The Impact of British Trotskyism on Left-Wing Politics in the United States with Prolekult Films

James of Prolekult films, Luke of the Prolekult Podcast, and I talk about the paradoxes of British Trotskyism, the British left in general, and more. What if I told you that the history of British Trotskyism could illuminate your understanding of American leftism? Come join us for a captivating exploration with James and Luke of Prolekult as we unearth the roots of British Trotskyism, tracing it back to the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1939. We'll navigate the stormy political landscape of the time, with the unraveling of colonialism and the rise of anti-imperialism that set the stage for the blossoming of Trotskyism in the 60s.

In the second act of our conversation, we'll probe the intricate dance between the SWP and Islamism, highlighting the enigmatic politics of the Respect Coalition led by George Galloway post-Iraq war. We'll examine the delicate cultural perceptions between the British and the Yanks and how the internet has become a catalyst for left-wing radicalization. Brace yourself for our exploration of the unexpected surge of 'Patriarch Socialism' in Britain and the curious existence of esoteric Stalinism-Hitlerism.

As we wrap up our discussion, we'll shine a spotlight on the influence of British Trotskyism on the American left, specifically focusing on the survival skills of the international Marxist tendency. We'll dissect the downfall of Corbinism, the dwindling influence of the Stop the War Coalition, and the Labour Party's branding strategy involving the Black Lives Matter movement. Join us as we peel back the layers of the rich and complex history of Trotskyism in Britain and its impact on the American left. It's a saga of political maneuvering and ideological struggle you won't want to miss!

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

Chapters

• 0:00 British Trotskyism
• 18:56 International Marxist Tendency Survives
• 35:38 Trotskyism in British Unions and Politics
• 45:18 Left-Wing Movements in US and UK
• 1:01:07 Politics and Influences on the RCP
• 1:08:12 Scandals and Challenges Within Socialist Organizations
• 1:25:02 Discussion on SWP's Relationship to Islamism
• 1:35:52 Trotskyism and Methodological Nationalism
• 1:40:41 Comparing Cultural and Political Differences
• 1:47:22 British Trotskyism and Soft Left Decline
• 2:01:16 Decline of the British Left
• 2:15:42 Understanding the Decline of the Left
• 2:26:05 Disputing the Population Bomb

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:48

Hello and welcome to Marmblogging Today. I'm here with James and Procult friends and Luke, friend of Procult.

Kevin: 0:55

Hi, derek, long time listener, first time caller. Thank you.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02

Yes, and it's good to have our British friends back in, so much that I have any British friends Actually I have quite a few. They tend to enjoy my slugging in their country. But today we're talking about British Trotskyism and the reason why I wanted to talk about it is that after the 1990s my thesis was that if you look at the trends of American Trotskyism the British currents seem to come in and out, dominate the American Conference, particularly the ISOs, and it's kind of interesting and complicated relationship to the Socialist Workers Party in Great Britain, whereas the other parties that could claim a legacy directly to James Cannon start to really disappear or even if they do have a direct line, like the American ISO does, it's uniqueness to the US and like Shackmanite thought etc goes away. There's a lot more push of Tony Cliff etc. And then you have the militant tendencies and the grand tide tendencies that come in mostly from Canada and kind of grow here as well and in fact the international Marxist tendencies is probably the only Trotskyist tendency that has a significant identity outside of either just becoming a purely anti-revisionist party like the WWPSL or a being subsumed into the DSA, although I make the somewhat controversial statement that I see the DSA is also a post Trotskyist phenomenon. So that, however, leads us to an interesting problem that we talked a little bit about before showing I want to give you a chance to articulate is when I did the research on this, I found that most of the comparisons between Trotskyist in Europe and Trotskyist in America before the 1990s was between French Trotskyist and American Trotskyist, not British ones, and I was confused by this because my historical frame of reference is that we always just listen to the British, particularly the British Trotskyist.

C. Derick Varn: 3:22

I mean, we don't tend to who knows what the classical Communist Party of Great Britain, ml, thinks, but and we've never really cared about that but the SWP has had a disproportionate influence on American leftist culture because even though the ISO left the IST and there is a split with the SWP, that Tarika Lee, basically the New Left Review, and the SWP's influence on stuff like the ISO's theoretical line or Haymarket books etc. Meant that they were really dominant as voices to the left here, particularly in the 90s and 2000s, and that, like I said, the other tendencies also came from Britain. But I don't really know, outside of kind of the great man history of people like Ted Gran and Tony Cliff and Alan Woods much about British Trotskyism and I think we're going to get into why today. So what are the origins of Trotskyism in Britain?

Kevin: 4:43

So the origins of Trotskyism in Britain come from the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1939, which was a very, very small group which was a split from the Communist Party of Great Britain, but it wasn't a particularly impressive split. It had a stronghold in East London and was able to organise during the war particularly low wage, disorganised workers, pitly service workers. So they organised an occupation of the Ritz Hotel, for example. They were never a mass force, they were kind of alone in not signing a figuratively not signing a peace pact with the bourgeoisie during the Second World War, but they weren't really able to take advantage of that to build a mass movement. The RCP folded, I believe, in the late 40s, largely under pressure of a growing Communist Party and a big surge for labour becoming the kind of hegemonic party of post-war governance, and a few of their members were involved in something called the Club, which was little more than that. It was a club. Some people in there were involved in Labour Party politics, some people in there were involved in extra parliamentary politics and of course, as time goes by there are all of these kind of splits and mergers, of little groups breaking away and then coming together, either back with the original kind of club formation or with other small splinters.

Kevin: 6:13

British Trotskyism really gets its growth spur in the 1960s, again not as a response to the failures of the pro-Soviet CP. No matter how badly the CPGB did, it seemed to have very little impact on how the Trotskyist groups grew. Even after the disastrous Hungarian events, when 10 or 12,000 people left the Communist Party, only about 200 joined any given Trotskyist group. So the real impetus for growth was actually the breakdown of colonialism and particularly the war in Vietnam and the brutality of American engagement in that, where it became clear that there needed to be a political articulation around anti-imperialism, around anti-racism, with race and racism becoming a much bigger problem within British cities or at least becoming much more apparent to young people who lived there, problems of women's oppression coming to the forefront and kind of so on and so forth. The Trotskyist movement then went on to have particularly awkward relationships with anti-imperialism, anti-racism and women's liberation through the 70s and 80s. But we'll put those to one side.

Kevin: 7:23

The high point of Trotskyism in Britain came in the middle of the 1980s with the minor strike and just predating the anti-poll tax movement. At that point Trotskyism had maybe 25,000 organised party members across all Trotskyist parties Now, depending on who you listen to, that's somewhere between seven and 20,000 fewer than were just organised in the Communist Party at the same time. So this was, even at its height, an obviously minority movement of the British left. The relation that you speak of, this idea that our American brothers and sisters have that British Trotskyism was the serious, radical political movement which saved them, really comes from an historical accident which only makes sense if you're around 40 years of age in America, which I think many of the people who speak on this quite a lot are.

Kevin: 8:22

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the break apart of the British Communist Party, the number of Trotskyists in Britain the size of the Trotskyist movement, if we want to say that went down dramatically. It more than halved within 10 years. However, weirdly, one group, the Socialist Workers Party, was able to grow amongst that smaller number. So by the time we get to the mid 90s the SWP has around 10,000 members of the 12,000 active Trotskyists in Britain. Now it got those members through two ways. One was it was able to position itself to take in all the people who would have previously the last generation joined the Communist Party and now had no Communist Party to join. Secondly, it stripped itself of all the stages of Trotskyism.

Kevin: 9:08

Its policy at this point was we go into the anti-globalization movement, the women's movement, the students movement and we don't push a political line. We just go in as the best organisers and then when everybody goes shit you guys are good at organising protests we go. Well, we learned it through this party. Do you want to join? That was an incredibly successful tactic for a while, before everybody realised that actually they were being pulled into something that they hadn't been told they were being pulled into, and so the numbers started to decline. But it was a very specific moment in time where, from your analysis, derek, as I understand it, american Trotskyism was weak, was looking for any kind of symbol around the world of a vibrant radical left-wing movement. We happened to speak the same language. We had what looked like a mass party, even in a declining movement, and thus we became, from a distance, sort of the Beatrice de Audente, if that makes sense.

C. Derick Varn: 10:04

One of the things that happened in the United States is the CPUSA, which you know long-instroyed history, completely collapses in the 60s and 70s. I mean you see a drop from 80,000 members to about 50,000 members, to about 5,000 members in 20 years, and that's before the fall of the USSR. After the fall of the USSR it seems completely irrelevant. It's only become even a peripheral force in American politics the way it is now in the last five years, Like it's growth seems to be predicated on reaction against the DSA. The American Socialist Party also broke up in the 60s, but most of the Trotskyists seem to actually have gone into that. It's going to be confusing because these acronyms don't overlap. Our revolutionary Communist Party is Maoist and our socialist workers' party is hyper-defensist. Maybe some people might even call Stalin a phoenix Trotskyists. And then we have our Marciite tendency, which at this point is no longer differentiable from Marxist-Leninism proper, in fact maybe more extreme on their defense of Stalin. But a lot of this is a recent development until the sexual assault scandals that rocked both the SWP UK and then later the US and concurrently the million-dollar publishing business that was built on top of it that finally made it actually an actionable thing to deal with.

C. Derick Varn: 12:05

The ISO had a disproportionate and I say this because I think the largest they ever were was 5,000 people.

C. Derick Varn: 12:14

They had a disproportionate pool on both organizing and on left-wing media and books and, for the same reasons you said, had a tie to the Cliffite tendency.

C. Derick Varn: 12:30

But it was very much similar strategy where you entered on the ultra-globalization movement, you entered in the American anti-war movement and once you got in you would entice people with altusere, which has nothing to do with Trotskyism but it's true, and then you give them Tony Cliff and a lot of the people in that movement were utterly confused by it because it was like, wait, I like Trotsky, sure, but I don't know anything about these tendencies. And you see that when the ISO collapsed, it fragmented in a bunch of pieces, a lot of which did not stay remotely Trotskyist even when they entered, say, the DSA, because there's several post-ISO factions in the DSA but there's also a lot of altusere and Marxist-Leninists. I think one of the things that's different is the collapse of Marxist-Leninism in the United States is earlier than in Britain. I don't know how serious a force they ever really were in Britain either, and one of the questions I have to ask you guys that I don't know is. Malism seems to have been more important in the US than it was in Britain.

James: 13:52

Very definitely, but yeah.

Kevin: 13:56

So, are all malice historically. What are?

C. Derick Varn: 13:58

the reasons for that.

Kevin: 14:03

I think it's probably to do with the first Maoist kind of splits we had and how those manifested themselves. So the Maoist splits that we had actually emerged through the trade union organizing sections of the Communist Party, which meant that instead of it being a broad split across the party on a question of imperialism, it was understood as a question of imperialism. It became a regional one and incredibly sectorally concentrated. So what you had is whole branches leaving the party in again Southeast London, in certain parts of East Yorkshire I believe in not in Aempshire as well and they were all auto workers in the same union and largely what held them together was loyalty to this guy called Reg Birch who was this very brave, actually very influential auto union organizer. And so there wasn't, it was experienced as a split within the trade union element as opposed to a split on the question of imperialism, and I think that that's probably an accident. That split could have happened any number of other ways, but that contained it and stopped it from spreading. Also, maoism in Britain was, as I suppose it probably was in America was, highly linked to the students movement, so slightly later. So that occurred in like 59, early 60s, something like that. Later, when you have those splits going around.

Kevin: 15:39

The Vietnam War we did not have the same. We had a vibrant student movement in Britain and we had a growing number of people going to universities. But it wasn't like the US where you had, you know, the college opened up to all of these people who'd served in the forces, which I think. So I think that that kind of boomed out a little bit and allowed that to take on the idea of a very significant politics. Also, the number of universities in Britain at this point were largely concentrated in the larger cities where the Maoists kind of melded into the rest of the left.

Kevin: 16:24

So it wasn't that you have this kind of big, booming student population which creates a new political tendency. It was. There have always been weird kind of factions of the left in London or Manchester or Glasgow and now there's a few extra weird ones and people you know would often be attracted towards other elements when they got radicalized at university. I know that's an unsatisfying answer. I don't think there's like a silver bullet reason, but those are some of the things that play into it, I think.

