Can Dignity And Science Share A Banner Without Becoming A New Elite with Daniel Tutt

Daniel Tutt returns to continue our series on intellectuals. The hardest truths are the ones that feel personal. We take Robert Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy” into the engine room of the SPD and ask why organizations built for emancipation so often drift into elite rule. From the paradox of proletarian vs bourgeois intellectuals to the cultural gravity of anti-socialist repression, we trace how habitus, patronage, and safety nets shape who gets to be “militant”—and who can’t afford to be.

Then we pivot to Jacques Rancière’s worker poets and autodidacts, setting aesthetic emancipation against “scientific socialism.” Do movements need science to map capital, or dignity to sustain courage—and can they live without either? Along the way, we pressure-test managerial class narratives from Burnham and Michael Lind, explain why pluralist fixes fail without leverage over capital, and pull hard lessons from Chile’s experiment: provisional leadership, worker coordination, and a sober reckoning with the violence embedded in class order.

With mass politics hollowed out into cartel parties and charisma’s glow fading, we sketch practical designs that resist capture: rotation and recall, sortition to break patronage, transparent conflicts-of-interest, democratic unions with real guardrails, and para-academic spaces that spread rigorous tools beyond the university’s segregating incentives. Overproduced elites complicate the picture; some can bridge worlds, but leadership must be constrained by accountability and class rootedness, not résumé prestige.

This is not resignation masquerading as realism. It’s an argument for building institutions that expect drift and correct it in real time—where dignity anchors motivation and scientific analysis sharpens strategy. If that sounds like the synthesis you’ve been looking for, press play, save the reading list, and tell us: which guardrails would you make non-negotiable? Subscribe, share with a comrade, and leave a review with your top design ideas for anti-capture organizations.

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

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Setting The Stage: Michels And SPD

C. Derick Varn 0:48

Hello, welcome to Varmblog with Emancipations here and uh Emancipation. And we are talking about the problem of intellectuals, elite and proletarian. And the contrast today will be Robert Mitch uh Mikkels uh as a contrast for um Rancier and uh and I think this might be setting up uh a lot in terms of various debates. Um I have talked a lot about uh Robert Mickels' influence on my thinking, but it his influence on my thinking is in a similar way to Hobbes' influence on my thinking is like the best enemy I'm going to have. Um you know, this is not me necessarily endorsing uh Mickels, and I think Mickels is interesting um uh for a variety of reasons. Um and one of which is that he's associated with the with the elite school in Italy, although this book was interestingly, it's about the espeday primarily, and also uh was written in German. Um he was tangential to the what we like to call the the youngest historical school, which is confusing, but uh for for those of you who don't know who that is, it's it's the people around Werner Sumbart and Max Weber and uh Loria who were the most Marxian of the Ger uh of the German historical school. The problem that you have and why you don't probably know about them as much, is uh because he um well, not just him, most of them ended up fascist. Weber didn't because he died before there was even a possibility. Um, but Sumbart famously is one of the most influential socialist thingers that you don't know about because, unlike Heidegger and some other people, his fascism really did make him not bring uncle uh bring uppable in left-wing circles, except for one text, which occasionally gets brought up, which is why Americans aren't socialist, right? Um, but no one and even that was only in the end of the new left, and everybody was very quiet about what Sumbart actually was. Um, but he was early on a Marxist. Um and politically, Mikkels was a member of the SP Day, then as he moved to Turin, um became part of the Italian Socialist Party and got really into the national syndicalist movement, and eventually becomes uh a supporter of Mussolini and a and a member of the Fascist Party. Um and you know, he that's the that's the political brief on him. Um he also wrote on eugenics. Uh so uh and he was considered the smartest student of Max Weber.

SPEAKER_02 4:16

Um Lukac is smarter, but that's uh personal opinion.

C. Derick Varn 4:22

Although I think that's an objective fact, but I think that's well, anyways.

SPEAKER_02 4:27

Uh so yes, so the book we're talking about is called Political Parties, published in 1911 by Michels. It's a very in-depth, comprehensive empirical analysis of the largely German but really European socialist movement. He mentions even data from the United States to in some very tangential ways. Um and it stretches back to the time of LaSalle, uh, who's technically one of the sort of you know founders of the SPD. Um and I mean it's a two or de force as a as a book, and the you know, the subtitle on the oligarchic tendency in modern democracies seems to indicate a type of fate accompli, not necessarily with fascism, but with elite theory. Yep. Although, although I don't I don't really um piece out or or sort of extract some of the insights from the book that might um speak to uh sort of perennial problems of leadership, uh class conflict internal to organizations. The first sort of interesting thing that's also sort of a limitation of the book, of course, is that he's talking about class dynamics that are purely within the uh matrices of a organization, of a huge socialist organization, which was extremely robust in its presence. I mean, you know, the SPD had all sorts of cultural clubs, you know, people could make their careers in the SPD. There was actually uh it became known for a hub for proletarian intellectuals to experience kind of something like a kind of intellectual formation. And he had whole generations of um worker uh members of the SPD, you know, and he analyzes the relationship between father and son over the course of four generations. He one of the more interesting parts of the of the text, of course, is an analysis of how the SPD was affected by the antisocialist laws in like the 1870s, 1880s, and beyond under Bismarck, um, which you know sort of um crippled uh the intelligentsia of the SPD in in very significant ways. And he gets into the sort of granularities of class distinctions and how they played out in terms of things like commitment to revolutionary zeal, revolutionary programs, and uh intensity. And one of the so, like, there's a lot of very interesting insights or findings from the text. And I think because it is so focused on a mature socialist organization, arguably the most mature socialist organization in Europe, um, you know, it's it's sort of parallels that you could draw from from that time to our own are somewhat constrained and limited for for that reason. But like one of the things that he says in the chapter three that that you and I wanted to focus on the most is that it's and this is uh perhaps paradoxical. There's a lot of paradoxical conclusions. But one of them, and this agitates me. Sometimes a truth can agitate, right? Uh it is a truth, but maybe I want to ask you if you think how you've how you absorb this idea. Uh the distinction between proletarian intellectual and bourgeois intellectual within socialist movement had a tendency for producing something which is other than what we would assume it would produce, which is that the proletarian intellectual, because they had to fight tooth and nail to get into the position that they are in, namely as an intellectual, had the consequence of

Elite Theory, Fascist Turns, And Influence

SPEAKER_02 8:17

limiting their uh commitment to revolutionary or militant positions as the class struggle unfolded compared to bourgeois intellectual. And this is a very interesting point. So let me finish one final point because I know you're gonna have a lot to say to this. He only speculates a little as to why that might be the case. And as I'm reading it, I'm sort of superimposing a bunch of things. Well, actually, you don't understand Mikkel's like why that is the case to the extent that that is hitting on a truth, or maybe it's more of like a truism. And like, for example, the notion here is similar to the same paradox that he uncovers regarding um the most exploited of the workers, and there it's not it's not necessarily the case historically from French Revolution on, like, let's say in the wider sweep of modernity, uh, that the most exploited of the working class are necessarily the ones who have the kind of immediacy of ideological commitment to the overthrow of existing order. On the contrary, what he tries to show, and this is related to the oligarchic tendency in a way, is that um uh bourgeois intellectuals, because they are traitors to their own class, and this is very unique, I think, to the German SPD situation. He thinks that they become almost like more adept enemies to the bourgeois class. And because we're talking about socialist revolution, we're talking about a revolution of the bourgeois class. Bourgeois intellectuals have a certain leg up. So that's the first proposition that I find frustrating or interesting and interesting that I want your thoughts on. And then I have a couple of others.

C. Derick Varn 10:14

I think it's but one of the things is I think it's true, but I was frustrated by him not seeing the obvious mechanisms for one. I mean, Bourdeau ironically would have helped him out here. Um the the stakes of ingratiating yourself to a different cultural habitat actually does mean that one, you don't have the time to develop these positions a lot of the time. And two, just as a and two, uh, you need relative safety to do it because your position is much more precarious than the person that then the bourgeois intellectual who has the resources to do it, which means that in most of the time you need a bourgeois patron, and why the hell would they patronize you to be that radical, unless you're very lucky within the within a party apparatus or something like that?

SPEAKER_02 10:58

And he gives he gives the example of Auguste uh Babel, who was a proletarian by origin and had the but extremely minority position in this in the history of socialism, who had the kind of unique and luck, you lucky capacity to inhabit the sort of trust. Because the other thing he says here, by the way, it may seem pessimistic at first blush, but what he also says is that in order for the SPD to function as a healthy organization, rank and file needed worker intellectuals to identify with, even though they were not necessarily at the uh cutting edge of theoretical production within the bourgeois science, that wasn't really their contribution. They played a different contribution in the same way that Babel played a contribution to this identification, and what he wants to argue is kind of like they stabilized the rank and file trust with the party. So the rank and file desires for working class leadership to be in place, you know, both intellectual but also uh bureaucratic and administrative, both. So, but on the intellectual side, I found that to be a bit of a um a tricky argument. But anyways, I'm sorry for interrupting, please.

C. Derick Varn 12:28

Well, Babel's actually interesting in in this regard, and and another person that we can mention in high sight would be Khrushchev, um, who is also, I mean, he's in a different scenario, and arguably because he's in a at least a nominally, but I think here nominally really does matter, worker control state. Um but that Babel didn't take the most radical positions in the in the espeday, but he was actually still for people on the outside. I mean, you think about Spengler writing about the SP Day and what he what he admired in Babel, um, was this vitality the associated with like Marxist positions, but that was embodied in Babel, even if Babel did not take the most radical positions as an MP. And I think that's interesting to think about as an interfacing, you know, like what is the role here? Uh, the other thing I would say is is this limited because of you're looking at the SPD in a particular context? Because I was thinking about in bourgeois radicalism um in the uh in the French Revolution, a lot of the N Rajes, you know, who are well to the left of uh of the mountain and the Jacobin really were proletarian origined. Um so is it specifically the context of the 19th, early 20th century that's leading to this or not? Now, I would I would say I've really thought about this a lot because my uh opinion is I do meet a lot of very radical workers, um, but they don't tend to be very successful in the current um like in the DSA, for example, you you meet someone who's actually blue-collar working class, and there are some, there's a lot. Um not tons, admittedly, but there are. But and some of them do take relatively radical positions, but they tend to get they tend to not have the social skills and habitat to to out negotiate their their what we wouldn't be dealing with bourgeois so much here, but professional peers. Um and that leads to an interesting problem. That's like, well, okay, where are the radical workers if they exist? And it's I don't think Mickels really deals with this at all. I mean, do you agree with me? What what do you make of that?

