or whatever.

Regrettable Jason 46:21

I mean, there's a reason why um Lenin referred to he's he called imperialism the latest stage, or what people call now the or people translate as the highest stage of capitalism. That's whenever the globe is covered, there's nowhere else to go. That's you know, that's it. Every single theory about the expansion of capital and the the whatever is all about the restructuring of existing modes of extraction and the and the declining rate of profit and the declining and the downward pressure on wages. There were brief attempts to like restructure everything, and they kind of work a little bit for a little while, but because of the declining rate of profit, they don't work for very long.

SPEAKER_01 47:08

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 47:12

I think what we're seeing actually, if you look at these kinds of restructurings of capital, they they seem to be becoming harder and harder to do. Yeah, neoliberalism in one country seems to just be accelerating decline. Like, and that's what post-neoliberalism apparently is, is like I mean it is funny that I'm like, okay, so so now our great debate is not whether or not socialism in one country or international socialism, it's now and how to do international socialism, it's now capitalism in one country or not.

Regrettable Jason 47:48

Yeah, like we have to have tariffs on everybody, so we um hopefully they remove all their production back here, but we can't tell them what to do, and also it's not doing that at all, it's actually accelerating the decline of our own production, like yeah, exactly transparently it's doing the exact opposite because you know you have to have a let's call it a nationalist industrial program if you want to encourage and or force production back into your into your heartland. Ironically meaning a different the different management style that right none of the ruling class wants would allow.

C. Derick Varn 48:25

You know what, you know, you know what rational Trumpism is? The Biden administration's policy between 2021 and 2023. Um and I know that's gonna piss a lot of people off to say that, but it is. It was trying to reassure slowly with an actual developmental program, blah de blah de blah. It was still at the expense of working class, by the way. Which is why all these, you know, everybody becoming we're gonna do China smokestack socialism in America is like you dipshits, you live in a decayed capitalist form, it's not a it's not an early capitalist form. Like those aren't the same thing.

Regrettable Jason 49:04

China by rational by by actual Trumpism, I it's really more like if Steve Bennin was somebody who did more than just say the words economic nationalism, he would be advocating for a program similar to that pursued by the Biden administration. Because the actuality of Trumpism is that it is just I mean, it's it's literally the same thing as it's looter's capital, yeah. It's just it's looters capital, that's it.

SPEAKER_02 49:31

Right, so like you know, China industrialized by through proletarianizing its peasantry and you know basic primitive accumulation, essentially, right? Yeah, and we we can't do that here, you know, it's ridiculous.

Regrettable Jason 49:47

Ray, that that's already been done here, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:51

Yeah, it was done here a hundred fucking years ago. Um started longer than that ago, you know. 150 years ago is when we began that process. 100 shit.

C. Derick Varn 50:02

Basically, and then right up to the civil war is when they just started. Exactly, yeah. That's when our bourgeois revolution actually fucking finished. Yeah, if there is such a thing as a bourgeois revolution, ours finished both economically and politically with the civil war.

Revolutions, Nationalism, And Uneven Development

SPEAKER_02 50:20

Like anyway, which is I've been reading for my I've been reading for my PhD comps, and a lot of a lot of the stuff that I was assigned to read for nationalism is about how the bourgeois revolutions are all fake.

Regrettable Jason 50:33

Yeah, I mean I think that's I don't think that's true.

SPEAKER_02 50:36

I don't think so either, but I don't think it's as cut and dry as you know, very rigid sort of conceptions of revolution that like but like the uh the vulgar materialist conception of revolution brings up in that way, but a like growing undialectical vision of the revolution from the second internationalist and Soviet Soviet Stalin era Soviet real bad at it, yeah.

Regrettable Jason 51:03

But like the the idea that the bourgeois revolution is completed by the by the conclusion of the civil war in the United States, that's also like the position of fucking Karl Marx. Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 51:18

I also think the bourgeois, I mean, here's the thing like we didn't, I mean Arno Meyers write, for example, that that we didn't get rid of our fucking aristocracy in Europe in most places until the end of World War II. And and even then, like in the places where capitalism started, you still have aristocracy that's pre-capitalist, like UK still's got all kinds of pre-liberal shit, as due with the next thing. Right now, yeah, although the one would ever argue that capital doesn't rule there, though. Well, what's weird is there are debates in the 70s to say Britain was particularly backward in the mid-20th century because of this. These are the other Brenner debates, which I didn't know about. And and then you left review in the in the 70s. So yeah, people have tried to argue it.