C. Derick Varn: 16:53

Yeah, the Maoist factions of the American Communist movement were able to take a really big role in the Students for Democratic Society. So before the DSA that's, and after the US Socialist Party, that's the largest. It's not even truly a socialist movement either. So that's part of the issue with it. There are a lot of Trotskyist who are highly involved in that, most famously Hal Draper. But even a lot of the traditions that get formed like monthly review are like Trotskyist, maoist hybrid traditions and whatnot which you don't see at all, and that's kind of an America only phenomenon, as far as I can tell. So I find that interesting and it maps with what I experienced here. But I guess that does leave us to kind of getting you know. One of the reasons why the Maoist movements were better positioned to handle it is even though they were also fractious. In fact they probably split even more than Trotsky's do Is that as a tendency, they were much more nebulous in their political differences, whereas in the United States, by the time of the students movement, the ideological fracture lines within Trotskyianism are hard.

C. Derick Varn: 18:26

They've been solidified mostly in responses to the 50s and early 60s. So and there's no way to bridge them Like, and they just continue to grow. So basically, every new event leads to another split, but by this point, like the Shackmanites and I believe, even the Spartacists and all that have already left. But it is interesting. I guess you know the dominance of the SWP is telling. But I want to ask you why do you think that the international Marxist tendency has held on so strongly? Strongly being not very strong, but it seems to actually be able to survive these changes, even if it isn't particularly growing.

Kevin: 19:14

So I think, james, you and I have slightly different views on this, don't we so? Do you want to come, and we yours?

James: 19:21

No, you go first. I can't quite recall your reasons.

Kevin: 19:24

So I mean, I think the IMT has held on largely through political cowardice. So it organizes in Britain. If by the IMT we're talking about, oh sorry, the IMT or the IMG, the IMT, the military tendency, yeah well, the grandites. So there are two loads of grandites as the IMT and the IMG, and I struggle to match the international acronym with the party acronym.

C. Derick Varn: 19:55

The militant tendency in America is represented by salt. The militant tendency in I mean the other, the non-militant tendency of grandites is represented by the IMT here, and I believe they go under the same name elsewhere, but I don't always know.

Kevin: 20:13

Yeah, so the grand type IMT, as opposed to the what previously was the International Marxist Group, now the Committee for a Worker's International Right. So the IMT, who in Britain go under the name of Socialist Appeal neither Socialist nor Appealing, if you ask me, but that's my dirty sectarianism for the day. So they organize a effectively small group of students within the Labour Party. That's what they do. Now you're always going to find Labour Party students who want to say hey, actually I'm a revolutionary socialist, but I don't, I'm not going to threaten party unity, and that's a kind of fairly deep, I think, identity thing for a lot of young leftists who want to be part of a mass movement but also want to feel that they are themselves, you know, revolutionaries, that they're in the mass movement but so far beyond it, because they've, you know, they go to these reading groups or they go to these meetings or something like that, and that, I think, keeps the IMT going. Basically, I think there's always a new lot of recruits for it.

Kevin: 21:27

I know a number of people who have been in and out of the IMT through their time at university. It's not an organization that holds onto people when they leave campus. So a next partner of mine was in the IMT during her master's year and then she moved to a different city and then there was no yeah, there was no temptation to stay involved and it served its purpose. It was a Marxist clique for Labour Party members in that particular constituency, labour Party branch, and so you know, really it's just demand led with the IMT. I don't think there's anything particularly politically interesting that they do. They have historically taken a more, I suppose, to my mind a more kind of straightforward and sensible line on anti-imperialist politics and a lot of the other Trotskyist groups. But I'm not, I think I was probably muscle memory rather than it is something which gets them a bunch of members and entrenched, as I mean communities.

C. Derick Varn: 22:24

What is their line on anti-imperialism exactly?

Kevin: 22:27

So they have an old kind of Trotskyist line, arguing that imperialism is constituted by a combined and uneven development and as such should be treated as both a political and an economic phenomenon. And if you want to do anti-imperialist politics you also have to target, you know, basically the private firms, cartels, financial institutions etc. Which constitute that kind of value stripping.

James: 22:57

With a modicum of support for social democratic projects in like oppressed nations like Venezuela, for example.

C. Derick Varn: 23:06

So different from the malice line, which is that the political contradiction is actually more important than the economic one. Thus, as long as one is not supporting Comperador Buzwazi, one can support Buzwazi, maybe even in the developed world, etc. Okay, that's consistent. How they grow in America and Canada is actually kind of interesting.

C. Derick Varn: 23:34

My impression is that, whereas the SWP spoke out of both ends of its mouth on quote liberal identity politics, the IMT is pretty open about opposing it and so they tend to be the radical group that is skeptical of, say, liberal anti-racism, as opposed to most of the social democratic groups that are or now we have Maga-Communists another weird shit like that.

C. Derick Varn: 24:07

But in general, as opposed to the SWP which the SWP very much, obviously the ISO excuse me, the SWP hate all these stupid acronyms the ISO very much had an internal-external line where, like externally they were super supportive and even sometimes took anti-worker as positions, but internally they often didn't. And so, although that didn't seem to change right before their collapse, where they actually started taking the somewhat worker skeptical lines, even internal, but it was often like a bait and switch, it felt like by many people who told me when they got into the ISO the way the ISO talked about this stuff in public versus the way it talked about it once you were in were very different, and that seems to be similar to the SWP, the way you, as you're describing it.

Kevin: 24:58

So I think that's right. Yeah, I mean. The other thing I would say is the slight difference in Britain, if we're talking about contrasting tendencies. So the IMT grand tight lot are that they're not the second largest of the Trotskyist groupings in Britain or nominally Trotskyist groupings in Britain. So the militant tendencies split in the late 80s, early 90s, around a bunch of them getting expelled from the Labour Party. Now the bunch that got expelled, who are the CWI guys, commit for a workers international in Britain, the Socialist Party of England and Wales and acronym, which unfortunately spells spew. They vie with the SWP for being the largest Trotskyist group thing. They're usually in the minority so they're considerably larger. They are parliamentary rote socialism people with the occasional quote from Trotsky kind of thrown in. I mean the SBP aren't like proper Trotskyist either. Cliff rejects huge amounts of Trotskyist theory, whereas the SP guys they just tend to kind of forget it. The Socialist Party sorry, the Socialist Appealer a little bit more stringent on it, but yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 26:08

Yeah, so the IMT is pretty stringent here as well, but we have more Orthodox groups than them. They're just small. Now I'm going to let James give me history. I just wanted to, like I was going to add to that.

C. Derick Varn: 26:25

While it's still relevant, though, salt was our second largest Trotskyist tradition. In fact it may be even surpassed the ISO, and salt is our, our militant tendency faction, but it has collapsed in the last five years from about five to five to six thousand members and potentially had more up on the beginnings of the burning campaign after the Kossama SWAT campaign, down to about a thousand members Mostly, although not solely, around maintaining Kossama SWAT, one seat at the city council, which you resigned, and so they have now entered split into both, some people who are both in the DSA and in the salt, and people who are just in the DSA as a kind of militant aligned sub faction in the DSA. But. But the IMT seems to be the last person standing of the British Trotskyist tendencies here. So, james, what's your, what's your take on the, on why the IMT is still around?

James: 27:31

I mean I don't disagree with Luke on socialist appeal too much. I think that's that's a fairly straightforward kind of social milieu that all Trotskyist organizations in Britain tend to recruit from, and those who exclusively recruit from it stay confined to it, and that's more or less what kind of happens with socialist appeal. What's interesting to me is that they're much more successful drawing from that social basis, and only that social basis, than a lot of groups which draw from more eclectic social bases, like from trade unions or from kind of the occasional activists who are wandering the things, which is where more, more kind of tasks get taken on than the primary task of organizational reproduction, which is literally all socialist appeal do. And then when those contradictions come into play, you end up with the hodgepodge mess that Luke was referring to earlier in the in the discussion, which I think is really the kind of core contradiction in British Trotskyism that we have these, these organizations that play the role of doctrinaire, dogmatic, organizational reproduction but also attempt to do trade union struggle but also attempt to do and entryism into the Labour Party quite often but also stand for election themselves but and also do things like social movements.

James: 28:48

The interesting thing for militant at the socialist party the other half of the IMT split is. I actually think they've done the most with social movement politics in Britain of, I think, any Trotskyist organization, and I think that's really important to highlight and explains their longevity, because not only do they have a real record that can point to, with things like involvement in the poll tax, they also became the bogeyman who were paraded around in the Labour Party, who were paraded around in the press and therefore serve quite an attractive purpose in that role. I also think they're the least scandal-ridden party in Britain.

C. Derick Varn: 29:27

I may be wrong on that.

James: 29:28

But yeah, I think that that does play into longevity there quite a lot, particularly given the dominance of scandal politics in determining more contemporary Trotskyist organizational development since the 2010s, and also the failure to kind of Trotskyism to work within anti-racist or women's movements in kind of any substantial way which prefaces that. So I think both of those things are really important to take into account when thinking about how the militant tendency is survived, but also how the STBP is survived. Really, those are kind of the core things that we need to hit on. Is that social movement politics and then how they use the other elements of their organization for organizational reproduction?

C. Derick Varn: 30:15

That's an interesting difference, though, because we don't like the United States. Trotskyist movement did have a strong relationship to the unions, but their lack of relationship with the unions now has to do with just like our unions are even weaker than yours, significantly so, actually and in the government sector unions no Marxist group has ever been strong, and the government sector unions are the great majority of unions. It's also kind of true that no Marxist group in America has ever been strong amongst working class unions, although Marxist organizers were the people who put them together. So it's, the relationship is a little bit complicated. And lastly, there's no way to do entryism in the United States without subsuming yourself directly to one party or another. You can't really be an independent faction, although the DSA is trying the damnedest, but so social movement politics is really the only way for militant groups to have an effect, and that's even going back to the CPU SA.

C. Derick Varn: 31:26

I mean, one of the reasons why the CPA USA survived the where I'd scare at all Was that it was a major player in like African American politics, african American cultural politics. They, the CPS, like almost every famous black writer that comes in the United States If you see where they got their first paychecks is from a CPS, from a CPU SA like Arts Fund Are. There are minor functionary in the party and they're getting a close to middle class wage from that in the beginning, but most of them don't stay in the CPS after the 60s either, so that that that is a very different problem. So it's actually interesting that the contradictions we have tend to be more about just the contradictions and social movement in the student movement and where it relates to the workers movement in general, that that plagues all the American communist movements. Whereas trust gives them seems to be trust gives them in Britain actually seems to just look like the way leftism after the 1940s in general looks like in America. Is that a fair assessment?

Kevin: 32:34

or yeah, I mean, I think it's also fair to say that, despite the fact that Britain practically speaking has no Trotsky's groups, we also only have Trotsky's group In. So far as you know. The Cliffites aren't trots in like a classical sense of the word, nor are the CWI guys, but all of those kind of, all of the stuff that we would say about a small sectarian group which tends to get associated with Trotsky's, and kind of classical 20th century Marxist literature, the kind of small bickeringness of fetishization, of tiny doctrine at points, the missionary orientation as in. You know, your job is to go into whatever this thing is and win these people to socialism through selling your newspapers, the power of your eloquence kind of, etc. Etc. Etc.

Kevin: 33:27

That's now in Britain. You know, whether you're a Marxist, leninist of whatever kind it is, or you're a Trotskyist, or you're an anarchist, or you're a Maoist. That's kind of all that you can do. So to a certain degree we've ended up in the same place, right in the all of the left reflects the problems of Trotskyism, although you got there from a fact of all of the left had it. So therefore Trotskyist had it. We got there from all the Trotskyist had it, and then the Communist Party fell apart, the organized left fell apart, the workers movement went into a precipitous decline, and the only organizing model you have left which is reproducible is the old trot one. And so that's what everybody does.

C. Derick Varn: 34:09

Makes sense.

James: 34:10

I do think we need to possibly go into some of the de-nithologizing around Trotskyism and unions in Britain and also Trotskyism and entryism and the limits of that. Because, yeah, I think it's correct that the US entryism is has always kind of been off the table, we're, but in Britain the results aren't too much different. Entryism is kind of only been on the table for the political opportunism of those within the Labour Party or for those within the Tory party who kind of want to mobilise the fact that entry isn't entryism is happening within the party to create a red under the bed kind of media scare and move forward with expulsions and so on and so forth and move forward with imposing tighter party policy internally and being able to take exceptional political action that they wouldn't without the excuse. And the most the entryism has ever achieved in Britain is really the Liverpool City Council in the 1980s under Thatcher, which was able, which was militant and was able to, you know, attempt to stop passing budgets and so on and so forth. But then was he was expelled and kicked out of the Labour Party and involved was in part of that purge and that is the most that's ever been managed and it was a standoff in local politics, rather than kind of any attempt to redefine Labour Party policy, rather than any attempt to actually take power over the Labour Party. That social basis has never happened.