SPEAKER_02 15:09

No, he he sort of wants to generalize a point, which is that uh the vast the whole oligarchic theory about the inevitable repetition of oligarchy is tied into, I think, this pessimistic claim that he's basing basing off of his empirical sample from the SPD organizational background history experience, etc. But he wants to generalize it out quite a lot. So he will make a kind of reference to the French Revolutionaries as having bourgeois backgrounds. I think he then tries to say on in chapter three, um, within Marx, and this is sort of well established, even Althusser in the beginning introduction of four Marx makes the same point that um Marxism has not produced proletarian uh theorists that have pushed the theory in a robust way forward. But Althusser then concludes that with the argument that actually it's necessary to do that, and

Proletarian vs Bourgeois Intellectuals

SPEAKER_02 16:17

it's necessary that that be regionally developed in France in particular, and he sees there's a certain poverty of that historically in France. You have it in Germany, um uh, but the examples usually are because theory requires uh interventions within the field of science, right? Historical materialism grounds its legitimacy as a scientific operation. It does make sense that people from bourgeois backgrounds, precisely because they've gone to elite universities, etc., and then they undergo the uh you know adoption of Marxism, would be in a position to push scientific theory forward in this way. In a way that's why I wanted to contrast Mikkel's readings with Jacques Rancier, by the way, is because in Jacques Rancier's studies of the worker intellectual, he puts forward the claim that in fact, what's more uh emancipatory in the history of 19th century working class struggles is the aesthetic uh capacity for worker intellectuals basically to uh engage in their own intellectual proclivities in this kind of um kind of like a separation from you know regulated or sort of hegemonic knowledge systems. And he sort of really valorizes the the sort of aesthetic production of worker poets and worker intellectuals in ways that I find quite interesting. And he thinks that in fact, scientific socialism, if you actually study the working class intellectuals, was sort of like an um alienating discourse for them. And he gives a bunch of like uh very concrete examples. The most famous is this uh figure named Goni, who like was a floor tiler uh by day and then by night. He was he called himself a uh plebeian philosopher. And uh Rancier actually reintroduced his works, I think, in the 1980s for the first time. It was completely completely forgotten from history. And one of the things I like about Rancier's uh efforts to bring out these forgotten worker intellectuals is that he treats them, he he analyzes their writings with the same level of seriousness as he would analyze like Hegel or Kant, or you know, and um it you really get that sense when he and then he does sort of like a comparison uh between like Plato and he does this whole genealogy and the philosopher and his poor, where he tries to argue that there's been a sort of marginalization of proletarian philosophers since the inception of philosophy. So uh Roncier, and I interviewed Roncier about these about this study. I find it very compelling. It's also a bit um, it's also a bit aloof because I do have the sense at the same time that his data points are journals and epistolary material, like diaries of the interior lives of workers, which is valuable, but he's really talking about like aesthetic emancipation, he's not really talking about political emancipation exactly. And that I think is reflective of Rancier's own disenchantment with Marxism itself, right? The fact that he sort of falls into that post-68 um kind of orientation where he sort of abandons socialism in a way. Um so anyway, so but that that's an interesting point of contrast because I mean to go back to Mickels, I feel like, yeah. Um what he's really trying to drive at is this idea that the SPD created a situation which forged a type of inertia, created a kind of organizational inertia in which revolutionary class consciousness was not capable of actually achieving the Marxist objective, which is class abolition. Rather, what it did was it sort of it rather uh kind of like a washing machine, just sort of re it just sort of cleaned, cleaned out the sort of uh class. Suppression, it sort of equalized it, sort of introduced what he calls bourgeois and made eventually made the members that were working class that then became apparatchics of the party de classe effectively. And he does he does spend a lot of time talking about some very interesting points of this idea of um the interior, because he also focuses on the interior life of worker intellectuals. And one of the things that he says that I think still rings very much true today is that uh the worker intellectual becomes sort of like a scandal within the sphere of bourgeois institutions, precisely because they're not necessarily comfortable to talk about their origins. That's actually one thing that he shares with Roncier because this study of Goni, the proletarian philosopher, or he calls him plebeian philosopher, which I think is a weird title. But by the end of his life, he actually says, I prefer not to be seen associated with the class. By the end of his life, he was interested in this like uh almost like libertinism. So it led to a type of uh post-class libertineism. And so uh I suppose the lesson from Mickels is so uh that's why I called it on Twitter. I called this an evil book, and I don't mean it evil as in um I mean it evil in a very subtle, it's a very subtly evil book because of these little paradoxical insights that he brings. And also because I feel that um it's very it's maybe not wise to generalize too much from the experience of of 19th century industrial proletarian organizations. Like, for example, I was having this conversation with Michael Heinrich, and you know, Michael Heinrich, you know, the great Marxologist, right? In his introduction to the reading of Marx's Capital, he starts off and he says, Look, 21st century socialism cannot repeat worldview Marxism. Yeah, and worldview Marxism he defines as exactly what this is, which is the party is your whole life, the party shapes your your your horizon of possibility. In other words, in utero, the party um gives you an alternative culture, right? By the means to to sort of uh comprehensively becomes a church, it becomes a church, a new church, and um comprehensively orientate your life, right?

C. Derick Varn 23:31

Anton Jaeger makes a similar point about the about the age of mass politics and and uh his point about bowling alone, although uh my critique of Jaeger is like um it doesn't entirely deal with all the social reproduction elements that were tied into that. Um, but to to to keep it here, it is a those mass organizations, political worker, etc. Not just accidentally, they intentionally replicated the the the the kind of institutional and para-institutional structures of of like Protestant church leagues down to having your own sports teams, yeah, and your own choir. And what I find interesting, and and when we talk about Heinrich, and I have a lot of problems with the hangrip, but I'm actually sympathetic to him here. Um, I work with workers' groups to try to do this. Like there's a workers' choir and this thing that I work with, and I support it in the sense that I support social interaction with people being socialized to do things in a sphere with other workers, right? But I will say most people react to it as a weird foreign imposition the way they will react to going to church. It is not, it does not have the same function um in the late 20th, early 21st century that it did in the late 19th, early 20th century. I think partly also because those the institutions that it's based off of have similarly declined in public life.

SPEAKER_02 25:10

Yeah, they've declined, they've declined in big ways. And I feel that I felt but but but I think I don't want to I don't want to eskew that history in the same way Heinrich wants to do so. Because for him, I even asked him, I'm like, he's like, you know, he's like and I was in a dialogue with him, and and uh it's like, do you think that we need socialism in 21st century to have big beer halls with you know whoever our leaders are, with massive uh portraits of them on the wall, like like Babel and Kautsky, and then of course Marx and Engels and so on. It's like he's like, of course not, right? But then uh uh shortly after that, of course, he then uh makes a total uh uh rapprochement between contemporary liberal parties and communism. And I'm like, wait a second, now you've just undercut yourself here. So there's still the need to kind of uh concoct a sort of subtraction from the hegemony of these contemporary liberal bourgeois institutions, which you don't see as antagonistic or even like elevating to a primary contradiction at all. In fact, you want to cooperate with them uncritically, you want to cooperate with them. So, in a way, I feel as if there's a question about how to utilize party and organization to overcome hyper-atomization, hyper like postmodern atomization,

SPD Culture, Anti-Socialist Laws, Inertia

SPEAKER_02 26:48

uh, without you know reproducing this kind of cloistered off religious vibe that ended up ended up creating this oligarchic tendency, right? Right. How does one, and this is why I mean uh you've had them on your show before, but you know, Gabriel Tupanamba and his colleagues down in Brazil are trying to uh they have this experimental organizational thing where they sort of try to concoct organizations that produce egalitarian effects, not oligarchic effects, because I do think that Mickels' general uh sort of warning is absolutely sound. One one also does, I you know, one of the things that's missing in his warning and in his political party's text is sort of like the materialist analysis as to how these oligarchic tendencies repeat themselves. Uh, in the sense of um the as tied to imperatives of capital, that's not present really. He's not giving a sort of Marxist analysis, I think, at the end of the day.

C. Derick Varn 27:57

No, no, this is a German historical school analysis, which I actually do think is important to point out. I said they were Marxians, Sombart being the most Marxist of them until he becomes a fascist. Um, but they aren't Marxist. Weber's not a Marxist, no way not at all. Like, um, one of my big beefs with analytic Marxism is that like it smells of Weber and Keynes more than it smells of Marx. Um, and I think that's a problem. And for those of you who don't get to where to where I think this leads, um, I discovered this book uh by reading James Burnham. And when I was trying to figure out the like modern 20th century theories of class, uh, I read Burnham first as a first, I think I may have even encountered him in high school because you get introduced to Orwell, you realize that Goldstein is supposed to be Trotsky, but he speaks Burnham. Um, and I realized this, I realized this probably in about 11th grade reading 1984. But I was like, okay, this is this is not I wouldn't have found some Trotsky. I'm like, this isn't what Trotsky says. Like, who says this um about the about the vital center? And I'm like, oh, the Italians say this, and oh Burnham, okay, and then you find like this secret history of Shackmanite Trotskyists basically becoming key figures in both the paleo and neocon movements, but anyway, um the the point here though is I read the managerial revolution, um, which to bring up to our uh our our issues about the class of intellectuals, um, the managerial revolution I think is one of the biggest influences on Aaron Reich. Um the reason why it's the PMC and not just the professional class and the petite bourgeois separately is that they're trying to incorporate for the left what the managerial revolution ends up doing for the right. Um, but there's a sequel to the managerial revolution called the Machiavellians. It's now published as the modern Machiavellians, and that's when you realize that Burnham was actually pretty sympathetic to fascism. But um, even though he doesn't say it because every single one of his examples are like Italians, and once you get to the modern period, they're all Italian elite school people that were liked by the fascists. Um but nonetheless, I read this book because reading the chapters in uh in that book, the chapter on Michels was one of the chapters that actually made sense, as was the chapters on Pareto. Uh the rest of it, I was like, this is just cynical shit. Kind of threw it out. But um, my my point about this is that I was surprised though, reading Burnham, that the mechanisms for this weren't really talked about, nor were another problem. Um is this actually tends to correspond with with Bonapartism and Caesarism and other hyper-authoritarian centralized executive forms of dealing with the problem, even in even on the left. Um because if you think about, for example, what the Yusuf China of the Purges and what the Great Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution were about, really, um uh it's not just Stalin's power, that's not actually even Stalin's primary concern, and we know that from his own diaries. It's that they need to control apparatchics, some of whom have bourgeois origins, some of them have working class origins, but these apparatch start showing these kinds of incentive structures that you see in Mickels. Um, this is also basically why Mickels becomes a fascist, because he basically seems to think by the end of his life, although I will say it is true, it is not even explicitly implied in this book, it's kind of just a minor subthread that the only way to control the oligarchs is a bigger Bonapartist figure that would break them up. Um, yeah. And I I bring all this up because this is why the declassiness is kind of interesting of it when you compare it to uh Rancier. This was my frustration. When you were telling me about Ranciere, I was like, I really like a lot of Rancier, but I've always had the issue that I felt like the stuff I read by him in the aughts that was really popular was just aestheticized. And I can come to the same conclusion from American outsider art, but that tells me nothing about the political viability of the proletariat and about proletarian theory in that way. I know plenty of uh of uh working class artists that fit the model implied by Rancier, Rancier, but um I don't know what that means politically, um, because of a thousand reasons, including uh something that I think is implied in Rancier, but Burdu actually has a better way of explaining, and that is one of the reasons why we don't like when people talk about symbolic violence, all right, and Burdu, um, they tend to misuse it. But what symbolic violence was dealing with the implications of your habitas, meaning you're at a distinct disadvantage in all social interactions if you're from if you average to be one of the people who jump from one social class to another, um, because you have to use more codes, it's not natural to you, you have to mimic harder, etc. etc. etc. And having that pointed out to you is basically it can seem even like a form of noblis oblige, like some of the people doing it think they're being nice, yeah, but they're also reminding you you were at an extinct disadvantage and taking away your ability to blend in, which I think leads to a lot of uh proletarian intellectuals, both in the formerly trained sense and in the organic, they never went to school sense, opting out of their class position.

