Diving Into the Wreckage: The French Left Remains Unbowed

Join hosts as they dive deep into the complexities of modern French politics with guest Henry Wallace. This episode explores the concept of the "new municipalism" and the strategic efforts of the La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) movement to reclaim local governance. From the legacy of the Yellow Vests protests to the innovative use of digital organizing tools, the discussion provides a comprehensive look at how grassroots activism is challenging neoliberal structures in France.

Key Topics Covered:

• The New Municipalism: Understanding the shift toward empowering local communes and city councils as hubs for democratic participation.
• France Unbowed (LFI) Strategy: An inside look at how the movement integrates intellectual production with popular education and local action.
• Lessons from the Yellow Vests: Analyzing the impact of past social movements on current political strategies and the demand for a "referendum of citizen initiative".
• Digital Organizing: How LFI utilizes custom-built applications to facilitate local action groups and bypass traditional bureaucratic hurdles.
• The Future of French Politics: Predicting the implications of local electoral successes on the upcoming presidential and legislative races.

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

Transcript

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Unfiltered Cold Open Behind Paywall

C. Derick Varn 1:00

Hello and welcome to diving into the wreckage at this wreckage and farm block. Um this is a special patrons only, only only um you're trying to get this shit for free, you're fucking crazy, bro.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

You're gonna have to pay one way or the other. We that's great because we don't even have to do like the announcement. We're like an hour in, we're like, oh now we're going behind the paywall, sign up for our shit. You've already signed up, you're already here already. This is the real, this is the unredacted, real shit. And it's only happening because our guests that we were gonna record with it it's very late where he lives, and we believe he's fallen asleep. So you get both of us unhinged.

C. Derick Varn 1:42

We're rescheduled at.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Yeah. Yeah, we'll we'll we'll get to that one soon enough, folks. Yeah, we'll talk about it.

C. Derick Varn 1:48

We didn't prep for this one, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

You what what what it means that we're unredacted is that we didn't prepare at all for this. So this is just gonna be we're just raw dogging this podcast here. Just yeah, I'm weird with it.

C. Derick Varn 2:04

I read on the LFI and France Unbowed and their municipal election stuff, and I concluded that I am not qualified to talk about any of that without a specialist on.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

So right, so we're sure as fuck not gonna be talking about it right now because our specialist has bailed on us. I was I was telling you before this as we were waiting for our guest. I I hope he's sleeping well, honestly. A good night's sleep is so important. I was telling you about getting fired for like the third time in the last year for being insubordinate for I guess being uh a good union guy, you know. It took me a while, you know. I I was thinking about the context of it. And when I first started the trades, which was way before I started podcasting, years before I started podcasting, you know, it's it's pretty tough to like to lead or to you know push your swing your weight around or stand up on principle when you're not good, when you're not skilled at your work, you know, and the build the

Trades Work Union Defiance Getting Fired

SPEAKER_01 3:07

highly skilled trades, the more skills you have and the more confidence you have, the more you can actually do, which is very different, I feel like, from like traditional shop floor industrial organizing, where it's really hard to push your weight around individually, obviously. You know, like your your only real strength is is as a collectivity. I guess I'm at a point right now in my career, which is nice, where I just tell the bosses to go fuck themselves and I I take the layoff and the firing happily, and I'm like a happy warrior now. So that's fun. That's what's been going on with me. I'm unemployed again, which is awesome. Very fun. I got an e-bike and electric bike, so now I can tool around the city in the springtime, spring is sprung, and all that good stuff. But there's a lot going on in the world, man. I think we were due to talk about some economic stuff, the oddness, the weirdness of what's going on right now. The fact that this thing of ours has not crumbled and fallen apart yet is very interesting. It's an intriguing thing, makes me kind of question my priors, at least some of them.