James: 35:39

What entryism tends to actively mean is a brief moment, every electoral cycle, where every it's every Trotskyist organisation sets aside their difficulties for a moment and joins in canvassing for the Labour Party and again gives up everything that makes them definitionally Trotskyist in that moment in order to pursue a different political project, which, in this part point of, is pushing social democracy within the unions.

James: 36:05

It's a little bit different and I do think Trotskyist politics occur quite a lot in British unions still.

James: 36:11

But what we're looking at is John Kelly, the book me and Luke, one of the books me and Luke read through, for this gives quite an interesting like look at this.

James: 36:21

But we're looking at like one or two organisers from a specific Trotskyist organisation ever getting elected within any kind of trade union bureaucracy and therefore serving a function within the unions, being able to draw people to the organisation to a degree within the unions but ultimately being isolated politically unless they cooperate either with other Trotskyists or with other trade union officials and therefore not really being able to do that much politically. So it's an anchoring point, it's a thing that you can say and show and you know be like we work in the unions were part of the workers movement and so on and so forth, but it's not something that's ever really produced any substantial results, which I think is important to understand, because, like one thing I think British Trotskyism does get the presentation of and I can see how this would kind of happen internationally is that it's actually affected some kind of change or represented a real social force, and it simply never has.

C. Derick Varn: 37:20

Is this? Because Marxism, the strength of Marxism in Britain, actually is a question that I've never actually had answered and I've always gone back and forth on this. And one of the the ironic things about the US Trots is they at least do have the founding of one pretty successful union, although one that they were purged from because all Reds were purged in the in the 1930s with the foundation of the Teamsters. I mean there's still one of the largest and relatively. I mean I can tell you about Teamsters controversies, but relatively more militant unions. It is plagued by associations with the mob in the 70s and stuff like that, but it is a. It is a real victory and Trotskyist, ironically, however, don't tend to claim it, and the United States they tend to focus more in their social movement work, but one of the the ironies of American Trotskyism is almost all of them want to found a workers party to entry it. Like that's kind of their strategy is we must build it so we can enter it.

James: 38:37

What is the most important job so we can go back to trying to influence it right.

Kevin: 38:43

We have exactly the same thing here and they nearly succeeded. So there was a group, there was a party which I think at one point had 20, 25000 members called Left Unity, which was basically some ex labor people who are really pissed off with the labor party and all of or not all but most of the Trots sects as entryists doing all of the work and pretending to people that they were social Democrats. Really it was. It was very, very funny. I used to go to some of their socials because my friends were involved and it really was just people who I knew were Trotskyists pretending not to be when giving speeches.

Kevin: 39:29

The real tragedy of Left Unity is it reached its peak about six months before Corbyn became leader of the labor party, at which point everybody just left right, because the people who left the LP were it was because it wasn't, you know, quite and quite socialist enough.

Kevin: 39:44

It wasn't a left wing Social Democratic Party and it was now. So they went back and all the trot left because finally there was something to try and do real entryism into. So it's it's it's that occurs kind of all over the place, and I think that that is I mean, look, I think me and James will be of the view that you know, if there is a workers party and you're a communist, you should probably try and be in it for as long as you can until it's internal contradictions, means that you you can't be anymore and you have to do something else. However, the idea that you would, kind of as a small group that, attempt to will this thing into existence so that you can then will your way into its leadership instead of on its own terms, it just seems as kind of absolute, kind of fantasy, and I think it's. I think it's kind of uniquely anglophone one.

C. Derick Varn: 40:35

It's. It's also I mean, it's not Trotskyist are the only people who attempted in the United States I have actually called the neocowskies movement that the heirs to Trotskyism in America, because they effectively Want to do the same thing of the current strategy is to try to take over the DSA so it will separate formally from the Democratic Party and then try to build a later part party off of that and then overthrow the US Constitution.

Kevin: 41:01

but Are they doing entryism into entryism now?

C. Derick Varn: 41:06

Yes, that my critique, my critique of of Cosmonaut, which is, which is not Marxist, unity tendency, that you didn't unity group, they're not the same but they overlap strongly was that you are to the, you are to the DSA with the DSA is to the Democrats and it's probably likely to work about as well. So you know, but it's what is interesting, it, I think this still gives this this kind of allure of British dominance is American neocowskies and it's a very incoherent thing. I agree with the neocowskies. I say it's not really a tendency because it's not, but because also, you know, bosch, carson car claims it, as does Eric like, as does most of the social Democrats who are, you know, progressive Democrats and the and in the and public view and their esoteric Austria Marxist and private view, but they also claim neocowskism. Everybody wants to claim neocowskism because it either gives you the linen that's cool and you want to focus on early linen and maybe, maybe last testament linen, but we're going to skip the Civil War and not really talk about that or or it gives you we have a politics going back to the second international. We don't have to deal with this linen Soviet Union stuff anymore, we don't have to condemn it, we just don't have to deal with it at all, it's no longer question, and so the gives you two ways around that.

C. Derick Varn: 42:38

However, that's, those are not the dominant trends those are, those are kind of the dominant intellectual trends. The actual organizing trends right now are We've seen the rebirth of of MLism, but with no party to represent it. Here there's, there's not really a party, it's like a meme almost, which is a interesting thing to talk about. Our interest that actually have happened have been in two social movements, which is the SDS and international answer. International answer was started by a coalition of the International Action Center, which is not socialist necessarily at all, and the W W P, which is the original Marci I party, which is pretty much for going any formal relationship to Trotskyism. At this point it became represented by the PSL, with split with the W W P, although I'm not sure it was actually an ideological line, since partly just about money.

Kevin: 43:39

It wasn't so me and Jim were actually in the sister organization of both the W W, p and the PSL and so we'd get reports, basically from you know, meetings that our comrades had with with their members when they visited London, for whatever reason it was, and both sides were like, no, this is interpersonal, this is purely interpersonal. Yeah, we might sort out in future, but for the time being them a lot of wankers, and I'm not talking to him and yeah, I remember people in our tendency. I tell me if you remember this differently. We're very much like you know. This is ridiculous, like we. How do we have two sister organizations in the same country and no one in Europe likes us? What have we done wrong?

C. Derick Varn: 44:32

So the Marciites are interesting because in the United States I I no longer see them as a tendency, tendency for Marxist Londonism at all, and if they are, they don't want you to know it either. Like they're kind of notorious for doing stuff like editing out Marci's relationship to Trotskyism from the from the Wikipedia page. That's fun. But they've also seemingly kind of collapsed recently as well here that they used to be much bigger deal. But all of this stuff seems to be tied into international answer and student movement entryism. They did not.

C. Derick Varn: 45:18

There's been very little success when people have tried to enter into the Democratic Party, whether it be Jean Kwan from the Maoist section, are the various partisan review people who had some relationship to Shackmanite Trosseism in the 50s and 60s. They've just become Democrats or worse, like they have not maintained any kind of separate identity at all. Bernie Sanders is the exception and he doesn't come out of any of these milios, actually Like he's kind of his own thing. So I guess that leads us to how two things seem to have happened that rocked British Trosseism. One is left unity. Two is there's this troubling association with British Trosseism, with George Galloway, which is a complicated thing. I don't think Americans understand it and I say I don't think Americans understand it, because I don't think I understand it.

James: 46:25

I don't think anyone understands it if I'm quiet.

C. Derick Varn: 46:31

Well, good, good, I feel better now.

Kevin: 46:34

I mean, it's also no longer present. So Galloway's current far left bedfellows are soft Maoists who are most concerned with being transphobes and supporting Russia, and supporting Russia, of course. Yeah, yeah, those are the two big ones for those guys.

C. Derick Varn: 46:53

So he's currently like a communist here.

Kevin: 46:57

Yeah, he's formally in a relationship with the CPGB and now. So Harpal bras kind of tiny.

C. Derick Varn: 47:05

Oh, yes, yes, yes, I saw them recently. Oh, you get started by.

James: 47:10

Mazzata made it.

Kevin: 47:12

Yeah, all, just like. No one has a good haircut in that whole. That whole organization finds no good haircut in a left leg. There's always someone on the street still who looks presentable, right, not?

C. Derick Varn: 47:27

So that's interesting because in the United States ML is basically divided on cultural lines and there's an extremely culturally I'll say conservative, to be nice section. It thinks we need to like Well, the Tucker Carson they you know what a worker in America is also pertaining as the 1950s. And then there's another group of ML's that are actually in the, the, the CP USA, who basically just had the same talking points of Democrats. So it's, it's a very straight. I mean I'm sure people will get mad in the comments and tell me of some other like Maoist organization.

C. Derick Varn: 48:13

One of the things that's happened in America is the Maoist organizations, which have very distinct identities and identity and tendencies, have all kind of collapsed into vague China, maybe, russia, maybe not support, whereas historically speaking they oppose China. Oh, I think. So that's this kind of a new development. What's what has happened in the United States is like I mean I know this sounds insulting and maybe it should that amongst younger millennials and zoomer generation people there is not a lot of political membership, even in these sectarian organizations, but there is a lot of identification with memes about Marxism, stalinism etc. And I think memes is accurate. It feels very much like a similar new year to like I'm not saying this in terms of content, I'm saying this in terms of distribution, before people get mad at me.

C. Derick Varn: 49:17

It seems like a similar new year to the radicalization on the right in America which happened through Internet forums. More than any like any organizational success. That may have happened and there was. There was a chance that came out of that and exists now. But I do not think the majority of Marxist Leninist I meet are in the RCP or the CPU, sa or any of these organizations. Psl is a little different. Psl is has branches in almost every major city and does focus on like Republican controlled states. So you'll find them out here in Utah and in the South and whatnot. But even there it seems to be more than mostly tied to student activism, decarceration activism and stuff like that.

James: 50:11

Yeah, I think that's. That sounds about right to me. From what I can perceive of the US movement online, it's very mean brand and it's very, yeah, discordant, apart from a few outliers, and most of it's not organizationally kind of solidified anywhere. Interestingly, the first, the kind of first tendency that you've noted among the ML's, the socially kind of conservative, you know patch, patch, sock they call themselves as something like that yeah, patriarch socialism, mega communism, mecca, mecca, stalin.

C. Derick Varn: 50:45

they call themselves lots of stupid things. Petrarch socialism, like the least weird of what they call themselves.

James: 50:55

So right, okay, that's worrying, but yeah, no, I think that similar tendency does exist in Britain, but it's interesting how it's diffused. So some of it has been organized, which is important to know, and that's through Galloway's new outfit. So you have the CPGB ML. You also have the Workers Party, who do very little. They were founded in around and responding to the Brexit referendum in 2016. And have a similar sort of views to the Patsok tendency, with certain elements deemphasized, which would namely be the patriotism is there, but certainly not as explicitly. I don't think they tend to do it with signifiers rather than words, in my opinion. So, like the Workers Party logo is a kind of riff on the RAF logo, but they wouldn't like go wet wet patriotic socialists to you. But those guys are a little organized and do do a lot of cultural abating and stuff.

C. Derick Varn: 52:04

Do you have a? A? It's hard to say and because one you have, your, you have an actual fascist tendency and party and the way that the United States not anymore, but you did, I mean you have mostly, whereas we've had actual, like, we've had several fascist, we've had the silver shirts, we've had arguably the second and third clan, we've had various neo-nazi groups, but we also have a weird, not uniquely American, because it's also found in Russia, but esoteric, esoteric, stalin, hitler, stuff, like we have a not supposed tradition that goes back to French jockey, to the fifties. That's real. It's never been, it's never been super influential. It's always been a bunch of weird, esoteric, fascist weirdos, but even even in the fascist movement.

C. Derick Varn: 53:02

But it is a real thing. That has a historical basis here and patriotic socialism doesn't go there, but it occasionally flirts with overlapping, with parts of it. And we also have LaRouche's them, which if you have it, you got it from us which is from the Spartacus League, which are most Orthodox, orthodox trots. But LaRouche's is not Orthodox Trotskyism, if anything it's, it's. It's anti Trotskyist and it anti Marxist, although its current form tries to hide that.