SPEAKER_02 34:08

Yeah, that's that's all very helpful. I mean it's a strange, it's such a strange situation that he outlines because, in a way, you know, if we compare Roncier's portrayal of worker intellectuals to Mikkels, in both instances, they experience an acute alienation from being capable of speaking to in a way that has continuity and that has coherence, their class origins. Because similar to the dynamic that I pointed out in our first episode from Alvin Goldner, in this Hegelian idea of the universal class, which is this sort of general philosophical milieu and orientation of modern bureaucracies, which has to do with this idea that, in a sense, there's um a precondition for universal utterance that is detached from social positions, in order for you know general discourse to take place, on the one hand. Then on the other hand, because we are engaged in a socialist struggle that is class struggle-based, and because the bourgeois intellectual um has a proximity to the sort of node of power of the bourgeoisie as such, and the proletarian intellectual has had to sacrifice and fight in ways which are not visible to their bourgeois counterparts, uh, that creates a situation in which the proletarian figure is going to be not necessarily at a disadvantage, but they're going to be at um uh like they're they're going to exert more caution on the one hand, they're gonna have more constraint on the other hand. And he he documents how all of this worked. And I feel like those insights have a certain um, I don't want to say trans historical relevance, because again, I think if we superimpose a lot of this stuff onto today's times, the situation is actually far different. And maybe what we could do in our conversation now is sort of try to stick out how it has changed because it's changed a lot. For example, one of the things I think that's really changed is the fact that most liberal or bourgeois institutions of our time are not formulated on these codified keep keep this in mind. I mean, Marx and Engels were sacrosanct. We have had only in recent times the introduction of Marx within liberal institutions. And even at that, it's this like sanitized new left Marx that we have had to uh sort of wrestle with the meaning of Marx. So, in a way, we are so many steps prior to this highly saturated and highly developed socialist milieu, a culture, that it becomes difficult. Like if we if we start to compare those dynamics, I mean it's helpful to know that at the peak of the most mature version of European socialism, these dynamics took place. That's extremely helpful

Babel, Militancy, And Context Limits

SPEAKER_02 37:17

to know that. Um, it's it's it's it's not necessarily encouraging to me, though. It's not it's that's why I think it's an evil book, but I'm only saying it from like my own perspective in that sense. You see my point, because and I don't I don't want to read this like a teleology, like every mature socialism will then produce this. I think that's like what liberals say about Stalin. There's well, I'm not saying that, but I do think that we need to take quite seriously some of these dynamics.

C. Derick Varn 37:48

I think that's what Michel says about I mean Mikkel's and Pareto, by the end of their life, basically just say that outright about all politics. This is what like almost in like uh an Aristotelian, you know, the good form is this, the bad form is this, but everything leans to the same bad form, which is oligarchy.

SPEAKER_02 38:06

Um, and you know, I think I think I think the managerial theory from the Burnham ship uh moment, because we're talking really before that, but what that represents is a kind of post-revolutionary, post-socialist construction. It's not class struggle, it's not the locus anymore. That's not that's not what that's not the foundation. What's interesting about this 1911 study is that these are organizations founded off of historical materialism as a science, they're founded off of Marxist principles. And Engels sanctioned all of that before he died. It's embedded, Kautsky, it's all embedded in there. By the time he gets there for still they have these problems, right?

C. Derick Varn 38:51

And you could try to blame LaSalle, um, as some left communists will do, that there's still some kind of LaSallean.

SPEAKER_02 38:58

You've studied left communism a lot more than me. I feel like I want to hear you say a bit about that because he calls left communism a palliative to this issue. Because at this time he's a kind of syndicalist, right? And what he is to his credit, this is his pre-fascist period, to his credit, he's basically saying, Yeah, these tendencies, oligarchic tendencies, he's trying to he's trying to concoct a solution for this repetition to cease. And he thinks that um forms of cynicalism and left communism can do that, right?

C. Derick Varn 39:34

Yeah, which he advanced later. He is like there's much abuse of this pipeline, but there is a left communist to reactionary historical pipeline that we see, particularly in the late 20th century. Uh, you all but the thing is, there's a as I always point out, there's an everything to reactionary pipeline, there's a Marxist-Leninist to reactionary pipeline that no one talks about. I could talk about it because it's really a major thing between the late 40s and the 19 and the 1950s and 60s, but it's dropped because it's I guess it's not as sexy as complaining about Trotskyists when you normally mean Jews. But um the I will get uh I won't get off go off about this stuff. The funny thing about this, um, to me is I know about these histories partly from paleocons who are inspired by Burnham, but also like, oh, but Burnham turned away from those Trotskyists, and all these other Trotskyists just became uh shills for Israel and getting conservatives in that sense. Um also he'll read this Harry Cruz book about that too, uh et cetera, et cetera. Uh, etc., etc., etc. I bring this up though. In left communism, the answer is attempted in a couple different ways. Um, one is organic centralism, which is the idea that um even having party elites isn't bad as long as there's an invariant unchanging program which binds them all. Um, that's that is the Italian uh Bordist answer uh to this problem. Now, the problem that I have is that's really, really vague. And what's the invariant program that binds them all? No one can seem to agree on what that is. Um, for Borderga, it's like Lenin in 1921. Um, and for later people some other successors of the left communists, it's something else. The the other, but um, that's not a tendency that Mikkels is talking about because it doesn't exist yet. The left communists he's talking about are councilists, and he's hoping that either the syndicalists from the anarchist tradition, the workers controlling the firms, or the councilist tradition from the Dutch and Germans will, by getting rid of the pressure points of oligarchical capture through bureaucracy, would lead to um things like sortition, uh other things controlling this tendency to develop. Now, what's interesting about that is Gramsci's really into that early on, because Lenin seems to be in in 1917, 1918, in the early periods of the Soviets. It's actually Bortiga who says that Lenin never meant that. Um, that was always fake. Fake news for you liberals.

SPEAKER_02 42:29

Um, and but I mean sortition meaning basically like lottery and random uh-based election, right? And and and and um Produanism was was was uh flirting with this as well.

C. Derick Varn 42:46

Yeah, I mean honestly, Marxist Leninism flirted with this as well. I mean, like um everyone was trying to control the well, what we were called bureaucrats, but in what Russia they would call apparatus, right? And uh and what in in uh China they called capitalist rotors, and for those people who believe that was an invention of the of the of the American left, they really you need to go read some Chinese documents from the 1960s. Um but my point on that is they weren't really uh aimed at bourgeois people per se, they were aimed at people acting like incentives, like like they were incentivized in the same way as the bourgeois were, which is personal capture to get opportunity on them uh through institutions because you can't get it easily on the market, uh, to be able to then act on the market or to bypass the market in some way, um to get the needs of your own personal ambitions met. And that's a real problem. My my issue with cancellism is that the historical tendency, if you look at someone like um uh let me think about who here. If you uh never went this far, but some of the German ones even turned against the the unions won by cancel communists because that was too much organization for them. They became obsessed with the idea that almost any structure on the proletariat was an artificial imposition on the proletariat, including the cancels themselves. So much so today it's Gorder. If you if you read like critiques of later Gorder, even anarchists think they're too organizationally um opposed. Like I've read platformist and syndicalists go like that's nuts. Um, I do think that's an interesting thing to learn. Um the other issue that you have in both cases, um and this is one of that things that your first point that Mickels hits you with that really hits in the gut that you think he's right, but it really hurts. Um workers don't really respond to that much democracy super positive, right?

SPEAKER_02 45:24

Well, keep the one thing I uh we didn't mention when when we when we introduced Michels is that he thought that Marx, when Marx led the international, was uh led through oligarchic.

C. Derick Varn 45:37

Yes, he does. That's what he that's what he says. Uh uh interpretation of Marx.

SPEAKER_02 45:44

Exactly. He thought that Marx was a dictator, straight

Rancière’s Worker Aesthetics vs Science

SPEAKER_02 45:48

up, no question. He he doesn't see really any difference between LaSalle and Marx. So if you read like Al Draper's four volumes in history of Karl Marx, you'd see a massive chasm between their leadership styles. This is part this is the the weakness of his book. He doesn't he doesn't acknowledge that at all. And that's that's that's that's that's actually terrible. In fact, he makes he makes the point because I I like him because he focuses on this problem and this riddle of class origins, which I'm studying and writing about myself, and I'm trying to work through it. But I don't like his conclusions. For example, he's like, Yeah, you know, the two two great enemies of Marx were both working class by origins, but Marx never acknowledged the relevance of that Produn and Willem Waitling. And it's like, well, actually, Marx that so then that becomes actually a question, I think, in a certain way, which is what what and I've I've had a debate with many comrades about this. What would Marx say about the riddle of the class origin intellectual? And I would argue, probably I would say something like this the development in the first international of the affirmation that each proletarian um there's this kind of sentence. I th I paraphrased it, I think, in the last episode or an episode before this, that's put into the mission statement, something about individual emancipation becoming necessary, which is a sentence that Gramsci focuses on a lot in prison notebooks, apropos organic intellectual. There seems to me to be, on the one hand, a lack of sort of this the class struggle had not uh elevated to the point in which you had a huge class like you would have at the time of the 20 early 20th century Mikkels' writing of proletarian intellectuals. In fact, in Marx's time, proletarian intellectuals were extremely rare. So therefore, like sociologically, it doesn't concern Marx as much. But as it pertains to like the actual proletarian intellectuals that he engaged with, I don't think that in most cases their origins became necessarily of a significant point. Not necessarily a significant point. Perhaps only insofar as the debate with Willem Whaitling, which revolved around a very interesting point, actually, because Marx actually is falling more on the side of an egalitarianism than the working class intellectual, insofar as the working class intellectual argue that the working class doesn't need education. That was the core of their debate. Which is why when Hal Draper writes about their debate, he says it's about the enlightenment, and he uses that as justification that Marx is pro-enlightenment. And Waitling is basically a conspiratorial blankist. It's like, no, no, no, revolution, revolution already is in our hearts. We don't need any mediation from intellectuals. We are ready, you know. This system has has um already oppressed us, and we're primed. The proletariat is primed, and Marx disagrees with that. So, anyways, you see my point, but I I suppose perhaps the riddle or the scandal of origins only becomes pronounced once you have elite overproduction, once you have this internal class conflict within these organizations. The time of Mickels it's is definitely before the rise of the of the new class, which we talked about last time and the time before that. Um, and in a way it's very it's much more it's much more interesting, I think, in in the SPD context. Because again, because ideologically, this is an organization structured on Marxist principles. Fascinating, right?

C. Derick Varn 49:54

Um it is interesting. I mean, one of the things that you you you have to wonder is like, what if I threw McNair, uh Mike McNair's revolutionary strategy at Mickels, what would he say? Because um, there is an acknowledgement in McNair that there is a schism between the worker, the working class intellectual, the and the socialist radical, who by and large comes from either D class A origins or Petti B origins. Um and you know, and that includes that includes pretty much all the great communist statements of the 20th century. Um that uh like I always tell people, well, the first proletarian that you have who of proletarian origins that you have in power in a communist in a communist state is literally Khrushchev, which I actually don't think is that bad, but a lot of people do.

SPEAKER_02 50:53

Um pretty remarkable, isn't it?

C. Derick Varn 50:56

Yeah, yeah. Um uh and and the point that I that I'm I'm making with that is not that these social like I'm not doing the anarchist thing that oh that all these Marxists are illegitimate because they're not from the right class. Uh, they knew they weren't from the right class. What they said and what Marx is explicit about is their goal is to democratically merge with the advanced sections of the proletariat. Now, I'm going to say that Marx's use of the word advanced has led to a big problem in the second half of the 20th century because who we see as the advanced sections of the proletariat is like what we want to see for the Marxist humanist groups. It's uh advanced means most oppressed as well as exploited. I don't know why they interpret it to mean that, but they do. So the advanced sections of the proletariat are uh the proletariat of color. Uh um they kind of have their cake and eat it too on the whether or not we've changed the social subject from um the worker to the identity, because they basically say, well, the workers, but only the workers of the correct identity are the advanced sections of the class. Then there are the people who think the advanced sections of the class is basically frankly labor aristocrats and people that we would call PMC, which uh um, you know, uh uh then there are people like me who just don't know what that means. Does he mean like the most advanced in technical skill, or does he mean the most advanced in ideology? That's not clear to me, and Marx doesn't make it clear. Um, but but he does have, he does realize one, most of workers aren't gonna be there initially, and you know that. Two, the only way to get them in is relatively democratic uh engagement with the class, but they're gonna need um intellectuals to come up. And three, it's great if you have um proletarian intellectuals join in on this, but they're probably gonna be pretty rare, yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_02 53:05

Well, I think I think I think the the thing that Mickels hits on that is resonates with our own time is very much related to this point we were teasing out in episode two, in the last episode, which is uh intellectual coding. So, like in Mickels' time, the um kind of class differentiation and sort of destiny of being born into a class and remaining within it. Um, the the paradox being that the party for some proletarians could give them the illusion that they have kind of ascended to effectively like socialist bourgeois intellectual status, and this gave them some profound relief. But that was demilitating, that was de-radicalizing. That's his that's his conclusion, and that's very interesting knowledge to have. I think the other point that he makes, though, is why bourgeois intellectuals have more militancy tech in a technical sense, is because the scientific foundation of Marxism. It's the science, it's about the discourse of science and the capacity for uh bourgeois intellectuals to have a kind of ease with scientific literature, with uh you know, theory, with humanities, etc. etc. etc. So I think that's what he's I think that's where he's coming from with that in a certain way.