SPEAKER_02 52:18

I mean, there were elements of the British economy that were backward, like if they're they the way that they organized their countryside was like semi-feudal, still, you know.

Regrettable Jason 52:28

Wow, so it's it's almost like they were the it was like combined and uneven like development. Yeah, I wonder if there was yeah, somebody should write it about that sometime.

C. Derick Varn 52:37

Yeah, well, here's the thing is people always think combined and uneven development like ends at nation national borders, which is right. I'm like, are you stupid?

SPEAKER_01 52:46

Have you been to the southeast and then been to like like Seattle?

Regrettable Jason 52:52

I mean, yeah, exactly. The whole the whole point, the whole purpose of that as a as a theoretical construct, that the com the that the destructure of capitalist production productive and uh distributive relations, because of imperialism, are already done.

C. Derick Varn 53:13

So, like there's a combined uneven development of capitalism and the so much would have gone better if Otto Bauer had won the nationalism debate.

Regrettable Jason 53:23

Absolutely, it's good, but like that's that's the theory behind permanent revolution is that because of combined uneven development, you will never complete your bourgeois revolution until there's a proletarian revolution. And I think that's a good thing. Yeah, well, people don't know what permanent revolutionary means.

C. Derick Varn 53:38

Yeah, they think it means revolution forever, which is not what it means.

Regrettable Jason 53:41

It's it doesn't mean that at all. It just means that you cannot have the revolution, then you have the period of bourgeois development, and then at some point later on you have the next revolution. That's all it means. And that's just that's undeniable, I think. Anyone who thinks otherwise, I just think doesn't really think about revolution, other than just that it seems cool.

C. Derick Varn 54:04

Or it's something that you do to na to liberate your nation, which I'm like, yeah, sure. But also like, no. The I I think the word revolution has too many meanings now, and even in Marxist time, it's kind of confusing because when we talk about revolutions of modes of production, often they aren't political at all. Right. Um they're not obviously political, the pol the political comes later.

Regrettable Jason 54:30

Right. I think to give it to have a proper understanding of this, we have to think of the bourgeois revolution as both the political shifts that happened that start to happen in like the late 1500s and the industrial, what we call the industrial revolution, which starts to happen even earlier, or certainly whatever these they both happened and those are both together. What we might call the bourgeois revolution, and neither well, in the political case in England, it's still not fucking complete. And it will never be complete until you know what we call socialism. That's that's my lingering. I don't think I'll ever let that go completely. Uh my my lingering Trotskyism. It's just never gonna go away. Forever post-trotskyist. Yeah. No matter how many posts you add to it, there's always Trotskyist at the end. Post post, post-post, post-trotskyist. Or you know, as an eco-Stalinist, I'm a post-trotskyist. As a I'm a post-trotskyist, reformed Titoite.

C. Derick Varn 55:43

I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 55:44

Yeah, I don't I don't think any of this those are all that that's all that shit that we just said is all fake. None of it means anything.

Regrettable Jason 55:51

None of that shit actually means anything at all.

C. Derick Varn 55:53

I was about to say I still go by this observation by Matt McNair that you can find Trotskyists and Maoists who agree on more than you can find between Maoist and Maoist and Trotskyist and Trotskyist, and that oh sure, and that Trotskyist and Maoist on both sides of literally every debate, right? And and more so today that when you find diehard non-Mooist Marxist Leninist, you're meeting people who like don't even know what that means. Oh, I talked to a MMT Christian Marxist Leninist who's like Stalin's views are vindicated by Michael Hudson, and I'm also a Christian. I'm like, you're an idiot. Like, like you believe in completely well, actually, I shouldn't say idiot. That's wrong. You have worked yourself into the ability to compartmentalize your theories that because they vibe similarly, you believe that they're the same thing, right? I Stalin would have had you shot, but you know, I don't know what else to tell you. I mean, every now and then you do. I mean, most of the most of the Marxist Leninists I meet who are serious Marxist Linists and that they know what Marxist Linus historically believed, are some weird non-dungist form of Maoist, of which they are they're coming back, but they seem to have gone away for about a decade.

Regrettable Jason 57:22

So yeah, they're coming back as part of this they're the the which you I guess you can call them like the left wing, the left edge of Xi Jinping thought, which is the right edge of it is is left wing Dengism, and the the left wing edge is right wing Maoism.