James: 53:41

So I mean it's interesting you mentioned that, because so I think it's again the same group, the CPGVML and the workers party, since miss your, your darling, mr Mouton, I believe. Yes for a long time, okay, since he started more openly flirting with LaRouche, he's been doing joint, joint podcast things with like the bras and stuff. So I think that tendency is open to it, but perhaps more aesthetically than anything.

Kevin: 54:15

I think there's kind of two things to say here. I mean one the thing which will stop the workers party from getting anywhere near that is the fact that so many of them are first generation immigrants. So a lot of people in this, in our version of patriotic socialism, are Indian nationals or Bangladeshi nationals or Pakistani nationals.

C. Derick Varn: 54:34

So interestingly, that's that seemed. It's a weird coalition here of longstanding people who are, who are white and Asian immigrants, and specifically Asian, asian and both the British and the American sense of that term. Immigrants seem to be big in that scene, whereas they don't seem to be a whole lot of. I have not seen a lot of like black patriotic socialists. They may exist I'm not saying that they do not but I have not seen them where there are a lot of black Marxists, linness, but their tradition tends to be Maoist or our strict CP USA. So it's that's it. That's a. That's an interesting difference, but it's one that's married here. I mean, it's it is. It is strange how much that is the case. The other thing is there are, you know, we, moppen has a, has a checkered relationship to Duganism, but we do have very tiny people. They are not major political movements in the United States, but we do have a Duganist far right. They're all ex-Nazis. So like new resistance in the United States is they used to be American. Third position is now they're new resistance, american. Fourth position and if you know what their position is, you know what it is. So we have that in.

C. Derick Varn: 56:14

Some of them seem to be trying to do entryism on this mega communist entryism. But again, other than the then a Center for Political Innovation, there doesn't even seem to be real organizations attached to these groups. Yeah, I mean, yes, there's the Ruleru shite. There's two different Lerushite groups. There's the Schiller Institute, which I think actually technically in Europe and gets a lot of funding from China not when I say from China, I don't mean from the Chinese government, I mean from Chinese investors and LaRouche Pact, which is more, it does stop the steel stuff in America. So, but the history of LaRouche is actually opaque. Even the people study it, because it's not actually quite clear that it's ever been as influence, like both its clerics and its supporters seem to believe it was more influential than I have evidence for it to be.

Kevin: 57:17

Sorry, go ahead. We do have a kind of slightly analogous thing, which is the kind of legacy of the second Revolutionary Communist Party.

C. Derick Varn: 57:28

Yes, I have been touched by them directly, so I know all about them.

Kevin: 57:34

That makes it sound like there should be a police inquiry, Derek.

C. Derick Varn: 57:38

Maybe there should be. No, I mean, I just worked for for a left wing publishing house where they would like they would publish with them and they've gotten into America that way and not just one person. I mean people seem to believe this on Doug Lane, but it's a consistent thing going all the way back to the early zero books. There's always been RCP people like James James Hartfield. James Hartfield was publishing with them when Marfisher was still alive.

Kevin: 58:08

James Hartfield of the Brexit Party.

C. Derick Varn: 58:10

Yep Of getting cock cock foundation funds as well. That's been openly acknowledged here in America. Yeah, he was funded by. He got some funding by the Coat Brothers, as did other former members of the RCP. We mainly know them, though we don't know about like the RCP's history is kind of obscure to Americans. We more, we more know them as spiked that annoying British libertarian magazine.

Kevin: 58:37

So they split from the tendency that James and I were involved in in the late 70s, early 80s. Yeah, 78, I think. Yeah, late 70s, over crisis theory, I believe. Is that right?

James: 58:52

Arguably.

C. Derick Varn: 58:53

So they're right. I mean, what are the weird? Are they pro crisis theory?

Kevin: 58:58

No, we are the most pro crisis theory motherfuckers you will ever meet. Yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 59:04

So well, I mean other than our problematic I it's, who are also super fucking crisis theory heavy yeah.

Kevin: 59:12

I mean I think we were the only like originally post-trop, nominally ML organization that had poor Mac is like a mandatory reading for members and education sections. At least that was what I was doing when I was city organizer, but anyway, yeah, so they split. I mean, a lot of it was personal stuff because basically you couldn't have two academics in a trot group that small without them tearing fucking lumps out of each other. So for Radi and his lot buggered off and formed, you know, a Trotsky's party with the name of Britain's first Trotsky's party, that kind of flashback, trying to claim the great institutional legacy, kind of thing. They started off kind of interesting but weird. So they did some quite militant anti fascist stuff at the time when the national front was largest and you know you could argue that actually anti fascism was a movement priority in a way that you just simply can't argue now. So ironic in hindsight, isn't it? Yeah, but they did. They followed our tendency in being quite militant on the Irish question, seeing it as a, you know, brits out the arm struggle against British rule in Ireland is, you know, legitimate and deserves the support of British communists kind of, etc. Etc. Etc. But they took on first some like weird aesthetic choices. So they started wearing suits all the time, like the old American PLP, the famous quote from our current of the dude. He's a satirical writer on British Trotsky's and wrote a book called when this Pub Closes. He said look, you know, they always look like they're more that they belong in a wine bar rather than on a picket line.

Kevin: 1:01:07

And as time went on their positions got kind of slightly weirder and weirder. So during the miners' strike, when you know the majority of mine workers clearly would have supported strike action but the government were trying to draw out the process to prolong the strike for as long as possible so they could stop Pal-Kol. And so we're insisting that the mine workers union hold a ballot on strike action which would have basically delayed the strike and allowed that the government to be in a stronger position for it. The National Union of Mine Workers weren't stupid, so it didn't fall for that and the RCP basically condemned them for doing so, said that they were anti-democratic for not holding the ballot and basically made this their point of principle. You know this was for a democratic workers movement.

Kevin: 1:01:52

You know the mine workers leaders are basically scabs for not consulting their members on a strike which affects their members. So like shit like that would start coming out. They lost some court cases, as I understand it, through their magazine started taking on some kind of external funding. Many of the members started working in PR and then kind of over time a left-wing Trotskyism shifted to a libertarian socialism, just shifted to libertarianism. The weird upshot of this is you've got former RCP members now appointed to the House of Lords by Boris Johnson. I remember some of our comrades doing a march against a commercial like a large landlord, like a big company which is a landlord in London, and the CEO who they were targeting act were people that they were targeting in this action was someone who had been in the party with them in the 70s.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:51

Yeah, the RCP second gen has always read to me like a weird mixture of what we would now call Magi-Communism but also neo-conservatism, and in America those people hate each other, but it's a similar tendency and LaRouche is a mis-similar and that LaRouche actually had some although no one really knows how much influence on the Reagan administration's executive staff, but it's unclear if it was significant influence or if it was just like played up because of Star Wars stuff. For those of you who are not in your 40s, star Wars was this weird attempt to build an anti-nuclear space program so we could contra-nuke the Soviet Union from the moon or something. It wasn't really from the moon, but it wasn't that different from that and it was a boondoggle of which Lynn and Rous was supportive and seemed to have had some actual influence. But we also have our neo-conservative tradition which parallels French Maoists going to the right more than anything weird like this.

C. Derick Varn: 1:04:01

The RCP, like spiked, is such a strange thing because, you're right, there's a libertarian, communist element of it that just becomes eventually right-ring there is. It gets really strange when we start seeing it as a tendency in America. It's actually around the Balkan Wars is when they start having influence here and that's when Spike starts getting brover. My first encounters with Spike online were in the libertarian and paleo-conservative world. I was surprised when I learned that they were Marxists and even more surprised when I learned that I worked with a place that regularly published them and had colleagues that were affiliated. So I know all about them now. But their politics, even from the libertarian standpoint, doesn't make sense to me because lately they've taken I mean they seem to have ties to Orban.

Kevin: 1:05:01

That I didn't know, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:04

So Feridii works for MCC Brussels which, I mean, is one of the few people in it, which is a tank that has some funding from Hungary. So it's a real thing. So it's a weird melange. I don't always get them. They were easier to predict in their libertarian days than they are currently.

Kevin: 1:05:33

So Feridii spoke this week at the National Conservative Conference in Britain, which is our attempt to import more American politics.

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:41

Yeah, well, and.

Kevin: 1:05:45

And he gave a talk on nationalism and it was just completely fucking incoherent, right. What was really amazing to me is, like why does anyone want to listen to this guy?

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:55

So here's the funny thing about National Conservatism it's our attempt to finally do red-toryism. So it's kind of like what you're getting is America's bizarro view of British conservative and European conservative politics back at you. So it's kind of like if you are an American eating at a Japanese American-style restaurant in Asia and are totally confused because but there is a sense in which, like British conservatism is actually a bigger influence on the National Conservative movement than it ever was any prior, although, let's be fair, it's usually the Canadians fault. Most of our reactionaries are like Canadian exports anyway. I mean, we have our own reactionaries, but they sound better doing it. So that's only kind of a joke.

Kevin: 1:06:59

So I just realized. So we wanted to talk a little bit about Trotsky's member in the last 10 years, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:06

Yeah, we haven't got to that really.

Kevin: 1:07:09

So we talked about left unity and left unity was funny as fuck in terms of the dance moves that made people do, but it also largely kind of centered around the smaller of the Trot groups. It's actually the ortho-Trot groups really, so it was groups like Workers Power, socialist Resistance, kind of. You know people, 100 people tops right in each of those. So maybe it just might be worth talking about the real blunders and downfalls of the big wigs, so particularly the SWP, the Socialist Party and the Trot groups with a larger kind of either institutional base or basis in social movements and their interactions with corporalism and other things. So what were your kind of main questions around that, derek?

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:01

Well, I mean one is I had people protesting SWP speakers in South Korea in 2013. So apparently it pissed a lot of people off, but there was also a lot of weird maneuvering. One of the things that is awkward to talk about was, like there's a lot of scandals about the SWP stances on things like Islamism, which was actually the split that caused the ISO and the SWP to one of the reasons to formally split off, even though that split wasn't that substantial. All right, thank you. Then there were the sexual harassment and other kinds of sexual assault scandals, which got a lot of press in America, and then the ISO had its own. What were its? Is that, is that with the? What brought it down, or is it more complicated than that?

Kevin: 1:09:01

So, james, do you want to come in first or shall I you go? Okay, so the first thing I will say is that on my jogging route around near my house I pass a number of lamp posts which are plastered with stickers saying don't work with the SWP. I don't live in a student area student area, I run through a kind of partial student area. So that's the thing which is still a big barrier to them, the fact that there's a kind of huge amount of fire. Back on this, I was at a demo last year against the kind of draconian policing act that the government brought in, where the SWP donated a sound system, and about half of the demo was just young students on an open mic slagging off the SWP on their own sound system. They're really, really struggling with it. However, it is always kind of deeply complicated what had happened. So the SWP had really focused on two recruiting and organizing tactics. One of those was an institutional recruitment and influence drive focused on the some of the larger trade unions with a relatively unorganized rank and file, where they thought that they effectively could form blocks within individual union branches to influence policy on a ground level. On the other hand, through these front organizations which had large institutional support and allowed them to present themselves as parts of a almost community leadership, in bourgeois terms. So you would have anti-racist organizations or anti-cuts organizations which would be led by the SWP, along with your local church, your local mosque, your local synagogues, leaders, primary schools, youth groups, all of that kind of stuff. So that was one of the things that they tried to do. The other recruitment tactic was just what all the TROP groups do, which is keep trying to recruit these students who you can take in, basically use as workhorses, and then they kind of split out a little bit at the end and maybe you keep one or two and that will be fine. In regards to the latter group, they spoke to them in the language that they understood in order to recruit them. So they were kind of incredibly right on abound all kinds of gender politics, race politics, lgbtq plus politics kind of, etc. Etc. And painted themselves as being you know, they were the most sensitive to the issues young people cared about on the left, and that's how they got those guys in.

Kevin: 1:11:47

Now, in the middle of this real kind of pivot towards I mean, I would call the outcome of it a pivot towards identity politics. But if we're being generous, it's a pivot towards what your constituency is most concerned about, right, which is that's a legitimate thing to do, however you want to do it. In the middle of that, there emerged these very serious allegations against their national organizer, from a very young woman, comrade, which it became clear had been covered up by the executive committee or people on or near the executive committee. I don't want to be slanderous, but you know it's very clear that some people who have very high positions of power were covering up these allegations against Martin Smith. Now there's no. What happened to that young woman is disgusting and Smith should rot in hell, right, but with the facts at our disposal, it is clear that maybe 12 to 15 people acted horrifically in terms of perpetrating acts of this kind or helping to cover those up.