C. Derick Varn 54:40

And but you want to run Anton Paticook's critique of Lenin, it actually is related to you can get to your question in a second, but I actually do think it's related to this.

SPEAKER_02 54:48

Yeah, no, remind me.

C. Derick Varn 54:50

Um, he he basically says that Lenin Lenin's uh uh entire arguments, even his arguments with the monist, are a misunderstanding from bourgeois science because they aren't taking in the new proletarian science, which is the social scientists, which I think we would all find like what I mean. Like today, if you were to sell me if like the proletarian science, like the proletarian science is like maybe like low low-scale engineering, not the the uh not sociology, but uh, and we also have to remind ourselves Panacook did not exempt himself from this because Panicook was, I believe, a physician and would have considered himself bourvoir. Um, but that was his critique of Lenin. I find that interesting because it does speak to the left communist admitting that the scientificity of scientific Marxism actually is an alienating thing. Another example, just to talk briefly, and I'll let you ask your question. Um Marxists tend to hate it when we talk about workers' dignity. I mean, I also I mean, I you know, I from a blue-collar background also have issues with the framing, but I I do always say, but yeah, but workers do respond to that as opposed to telling them that they're victims, right? Right. Um, right. Uh, but it's it's the fact that dignity cannot be defined scientifically.

SPEAKER_02 56:16

This is

Oligarchy, Party-Form, And Mass Politics

SPEAKER_02 56:17

that makes it so difficult. This is you it's I'm so happy you said that because this was the conclusion of Roncio's studies on on why aesthetic emancipation is more, and he even says it's more revolutionary, precisely because when he performs his counter history of the workers' movement in the 19th century, he will conclude that if we study the interior lives, the desires, the hopes, the dreams, the wishes of the workers, it's for a life of dignity. It is it is revolutionary. It's not in some ultra-pessimist sense that they just want a better capitalism. No, they don't want capitalism, that is for sure. Especially when you look at um the most exploited of the artisans and uh downwardly mobile, uh petty bourgeois that become proletarianized. They have a profound militancy in there inside of them, but uh dignity becomes the watchword, and he does juxtapose that to science, exactly how you did. And I've always been quite compelled by that. And I think you're right that Marxism can't or sort of has a refusal. I'm not sure that Marxism thinks proletarians as victims. I think that's perhaps more of a no, I don't think that's I think that's liberal. But go ahead's liberal, yeah, that's liberal. Um, but still it's a blind spot, it's a certain blind spot, but it's not it's not necess a necessary blind spot because I think we have the we have an Angelsian tradition going back to the condition of the working class in England, uh, which does actually conclude, and E.P. Thompson as well, does it conclude similar things? So the question is yes, yes, indeed, you can have a class abolition revolutionary practice centered on a demand for dignity, right? As a virtue. I I I don't I don't think I think we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot if we want to, but uh, you know, because people think in these kind of binaries. So they think either either you are scientifically rigorous or you are uh for like a humanist dignity or something like that, which I think is very silly. Like um I I recently wrote a paper about Jacques Lacan's uh reinvention of the Marxist intellectual in the 20th century after 68, where in two seminars of Lacan he tries to argue that Stalinism had effectively created a kind of uh typology of the Marxist for the worker to become to become a savant, to become you know, a savant, right? Like kind of like a um a worldly intellectual who's like an autodidact who can um sort of um achieve sort of like worldly uh poetic knowledge, etc. Like a kind of uh sort of like a bohemian intellectual, but also sort of like a jack of all trades type thinker figure. And I was reading Lacan, and I'm like, wait a second, and and then of course Lacron is advocating that well, if Marxists want to truly um inculcate a sort of revol uh intellectual uh typology for for workers, he you should really turn them into logicians, uh into scientists. And I'm like, hmm, that is an interesting binary, that's an interesting split. The logician or the savant. And um I'm not sure. I'm not I I do think that the science science orientation inevitably produces this elite problem. I don't want to go so far as to say it produces an oligarchic problem, but one can see quite easily how it kind of reproduces something that um will be exclusive. Um, so I don't really have a clear solution to this aporea, but it's certainly a real Aporia.

C. Derick Varn 1:00:29

I I would also say one of the few things that I would back up sociologically today that even like normie liberals would agree with me about is bourgeois engineers, in particular engineers, but uh also ones that work for themselves, tend to have the space to be the most absolutely bad shit and saying radical Juventus. Meant in your life for anything. Um, like not just it's not just it doesn't just cut in our direction.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:53

Um, you know, uh well, for that matter, we should also talk about the propaganda during the Cold War, which was anti-communist, which which tried to do something very specific, which was to excise communism and socialism as words and replace them with radical. So when we say radical without applying it to any like concrete spectrum of what the hell that means, it becomes extremely vague. So we probably shouldn't do that. And also like ultra-leftism, like ultra-leftism, I think Lenin is right about the problem of ultraliecism. So we end up maybe valorizing radicalism for the sake of valorizing it. That becomes an issue. Now, I don't want to go so far as to fall into like what Lash often does.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:42

I think he kind of comes at it from the opposite angle.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:45

Lash comes at it from the opposite angle, and this is kind of why workers would sort of like Lash's critique, because where he's coming at it from, it's like, yeah, well, I'm going to question the narcissistic foundation of the bourgeois radical, right? To such an extent that I don't know, can they be trusted? The problem with that that I have with that is that once you adopt that narcissistic analysis of of the PMC, you you you risk you risk a kind of like you know, tripping into the abyss of nihilism, where it's like, yeah, well, nobody's sincere, and what is liberation after all, and who gives a shit about class, you know, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:02:27

You know, you yeah, so which last admittedly doesn't do, but latch gets even weirder because at one point before he becomes a populist after not being a populist for most of his life and explicitly critiquing it. Um, he he also decides that you know the expression of working classness is actually the early bourgeois artisan. Um it he does, it's it's it's it's in the last two texts, right? Um, and then also if you see his uh Takun Volume 1 debates, he he he starts talking about the need to find, but I think invent mythically, frankly, um a proletarian um traditionalism. And I don't think it's surprising. Um, and maybe when I write like when I write my book of essays on Lash and uh invite other people, I think this will be an essay that I that's gonna be the most speculative that I'm probably gonna write it. Is that uh it's not surprising to me that he goes to a Sorel towards the very end of his life in his interviews for Teleos uh Telios magazine, um Artelos magazine. He he uh uh he moves, I mean his movement is as following uh Marxism, uh workerist Freudianism, um we uh communitarianism for five minutes, but he gives up on that very, very quickly. Uh uh workers populism, um, and then whatever the hell he's flirting with with Sorrell. And you know, the reason why it's super speculative is this is all stuff that he does at the end of his at the very end of his life. Um, I think that's actually really telling. Um maybe this is, you know, uh I consider myself to be the left wing of the Marxist center. I've said that a lot. The ultra-leftists sometimes like me, but they sometimes hate my guts for this reason. But uh, I think that's all telling to me because I feel like you fall in two directions on this. One is you fall into this romantization of the working class, which I do think happens a lot, but not from the working class itself. The romanticization of the working class does not often come from the working class.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:55

Um, that's very, very correct, right? Right, right. And more than in that case, then it's based on a kind of fantasy image, a projection, yeah. Kind of uh right, yeah. I mean it's like one a lot of the PMC discourse I call PMC on PMC violence, like yes, yes, yes, because it's very manic too, because in a way, in a way, uh one cannot make heads or tails. Like we see this with Zoran Mamdani's victory in New York. I noticed that a lot of ardent PMC critics who would contend that the PMC is kind of not salvageable as a class, that they need to be like, say, Michael Lind in his book The New Class War, he cannot think the Mamdani moment at all, because the only avenue for uh class uh transformation that he thinks possible is either uh war, in which like he he he he goes back and he tries to develop historical analogues that we could apply to today for the sort of overcoming of a kind of uh decadent class for which he sees the contemporary PMC as a decadent class that needs to be overcome. Now, um his model for doing that, this is sort of related, don't worry, and it might be helpful for people. I don't know if you've covered Michael Lind.

C. Derick Varn 1:06:25

I actually have covered his his his particular version of not quite but kind of PMC theory actually rejects the term PMC, but it's the professionals versus the petite bourgeois with the overclass, which I think are supposed to be the capitalists, but he never says that, like shifting around, and then like the base that it's basically mostly the working class, but also maybe peasants and

Councilism, Syndicalism, And Control

C. Derick Varn 1:06:47

other places that have them, uh, as a kind of unwashed rabble that just picks sides between the the eternal war between the professionals and the petite bourgeoisie, um to kind of get at the overclass. That's his class theory. Like, yeah, um, that's the new class war.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:06

And that's very that's a good summary, yes. That's very right.

C. Derick Varn 1:07:09

And I think it's I I think to be fair that there are elements of it that are true, but it's it it makes the actors of history either random events like war or the the great masses of people are basically inert dupes that just pick sides in this this inter-lower elite war, and also he doesn't deal with the driving of the of like the overclasses also seen as just like oh they just pick sides every now and then, uh they're basically not here anymore, you know. Um and a lot of Marxists who use PMC theory sound sound the same. And the thing is, if you know about Lynd, Lynn seems like a burnamite, like Lynn, like you know, instead of the managerial class, we got a professional class, but like the the the real movement are these people in the center who are fighting to become the top because they're overproduced, and I think elite overproduction or potential elite overproduction anyway is a real phenomenon. Like, I do, I actually think it's real, but um, that's not like I don't see it as the sole driver of history. To me, it's a driver of policy within a mode of production, it doesn't shift them.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:27

What I find interesting about his book, New Class War, is he put forward he he uh his model for changing the dynamic is what he calls democratic pluralism, and this is sort of a way it's a bit vague, but it sort of is a sort of semi kind of like liberal, it's like liberal councilism in which you have like workers scattered across institutions to um it's very like Catholic distributism, but more liberal, basically to me.

C. Derick Varn 1:09:02

But but if people don't know what that means, I guess I'd have to explain that. So go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:06

He developed he develops it in one chapter and he thinks it as a kind of antidote to the sort of pernicious inegalitarian. Because I think one thing he's right about is that this war between the professionals and the petty bourgeois and the overclass is creating a situation in which the working class is experiencing a type of immiseration. I think he's right about that, and I think it's interesting that he's proposing this model of like mass democratization, but on the one hand, he has no true critique of capital, and in fact, he thinks that all forms of socialism, including democratic socialism, all regress into dictatorial state control of the economy. So he has like a kind of libertarianism underneath all of this, which has a totally uncritical analysis of capital unto itself. Um it's a it's a very uh interesting argument.