Microsects, ISO Lore, And Left Fragmentation

C. Derick Varn 57:40

Right. And I wouldn't discuss a lot of it has to do also with sex re-emerging within the DSA as opposed to outside of it, because nothing's been done since the end of the end of 70 sectarian Marxism.

Regrettable Jason 57:57

So honestly, the last really, really crucial, significant potential development in the world of uh Marxism as like a distinct political, whatever, political uh uh phenomenon was the uh the phone call when uh Ernest Mandel calls Tony Cliff and says, at the end of the when the when Yeltsin declares the end of the Soviet Union and uh and and Mandel calls Cliff and says obviously there's no more basis for uh our separation. We need to you know kind of get the whole family back together again. And Tony Cliff says, Yeah, go fuck yourself. That's the end of it. It happens in 1992, it's been a long time, but we we haven't yet figured out we're starting to figure this out, but like it's all different now. Everything's there's no more basis for any of this stuff.

SPEAKER_02 58:57

I remember the old ISO people used to tell that story. Like, listen to how cool Tony Cliff was, and I'm I was always like, what a dickhead, what an idiot.

C. Derick Varn 59:09

Very dumb. Also, weirdly, Tony Cliff, you were able to get over half of the fucking draperites and Shackmanites joining the ISO. That's why the ISO existed. Yes, yes, is it was a split-off from the IS, which was a you know, development of draperites and Shackmanites when the when the left Shackmanites left left that the SPA because his Shackman was too right wing, yeah, and that created the IS tradition in America, which had which was a callback to the independent socialist tradition like in the 30s and 40s. And yeah, it had a cliff like in like correspondence group that became the IS the ISO.

SPEAKER_02 59:58

Well, it they affiliated to the IST, like after they had already been an established or an established sort of draperite organization.

C. Derick Varn 1:00:09

Right. And they were kicked out of the draperites, which is also weird because the draper was not in the draperite organization. Draper wasn't independent three years in because he thought that the IS tradition was already a sect. Yep. It's all very straight. I mean, it's very weird.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:28

I it was always funny reading anatomy of a microsect in the ISO and not being able to like self-reflect at all.

C. Derick Varn 1:00:36

I had when the ISO still existed right before it fell out. I was in America at the time, so it must have been 2017, but right before it's about to completely dissolve. Right. I was doing a speech with the DSA in New Orleans, which I wasn't back before I was in the DSA. Back when I just worked with them, and I'm probably gonna go back to that stance if things don't change, but whatever. Uh, what I was what I remember like ISO people coming to yell at me about Draper and how Draper couldn't do anything, and I was like, Well, you can do shit either. The best you can do is pivot wildly on whether or not you think tailing the Democrats makes any sense. And your organization is what 5,000 people, and apparently it wasn't even that, it was a thousand. Somebody told me the other day they think the CPUSA is 20,000 people, and it was a Trotskyist, and I'm like, I don't believe you.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:26

I think the CPUSA is probably was 5,000 at the beginning of the 2000s, and it's probably since all the old people have died off since then, are probably around like a much less than that. But no, I mean the ISO, the the biggest numbers the ISO ever had at its peak was around 1100. Yeah, yeah, and so I mean, most of the time that we were in the organization, we were we fluctuated between 800 and 800 and 1100.

C. Derick Varn 1:01:54

Yeah, the reason why the ASO seems so much bigger is because they had rule uh like stakes in a historical materialism conference and a history of being affiliated with the IST.

Regrettable Jason 1:02:06

Yeah, which is also having to work very very, very vocal and very loud.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:11

So you could we did the work, each one of us did the work of 10 regular Trotskyists. Yeah, so we saw the papers of 10 Trotskyists.

C. Derick Varn 1:02:23

It's interesting to me because I know so many people came through the ISO and yet ultimately there wasn't that many people in it, which also tells you how many people were getting were just leaving.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:32

Yeah, revolving door the entire time. We were constantly trying to recruit and uh and our branches, depending on the branch that you were in, stayed about the same size, but never ever kept more than a core of cadre for longer than a year or two.