Kevin: 1:13:07

The very visceral response that you got to it was a, and by visceral response what I mean is people started treating the SWP like if you got within five minutes of them, you were physically at danger.

Kevin: 1:13:23

Like I have been in planning meetings for demos where people go, we need to stop the SWP showing up, not because it will make us look bad, but because it will make women in our group unsafe, right.

Kevin: 1:13:35

And that response I think largely came from the fact that people who were in or close to the party had felt personally betrayed because they had been fed this line you are committing to something which upholds an impossibly high level of virtue and they had found out in the most disturbing way possible that it didn't.

Kevin: 1:13:58

And I think that led to a large generation of people who went on to be influential activists in other movements and in the Corbyn movement as well, or in the Corbyn search, having this very like I guess almost traumatized relationship with the SWP and in the kind of the cultural moment that we were in, with stuff like me too going on at the same time. That response was very easy to communicate to others. You got around the world, exactly exactly, whereas the you know the kind of the facts of the case are horrific, right, and there's no way of getting around that. But the facts of the case didn't, because what they showed is that that really disgusting behavior occurred in the executive committee in Birmingham. It had nothing to do with an SWP branch in Cardiff, right? So yeah, I think that was part of it. There's also like I'm not sure there was a clear idea of what the SWP was for by that point, and that really changes your incentive models for how you conceptualize your relationship to something which is deeply flawed in whatever way it's deeply flawed.

Kevin: 1:15:21

Does that make sense?

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:22

Absolutely. I mean, I can't think of a socialist organization that hasn't had a sexual harassment or sex scandal, but I can, except for maybe interestingly, you mentioned the CWI not having a problem. I actually have never heard of a. I'm going to knock on the desk. I've never heard about that with salt either. But every other group has a similar scandal. But with Trotsky's amount of groups it tends to be disastrous and in the thing where, as with the DSA or the CPO say, it tends to be a lawsuit and it does have a fact that it's scandalous but it's not going to destroy the organization. And that's not just about size either.

James: 1:16:09

No, it's about professionalism and the difference between that and really strange relationships with people who are kind of your friends and kind of not your friends at the same time, which Fest is in the sect a lot more.

James: 1:16:21

I do think that those kind of questions for the SAPP were a double killing blow, in the sense what Luke said is correct in that respect, but also the context of complete Trotsky's failure within the women's movement, complete Trotsky's failure within anti racist movements and the disabled movements, so on and so forth.

James: 1:16:42

And then to kind of put out this rhetoric that suggests finally, yes, you're going to address it and then for sure will have also hit older comrades within the movement. I think that's really important to kind of note, because there were a few older comrades of mine that I was speaking to around the time of the SAPP scandal and that basically said that this is the same wound, but now it's in the open and I think that that's very important to acknowledge and it reflected, does reflect something institutional in the failures of Trotsky's, but in a very media oriented, explosive way, which is to do with personality clashes and the way in which those organizations are run and how media trickles out with them and so on and so forth, but yeah, it didn't seem to help that the ISO had a almost identical kind of scandal that was similarly limited but went on for six years.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:36

What brought it to light, I think, is that Haymarket Books became a multi-million dollar operation that had corporate oversight, even though it was a non-profit, and that meant that they could not legally get away with the kinds of things that you normally have in sex, although the extent of the corruption in the ISO actually seems to have been even less than the SWP, like it was not that many people implicated. But this seems to be a constant. I mean, like the IMT in Canada just literally had and the Canadian Communist Party both just literally had similar scandals recently, in the last year. So this seems to be a constant thing and I tend to think that you're right. It's professionalism as much as anything else, because you, in a lot of these sectarian forms you have I'm not saying that they're religious, but you have similar dynamics to religious groups where there's a lot of both peer-friend professional barriers, there's not really good grievance handling mechanisms and there's cults of personality involved personally too, and all those things play together, I think, on an organization.

James: 1:18:58

So there's the point. There is the point that on an organization of that scale it becomes incredibly difficult to construct a grievance mechanism, particularly when you are just juggling loads of other things with burnout people doing all of them. I do think that the religious comparison holds up, particularly in terms of the vulnerability of people that those organizations recruit. So in a sense it's kind of horrible to say this, but it shouldn't be surprising in a culture and a society that's so violent against women in general and that this happens so generally. That like that occurs in smaller groups of isolated people who organize together all the time and provide many entries for people who are manipulative in either a pathological way and many circumstances for people who are not that but will be horrible rank opportunists and do awful things too. So you know, those things are kind of social problems compressed into a really extreme representation of them.

Kevin: 1:20:02

Yeah yeah, go ahead Also. I mean just from from. So I was at university, I was actually in the Communist Party, but with SDP people trying to recruit me, kind of four or five years before all this broke through. And what I noticed from both me and the other people they were trying to recruit is that effectively, what they were doing a lot of the time was taking isolated, weird, emotionally immature young guys and saying you know what, son, you're the fucking future of the revolution? Right, just by basically being angry and hanging out with us. Now, luckily, I'm from a Communist Party household, so that was never appealing to me, but that was what they were doing and what was the compound?

Kevin: 1:20:57

One compounding element of the crisis in the SWP is that there had been lower ranking crises of sexual violence in branches running up to that which, in fairness to the SWP, had not been covered up.

Kevin: 1:21:13

Right, they'd been dealt with by a grievance procedure and it had worked reasonably well, but there had been quite a lot of them and it had been very clear that that was related to the way in which recruitment had been taking place and the culture of branches.

Kevin: 1:21:27

Yeah, and so in many ways, what you had here is you know there were women, women, comrades all across the country going okay, this guy got really gross with me or this guy assaulted me or what have you, and he's been kicked out. And I'm glad he's been kicked out. But this mirrors so closely this shit that I know so many people have been going through with that's. That's the. It compounds a sense of the track. Effectively it becomes a you didn't mean it really thing, and so you almost have this kind of coming together of like a grassroots problem, which was facilitated by the way that the party operated and its recruitment policies, which then was compounded by a fact that when it happens at the top, it's covered up. So it's, you know, it's allowed to happen, and then someone is punished at the bottom. And it's allowed to happen and nobody's punished at the top.

James: 1:22:20

With a persistent structure due to the prevalence of sectarianism as well, which does prioritize recruiting aggressive young men, primarily so that they can deal with those sectarian confrontations.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:34

So this is my experience of Marxist groups, regardless of the tendency. This is a trans Marxist group problem in America that really size deals with kind of but, but really only that. I mean, there's horror stories that come out of even fairly famous groups like I don't know, the Black Panthers, but we're in a time period in the context where that stuff wouldn't have been outed. But we don't have groups really that haven't had those kinds of problems, and I think they're in general. There's a tendency that you, you too, may agree with me or disagree with me.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:21

I think this is true for our marginal politics. Whereas you're in marginalized, sectarian politics, you have to have people who are ideological motivated, which leads to an over dependence on students and an over dependence on the ideologically alienated, and this is also true in right wing groups. However, in right wing groups, a, some of the stuff is normalized and not complained about, and B, they have authoritarian ways of handling it. So you know, just, I happen to know that. So it's. It seems to be an interesting predicament of left wing groups who want that kind of active, militant culture but are often appealing to, to young men, are and yet don't really know how to socialize them for this. They don't have the capacity and society in general, as we mentioned, kind of doesn't. And then also on top of that you have structures that are not conducive to to grievance being across the board. One of the biggest ones, I actually think, is like this fetish Trotsky's organizations have for upholding the Bolshevik Constitution of 1921. I don't think that helps it certainly does not know.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:46

So it's. It's it because I have noticed things that have more tendencies and stuff tend to handle this a slightly better, although small groups are always open to it, and I do think that's. I think it's a doubly compounded problem. What do you make about the claims about the the SWP's relationship to Islamism? Is that overstated? Is that like? Is that like a right wing myth? What's going on there?

Kevin: 1:25:13

Happened for a bit and then it stopped that it so the thing which is really visible about it was Galloway's respect coalition after the Iraq war, where Galloway broke away from the Labor Party on an anti war platform.

Kevin: 1:25:28

The SWP and the Socialist Party joined with him, at least initially. It then became clear that Galloway, who was MP for a largely an area with a very large Muslim population, who were of course very upset about the Iraq war for understandable reasons, was more willing to tolerate conservative Islamic politics. Now I'm not an expert. I haven't met and talked to all of these people. I'd be reticent about just saying Islamist with a kind of wave of the hand. My imagination is probably some of them would fit into a definition of Islamism, some of them would not, but they were certainly conservative politics which were very influenced by religion, if that makes sense, so they could be so much of an influence. The SWP were happy to go along with him on that. The Socialist Party weren't. So there was a falling out between them which had quite a high press output, if I remember correctly.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:30

Again.

Kevin: 1:26:31

I heard about it in the States and abroad, so yeah, yeah, so shortly after that, during one good election, the SWP were prepared to live with it. After one bad election, they were no longer prepared to live with it. So it's weird like the SWP and the SP both broke from respect on a point of principle about conservative Islamic politics. It's just the SWP, the SP, the Socialist Party did it. Before it could get them anything any kind of gains in, the SWP, waited until it exhausted anything it could do for them before ushering the point of principle.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:06

Technically it led to the ISO leaving the IST too. So it's which meant that, like the ISO had this plausible deny and did, until it collapsed, this possible deniability relationship with the SWP. Like they push SWP lines, they act like the SWP, but they're not in the eye, they're not in the international socialist tendency more. So they're not technically a problem and I would also. I am using the language that was used at the time. I'm actually quite sensitive to the difference between Islamists and Salafist and, as it gets thrown on America, a lot Wahhabist. That's a very specific thing and I realized that you could have fairly conservative Islamic politics and be actually a quietist or something.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:55

I lived in Egypt for long enough to understand that, but I'm framing it as the way it was framed to me 10 years ago, that's, you know, that's the way it was framed and it's an interesting problem. I mean, one of the things that I would say that makes it so, it makes Trotskyism so interesting, is that it's limits to growth. We're also part of why it doesn't go away. So, like the, the super Orthodox Trotskyist groups are the super idiotic and cratic trust groups. So, like you don't have a Norphite group, for example, I don't think you have anybody who has any relation to David Norph, but but for us that's the world socialist website, people for those who don't know who they are, and the socialist equity party, also confusing.

James: 1:28:47

We have individual members from the world socialist website right occasionally, but they're very weird guys who will just sort of stand up in a meeting and tell you to read an article on the world socialist website and then sit down.

Kevin: 1:29:00

Yes, yes, yeah, I've met more of them at demos in Germany than I have in Britain.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:06

Yeah, wow. Well, what's interesting about that? I mean, the Norphites used to actually take on ultra what would be considered an ultra left position on unions. They have moderated that kind of now back to a sort of Trotskyist Union bureaucracy critique, as opposed to the entire form is capitalist, so we can't do anything with it, which was their original critique. I used to work with someone who was a, who was a Norphite. He later became a All right would be the nice word for it. He worked for Talkie Mag for a while, so you know how that goes. But so we have them. But the organizations I'm not the various Spartacist League splits, a lot of them are still around, at least the IBT, the International Bullshit Expendency, and I believe the Spartacist League itself is still around. You guys don't have those either, do you? We do? Yes, oh, did we give them to you? Was this?

Kevin: 1:30:09

one of the events. They are all so the Communist League, which is the IBT in Britain. They have like one English guy in that I've met, but all of the Spartas I've met are Americans.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:27

I was going to say the Spartacist League seems so very us.

Kevin: 1:30:31

Yeah, I kind of felt like they should have been bringing me a Big Mac, but no, so we have. So I actually went to a. I had a meeting with the Communist League in Manchester. All two of them. They're nice people. I really like them and actually they are. They're both organizers in a particularly large and particularly militant union branch. So they're doing God's work there right, but their meetings, as I understand it, their public meetings, are fairly ill attended, despite the fact that they lay on catering which nobody else does on the left and should be a big kind of draw for new meetings. They, holy crap, yeah, really really nice catering, apparently as well, actually. But so, yeah, there's like two of them, the Spartacist League we there's two things they're really good at, which is coming along to other people's meetings and asking very tangential questions. Yes, and they will do that for all large left meetings in London but nowhere else.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:38

And really caring about marginalized positions that no one really even wants to deal with, such as like their stance on Nambla.