C. Derick Varn 1:10:06

Um it comes out of an explicitly fascistic tradition, though, and I don't just say that in a normal like wag my finger fat bad fascist. I say it in like it's it, he his last chapter is integralist, and it is based off of distributism. Um it's the idea that you you can through getting more council participation of the various classes and coordination together, you can have them collaborate to create an integrated state. That's and I hate to tell you, you know, who came up with that? That's Giovanni Gental. Um and that's in Lind. And I don't say that to say that he's wrong, because I don't think, you know, I actually don't think calling something fascist is an argument against it, unfortunately or fortunately, or whatever. Um, I'm just saying that like that's his vision is if you integrate the classes, they'll stop the oligarchical takeover from the state from socialist, they'll re-envive civil society by making policy for civil society. And my thing is it like the belief is that the common if you do this, if you get enough stakeholders in the common interest, they won't immiserate the poor anymore. But that necessitates not looking at what drives capital and capital accumulation, exactly, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:27

So and it also has it underappreciates the pernicious like sort of consistency of class war and class fragmentation that is at the heart of the division between capital and labor as a primary contradiction to begin with, which is goes unanalyzed by him or is uninteresting to him. So he has this sort of fidelity to this idea that this vague liberal councilist expansion of democratic associationism in a way, it's kind of like civil soci liberal civil society engagement on steroids will create a kind of taming of the market. And my question is like, when historically has that ever happened? Never, that's not how the new deal happened. No, you're you that's not how the new deal, and that's what he concludes with by saying, I want a new New Deal. But the fact you have alienated the socialist tradition so much in doing that, and that's why his recent response to Mam Dani was so two-faced, because he's like, Oh, yeah, mom Dani is not a socialist. I'm like, well, that may be true, but neither are you. And momdani is way more of a socialist than you are, my friend. I must I must say that. So it's a very um odd thing, and um, I just I just found his book like sort of he didn't he didn't elaborate it enough for me to feel like okay, this is viable, it did not feel viable to me.

C. Derick Varn 1:13:04

It well, it to me, it's like if you if you if you for some reason accept the proletariat as somehow not having any agency ever for anything, um this would make sense. Um, and that you give the proletariat agency by spreading them out amongst the the civil institutions, and basically you get Fordism. But the problem that you have is uh is the problem that I have. That's not how Fordism came into being, that's not how the New Deal came into being. Um, yes, it was a class compromise, but it was a class compromise born out of fear, not a class compromise born out of benevolence. And and as soon as they could could kick that stool away, um, because of a profitability crisis, they did. I mean, I always talk about the difference between Fordism and neoliberalism is just are the workers at the table at all? Right? And what Lin basically says is let's just put the workers back at the table. But again, from from his own theory, why wouldn't even stakeholders do that?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:21

Like where's the incentive? Right.

C. Derick Varn 1:14:23

Yeah, there's no incentive for them to do that. Like um, because uh uh I mean because an immiserated proletariat will eventually kill capitalism. Well, what if there isn't a choice? Like, you know, uh or whatever. I mean, that is the great the the Marxist gambit, what the the the thing that I that I that I always say, like I'm not an immiserationist, I'm not an accelerationist, I'm not any of those things. But I will say part of what makes Marxists sound like conservatives to a lot of liberals is that we say, and I don't just say this, this is where I'm different than a lot of people's like, oh, it's the economics, it's the it's the it's the declining rate of uh profits, etc. etc. And I'm like, no, it's also sociology. Sociologically speaking, you can only get people to accept that you are exploiting them for so long once they realize it. And the more you integrate them, they're going to realize it, which means you're gonna have an incentive to disintegrate them, um, which is going to drive this push and pull, which is why things like MNT investment schemes or whatever, monetary fixes to the economy, which Ingalls made fun of, he made which he did explicitly make fun of it. He said it was an American problem. He was talking about Henry George, not post-Keynesians, but nonetheless. Um, the reason why that's an issue is not that it doesn't work on paper, it's not that it doesn't work if you assume clash neutrality, it's that crash neutrality does not exist, so it will never happen. Like, um, there is no incentive, like the reasons why you why just getting the taxation thing away from uh the bourgeoisie is not enough to give them to give up their powers. You think it's just because you're taking their money. It's like, no, that they don't money doesn't mean that much in and of itself, it's the power money engenders. Um, so yeah, you don't tax, you don't tax them, but you make their you make you give their employees power. They're not gonna accept that because there's a necessary exploitation that has to happen for them to make profits and to have control over the situation. And it is not just about like monetary flows. Now, I say all that to say that like this has been the problem of Cold War radicalization, right? Because people hear this and they go, Oh, it works on paper, you know, like yes, currency, we no longer own commodity-backed currencies, there's no natural limit to them, blah, blah, blah. And that's all true. It's true. Yet, why can they never get their policies through? And it's and it's the same reason why Michael Lynn thing isn't going to work, because they're all basically class collaborationist ways to try to mitigate the fact that you're asking someone to sit at the table with the person who exploits them and them see it and it not have social and economic repercussions. Um, and that's to me just like sociologically nuts. Like, I'm having me sit at my conqueror makes me want to stab him in the throat. It doesn't make me like him more. Like, so you know, I mean, what are the advantages that you can say today about the bourgeois? The bourgeois so structuralized that one of the reasons why people complain about the PMC, and I mean, right winger, right wing working-class people don't call it the PMC, like that's itself a code of education. But one of the reasons that they hate those egg-headed intellectuals so much is because that's the position of class power and habitas and whatnot that they have access to. The the bourgeoisie has structurally removed themselves from the life of the the cat of the average person, except as like celebrities and policyholders. But you're never gonna fucking meet most you know high-level bourgeoisie. I have, and it blew my mind when I did, you have too, because of our access as institutions of power, but like when we were just blue-collar people, no damn way.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:29

Yeah, no, um, yeah, no, uh it's it's almost as if the reason that Mikkel's book is so triggering is because it tries to maybe un maybe in a sincere way, because again, he has leftist bona fides at the time he writes it in 1911. In a sincere

Dignity, Scientific Socialism, And Tension

SPEAKER_02 1:18:47

way, um, he's like, Look, there are there are fundamental limits to doing proletarian politics. Proletarian politics will devolve into these oligarchic repetitions, and there's not much we can do about it. And there's something that is very pessimistic about that. And I think this book, and I've even heard from many people, that reading this book has led them to kind of see socialism uh differently. And that's that's extremely unfortunate, you know, like that conclusion. Because I do think that everything you're saying, like, okay, well, why not go to MMT? Why not go to cybernetics? Why not kind of just abandon the whole scientific theory of part of the whole idea of the scientific basis of historical materialism is to lubricate our work uh doing proletarian-centered politics, not necessarily just to give it kind of the veneer of legitimacy in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, but also to historically situate our work. There's also like a historical element there that I think is is uh is essential, right? And so I I I suppose one of the things I wanted to ask you is like, what is without falling into like some retrograde Lysenkoism or some kind of anything like that, but how would you cut this contrast that that we've hit at between a kind of socialism built upon proletarian dignity formation and the necessity at the same time to have a socialism grounded in scientific approaches? How do you think that looks today, knowing what we know about the way it played out in the 19th and 20th centuries? Honestly, it's a hard question.

C. Derick Varn 1:20:49

It's a hard question, but I actually do think we have the hints of an answer, and it's in the failures and successes of Chile in the 1970s. And I don't think it's because of cybernetics. I I mean, I do think cybernetics helped in some ways, but people think it's the computers and it's not. It's a Cadorne system, it's trying to systematize what workers do and have workers have we call. There's there are leaders, but the leaders are far more provisional. Um, the issue that you had is they never dealt with the military and violence. And they because they didn't do that, um, and you know, Trotsky say, oh, they didn't arm the workers. And I'm like, well, but like, if I are like the United States is a very armed country, workers have guns here. Um, you know, not all of them. I think, you know, I think probably only like 50% of them have guns, but like, and that's kind of off the top of my head, so it might even be less than that. But you know, we have three guys, the people who do have guns have a ton of them. Do you think that would stop a military coup? Because uh I don't, I really don't. I mean, that's what like like you know, I I go shooting on the weekends, uh, not all not most weekends anymore, but I do. I don't own a gun because I don't want it in my house. Um, but I make sure I know how to use it, right? Now you might go, what does that have to do with this? Well, let's think about this for a second. Um, that means that we actually do have to deal with some of the violence, and I don't mean symbolic violence, the violence inherent to maintaining classes, um, which requires a level of discipline that's a lot more than just arming the workers. And for me, this is where the merger stuff really starts to matter. Um, because we do need the workers to have not just guns, we need them to have skills that they probably aren't gonna get on the shop floor, particularly today, but even in the middle of the 20th century. But we also need to recognize, valorize, and fucking listen to the skills they have, um, which is not often done even by the people who romanticize the workers against the PMC or whatever, because they're not looking at where the strengths and weaknesses of the class are, they're looking at the people who they see as suppressing and speaking for the class, um, which is fine, but it leads you to one a mistake to believe, and I think this has been a common mistake that that somehow the bourgeoisie have gone away. Hopefully, the last year has removed that delusion from people, but we'll see. Um because it's always been Democrats are in power where you people think that the are are social democrats or whoever. Um the the the left wing of liberalism. Um, I'm not gonna say the left of capital because that implies that there's a left outside of capital, and frankly, there isn't. Um but right.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:53

Um yeah, no, it's very I mean, I I also think that an intellectual task would be to model in microcosmic smaller forms uh ways of association that do break the iron law of oligarchy. Yeah, because I think I think you know, uh speaking now as a sort of prominent um critic of Frederick Nietzsche, um, a lot of Nietzscheans will walk away from a text like this one, and effectively will hold the view, like, well what are you so worried about?

C. Derick Varn 1:24:34

Yeah, this is what we believe anyway, and also that's good.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:37

Like yeah, there's a certain there's a certain type of um there's a certain pessimism on the one hand, but but even a kind of um I would I would call it like bourgeois realism in a certain way, and I feel as if if you read Mickels's very closely, I mean this is a dense book full of these conclusions based on this these empirical studies, and I would contend that part of the iron law of all oligarchy is bound up with a kind of um interminable bourgeois pessimism that cannot be kind of transcended or cannot be expunged. And it's kind of like uh what what what Mark Fisher used to refer to, or I'm not sure, in his debates with Nick Land as transcendental miserabalism.

C. Derick Varn 1:25:27

Yeah, that phrase the next phase of uh capitalist realism was transcendental miserabism, you know. Uh it's uh it's land and it's uh it's uh that French author who I normally know, but it's yeah, no, well it's Leotard too, but also um the Holbeck, well, wellbeck, wellbeck. Um it's well back, it's it's uh it's uh you know, sometimes when I'm pissed off and I read Thomas Logati and I hate the world. Um, but the one thing I always say, you know, maybe I maybe I take this even more seriously than uh the um our uh late friend of show Michael Brooks always said, you know, be harsh to systems and kind about and kind to people, although he had people that he would be harsh to. I know there's complications to that. Um, I would always say, well, be pessimistic about incentives and optimistic about people. And that blows people's mind because I sound like a doomer all the time, but I'm often like, yeah, but I actually do think you can incentivize people to see each other. Um, and I to almost sound like an anarchist, what you know, in uh an annoying Graberite way, and we could have a whole discussion one day about why I think Graeber said both the anarchist and socialist movement back like a thousand years, but um uh that we know that humans have had relatively egalitarian um societies in the past, not on every single thing you can be egalitarian about, admittedly, but we know they have existed, yeah. All right, and we actually know they have existed longer than class society has existed, but we don't really want to go back to living as hunter-gatherers with low subsistence, and that becomes the question of today, and that's like Marx is like the question about primitive communism. You'll hear liberals who say, Oh, all the communists are left-syrians, we want to go back to like uh primitive communism. I'm like, read Marx, Marx does not think going back to primitive communism as possible or good.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:42

Yeah, that's why you get that weird like like pipeline between like primitive communism and and like neo-accelerationism, like with come out with come out. Yeah, I mean they they they have they have found a way to fall into the same pessimistic trap that Mickels has fallen into, meaning the pessimistic trap meaning the abandonment of proletarian politics, but they've done it through this um yeah, this very strange uh kind of like yeah well, I he's not technically a primitivist, but I know I know that um Phil Neil is like him, so go ahead. Yeah, I know that Phil Neal has like redeemed Kamat to me a bit, but I still struggle with his work quite a lot because I was reading in preparation for this uh event we're doing on accelerationism. At the height of accelerationist left-wing um attention, like when when this was like a left-wing issue with like Strinasec and Williams and the Accelerationist Manifesto 12 years ago, yeah, when Mark Fisher was still alive, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:28:49

Comat's was useful. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:52

Yeah, Kamat was like a whole literature that the accelerationists would read, and they would read his like post 70s reflections as effectively accelerationist, which I always found very weird of an argument. Does that does that how does that does that make sense to you out of curiosity?