C. Derick Varn 1:02:49

Yeah, let's say my my experience with like I went to I've been I've been going to DSA meetings here since I came back to the States, which is almost like nine years ago now, right? Yeah, and I now that I've joined, there's almost nobody who is under 50. So the people who were who are like elder elders who were like joined in the 80s are still here, but but they have gone through like this entire branch of like 250. They're they they might still be in the organization, but they're not showing up to meetings anymore. Like that's interesting because they're claiming 100,000 members now. Yeah, they probably have a hundred thousand members. Here's what, however, they probably go through 30,000 a year. Yeah, the ISO is a I mean the the DSA is a huge revolving door. Like you know this. Uh oh, sorry, go ahead. No, I I don't believe they're at 100,000. They the which is which it's funny because they're now finally at what they were telling everyone they were almost at right at the beginning of the Biden administration, right? Yeah, they lost 80,000. Yeah, they were at 80,000. They lost 15,000 formally without, and that's in addition to who their normal revolving door attrition rate. But as I told someone, there's probably 400,000 ex DSA people in the United States.

Digital Tankies And Politics As Identity

Regrettable Jason 1:04:15

That's probably true. Like the largest group on the American left is ex-DSA members, just like it used to be ex-ISO members, just like at one point it was XCP members. So earlier, this conversation that we were having about uh what you know, I said something like I'm an eco-Stalinist, reform TOIS, whatever, post-post-post Trotskyist. It was just funny, whatever. It reminded me of an article I read recently. I wanted to read a section of it. It's uh the article is called New Tankies in Digital Neo-Stalinism. Uh it's Europe Solidare Fran Sans Frontierist, but it's this is the this section goes through bioabbreviations like Marxist, Leninist, Zapatista, Titoist, Accelerationist, Georgist, digital militants identify themselves as belonging to one or several left-wing subtendencies, removing any kind of historical geographical context from that identity and ignoring potential ideological contradictions. This type of expression also reflects the fragmentation of the global left, where transformative projects have given way to identities disconnected from concrete experiences of class struggle. And then one more part. The experiences, the experience of America of the American left in particular, is marked by an absence of real expectations of socialist transformation. I just that this is like one of the most it's like it's just so uh extremely uh that's it's just so right on, you know.

C. Derick Varn 1:05:42

Yeah, I'll read I just found this, so I'll read the but I'll link it in the show notes too. The phenomenon of the new tankies is therefore a product of the historical failure of the left. Far from constituting a current movement, they are a cultural expression of aesthetic nostalgia and political resignation. They do not represent as a defense of rear socialist politics, but merely a postmodern provocation against liberal democracies and their hollow promises. I think that feels true to me. Like because these people well, the one thing I'll say is I go on Twitter and you think everybody's a fucking Stalinist in some way now. And I, you know, I don't even think Stalinism's a thing, to be completely honest, but but everyone's like got mustache man emojis.

Regrettable Jason 1:06:24

And I think that Stalinism was a thing back when the term was first coined by Lazar Kaganovich. But it hasn't been a thing in like a very, very long time.

C. Derick Varn 1:06:35

But I mean, I don't like I said, I don't think these Marxist Leninists are any kind of coherent Marxist Leninists either. Like half of them like would get mad. I I remember someone yelling at me was like, You said popular front, that's some Trotskyist. Bullshit. And I'm like, it's literally the opposite of that. Yeah, it's it is literally the opposite of that.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:53

They're not in organizations either. Most of these online Stalinists. They're not in organizations. They don't do activism. They don't do reading groups.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:01

They're are they in the fucking DSA?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:03

Or they're not in the DSA, exactly. Yeah.

Regrettable Jason 1:07:06

Like they're not in Python's unions. They're not in bus drivers' unions.

C. Derick Varn 1:07:13

They're not in the places where you would expect to find the where you would expect, where you should be able to expect to find the No, if they're in unions, they're in like teachers' unions and the CWA, which is by far the largest growth union around here. And maybe if you meet radical nurses, although that's not as likely. I mean, the the thing that I can tell you is like yeah, I work with teachers, so I guess they're PMC or whatever, but like they see Marxists fighting on Twitter with fascists, and they think it's teenagers LARPing. And they don't have any idea what most of the stuff means.

Regrettable Jason 1:07:58

Yeah, sometimes it's really more like 30-year-olds LARPing. Well, I shouldn't say that they're not in pipe footers unions. I'm just saying that they're not that's not that doesn't matter, that's not part of what they think is political.

C. Derick Varn 1:08:15

We I we have seen the CP USA like go back to earlier rhetoric around around Stalin the way the PSL did. But the weird thing is like the PSL, for example, they're not actual orthodox Marxist-Linist, but you don't know that until you're well in the to the organization. Yeah.