Kevin: 1:31:46

Yeah, yeah, that's we had. Luckily we no longer have that in the British left, but it's within my political lifetime that we've got rid of it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:56

We have mostly gotten rid of it too, I think, and I don't think the IBT does that. I think that's a classic, that's a classic Coke variety of Spartacist League. Yeah, the other thing, though and the Spartacist League in America is famous for producing both the Platypus Affiliated Society, which I come out of, so take that as you will, if I can go to that reading group in Manchester.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:19

Yeah, they run a good reading group. I don't, despite other people, I don't always agree with them. In fact I often don't. I think I don't agree with them more than I do, but I do consider them still to be leftist in some variety, whereas they also. You know, the Spartacist League also produced LaRoucheism, so it's known for its entrancingism, breeding very strange ideology. It also produced, indirectly, a anarcho-primitivist turn anarcho-fascist tendency called a, called a Tasha in the United States. That's probably four people actually. Whoever involved in that. But the Spartacist League brand of militancy apparently has a tendency to mutate, but I figured if anyone else had them it's because we gave them to them. It doesn't seem to be a tendency that happens anywhere else. Do you? I do have to ask, though are the French Trotskyist tendencies, you know, do they exist in the UK? Because that is something that's always confused me. They don't really like. French. Maoism has existed in the United States, but French Trotskyism never caught on here.

Kevin: 1:33:43

I don't think so. I've certainly never come across anything similar to it, james, maybe.

James: 1:33:50

I met one guy handing out some badges from a French Trot party, Can't remember which, At the Miners Gala in 2018. Miners Gala is a big like workers event in the North of England. Yeah, that's the only experience I've had. Yeah.

Kevin: 1:34:13

My mate's partner is French and is a Trotskyist, and she's not been tempted to get involved in any of the British organizations. Now that might be because she doesn't see enough political similarity. It might be because she can't be asked. It might be because, having met a British Trotskyist, you really don't know who that means.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:32

I mean that makes sense. I was going to kind of like Mandel and Belgian and French Trotskyism has an intellectual influence here and it was picked up both by the ISO and the USSWP until recently. That now the Pathfinder tendency, whatever the hell that is I believe all those people are 80. But so it was represented here as a thought tradition like Ernst Mandel is super important for us too, but not as a political tradition. And then what is fascinating to me, despite the large number of Latin immigrants Mexican or Argentine, argentine, actually fairly so big British, mexican, latin American Trotskyism has only really come over as a sad meme in the form of Passatism, like its actual traditions are not really picked up here, even on the Latin American left. And I'm told I don't know if I can prove this that Latin American Trotskyism, particularly in Argentina, is the only Trotskyism that is growing right now. Everything else seems to be in massive retreat, and that makes perfect sense to me.

Kevin: 1:35:53

I haven't understood whether it's still Trotskyist after the fall of the Soviet Union, like I think there's also a problem for us that actually this is something you've talked about on other shows but Marxism in general, all intellectual trends in general characterized to some degree by methodological nationalism, yes, in England that turns into little Englanderism yeah, really, really sharply.

C. Derick Varn: 1:36:25

So Orwellism for Americans.

Kevin: 1:36:29

I think that's unfair. But, like every, I actually quite like Orwell. But like I think you know, he's probably the same as Eric.

C. Derick Varn: 1:36:41

He talks about, like why the British will never have the problems that Americans do because they're working classes perfect and ours isn't.

Kevin: 1:36:49

Yeah, we don't quite have that, but it's this idea that even and especially the internationalists, right, people who talk about internationalism all the time imagine that the world is just a series of Britons and everybody must think and act the same there as they do here.

Kevin: 1:37:07

So, despite the fact that there was a, you know, a burgeoning Trotskyist movement within France, for example, which is literally just over the water, right, everyone went on their school trips there.

Kevin: 1:37:20

British Trotskyism imagines that the great truths of society were found, you know, first by Lenin and then by Ted Grant, and nobody else need to get a word in edgeways when there are international conferences and I know that because you know they used to put sessions of those online and as a student I'd listen to them and stuff You'd get speakers from other countries to be like, yeah, hey, we're international, but it was always people involved in struggles from cities that really could be transposed into the West Midlands. You know, very there was very little engagement with the kinds of struggles which would look different if they were in Britain and so, ironically, you'd end up with stuff like you'd end up with this big kind of focus sometimes on urban Latin American politics, large industrial cities which are being deindustrialized. You know, gentrification, slums. What have you instead of? Like battles in Italy, where there would be cultural variants in there, or the influence of social actors that you just wouldn't have in Britain, and so people would have to think to understand why they were in solidarity with them.

C. Derick Varn: 1:38:35

That's an interesting issue because essentially it is both true and not true in the US Trotsky case simultaneously.

C. Derick Varn: 1:38:41

I mean because I would say US Trotsky, us Maoist are actually tended to be better at international issues than, say, the CPU SA was, except when it was talking about stuff that specifically they had to because of common Turner way over, told them they had to, but when it came, all the American left imagines that America's racial and class problems are universal and it doesn't help that the British British soft left society and European soft left society, even when they're complaining about Americans, which they are constantly doing, do so on the terms of American liberal left identity politics explicitly. It's so much so that, like when I had a German professor who was telling me how bad the United States was, and I told him telling me his opinions on American literature, and I'm like you got that from the New Yorker. It's just like you know, you are actually marrying us back at us and our own uncomfortability with ourselves is what you're expressing as your version of anti-Americanism, which I think is kind of funny. But our own racism yes.

Kevin: 1:39:55

Oh, that's important.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:58

Right. I've been trying to explain, like when British people and American people talk about black and Asian, we don't mean the same thing at all, and sometimes I'm like, and actually it's sometimes really convenient to appropriate American style understandings of racism, because then you cannot deal with your actual conflicts in your home country, like.

Kevin: 1:40:24

So I think that's actually really really crucial to it's really important and this is coming from my workplace and I imagine it probably mirrors some stuff in yours as well Right, it's really important for middle management anti-racism strategy. Yeah, I think, if you're particularly in Britain, if you can make race a symbolic problem as a middle manager, that requires you to do nothing because it's a symbolic problem, but yet you can interpret any behavior you don't like within that symbolism.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:56

That's even true for the United States, like in here. We need to get teachers who represent their communities. They go to the South and hire black professionals in a community where most of the black students are Somali and Ethiopian refugees and Haitian refugees. So it's just like it's like it is the most superficial form of representation that you could possibly do and doesn't actually deal with local issues and the United States being you know what a third of a continent and huge. You know, as I like to remind people, all of Britain fits in what two states, two East Coast states, one West Coast. Even now, we are also like we have trouble talking about our own issues because the national framework is so consolidated, even though we're regionally so variant, and it doesn't have the Europeans basically think New York and California are the country or they think a stereotypical version of the deep South is a country. It's kind of funny.

Kevin: 1:42:06

But you guys think that London and the Southeast is a country.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:09

Oh, yes, I totally. If we think about you at all, like, let's be completely fair, most of us don't. But but yeah, no, the cultural differences between England and England is something that is not real represented here. Basically, our view of your culture is the same as your view of ours. It comes from our media hubs and that means it's, it's England in the South, and we know some of us who are more cultured know that, like the North is different, but we couldn't tell you how the broad amalgamated North.

Kevin: 1:42:50

Yes, it's like according to Americans and southerners is about two thirds of the fucking country.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:55

Right, which is it isn't London, basically, and not Wales or Scotland, so which, I'm sure, really pisses you off, just like it does.

James: 1:43:13

That's fair. I find it funny.

Kevin: 1:43:18

Me and James are North truthers. So we we have a definition of the North which is only accepted by people in that part of the North, which is it starts at the line between Blackpool and Scarborough and anything south of that is the Midlands. So, like Manchester, liverpool, you're not in the North. I'm sorry, you never will be, like in dream, but so I'm a South.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:45

True, for if you're North of South Carolina or West of Louisiana, I don't consider you Southern.

Kevin: 1:43:52

So you want to found an international, derek.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:59

I have sort of thought about like translocalism as a way to do internationalism, because we also like I'm really proud of my very particular fucking sub region with a state mate Like it's like like I'm from one strip of area and I'm like fuck all those people that way and that way and over there. But I have, I have a, I have broad solidarity with the world, as long as you're not from Alabama or North Georgia.

Kevin: 1:44:26

Yeah, I got you, I got you.

C. Derick Varn: 1:44:30

Yeah, it's, it is, and it's funny that you say, because I'm like Manchester, that's the Midlands. But do we believe the Midlands are real? I don't know that I do. It's a residual category.

James: 1:44:43

Anyone from the Midlands hearing this would literally like fly into a fury right now I'm probably going to get it just like that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:44:51

Well, it's funny, though, because people forgive me for all the bad shit I say about England, because I'm just normally slagging you and I will just say this this is actually my slagging on. The English is mostly for the Americans, who tend to worship you for some weird reason that I don't understand. Like, I'm always hearing about how like oh, there's a real left in Europe. I'm like is there though? I've been to Europe, I don't know.

Kevin: 1:45:18

I mean, you're going to say there's a real left in Europe, right? Like I'm not sure that you know, like I don't know, I don't want to do a no true Scotsman right and be like.

Kevin: 1:45:28

well, there's nothing that I would want to call the real left anywhere that I've been Like, but you know. So, comparatively, maybe you can say there's a real left in Europe. Why would you worship Britain, though? I mean for sake like? If you go to France or Germany or Italy or what have you, you will find a much more consolidated, much more vibrant, much more capacious anti-capitalist movement than you will find anywhere in these kind of squalid hell islands where we seem to you know. Every year, this country becomes more and more authoritarian, and what do we do? Like? We write some bad PhDs about it. That's all that happens.

James: 1:46:08

You know, every year the state gets more authoritarian, with nothing to exercise its authoritarianism.

Kevin: 1:46:15

They would love for that to be a left movement. Just so these laws make sense, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:21

I realize sorry. Go ahead. Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. I mean, I think that's actually becoming clear to us in the States. I do think that the, the, the, the, the. How fast the British left seems to have collapsed.

James: 1:46:38

I think the speed might be misleading a little bit and I think this is possibly because of the similarities people draw between the Sanders and the Corbyn moments, whereas I don't think the similarities are that clear cut, to be quite honest.

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:52

They're actually there at all, to be completely. To be completely honest, like although I do worry that the post-Corp the Coast Sanders reaction will actually probably end up similar to the Corbyn reaction, but like Corbynism was both bigger and smaller simultaneously, I think, and that's hard to explain, but but it was the last great yawn of social democracy in Britain.

James: 1:47:20

Right.

Kevin: 1:47:23

Actually going back to Trotskyism, there's one really decisive thing that has led to a precipitous decline of British Trotskyism in Britain over the last 10 years. And British Trotskyism has one consistent and deadly enemy who it never recognizes as its consistent and deadly enemy, and that is the soft left. So socialists in the Labour Party who are not Trotskyists maintain their position and their influence over policy effectively as the the, the kind of the Trotskyist lion tamer. So when they don't feel like they're getting their way in the party, they will integrate and use Trotskyist arguments and activists and organizational structures to put pressure on the right of the party effectively to negotiate with them over the terms of policy. When either they've got a negotiated settlement that they want or, alternatively, the right is got toying with the idea of fucking all of these leftists out altogether, they will stab the Trotskyists in the front sometimes and then what you'll find is 10 years later the exact same thing will happen, because the British Trots have not learned that lesson. So this happened in the 80s with with the rate capping thing in. So Livingston was involved in this, shafting the, the Trotskyist Labour Party people in South London Later, with the militant tendency being kicked out. That happened again, and most recently in the Trotsky sorry in the in the Corbyn phenomenon. It happened through momentum.

Kevin: 1:49:06

So all of these trot groups kind of dispersed themselves into momentum, momentum and into the Labour Party.

Kevin: 1:49:15

Many of them were banned from joining Labour itself because they had previously stood against or supported campaigns against the Labour Party or, alternatively, had been in groups which were considered to be contrary to the, to the views of Labour Party.