C. Derick Varn 1:29:13

No, I actually uh I mean it it would be like going and reading um Sarson as a defensive accelerationist, like the only way we can get to a human being that doesn't have the capacity for reification, a aka a frontal lobe at all, is actually to just let technology destroy it. Um so and I'm actually surprised no one's actually made that argument, to be quite frank. Um, because as insane as it is, if you remember the leftism that you and I came into in the end of the aughts, and uh was that leftism like like in the you know, if you were in quote radical circles, unquote, in 20 and uh 2008 and 2008, um 2009, uh you were probably likely to be reading Daniel Quinn, Derek Jensen, and John Sayerson, and maybe Ward Torres Hill, but and and it was during 2008-2009 that all that like went away and we just all forgot about it. Like, like it's in marks came back, but that's where we were. Like, if you think about it, and then the marks that came back was this weird marks that we couldn't actually deal with even the new left, but we had a lot of like new left hangovers about like this and that Ingalls was bad. We still see some of that in like Kohei Saito and people like that, but like um uh the Soviet Union was utterly unredeemable, not just screwed up, like you know, it was just bad

Lind, Burnham, And Managerial Class

C. Derick Varn 1:30:47

from the beginning.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:49

Um, yeah, yeah, there's been a lot of like that's that's the thing that makes me very hopeful, don't you think? Like where Marxist discourse has evolved to in our present, it's only gotten better, i.e., more rational, more sane, more historically grounded, less hyperbolic, less romanticized, less obscure.

C. Derick Varn 1:31:13

I think what's because it's less uh an obscure sub subculture. I mean, like it it is less of an obscure subculture than when we and when you and I hit right, right.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:22

Like, yeah, you know. But we've also tried to de-academize Marxism. I think that there's a kind of yearning for the de-academacademic, like you know, no longer is the academic Marx like gonna cut it. And I think people are alert to that fact. Uh, you know, that's at least maybe a positive premonition that I'm feeling, but yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:31:46

Well, you know, I do think, you know, this is not to say we don't get dumb Marxism still. I mean, we do, we get, but it's it's not insane, it's vulgar. Do you know what I mean? Like, um like I felt like some of the stuff that we were dealing with in the aughts was, and it wasn't it particularly in the pre-Marxist period, but even in the Marxist period, was was frankly like you're literally arguing that we should have a political project that we should get rid of the human frontal lobe. I mean, I look I am not making that up, by the way, people. Like, that's that was an essay even pushed by John Sarison. Um, about and he he actually tried to derive it from a Marxist argument about about reification. Um and uh that was where we were. Like, um, whereas today we might have to deal with the vulgar, like vulgar Marxism is annoying, and if if it had a lot of guns, it would be dangerous, uh, but in general is not, and most people moderate significantly once they start dealing with it in in their actual life, right? And and and people like, oh, that moderation is not good. I'm like, I don't mean become center like centrist in like the Ezra Klein sense. I mean, they realize that you have to incorporate something into your life, and wearing a Stalin hat all the time isn't gonna be enough to do that. You like like uh uh and you can and you can pull from people that you disagree with, which that was another thing you couldn't do, like who you liked or who you were a fan of, um, which which actually was in well, I used to say it was a milie culture back then.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:41

Uh, which is also back in the day of like Zines, zines are zines, zines and and early internet.

C. Derick Varn 1:33:48

Um but like who you liked really mattered. Um, what I found interesting today and hopeful is you got more and more people trying to deal with these key problems that emerged in the 70s, and they're not all academics. I know that people say they are, but they're really not. I have talked to like 19-year-olds who are, you know, um getting their first jobs who have from a podcast gone out and find PDFs of this stuff and read it and started to struggle with it. Like it is not just in academia anymore. I know I often complain about how you know academic culture spilled out into popular culture through the blogs and everything else, but there's a dialectical issue that I think we should be actually hopeful about, is that it did actually then, even though it led to about a decade of really weird arguments, um, it's led to people having to engage with this who are not necessarily enculturated into the habitat of academia to sometimes go, well, that's fucking stupid, and me go, yeah. That does not mean that I agree with everything else, but I do think there is a way in which like the right the the the bourgeois socialists really do need um pragmatist workers to moderate them. And I do not yeah, I do not mean in that left populist sense. I mean, one thing you and I have been talking about talking about about the contradiction to left populism. One of the things about left populism is it pretends to be pragmatic and isn't, but also doesn't really listen to workers that much, it just posits them as a social force that it then kind of imagines in its own analytic imaginary, right? Um, and I find that to be heartening. Like, okay, you and I have talked about family abolition. I have said, like, if we mean by family abolition, what was meant by it in the 19th century, well, a we already there for the most part. Um if you like uh divorce, uh relatively free love, not necessarily in the way they made it in the 60s, but like no one's picking your spouse for you, yeah. Um uh um social institutions to do family planning for you. I actually agree with Lash, there are complications to that, but I'm not in agreement with Lash that, like, oh, it'd be great if this everybody had to immiserate their wives and just make them deal with the children all the time, and that was it. I actually don't think that's a very good vision for the future. Um uh, but you know, that's what the 19th century meant by it. Now, you know, today when you talk about like family abolition, it's basically like we're gonna have the state raise you from kindergarten forward almost the way it was posited by Plato uh as a way to break up kinship bonds. Um I I bring this up because like when you present that to most working class people, they're going to fucking laugh at you. Well, if you talk about what you know, families of choice, which has its own limitations, I don't think it's a perfect answer. Uh, but and stuff like that, they're not, right? But what they do know is that without family resources and whatnot, they're in a lot worse shape than their grandparents were. And you're not offering them any any social help to deal with that except for this idea of this all-powerful state, which they do not bel which they rightly probably do not believe anyone could actually pull off.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:47

And that's a check. I just I just I just think it's very interesting, it's kind of come full circle here because stretching from my first point about the paradox of Michels' conclusions about the lack of radicalism internal to the SPD of proletarian intellectuals, now we've come full circle to a reflection on the contemporary, in which the function of proletarian proletarians in this new public sphere, uh where people do have some adequate level of access to academic arguments, which like Mikkels says, are pitched at a level of radicalism and intensity that appears, key word appears, at a higher decibel level than you know what workers are asking for or are demanding for. But what you're articulating is kind of like worker common sense to mediate that radicalism. Not to say that it's necessarily fake radicalism or we're gonna fall.

C. Derick Varn 1:38:51

No, we're not saying it's it's all bad.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:52

Like there's real problems with with historical families, like like but that that that communicative dialectic is sort of what's missing are I think institutions to well, not necessarily missing, maybe we could say institutions need to be organized to strengthen that communication and that exchange, because in that exchange, you will get a more grounded proletarian practice that will emerge when the common sense of workers can interact with uh you know high bourgeois forms of radicalism, and I think this is something that I have always been in favor of. I'm only now more recently able to clearly articulate how the class dynamics function, because I think part of the problem here is that bourgeois institutions don't have the resources to recognize uh or or incorporate. So you you have to bring it to them. They're not gonna invite you to do this, you have to bring it to them because that takes initiative. That's on you. So that's on you. It's not on they're not gonna they they are gonna be in they are gonna be impervious to the not impervious, but they are they're not gonna accept the critique, but you still have to make it. It still has to be made.

C. Derick Varn 1:40:20

This is where I you know maybe I'm a merger formulist in ways that even aren't normal for um for merger formulist Marxist interest or whatever. Because I also think this is where you merge the scientific with the dignity. Um this is me recognizing not in a not in a vulgar standpoint way, but in a way that like Lukash meant by standpoint, yeah. Um that there is Is expertise that you have that I don't have, even though I might have a better scientific framework for uh articulating it, and you can stand as a check to the the the wildest shit that's gonna come out of my mouth, right um when I try to think this through. And this is the this is a dialectical tension. I mean, it really is that would lead to, you know, in a way that'll make our analytic Marxist friends even more my uh angry, a sublation of tendencies, or even our structural Marxist friends. Um because one thing I said, you know, I've said to my structural Marxist friends you know all the time that uh Guldner brings up a lot that despite this whole tension between the scientific Marxists and the Marxist humanists and what they favor and what they don't, um, they came to the same conclusions in the 70s, where at a moment where if you were looking politically, it was like Marxism was on the ascendant, and they both sides of that debate, whether you are Alcester or Lukash, said that, like, no, we're entering into a crisis right now of Marxism. And did the next two decades not prove them right?

SPEAKER_02 1:41:55

Like um that goes back that goes back to the class standpoint, it's not just it's not just any standpoint, it's a class standpoint, which means that the scientific if I'm a if I'm a Marxist within the academy and I'm working on you know Marxist humanism and questions of proletarian experience, but I'm not capable of actually having any true uh account of how actual proletarians are experiencing the world. I mean, and that's actually that actually happens a lot in academia, believe it or not. I have seen, and this goes back, I think, very much to our second episode on Bordu, which I have seen because part partially the incentive structures of academia are very segregative. I mean, Lacan argued that the university is a segregative institution,

Why Compromise Fails Without Power

SPEAKER_02 1:42:48

and I really feel that that's true. It's also that way because it goes its foundation is like stretching back, it's a quasi-feudal foundation, that it's never shrugged that off entirely. So I think paraacademic and you know, even this platform that you've created and my platform are ways to actually penetrate into research that could actually um sober and um kind of make more realist, it's more of like a realist argument, perhaps. Uh, you know, you you could invoke the concept of realism here as a tonic to some of these some of these formulas, because I think if Michels, if Mickels is right, and he's only right in the context of one organization, that's the limit of his study. Is the limit of his study is like it's just this huge bureaucracy.

C. Derick Varn 1:43:45

Yeah. And he's talking about the Espe Day, and like you and I haven't mentioned this yet, but you gave it to me to read off of uh and weirdly, I read these for uh uh Peter Marr, um or mayor. Uh I read these for two different reasons. They're mentioned in um Benjamin Studebaker's work on liberal legitimacy crisis. Yes, oh yes, but they're also mentioned by Tad Tazza and then the people at the the two people I actually know from the Rabble report, uh Grant and Joe, who talk about the uh the the hollowing out of the cartel parties in the state from the movement of mass politics. And like when you read Mickels, it is actually a little bit dependent on mass politics actually existing.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:30

Not only that, not only that, but it's dependent on mass politics having a another thing we didn't mention is part of the there's many loops of the oligarchic tendency that loops back, and one of them is the masses at the at the peak of mass politics having efficacy was the fetish for the leader. And one of the things that these studies of ruling the void and and mayor and um this this work on the cartel party, which is also it's mayor and cat. So there's mayor and cat, yes, yeah. But it's important to cite both of these authors. It's not my area of like specialty, and you know, Studebaker recommended that we look at this because I said, Hey, I'm reading Mickels. What would you recommend? And he's always good at these sorts of things, and he recommended these two these two works. Well, one of the conclusions is, of course, is that elites are themselves experiencing a profound um uh incapacity for the type of affirmative, autonomous, charismatic sway. You know, a big focus of Weber and Mickels, of course, was the charismatic leader.