Regrettable Jason 1:08:34

Well, and I will I I return to my my my periodic defense of whatever I I'm also not a CP member, but they are you know they they are involved in the the trade unions for for better and for worse, right? They are actually there, and that's but then so is so so is the DSA. Well, yeah, and that's more than you can say for uh much of what we've discussed when it comes to the the sub tendencies, whatever.

C. Derick Varn 1:09:04

No, like the no the ISO was hardly ever involved in unions here, and like the teams outside of Chicago, outside of teachers, the ISO just wasn't.

Unions, Salting, And Strategy In Decline

SPEAKER_02 1:09:14

Yeah, it could be able to access us as in as much as we could, but like you didn't recruit from that though.

C. Derick Varn 1:09:21

I mean, and you couldn't have easily either, because I'm gonna just tell you if you have to have an opinion about what the Soviet Union was in 2007 or whatever, yeah, yes, like if you've you've got shovel-ups about the fucking Soviet Union when you're trying to recruit workers.

Regrettable Jason 1:09:41

Well, yeah, like I I was a I was a member of the Texas State Employees Union, which is a a statewide subset of the CWA, and I did try to recruit from my union. And you know what people told me? I don't have time for this shit.

C. Derick Varn 1:09:56

And so you know what? That's fair. CWA will complain about the new communists who don't have jobs, but who join their ranks as salters? I will say this. I mean, one of the things that I've seen is people locally the lay the one of the reasons why the labor committee went dormant again, again in the DSA is all they could think of doing was salting. And I'm like, how are you gonna salt a down economy? If no, if like if people aren't getting jobs, how are you gonna get them jobs to like and and all you people post all your fucking shit on the internet so they're gonna know who you are? Like, yeah, way before you you show up. Because if you're ideologically dedicated enough to salt, you but you haven't been disciplined to keep your mouth shut for years prior, they're gonna know who you. I mean, like, I was just like, what are you even doing? Like, like, like, why aren't we trying to expand the unions that currently exist as opposed to salt for new ones? Well, I'm not against salting for new ones, but like, as that's the only way you can grow, it means that your growth is really going to be shallow, and then a lot of the people are gonna be disillusioned by by union politics because what you're saying is that union politics is only appealing to places that aren't unionized, because people that are unionized, even though their shop density is like at 30% or less, unions don't have appeal to them. That's what you're actually saying, which seems to me to be a pretty to bring it back to the to what we were talking about at the beginning, decadent position. Yeah, I mean the greatest irony right now is unions have never been more popular and less people in them.

Regrettable Jason 1:11:48

Like I mean, some you some people would would say not entirely unjustly would say that's a not a bad place to be because that means that there's you know potential for growth, yeah. But on the other hand, I don't see anyone adjusting their like strategies around it.

C. Derick Varn 1:12:10

Well, because you'd have to admit that one Starbucks unions are never going to be as much capture as an industrial union, and two, the organic composition of capital, a la Aaron Benev, and Marx himself, and automation means that you don't have large fucking factories to recruit from, which is why all the powerful unions are in the goddamn public sector and are being crushed by the government now, anyway. Yeah, so go fuck yourselves. That's all I have to say about that.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:40

No, um, we should love it. Yeah, speaking of, we do need to wrap up soon.

C. Derick Varn 1:12:46

Okay, we can wrap up. I'm not gonna, I was gonna go through the various critiques. I'm just gonna say this off people themselves before, you know, I think in debates with Theory Communist, which is famous, I guess, for the debates that caused the EndNotes Collective to exist. But Theory Communist saw decadence as a period of clap uh of the cycle of struggle, where the working class saw itself as a positive warfare in capitalism. They pushed off he bund the move towards a theory of communization where the where the revolution is the immediate destruction of the proletarian condition as a whole, but also so no longer any transition, but also this meant for communization theorists an abandonment of the working class as a universal subject. That's where that goes. If you don't get to end notes volume four, a history of separation, what they basically said not only were the bourgeois revolution fakes, but the workers' movement was fake too. Which I just think is false. I'm like, no, there was actually a workers' movement, like yeah, I think that's false.

Regrettable Jason 1:13:58

Also, I think maybe just for anybody listening who's like skepti, whatever I just want to set the record straight about something. We're all, I think, very pro-labor, very pro-union.

C. Derick Varn 1:14:15

I'm in a union, I'm a fucking union rep.