Kevin: 1:49:29

The Labour right has a fairly fairly well put together anti-entrism policy. Now these guys were integrated into momentum from its early days. They helped to build it as a front organization. They helped to effectively give it the organizing capacity that it had and they were involved in in, you know, effectively making it the force that it was, because these are very trained, very seasoned organisers. They were able to do all of the shit that you need to do around elections, because they've been doing that stuff for years. As soon as it became inconvenient for the soft left who had the majority on momentum because they will always have the majority over something like that as soon as it became convenient for them to be gotten rid of, momentum got rid of them like that, and so, effectively, what you now have is these group of Trotskyist organisers who have gotten rid of their party infrastructure they now only exist as a network who have, you know, four years of their lives effectively pissed away and nothing really else to go back to and no way of making decisions about how they go forwards.

C. Derick Varn: 1:50:36

That's an interesting parallel to the United States, because we we not just in the DSA, like we in general have a similar issue of our relationship to Democratic Party activist and, you know, dual carders or whatever, but one thing that makes it both easier and hard I mean, bernie Sanders is a key example of this. One thing that makes it easier and harder, though, is that, no, our parties are not by by European standards. Our parties aren't parties. They don't have those kind of like they can do. Party membership in the United States is nominal, and so you can kick someone out from caucusing with you officially at the like, the congressional level, but you couldn't kick out activists from claiming you because our, like you, can't vote in certain ways in the United States without declaring, you know, a party option, even if it's, even if it's formally declaring nothing, depending on the state you live in, which, which in some ways, does mean that it operates kind of differently. Like there, no one's going to be kicking out activists who who do any of this.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:05

However, we still have a similar problem with the Democratic Party and the soft left turning tail. Like the relationship with the DSA to like justice Democrats, for example, is a similar relationship where, when things get hard, they turn tail, are the squad which, I mean, is not all DSA members are endorses, but is mostly they also that there's just no way for the DSA to even begin to hold them accountable. So that's a similar, a similar problem, I guess it's. The other difference to me, though, is like Well, it was an interesting thing. Corbinism in some ways was the first time the British left actually looked like the American left in its voting trends, which is like it had a working class constituency, but it's mainly younger, et cetera. That's not true, actually. Oh, interesting. They didn't have a working class constituency, or it wasn't mainly younger.

Kevin: 1:53:07

I mean it had a working class constituency in the Marxist sense of a working class constituency. It wasn't the bourgeoisie or the petty bourgeoisie who were organizing in this, and labor held together the majority of its working class base, even in the seats that it lost. It was really people who were no longer working or small business owners who proved the kind of switcheroo here. They've got those things to worry. But in terms of the Corbin activist base as opposed to the voting base will change city on city because we're highly regionally differentiated.

Kevin: 1:53:49

But in the larger city, voting blocks and within the activist base the age of labor voters actually went up slightly and the age of Labour Party membership went up slightly, as you would probably expect, because what Corbin was trying to bring back was effectively a soft left labour program from the 1970s or 80s and so old Labour Party voters who would basically think, well, it's not the party for me anymore. Blair fucked it. They got rid of clause for I'm an old whatever, I'm an old lefty, I'm either not going to vote or vote green or whatever. They came back it was an influx of young people into street level activist roles because they were enthused and they wanted to be at the forefront of this thing, but in terms of people actually rejoining the party or deciding to get up and vote for Labour that got older under the pressure of people who felt betrayed by the party for 15, 20 years, saying I no longer feel betrayed by it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:54:59

Mm. Yeah, that's that mammoth is interesting Because the way it was portrayed in America was that it was the first time that the British left looked like the US left, in both the good and bad sense of the term. But I guess that was. We didn't actually see all your exit polls, and they are not usually fairly represented to us. What we got was a media narrative about how the working class had just been left out of British politics entirely, which now is fair enough.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:34

One thing I would that I find interesting about this moment is that in some ways I think the US left doesn't have a strong history. Like we have an appeal to the New Deal and maybe to the Great Society, but we don't have a workers party. We've never had a workers party. Like Taft-Hartley is almost specifically designed to make sure the traditional way of forming a working party is closed off. There's no way for unions to coalesce that way, and so that's a major difference, and thus we also don't have a hankering for a soft left 70s policy, which I knew that Corbyn was pushing, but if I am frank with you, I thought was chaotic, because you don't have that industrial base anymore, nor do I even see the ability to build it up in the same way I think that's true.

Kevin: 1:56:40

Yes, I mean it was really an interesting politics of difference. It was attractive because it was a break from the kind of the liberal center consensus politics which had come before. It was exciting because finally there was somebody who was talking about issues of inequality and class and socialization in a way that people weren't before. It didn't need to make sense to be an exciting alternative. On that basis, now that Jim is back, I'm afraid I'm going to have to go because I'm already late for another call. I'm really sorry about that. That's OK. Would it be possible to plug two things super quickly before? Absolutely Nice one, mate.

Kevin: 1:57:29

So the first of those is the Marxism and Disability Network, which is a monthly meeting and research seminar that happens online. Please look us up. So far we've had really really interesting talks on disability, labor and time. I did one there which was a critique of Adela Bultman for Camps Health Communism. I believe you've had Adela Bultman on the show before, so if anybody heard that and wants to hear an engagement with her, that will be up online soon. And we've also had some really interesting stuff on applying the theoretical insights of Tronti and Pantieri and Italian worker as Marxism to questions, disability politics In general. We're an attempt to bring together organizers and activists involved in disability politics but who are interested in insights from Marxism, along with Marxist researchers who are interested in disability politics as a sphere of anti-capitalist organizing. It's chill. It's a really nice group. Please Google us. We have a mailing list you can sign up to. You can come along to any of the seminars and we're going to be kind of toying with some kind of interesting entry-level publications coming out soon.

Kevin: 1:58:38

The second and I hope this is resolved by the time that you publish this but at the moment 140 workers at the University of Brighton, including teaching staff, admin workers, technical workers, all that kind of stuff. Apparently the management is attempting to make that number of people redundant. Currently the whole of the philosophy, history, literature and arts departments have been told that all workers there are at risk of redundancy. There is a petition to rally support to let management know that they're basically pissing away an asset. There's lots of actions going on on the ground in Brighton as well as around the country by distance learning students in support of the workers. If I send you the link to the petition, derek, would you be cool to pop that in the show?

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:27

Yeah, we'll totally pop it into the notes of the show, not a problem.

Kevin: 1:59:30

Nice one, mate, all right. Well, I'll see you boys in a little bit. Take it steady guys. All right, you too, take care Luke.

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:40

All right, james. I guess we were talking about how Corbinism does not actually both does and doesn't reflect Sandersism, whatever. That is One of the things about Sandersism. I think it is different. It's actually less coherent than Corbinism, but it's because.

James: 2:00:03

I mean there's less of a tradition to appeal to right.

C. Derick Varn: 2:00:05

Exactly, there's no like you can't really appeal to the great society because of Vietnam War. Yeah Right, I guess you can appeal to the New Deal as long as no one knows anything about it. I mean that's relatively true for most of the Labour Party's history as well, but yes, Well, I mean, it's just funny what people think is in the New Deal and I'm like that's not there. That's not there, that's not there. It's like a bunch of Banco stabilizations in the Public Works project mate, like that's all it is.

C. Derick Varn: 2:00:37

I'm sorry. Like I mean, there's some other things. There's the National Labor Relations Act, but which I don't think I think Americans now realize, but I don't think they did realize does it cover most unionized workers anyway, which is there's so many exceptions to it Railroads, government employees, state employees, education, nursing Nursing does have some reprisation on the National Labor Relations Board, but it's subject to other laws except and so forth. So yeah, we don't have that tradition.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:17

We also have a more strained relationship with the Democratic Party, although it seems like what has happened here and this might be controversial and I want you to speak on it a little bit but that the American Marxist have actually filled the role as a soft left in making reconciliation with the Democratic Party seem inevitable and perpetual, and I don't just mean the DSA. Like I've seen Marxist intellectuals who have historically been hostile to the Democratic Party capitulate on the Biden administration in ways that do not make sense to me. How has the British left handled the failure of Corbinism? I mean, because we talked about it a little bit last time. There's been this upsurgence of workers' militancy in the UK, but we haven't seen a left that's really been able to benefit our help or merge with it at all.

James: 2:02:18

No. So I mean I think, to set it in context, the Corbinism comes at the end of a long decline for both the traditional CP and for the British Trotskyist movement as a whole. So following the kind of heights of the 1980s for Trotskyism, membership halves before we get to Corbinism and that's quite significant. It's tied to a lot of campaigning activity, that there's a lot of members through campaigning effective campaigning as well, which is an interesting thing. That goes back to setting aside being Trotskyists in order to do things. But I think since then the upswing for Corbin was interesting because I think that was more of a consolidation of the sectarian milieu than an upswing for the mixed sectarian milieu. I think that's very hard to quantify because obviously a lot of these organizations don't release membership statistics or incredibly quiet about that kind of stuff. But I don't think there was that socialist growth that people associate with Corbin. I think there was a lot more of them in one place than would usually happen because they had a joint project to throw their all in together rather than kind of anything more substantive. I think Luke was outlining the problems within momentum that the British Trotskyism faced with the knife to the front again. That's one element of it.

James: 2:03:45

Since then we've seen I mean, most organizations they don't think socialist appeal have been yet. But I think most of the organizations within the Labour Party have been expelled. I know the Alliance for Work as Liberty was expelled, another one was expelled quite recently and so they've kind of been forced out of the Labour Party, which was, for a huge section of Trotskyists, was their primary tactic in quiet periods, that union work or one or the other, and so that certainly damaged a lot of organizations quite a lot. Other damages have been dealt as well. It's kind of a strange twist of fate that prior to the Corbin election the old militant tendency, the Socialist Party, were in an electoral party alliance with the RMT Union, which was called the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, I think it initially had members from Respect and some SDP involvement, but that dropped away and it was just the Socialist Party and the RMT. The RMT quietly, very respectfully I would say, left that post-Corbin and are now advocating vote for Labour.

James: 2:05:05

And well, if not explicitly but would say anything but the Tories and the Socialist Party have therefore lost their kind of electoral collusion which has basically decimated their possibilities as electoral candidates, which is another strategy, kind of out the window. Social movement-wise, since Corbin is in, what we've seen is a lot of semi-organized street movements, more than I think is usual for Britain. We've had Black Lives Matter during the pandemic. We also obviously imported from the United States but did manage to address certain issues of racism within Britain. There was quite a lot of trying to draw out the lessons in Britain in a comparative sense which was not wholly going into. The difference between the analytics is still more useful than not.

C. Derick Varn: 2:05:56

I would ask how I saw Labour Party ads about Black Lives Matter that didn't seem to deal with British racism at all.

James: 2:06:05

The Labour Party, the activist Miliur did Okay, yes that makes sense.

C. Derick Varn: 2:06:10

I saw the Labour Party trying to use American BLM for it. I was like, how does that have any like? And the UK, just to understand what you're even trying to do.

James: 2:06:22

But anyway, I think it's just straight up branding in their view on that line. Yeah, it's quite gross. But then we also had the kill the bill movement which was, I guess, more like, although initially kind of arose from the Sarah Averard vigil in London which was attacked kind of at the same time as the Public Order Now Act was unveiled. The serious attacks on the rights to protest in Britain did become a kind of joint project of some Trotskyist organisations, some other kind of organisations in campaigning, depending on where you were in the country, and that campaign did some good work but as by and large fizzled out I didn't win any of the victories that it was trying to, even momentarily really, and things like that.

James: 2:07:13

So there's occasional attempts to do the entryism into stuff, oddly not with the environmental movement, so not with Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil and things like that. That seems to have kind of wholly separated itself from the Trotskyist milieu, despite being the most consistently active force that they could appeal to within the country, I think. And then just kind of attempts to turn up to other demonstrations and moments and kind of do that as well as pursuing their old strategies where they can in unions, a little bit electorally a little bit, but we are looking at a continued decline. To illustrate that, in 2017, stop the War Coalition which is a bunch of Trotskyist, socialist Workers Party particularly, but also the Socialist Party founded in response to the Iraq War I have criticisms of the campaign at the time, but skipping over those In 2017, that had 52 branches.

James: 2:08:19

Now last year it has 25. So we're talking about losing about half of their branches since the Corbyn period for a joint kind of front organization, which is the only kind of consistently formed anti-war campaign they've had for a long time. And that's yeah, that's cut in half. So I think that shows quite a perilous decline.

James: 2:08:44

Politically they're kind of not they don't really have a home at the time. At the moment, I don't think.