C. Derick Varn 1:45:44

Right, and they just don't exist now, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:45:46

And they don't exist now, right? They don't exist now. Maybe we could say well, okay, they exist in what you know Kat Simara refer to as the sort of populist exception, and they spend some time talking about this. I think their work sort of predates Sanders and Trump, so it's a bit it does.

C. Derick Varn 1:46:04

I think it was published in 2018, but it was written like in like the early 2000s. It's really more about like people like Urban and maybe Ceriza. Um, right.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:16

So, yeah, so I mean, do we still have magnetic charismatic personalities that seize mass movements? Of course, the answer is yes, but do we have the type of ubiquity of charismatic personalities uh that sort of become the glue of organizations? And I think the answer is no.

C. Derick Varn 1:46:40

Yeah, hard no, actually. I mean, um, I would add to this, I mean, I always add it, but I do think Joseph Tainter's thing about the complications of institutions leading to the ability of charisma to be less effective within within highly bureaucratic organizations because of the sheer complication of what you're studying, um, to be true. And that weirdly leads to, I mean, we where where will we see this other than populism? We see it in CEOs who are basically executive bullshitters now. They actually aren't competent. But this is where I start overlaying a bunch of other theories. Like I pull from Michael Sandel about like the shifts in the American Republic and in republicanism in general. Um, and I pull from a little bit from Peter Turchin, who I'm not as sanguine on as a lot of other people, but he is right about the overproduction of the potential people to fill in elites, and that these institutions have a reason to overproduce. Um, now what what he thinks this is all bad. I actually think some of it's good because it means you actually have people like us who have now been skilled by by bourgeois apparatus, but aren't A from it and B aren't going back to it because it just doesn't have the space for us. Not even that we don't want to, it's just not there. Um and you know, that does create its own uh you know ability for people to interface between these worlds, between like the you know, the 19-year-old fresh worker who's never who is now reading theory, but also like has never been to college in his life and doesn't know what the hell we're talking about about the way these institutions work, and then the um you know uh elite captured fail sons that we're always talking about and implying. Uh uh, because the other thing that I think that Mickels doesn't create room for is I mean, he he we have if people like Turchin are just like my observation, but we talk about fail sons, we now have a lot of elites who aren't elite anymore. Like really, I mean sincerely aren't. Like it's not just that they like they have fallen in, they have fallen down in one or two social classes, uh, at least in who they have access to. Um, in fact, one of the things that I've thought a lot about is the lumpanization of all the classes, um as things seem overripe. Uh, but my my point about about all this is it just create it, it is not um it is not easy to tell people that like you know, hey, look, you know, let's look at uh Zora Mandami, and people are like, oh, well, now we have an elite proletarian, the PMC. I've seen that uh said it a lot. And I'm like, well, you have in a labor aristocratic strata of workers, and I do think some of them really are really workers, but they are labor aristocratic, they have cartelization and access that other people don't have, not the only people who do, by the way, but they they do. Um, and they're in a highly unequal place, and there's also a lot of people, elites who have fallen into that, all right, and so you have these skills. Um, but like don't fool yourself and think that they can speak for the class because you you've had these weird people almost making the same mistake we accuse Goldner of, is seeing this new class as the kind of savior of the workers because it's got every reason to be radicalized, but doesn't have the buy-in to the system that prior bourgeois did. Um, and I just think like, oh, it's got a pretty big buy-in to the system, it's just only got a buy-in to part of it, and a lot of it is uh tied into like um tax tax government work, but that that weirdly is gonna make it look more like the Michael Lind world than the world that we think actually exist. Um, and you shouldn't be confused by that. Which the big the bigger thing means that we need to take these institutions that we're creating, you know, through parties, through the DSA, if it would ever fucking leave the Democrats. Um, if you know uh unions, um, podcasts, all these parent stations, some of which are objectively petite bourgeois, like you know, are in my in mine in your case, actually kind of petit bourgeois rentier, even. Um, but this is this is not mean that they aren't useful for proletarians, because you know what? Four bucks a month to listen to me is a lot cheaper than taking a class from David Harvey. Um, and it's actually a lot cheaper than joining one of the weird political sects, like you, you know, uh whatever. Like, um the function is that now there's more places for these things to intersect and merge, and that should actually give us a little bit of hope. Um, I think about proletarian intellectuals being able to be convinced that they don't have to give up their dignity to get their science. But like maybe we should also admit that they need their dignity and not just talk to them like they're robots and automaton in the history of and just subject to structures or whatever, you know. Even if you think structuralism is true, I think that's still a bad structure like tactic for for for building politics.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:10

Um, yeah, no, I think that's well, putting aside the class status of of our podcast as petty bourgeois, I'm not sure if that's the case, but uh maybe that's okay. We'll have to air that out in our final episode.

C. Derick Varn 1:52:25

Yeah, the big fight about whether or not what class our podcast is.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:29

We need we need we need to verify that. That needs to be um that needs to be that needs to be debated. Um no, I I I I think this is hitting on something very interesting, and I think you know, people there's a lot of books that are written like Mickels, which you know qualify like um I mentioned Leotard's libidinal economy earlier. But you know, he's using this kind of dark Freudian insight that well, what if the 19th century proletariat actually didn't didn't achieve uh you know the revolution in Germany precisely because ultimately they desired their emissoration, they gained pleasure out of their emissoration, they liked it.

C. Derick Varn 1:53:13

Saw death drive all the time.

SPEAKER_02 1:53:15

Yeah, that kind of that kind of um that kind of ultra-pessimist thing. I I don't think Mickels is falling that he's not that blackpilled, but I think a lot of people that read this have become very blackpilled about socialism. So therefore, it's a very difficult text to work through, but I think it's a necessary one. I definitely, I definitely think it's necessary. Also because one of the things that I think the new revitalization of Marxism is happening now is the sort of reopening of

Chile, Violence, And Organizational Design

SPEAKER_02 1:53:47

the working class uh experience, you could say. And I think this question of class origins becomes very interesting. That was sort of one of the overarching themes of this conversation for today.

C. Derick Varn 1:54:00

And I do still end up mattering here. Uh sadly, it really does.

SPEAKER_02 1:54:05

It still matters, and I suppose one of the conclusions of Roncier's work on this question is that what most working class autodidactic intellectuals uh proposed was ended up, at least in his analyses, ended up being for a type of subtraction from the norm and a kind of allergy from full solidarity with the sort of centralized party. That may be because the choices uh that he's drawn to of these various uh sort of studies that he brings out in proletarian nights reflect perhaps his own position as a kind of alienated from the PCF, alienated from all Fusarianism, wanting this kind of he doesn't call it he doesn't call this position libertarian socialist, but I think it could be it could be applicable. So he wants to think that uh you know proletarian workers tend towards that. They tend towards this. Uh and I think that, you know, if we look at a lot of uh working class podcasts, that does happen. But absolutely but the thing that becomes, I think, what where uh Marxist theory and like sort of proletarian science, if you want to call it that matters a lot in this instance, is to try to keep comrades tethered to a commitment to sort of foundational principles that A would keep people committed to class abolition, that people keep people committed to a socialist vision and not fall into some type of despair. Um a lot of that hovers around the question of inclusion and exclusion on the left and kind of discourses that uh that alienate people that are doing this kind of inquiry, which is a very real thing, because there is at the same time an environment that can be quite pernicious out there. And I've always tried to sort of mitigate against those tendencies as best I can, you know. Um that kind of like cancel culture, backbiding divisiveness on the left. I think after Trump's election, it's gotten a little bit better, actually, now that things are evening out a bit. Um, but it could always return, you know, in in ways that it was under the Biden period. For whatever reason, I felt like the Biden period was just rife with leftist infighting for whatever reason. Um it got out of control, I think.

C. Derick Varn 1:56:44

That doesn't that seem to happen when Democrats aren't in power? I mean, I I I just really do like look at like the periods where this gets really bad. And I I don't have a good answer for that. Like, because I'm like I as a good historical materialist, I shouldn't be saying, is it because the assholes that I that are technically slightly closer to us than the assholes who aren't are in power?

SPEAKER_02 1:57:04

Um well, I mean, Lash Lash has a very nice um theory of like super like leftist superego in in the minimal self and other essays.

C. Derick Varn 1:57:16

Oh, yeah, no, that's a good that's a good essay. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 1:57:19

Yeah, it's a good essay where he links it to a cycle of disappointment. So it makes sense though, right? Like we already see, you know, and what we call this like in colloquial sense vibe shift, right? So there is that um sense in which you know the bot, and this is what happens when you have this paternalistic reliance on the Democratic Party, they determine your fate. And when a figure like mom Donnie lets you down, you know, what we should be doing is just preparing people for that and not allowing for, you know, not not being like um like wet confetti, not not like that, but being um being very skeptical to to to be celebrated uh of this whole thing because we know the site, we know how the cycle goes. We've been around the block.

C. Derick Varn 1:58:09

Right. This is this is you you saw the response to me being like, I am glad Mamdanny won. I am not shitting on Mam Dani, I'm not saying the DSA sucks, I'm not doing any of that, but I want you to look at these structural things and also quit telling me that your world began in 2015 because it didn't. Like, even if you think that's true, it's not true, it can't be true. Um, but also like didn't St. Bernie disappoint you? I know ALC definitely did, although half the people have forgotten about that. Um and I guess like what makes me like if I was only dealing with leftist politicos, I would be super super bitter right now. I think I'd be one of those like post-left motherfuckers. The reason why I'm not is like I don't think that's actually how most people operate. And I I I do think like a lot of the people who voted for Mamdani are probably pretty clear-eyed that a lot of his policies are never gonna get past the bond market or the city council or the state legislature. They know that they're not stupid, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:59:15

Like, yeah, no, I think I think you know, careerist leftists, for which there's a less and less of them these days, um are are you know gonna try to um pump pump a certain vision about mom Dani. But you know, we've been around, we've gone through that, and we've gone through oscillations of that so many times that I don't see the careerist left actually being able to really achieve that. And I'm not sure if they're really um people seem what I'm trying to say is that at this moment, one thing that gives me a positive affirmation is that people are not necessarily too naive about Mamdanny on the whole. There seems to be a pretty moderate. I mean, he's in New York, New York is such an exception to the rest of the country, you know. Um and you know, there's and he's a mayor, there's a lot he can do it within the city, but that's a very localized thing and very regional based and so on. Um and also the thing that I worry about is that the Democrats can quite easily, once we get to the presidential run, manipulate the fact that they have allowed for this wild left wing thing to happen, and then make the argument that at the national level we must go centrist because, of course, of course, this can only work in New York. You know, it can only like they're definitely gonna do. That, you know. So we'll see how they how they manipulate that situation. They've done this before. Um, you know, we'll have to just fall follow that whole thing. But I mean, it's still the fact that it is so orchestrated through the Democratic Party. And here's the one thing, I'll I'll stop with this. It really bothers me. People that celebrate Mamdani as a way of reforming the Democratic Party, it's that uncritical point that ingratiates my sensibilities a lot. I can't handle that. Because ultimately, what they want is a sort of re like a new face to the Democrats or a Democratic Tea Party or something like this. I can't get down with this. You know, Omam Dani has to be seen as a fundamentally hostile figure to the Democrats. I know he's not going to remain that way, but that's the only way that he's a redemptive figure for me or an interesting figure for me.