Regrettable Jason 1:14:17

Like it's just that uh when we when we vent our frustrations about the state of the unions and then we laugh, that's like dark humor from a World War I soldier coming back. It's like you we're talking about something that sucks, we're not talking about it as a good thing.

When Modes Of Production Just Fail

C. Derick Varn 1:14:36

You're I'm not a council communist who thinks that we shouldn't be dealing with actually existing labor unions because I think the actual existing labor unions are all we have. Yeah, I also will tell you that they're in a much worse state, though, than what Jacobin magazine will tell you that they're in. Yeah, and that's right. And I actually get very angry with the refusal of you know, American Democratic Socialists to be honest about the leadership and state of the labor union. I think we're actively dishonest about it. Yeah. And I don't know that I would consider myself democratic socialist, but in so much that I am, I guess because I do think democracy is okay and I am a socialist, but but in so much that I am, yeah, it's not, we're not in a great space. All right. Well, I think we're gonna wrap up here. It's not gonna be one of our longer episodes because we started late and everyone's got stuff to do. I think this this this act this essay is interesting to me because while it's a critique of economism and decadence, it has an economistic definition of decadence. And I think it's I think its last three-paragraph conclusion is actually true, but it's too harsh on people who wanted to understand, you know, the internal dynamics of capitalism. Because I can believe that there's internal dynamics of capitalism, but if the working class are some actually, if socialists don't merge with the working class and the workers don't become more aware of their position in history and start taking and start overcoming their sectoral divisions and acting together, I just think things are gonna continue to get worse. And and the thing I remind myself from our for to tie this back to our discussions on No Royal Road before we get into to decadence theory conservative edition, is that you can have a mode of production just fucking fail. Like, and not have a revolution, or the revolution be a long, drawn out, 500-year process because the other because the other mode failed.

Regrettable Jason 1:16:53

Right.

C. Derick Varn 1:16:54

Yes, like you know, like by the time we know what feudalism is and if it even existed, it was already over. Like, yeah, that's what I learned from the quiz wickham stuff.

Regrettable Jason 1:17:07

Like, yeah, I mean the proletarian, if we can say that the proletarian revolution is a is an objectively existing thing, it's the first transition from one mode of production to another mode of production, which is conceived of in advance. It's the first one ever. Yeah, which I think might be one of uh one of our uh problems.

C. Derick Varn 1:17:36

Well, I mean that that is where I think there is a problem here, is that Marx actually, you know, the gambit on socialism is becomes the first self-aware man controlling history as opposed to man stumbling into revolution by accident. And one of the things that I that I've struggled with on this decadence stuff is decadence prompts us a revolution, is it a self-awareness? And then if that's the case, do we have like a like if the economists are right, then we might be in some like shitty 400-year transition into a new mode of production, you know, and and even the techno feudalists are actually are actually optimistic because they can't believe that that capitalism could decay this long and this bad, but of course they're wrong.

Regrettable Jason 1:18:27

Yeah, I think I don't think very many people can accept can can countenance the idea that late capitalism is just a very, very long time.

C. Derick Varn 1:18:36

Yeah, but late feudalism was apparently the longest part of feudalism, again, if feudalism was even a thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:44

Yeah, like it was, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:18:49

So like 900 to like 1300 is late feudalism.

Regrettable Jason 1:18:54

Like it might be the case that 1917, uh you know, way later in history, you know, when I was looking back, we could see 1917 similar to uh the Chompe revolt, in that it was an early, early basically a protocol part of the remote.

C. Derick Varn 1:19:16

Russia is our Florentine Republic, yes, like Soviet Russia's or Florentine Republic. That's kind of depressing, though. It is um because that means we're in for a long haul.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:29

Um we've only we've only got about three or four hundred years of capitalism left. That's all.

Regrettable Jason 1:19:34

Yeah, hell, that's that's more time than we have left to live on this planet at this point because they we have more we have more time for the mode of production to run itself out than we have uh life on the planet Earth.

C. Derick Varn 1:19:46

Well, I mean, this is this is my thing. It's sometimes this is my my eco-socialist bit kicks in, and I'm like, you know, maybe it's the ecology damage that prompts us to for the for the working class to act. And the reason why I I have a friend who's always trying to convince me that they're on honestly, not a Maoist, a libertarian socialist, whatever the fuck that means. That's my favorite. Because it used to be an anarchist, but now it doesn't mean that. But anyway, I think that uh he's always trying to convince me that there's uh there's still a peasantry, and I'm like, well, I mean, there's still agrarian labor, but no, there's not a fucking subsistence peasantry anywhere on the planet of any significant size. Yes, it still exists, but like like even Africa and India are now more urbanized than not.