C. Derick Varn: 2:08:53

It's interesting because the consolidation thing does seem different than the US. Yes, we had a consolidation of the sectarian left, kind of after occupying into the DSA, but the broader population of popularity of socialism is actually a group Like. It is not just a consolidation Because it is so generationally correlated, like Gen X. Like I mean you might think from my podcast, there's a lot of Gen X left. There's not statistically speaking, and there is a huge growth in left-wing movements. That said, all the major left organizations that I follow seem to be posting membership declines of significant amounts. I would say it's kind of case you about their. They used to be very good about reporting their numbers, now they're not Always the same.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:50

But it seems to be declining in active membership rather quickly and precipitously, from a growth at the beginning of the pandemic to, you know, a little under 100,000 probably about 80,000 now active in the ship or so and this is a joke that makes more sense to Americans. But getting off the role of the DSA is like leaving the Mormon church. It takes a while to do so and you kind of have to actively do it. So those numbers may not, like even the numbers of members not in good standing may not even actually be particularly accurate and up to date because of the way they count membership. A lot of other things seemingly have just declined into either the DSA itself or gone away.

C. Derick Varn: 2:10:54

There's rumors of a massive increase in the CPUSA and I will say I see more people identifying with them online than I have historically. But the CPUSA has been tiny until the Sanders campaign, ironically shortly after it in 2016, because they opposed it, because they basically were. We may find them for just being like you know. They don't officially endorse Democratic candidates, but they maintain a popular front strategy Pretty much identical to what they did in World War Two. So they endorsed they won't formally endorse anybody, but they strongly supported people supporting Hillary Clinton etc In the past.

C. Derick Varn: 2:11:45

Now they don't seem to be doing that anymore, although it's unclear. They do still seem to be largely Biden supporters. But the entire left seems to be kind of there, except for the Maga Communist left etc. And Maga, they don't want to be called leftists and I don't consider them leftists either, so I shouldn't call them left, but whatever they are. So we're seeing ideological fragmentation and disarray, but in Britain it looks far more terminal. I mean, from my outside standpoint it just seems like I think part of it is what you are, you in the beginning that we misunderstood the strength of the British left in the first place.

James: 2:12:27

Yeah, yeah, I do think so. For example Trotsky's and I wouldn't say there's ever been a Trotsky's movement in Britain there have been movements that have been Disproportionately influenced by Trotsky's them but wouldn't define themselves as Trotsky's movements. So, for example, like the biggest example and the most successful example I would give would be the poll tax campaigns again to go back to that because that got quite a huge class basis behind it and was initially started by the militant as a Slow sequence of meetings and campaign events and so on and so forth. That gathered huge support but it outgrew them and in order to do it they have to stop being Trotsky's. So Trotsky's influenced but not a Trotsky's movement by any metric, and I think that's that's a big contradiction in the respect, because on the boss we can say that, as Luke referenced earlier, we we also don't have any organizations that are not Trotsky's at this point. So you end up with a position where it's never existed but it's dominant. And that's a really strange contradiction to be in, because in the lolls between where more organic activity or union activity occurs, if you do street politics in Britain, you are going to come up against the Trotsky's left and they are going to seem like either you're going to merge with them, you're gonna work with them, or they'll be aggressive if there's a position that they want to defend that you disagree with, and that will seem dominant. And that was how politics appears in the day-in, day-out Activism. So it's also going to dominate our discourses and which, which comrades in the US can see, but actually socially it doesn't mean that much like at all and it gets leveraged, as I said, for reasons within Labour Party, power politics and so on and so forth, to which presents this image of something that's much more powerful than it ever realistically was.

James: 2:14:22

And I think the only kind of answer these questions is that we're dealing with things that draw from really fracturous social bases.

James: 2:14:29

To begin with and I think that's important to understand, they're not. They're not something I would say is rooted in a class, and I wouldn't say that's the rooted in this particular demographic of the class. They certainly draw a lot from students, but students are very variable and they tend to draw from quite alienated people normally, and that leaves you with a very fracturous kind of vulnerable political base that can accidentally wander into doing significant things sometimes and has, but by and large ends up Continuing this process of decomposition, which it's never been able to, and renewal, which it's never been able to escape from. But it seems like the conditions for renewal are going away as the Labour Party goes to a more hard-right position, as campaigns become less coherent, as as kind of economic crisis starts to bite and unions don't have any of the kind of actual power to represent workers interests that they used to, even within Britain, and so on and so forth, and it leads you with a very difficult situation, I think.

C. Derick Varn: 2:15:31

What I find interesting about this to me is it makes Britain kind of the most acute form of the sporadic decomposition. We can talk about Italy and France's, where places are better, but we see similar decomposition patterns. I think I Am uncool, like, for example, if my crown is the loot is really to Lose next round, next round elections in France. I don't see my la shawm being able to overcome lapin. I just don't, maybe.

James: 2:15:59

I'm wrong. I hope, I hope I'm wrong. But yeah, I agree with you on that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:16:04

Um, I also don't know how long the SPA day is gonna be able to hold on to power in Germany. I don't suspect very long. So it's, it's. It's very strange. I think we're gonna look back at this and you'll be like well, this was a left-wing revivalist movement, of which and where a lot of the current lefts of the world actually die, which is not a fun period to live through. But Maybe I'm wrong about that, but so far I haven't been, but it has been clarifying it's.

James: 2:16:42

It's kind of hard because, like, on the one hand we can look at, because I think what one thing we do Within every tendency, even when we're talking about tendencies that we disagree with or whatever think, think have problems, we tend to periodize over and over and over again, so a failure doesn't last as long. So if that makes sense, so like we talk about British Trotsky's, I mean there was an upsurge in the 80s, in the 90s and there were successful campaigns over those periods, right. But what we're talking about in terms of success is really important to know, because the poll tax is the only one that got policy revoked, it's the only one that affected a meaningful social change in direct terms. The anti-Nazi League, the socialist workers parties, anti-fascist strategy Can be quantified as effective in some respects.

James: 2:17:33

It certainly had huge popular turnouts and engaged at youth culture and made some kind of gains against racism within kind of broader society. But in terms of in advance for the class or for like, like a concrete policy or a concrete room for maneuver or an advancement of a party or anything, none of those things happened. So the retreat in Britain I think has been going on for a long time, as it has in the US and we Reperiodize it with the defeat of Corbinism, for example, as if the upsurge was anything but an aspiration, because I don't think it got beyond an aspiration.

C. Derick Varn: 2:18:09

Yeah, I think it's clear our defeat because we got so thoroughly defeated in the 90s and 30s like yeah, and then, and then buried in the Red Scare in the 50s. You know, whereas we have, micro resurgence is, but even then, I mean, as I like to point out, we're talking about a few hundred thousand people In a population of 320 million, and Even though socialism's popularity has gone up so far, it has gone up significantly. So you know, no longer 200 million of those people hate socialist. That's no longer true. That does not mean that there's a viable socialist politics in the United States at all, and and this seems to be true in a lot of Europe too. So it's, it's a. It's hard to say and and most of the left-wing you know you're right about the purization there's also a tendency, like you see each left-wing renewal Possibility as successful before it's ever even really launched. As anyone who remembers ten years ago and everybody who thought that Podemos, our Sarizo, would be a rebond for the rebirth of the European left, yeah, that has not worked out.

James: 2:19:36

So Not at all. No, no, it's a very difficult one. I think it's something that Go. There's various different ways of explaining it, but all of them are kind of unsatisfactory. So you can look at it in terms of cycles of capital accumulation.

James: 2:19:53

There's some arguments that suggest that workers power actually increases in periods of positive valorization. Right, there's the case to be made that there's a sort of class decomposition, for example. But people are this is the end notes kind of theory in a very Small potted way of people are spread out more, workplaces are more dispersed, so on and so forth. The capitalist geography politics have changed, which is again partially true. In in like Britain, certainly, the industrial working class does not exist in anywhere near the same form as it did in like the 1800s or 1900s.

James: 2:20:30

But Again, that's kind of unsatisfactory as an answer for why the whole left would decompose in the same way. Then you've got the defeats of international socialism, the defeats of like dealt by a factorism and Reaganism specifically as forms again, which do explain something. But don't get it, I don't think. I think it's one of those things where in the downturn all you can really do is Is attempt to find the actual like social Forces that you need to find in order to build something, and that's not going to come from repeatedly attempting to build tendencies which have already died. It's sad to say, but I think that British Trotsky isms on its last, like violin solo out at this point.

C. Derick Varn: 2:21:18

As much as I. I'm not an anti-trotskist. I want my, I want my audience to know that, but I Think it needs to go. Yeah, me too.

James: 2:21:28

I think I used to go like I have a lot of Disagreements with the trotsky's tendency. I'm not like an anti-trot in the sense that I paid all trotsky's. I agree with some on some things and disagree on a lot of the orthodoxy that goes with it, but that doesn't mean I think that they're bad. But yeah, I just think it's become a Fetter on any kind of organization Attempting to form something new. At this point that we all fall into the same model and repeatedly, kind of because of the ways those models justify their failures in terms of doctrine, just go on to attempting to refine the doctrine and never looking at the organizational problem as a whole Leads to this kind of expansionist, drawn-out defeat and we just kind of need to go no and move on.

C. Derick Varn: 2:22:19

Yeah, I think I mean, if anything, my cause in general, for Marxist to Realize that we have to kind of move on from the 20th century, learn from it, not try to bury it, not try to pretend it didn't happen, which I think maybe that latter tendency may be a common one these days, whether or not your ML's are, your a neo-kowskies. There seems to be this whole like let's just get back to the earlier form where it quote worked on, quote Mm-hmm, and I don't think, I think it's useful to learn from that. I you know, obviously I wouldn't be talking to you on about the history of these things and the revisionism controversy etc.

C. Derick Varn: 2:22:56

If I didn't but, If there is a vibrant socialist political tendency in the future, it will probably be Marxist, but it will probably not be any of the forms of Marxism that currently exists. So Maybe it'll come out of China, but I'm not sure about that either. So it's it's that's just my stance on this at this point that a lot of these things feel like they feel like I Call them cargo Colts. You know, it's just. It feels like, oh yeah, you know, we did this in the past and let's just keep doing it until they show back up. And no one showing back up.

James: 2:23:36

So yeah, so.

C. Derick Varn: 2:23:39

So, uh, james, anything you'd like to plug?

James: 2:23:43

Um, I mean we're on a little bit of a video down time at the moment we're doing a longer film again. I'm gonna be on the Capit. It's called for land on the capitalist mass extinction, um, and that will go into the, the mass extinction which the sixth mass extinction, which is distinct from and composed of the climate crisis, so touches on a lot of different eco politics. Um, trying to draw things together to deal with arguments that were in an anthropocene and Give a little bit more context of the distinction between the social critique and the scientific kind of way of Arriving at that critique, because I think that a lot of Marxist tendencies tend to dismiss scientific reasoning around why it's a human driven, not a capitalist driven, specific mass extinction On the basis of malfusionism or a misunderstanding or a lack of engagement with the science, and kind of just deploy the social critique without Examining where the science is kind of reasoning from. So it will go into that, but that'll be a couple of months, a month or two.

C. Derick Varn: 2:24:51

That sounds heady. I mean I just had matt huber on, but I'm also reading a cohe seto and um, yeah, I, I'm becoming I'm not mouth is in pill at all, but I do. I am sort of, uh, becoming more, more skeptical of the oh, it's just totally about redistribution of resources equitably and then we could grow forever sort of Um thinking. I just I don't think there's a lot of scientific evidence for that Um, but we do need to, we do need to understand both, both debates and arguments, and if we're going to have a critique of the of of, you know, the scientific, we can't always just talk about the population bomb and other easy to do bunk bullshit.

James: 2:25:38

No, I think. I think the core of it for me comes back to if you look at um, I mean marx's phrase of His critique, which is that natural science was without history. If you're going to be able to critique natural science, to To allow the entry of history as a critical domain, then you can't have a marxism without science. Um, it's kind of the correlation right, and I think we're falling into the marxism without science trap quite a lot. Um on those problems. Um, because, yeah, the population bomb is really easy to dispute but it doesn't tell us anything when we do.

C. Derick Varn: 2:26:13

Yes, fair point. Um, well, thank you so much. Uh Uh, thank you for coming on and um, probably We'll have you on in the future. Um, maybe I'm on these topics once you're in the x movies, but Well that would be wonderful.

James: 2:26:34

Awesome, I've been good at chat team man. Uh, I am gonna have to run now I understood All right.

C. Derick Varn: 2:26:41

On that note, good night everybody.