C. Derick Varn 2:01:39

Right. I have to believe. Well, I don't have to believe. Uh let me rephrase that. For me to believe that either Mamdami or the the push within the DSA to support Mamdani, even from the DSA left, which I was a little bit surprised by, um uh is a good thing. The reason why I have to believe it is a good thing is not this weird accelerationist or impossibleist, like, oh, he's gonna fail and radicalize workers. I don't think that ever works. Um historically, that just pisses workers off and makes you think you're a traiturist bastard. And they're right, actually, if that's your play.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:22

Very true.

C. Derick Varn 2:02:23

Um, but I I think where where I come from on this um is that he must like we can't let them forget how opposed to him they were, and the way that we kind of have let them forget with Bernie Sanders, and Bernie has not helped. Um, and uh and I I do think there's going to be a pushback on like one of the things that I think we're gonna see right now, uh, and maybe this is the last thing to think about, but like, you know, we talk about uh Robert Mickels and the way the elites happen, but what do you do when you have an inflush of of elites who aren't in any institution that's not working the way he describes in the S Bay Day? Uh, but they just are overproduced, and so they're grasping on to anything that can give them a venue. Uh, and if that venue, if they've moved from like the number of former liberal elites who are now like DSA, I'm not a liberal anymore in LA and New York that have Harvard educations and they're like uh heterodox economists or comedians, is actually a little bit astonishing. And I'm not saying it's all bad, I just said it wasn't all bad. Uh, but like there is a chance where they could capture this and through a different mechanism, and I have no problem with them being in the move in the movement if one were to come out of this. I really don't, right?

SPEAKER_02 2:03:58

Um I think I think it would be it would be so they can't be in charge.

C. Derick Varn 2:04:03

Like, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 2:04:04

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, in a way, it kind of comes down to sort of like um how is leadership um going to break with the sort of regimentation of elite capture on the one hand, but then on the other hand, there's this more sunk class question um that persists despite institutional affiliation and legitimacy, and in that sense, it's like a um form of cultural capital which is able to be exerted even if you don't have access immediately to the institution itself. Maybe you have the kind of hangover prestige that it is endowed upon you,

Bridging Habitus: Merging Knowledge

SPEAKER_02 2:04:47

and that then has this whole series of unconscious mechanisms that you adhere to it, and it still gives you a certain power in society. Keeping in mind the fact that a lot of those people also are D-class A and they are capable of doing comedy gigs and making hardly any money because they have family patronage. I'm not gonna allow for that to be uh the grounds for dismissing them, as you say, of course. But when you say that they shouldn't lead, that then means that organizations need to be constructed in ways that DSA is not constructed. Agreed because because the DSA does not, for example, um uh put forward certain questions about like one's income as a prerequisite of joining that's not put into consideration in terms of leadership, as far as I know.

C. Derick Varn 2:05:44

Probably because it would mean that people like a certain former editor of Jacobin magazine could have never joined. But go ahead, like um, you know, um like yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:05:56

I mean it is it is one of the sort of things that that class unity did right, it was one of their ideas to sort of reform, it never happened, but it was a good idea. But I think those types of things need to be um prioritized, and ultimately it's why I'm not sure that DSA is the is the right vehicle. Um, but we don't need to get into that whole no.

C. Derick Varn 2:06:18

I mean, here's the thing. I I at this point have no idea what the right vehicle is. I've tried a lot of vehicles, and uh to use a Buddhist metaphor, I'm still stuck in Samsara. So um the one thing I will say is I actually have a lot more faith in unions, and I don't have a ton of faith in that. Uh and that is for the same reasons. I mean, the one thing the one place where Michaels hits me the most isn't actually so much in politics, it's in it's in like using union presidency and working class organizations that uh get mobbed up, but weirdly uh are professionaled up, depending. Um, but weirdly, believe it or not, Mickels doesn't make that argument, it's like kind of implied, but not really. He doesn't actually draw it out. Um, and so you know uh I find that kind of interesting, but I will tell you that I think all of these institutions have have problems and they have choke points. I just don't know that when we say the iron law of iron oligarchy, that we can assume it's gonna work the way it worked in the espe day everywhere forever, when not just does. I mean, the espe day today is not the institution that Mickels is writing about. Hell, the espe day by like 1935 wasn't the institution, if the in so much it was even leal, uh that Mickels is writing about. So, you know, it it I can I learned a ton from this, and I think it is a harrowing thing to deal with, but I also think like uh the idea that this leads to some eternal unbreakable iron law is kind of a joke. Um, if I have any historical context whatsoever.

SPEAKER_02 2:07:59

Yeah, amen to that. No, a hundred percent. And I think it's not only like some idealist wager that I have, like, oh, we must in Pavl in a Pavlovian sense just you know will it out of becoming becoming a fate accompli. But no, I think I think that it's actually within our purview to create institutions with this knowledge to disable these tendencies in a very real way, and I think that's very feasible. Um so yeah, yeah, it was very it's a very interesting uh essay. I hope everyone gets a chance to to look at it. Apparently, somebody told me that the footnotes I guess this is true. Uh there's hardly any footnotes in the English translation. So the English translation is not great. It's still good though. It's still, I mean, but I in German it's like the empirical stuff is way more apparent because it it shows the kind of gravity of his the magnitude of the project, it's just a massive project.

C. Derick Varn 2:08:58

I uh I have done with this book what I did with um negative dialectics by adorno, which is actually look at the German compared to the English translation and really decided that the English translation was super super deficient. Uh, which I've also done with with you know, not that I'm as obsessed with Adorno as I once was, but like negative dialective translation is terrible. Um, like it and similar to this, I don't actually know why, you know, because because at least Adorno is very difficult in German. Um, whereas this is not actually particularly difficult, they just seem to have like cut out the data. They cut out the data, they just left the argument because it was unsexy or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 2:09:38

Like it's very weird, yeah. Yeah, it's very strange, not not normal. Uh, well, speaking of negative dialectics, yeah. I once did a very undemocratic thing with my podcast, is I gave people a vote to do a study group, and the masses selected negative dialectics, but because I was so critical of Adorno, I'm like, no, we're not gonna do that, guys. I went against I I went against what they wanted.

C. Derick Varn 2:10:06

But um I don't think they want it. Uh like as a person who studied that text for like uh like almost obsessively for so you know, unlike I'm not gonna say unlike you, the reason why I turned against um against Adorno was not because I didn't uh I thought Adorno was you know corrupted by OCAA or the OSS or whatever. Uh I do think maybe that's possible, but it's not really why I turned against the that's not sentiment against him either.

SPEAKER_02 2:10:35

I'll be curious to see what Rockhill says, though.

C. Derick Varn 2:10:37

Yeah, I I'm waiting. I'm waiting for the I am gonna look at the receipts. Um I have looked at similar receipts for art and decided that some of it was real, so I'm it's not beyond me. But uh my point is like I think negative dialectics leads to the resignation essay, and it's like when when Gizek said when Gizek was doing his like, oh, we just need to think and do nothing, and we'll come to the and I'm like the resignation essay by Adorno basically seems to think that you know communism is the is the emancipation we have in our heads. And I after going through negative dialectics multiple times, I've decided that that is where that book leads you.

SPEAKER_02 2:11:25

Yeah, well that yeah, yeah, and that that's that's very close to what we were saying with Chuck Rancio's studies of 19th century proletarian.

C. Derick Varn 2:11:31

Right, yeah, and I'm just like uh I'm not sure how useful this is, and the other thing is I'm sympathetic, even empirically, all right, not just on a on a bait on a like uh ideological basis, like the authoritarian personality. The one time the Frankfurt School's sociologist actually did empirical sociology, the actual data doesn't back up their conclusion when you look at it. Yeah, it's very and neither do other studies that like the idea that somehow that the working class was more authoritarian, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:12:05

Exactly, exactly. It's one of those things that's also not I don't want to say evil, but has spawned all of this uh uh not only not only uh this empirical like um sort of false application to class and so on, but it's led to a concept, a popular conception of prejudice and discrimination that is been abused by liberals over decades now. That that's my biggest problem with all authoritarian personality, which is interesting because I was having this debate with Doug Lane, and Doug Lane, out of his reverence for Adorno, refused to see any problem with the authoritarian personality study. I'm like, what do you mean you don't see it? Like, I don't yeah, I that was very strange to me.

C. Derick Varn 2:12:55

No, I mean there's been liberal sociologists who've redone the data and got the opposite conclusion, not even Marxists. We're not talking about Marxists here. Like, uh I I remember uh talking about uh Martin J talking about this because Martin Jay also thinks it's crap, and um and being told by a certain monitoring organization that that was slander, and I'm like, it's just empirically like the empirics don't back up the conclusion that that study made.

SPEAKER_02 2:13:27

Okay, I see. I I I don't mean to call out Doug Lane in particular, I I have no particular problem with him at this moment, but I'm just saying it's a little funny, a little funny.

C. Derick Varn 2:13:35

No, no, but uh I will also tell you a certain organization that you have been and talked to, and uh you know, I suppose you're talking to them, but um told me a similar thing that it was just slander to even say that it was empirically invalid.

SPEAKER_02 2:13:50

I know I know who you're talking about now here, right?

C. Derick Varn 2:13:52

Yeah, yeah, we're not even talking about Doug, we're talking about people associated with him, we're not talking about Doug. Um, and I just find this to be just like I I just think it's false. Like the the the the data doesn't back it up. Um yeah, and it seemed like a foregone conclusion, actually.

SPEAKER_02 2:14:12

There's stuff on um like authoritarian personnel. I I think the negative dialectic I'm sorry, the dialectic of enlightenment essays, especially the ones on like anti-Semitism, elements of anti-Semitism, give us more interesting things to work with than does this empirical study.

C. Derick Varn 2:14:33

Absolutely. I I actually think the dialectic of enlightenment's actually kind of useful. Um, you know, it uh I you know I also have harsh things to say about Marcusa and and uh his weird Heideggerian quasi-Maoism and and stuff like that, but like um the I uh I don't I actually find that the Frankfurt School is interesting, and the people in the Frankfurt School we don't talk about as much. Um, I I I've always I have critiques of him, but I take him a lot from Grossman. But I also take a lot from like Otto Kirchner and a lot of those guys, and those are not the people that in the Frankfurt School the people find sexy.

SPEAKER_02 2:15:15

Um I think Adorno Adorno is just like a masterful essayist, and a lot of his early essays stand the test of time, but uh all throughout his his oeuvre you find some gems, so you know he's always good with the one-offs, I think. I don't think that um his forays into Marxism are useful at all. I think that um Adorno on literature is amazing, um his his work on morality is amazing, his work on the history of

Charisma’s Decline And Cartel Parties

SPEAKER_02 2:15:47

philosophy is amazing, his book on dialectics is amazing, his lectures on dialectics, his lectures on ideology are amazing. All of these are published and translated. A lot of Adorno's stuff is translated, some isn't, but I think the majority is.

C. Derick Varn 2:16:55

Um, you'll find everything. Uh we'll put at least the major readings in the show notes so you can go and verify. Trust but verify people, don't just trust shit because we said it. Um, and uh yeah, we've got a drop box folder.

SPEAKER_02 2:17:08

You guys can check out the PDFs, read all of these great, great pieces we've been discussing. Yeah, sure. And I know we mentioned a thousand books that don't appear there. Apologies for that, but yeah, hopefully it's useful.

C. Derick Varn 2:17:22

Yeah. Uh people have been appreciating them. I'll say that. The the the YouTube and Twitter comments have been almost uniformly nice for once. For once, for once. So on that note, we'll we'll end. I'll be right back afterwards.

SPEAKER_02 2:17:38

All right, peace out, comrades.