Regrettable Jason 1:20:39

Um Mike Davis wrote his book uh Planet of Slums, and I think he marked the year 2005 as the first time in history when more people uh lived in an urban environment and worked in some kind of an you know industrial or industrially adjacent sector of society than at any other point in history. It's the very first time whenever agrarian societies became the minority, and that was that was 20 years ago.

Conservative Decadence And Trump’s Contradictions

C. Derick Varn 1:21:13

Yeah, and it's only become more so the case. Yeah, we have returned to 19th century work conditions in that informal and peace labor has replaced formal employment as the dominant node of employment on the planet, even in even if even in becoming that way here, because so many people are contractors now. But I do think I do think that this leads us to an interesting problem. Now, if I was going to make a really long series, I would now say I'm now going to discuss all the answers to the various interpretations of the law of the rate of Prophets to Fall that aren't decadence theory, and that will be the next 50 episodes. Because for those of you who don't see my notes, and the people who see my notes is me, we're about a third of the way through my notes because I took on all the economic responses to this, to not not specifically do this, but like the people who brought up stuff that wasn't included in the off-hubun critique, and that actually quadrupled the size of my notes. So we're not gonna do that today, and probably never gonna do that. It might be a Vong Vlog supplement one day. Uh, who knows? But we're gonna start talking about the conservative view of decadence because in reading some of these post-liberal decadence books, I have been led to an observation made by Christopher Lash in 1987 in his debates in Takun magazine, where he said, for the working class, the left often is in denial of the problems that the working class has, and the right acknowledges them but gives bullshit answers. And I have been very much, particularly in like watching someone like Ross Dunhat and stuff, celebrate Trump, the very manifestation of every condition of decadence that he is writing about in his book on decadence. Like, I mean, you know, these are people who talk about renewing western civilization by I don't know, legalizing gambling and prediction markets and shit.

Regrettable Jason 1:23:42

Like Donald Trump is like he's the guy who's the at the forefront of legalizing unrestricted gambling.

C. Derick Varn 1:23:53

He's the guy who's talking about who's tagged crypto into the actual formal financial market in such a way that crypto is going to crash.

Regrettable Jason 1:24:01

Right. He's he's he's doing H1Bs, but only for people who do OnlyFans. Donald Trump is the most decadent president, he's the most vice-driven, dominated president that the United States has ever seen.

C. Derick Varn 1:24:15

And the only other one I can think of that's close to him is Warren Harding. That's how far you gotta go back.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:22

Like, and even then, I was like, man, the teapot dome scandal just seems so quaint. Yeah, it really does. Fuck Watergate seems quaint. Wargate seems really quaint compared to the Epstein Files.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:39

Yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:24:41

God, I don't know. The Epstein Files is basically like every disgusting sex thriller that you saw in the 90s about how evil a large part of the ruling class was is apparently true. Yeah, the files.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:57

Um just about every conspiracy theory is partially correct, except for the flat earth one.

C. Derick Varn 1:25:04

Except for although I will admit that one of the unfortunate aspects of the Epstein files is like now everyone is a conspiracy theory about every about everything, including things that are not in there. Well, so yeah, like the number of people who think we're led by satanic cannibals because of the Epstein files. I'm like, there isn't evidence for that other than jokes. And Epstein was a sicko, so his sense of humor was fucked.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:32

I mean, there's there's the allegations, but there is no evidence, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:25:37

And the allegations are in the part that aren't they're in the part that they released because they weren't particularly believing salient. I actually think that they released some of the most ridiculous allegations first, so that people won't be paying attention to the how bad the shit and the rest of the 92% that we don't have access to, apparently. Thank you, UK, because these foreign findings are actually saying how much they're actually holding back. Holy shit. There's sort of like 15 15 terabytes of data on Epstein. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:12

I think that even without even without any of the most outlandish without any of the most outlandish conspiracy theories to come out of it, and the the craziest allegations, you deal still do have oh, a pedophile cabal tied to every intelligence agency of any size on the planet.

C. Derick Varn 1:26:35

Yeah, and like Epstein doesn't seem to have been anyone's agent, but he was an asset for at least four different fucking countries.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:42

So right. I mean, and you know, I don't think we have to even mention who the one he was closest tied to. Yeah, it wasn't us, it wasn't us, and it certainly wasn't Russia.

C. Derick Varn 1:26:54

So if anyone has that idea in their head, they've uh swallowed bullshit propaganda, very the Israelis, then us, then the Gulf states, then the British, then the Russians are implicated too, but they're like number six or seven. Like well and also the Russians, the Russians' ties to this are thin, and back they're also back when the Russians and the Israelis were playing better together, so and they're also not through official channels, no, they're they're through like dissident MPs and the Duma and stuff like that. No, we don't have a handler for for Mossad and Epstein, so we can't say that he was an agent, but we got but we can say it was an asset, and that they bugged his fucking house because Barak was hanging out out over there so much. And I like to remind people that Mahu Barak is on the Israeli center left was great, yeah. Oh he he is uh you know one of the more reasonable genocidal fucking pedophiles that yeah, I was actually telling someone it was it was Sean Kb when I was like there are different versions of Jewish supremacy fighting themselves out in this text, and I hate to say it, but but you guys are so not taught about this, about you know, different visions of of what Israelis think the religious versus the secular, blah blah blah, that you can't even recognize there are multiple different forms of this represented in the Epstein files. And and the secular one is the one that is winning out with Epstein, but it there's actually internal debates going on here, and yeah, it's it's it's gross. I mean. I will say I will say this. I'm not full Zog occupied government, not just because it's a Nazi conspiracy, but I will tell you that I'm closer than I used to be.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:01

I think we all are. We've shifted in our conception of how much pull Israel has over the U.S. government. I don't think it the Israel controls the U.S. government, but I think they have an outsized impact on our foreign policy based on the people that they have bought or blackmailed, I guess.

C. Derick Varn 1:29:27

Also, I'm gonna say this the Gulf states are way more corrupt than I even thought. Uh leave it at that.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:33

That is fucking impressive, too. That's impressive.

C. Derick Varn 1:29:37

Like just that's the other thing that shows up in those files. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:42

What what no one's talking about is the enormous number of financial crimes that are taught that are revealed in these. No, that's they just don't register.

C. Derick Varn 1:29:52

Yeah, I was about to say the the shit that I was horrified by is one. I mean, you want to talk about the the literal like proof of how bad it got in the post-Soviet Eastern Europe. It's just what you're like, you read the Epstein files, and you're just oh fuck man.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:09

Yeah, there's uh events in Ukraine did an article about Epstein's sort of like looting of human capital capital in the form of Ukrainian and Russian young women and girls.

C. Derick Varn 1:30:21

Yeah, I mean, you know, they also did it to Latin America and the brown part, but they were definitely willing to do it to the post-Soviets.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:29

It's it's just to be indulged in a little bit of conspiranoia. He did order 300 gallons of sulfuric acid to his island, and there's a trapdoor that leads to the ocean. I think some people were getting murdered in there, and I don't know who they were, but that is fucking horrible.

C. Derick Varn 1:30:48

Oh, I I I I I will I mean there's also what accusation of at least four people buried in Trump golf courses that no one's ever investigated. And I'm like, you think they'd even encourage the investigating because that would be really easily disproven. No, I mean uh a bunch of girls definitely. I well, I'm not gonna say definitely, it is statistically very likely that a bunch of young women died.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:16

Yes, very likely.

Epstein Files And Elite Impunity

C. Derick Varn 1:31:19

Well leave it at that. It's a very very awful note to end it on, but well, I mean, you want to talk about proof of fucking decadence. The fact that's depravity, no one's in prison for that in this country. I mean, the fact that the British arrested a royal and we haven't arrested anybody after Epstein and Galay Maxwell is is proof of decadence enough. Like, sorry, that's where I'm at.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:44

All right, now that we're supposed at bare minimum, we're supposed to have equality in the eyes of the law, regardless of class, right? Yeah, bare minimum.

C. Derick Varn 1:31:57

They're not even trying to do that. What a flocking joke, they don't even pretend anymore. No, no, no, the bourgeois project is dead. The the British are doing a better job of yeah, like I mean, if anything, like isn't this what we had a revolution about? Like, no, I know not really, but if we were to believe the propaganda, isn't this what we had a revolution about? Anyway, yes, the bourgeois project is dead, and I'm not going lull on the bourgeois project because fuck that. I'll see you guys later.