C. Derick Varn 4:15

But and yet we actually are beginning to see the things that we've been predicting for a long time. I mean, there's more houses on the market than there are buyers. There, we are seeing major problems in retail spaces. This move to pull people back into business stuff is gonna be complicated by the price of gas, they're just not gonna be able to front it. Gas has not gone up as much as the apocalyptic things have predicted, but I don't think a bunch of months of over a hundred dollar a barrel gas is gonna be easy to absorb. And I remember the last time this was true, which was the middle of the Iraq war cycle under George W. Bush. And if people remember that, we hit five dollar gas in most of the country at a time where five dollars was more money, so probably equivalent to about eight or nine dollars now. If you imagine nine dollar gas, though, for a systemic piece of time, you would actually see the markets respond to that. And it makes a lot of other Trump policies seem particularly fucking stupid.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

On the gas front, because I I think that that's like going to be an important indicator, geopolitical and economic indicator. My understanding, and I get this from a lot of the same kind of people, analysts, pundits who said that Ukraine would be destroyed right now, that there was no way that the Ukrainian army could fight nearly this long. So it needs to be all be taken with a grain of salt. But apparently, the oil tankers that left the Persian Gulf passed through the Straits of Hormuz a month ago, are all of them are now reaching their destinations. And so within the next week or so, that kind of bumper will be out. And suddenly now having 20% of the oil production of the of the globe shut down and unable to circulate is going to start to become an actual material constraint as opposed to like spec speculative prices on the futures markets kind of dictating things, it's going to instead become an actual matter of supply and demand. That's my understanding. So people say that oh, the catastrophic oil prices haven't happened. Uh, I'm not sure that that means they're not going to if this war continues. And I think maybe Trump continuing to try to juice the market is it can only really work for so long. But who knows? I don't know.

C. Derick Varn 6:44

This is an economic thing that I really want people to understand. In the past, we had months and months between when we wrote about something and when something happened and when we reflected on it. That's a pre-internet world, but it was the way a lot of analysis happens. In hindsight, it can look immediate. Markets don't respond immediately. Things that happened five, 10 years ago will affect you five, 10 years down the line. We saw that actually in COVID because there were things that were changed all the way back in 2008, 2009, 2010 that actually had production effects in 2020, 2021. So I think we should take that seriously. Two, I don't know. I mean, I was I just drove across four states, and my friend, if you're in Southern California, gas is between six dollars and seven fifty, depending on what municipal area you're in. And if you're in like Nevada or like rural Mojave, California, it's still it's still above like $550. Here everything is between $398 and $419. That is across the board, but we have low consumption taxes. I think that does, I mean, it's effectively a doubling of energy cost when we have cut other forms of energy. Now, the US is a major producer of oil. We actually became oil independent during the Bush and and and Obama days through fracking and through other

Why The Economy Still Hasn’t Cracked

C. Derick Varn 8:27

forms of extraction. And you know, we might see this again. Remember, if we think about the way ideology corresponds to material conditions and what weird ideologies pop up, and how that can have a weird effect 10-15 years down the line, you may remember fun stuff like how many people were peak oilers in 2005 to 2007 when gas was really expensive. Now, I would actually say the peak oilers were not wrong about a lot of stuff in crude production. What they did not see was the willingness to put energy in at cost or above cost early on to open up new systems to get deeper and deeper crude. So they weren't they weren't even empirically entirely wrong. But the other thing that they missed, and I think people might miss this now, is despite the talk of seizing oil or this or that, why oil matters is dollar hegemony, which is weakening, um, and oil futures, which are traded on the market. And when oil futures go up, it's countercyclic, it's actually bad for the entire rest of the economy. You already have a fragile economy hurt by tariffs. If you would as I said, I can't remember if I said it to you, if I said it to Jules Taylor or Bret No Easy Answers. If you adjusted, if you use uh a commodity and not fiat currency or the forex currency pool to figure out where profits have gone since since COVID, uh, even in the US, which nominally look pretty good compared to Europe which had recession in 2022. There has been none if you price it in gold. Now, I say that because MMT conditions exist when there's a clear hegemon, and people will accept currency by that hegemon. We live in a multipolar world now. It is no there is no clear hegemon. Bricks has been storing gold because they know this. Sorry, MMTers. And without a hegemon, MMT conditions and the dependency on forex currency aren't completely clean, and you need various commodities to back that up. Those commodities are going to be metals and oil for reasons that make sense. So you don't really want to trade too based on oil because oil is a is an energy resource that we deplete at a massive amount. So you see the storing of metals again, and you it has all kinds of downstream effects, like the UAE buying gold from slave markets in Africa that are going to

Oil Shock Timing And Gas Prices

C. Derick Varn 11:17

China, which no one really wants to deal with except for liberals when they're being obnoxious, but you know.

SPEAKER_01 11:23

And you have the bizarre, the seemingly nonsensical gold collapse of a couple weeks ago. I think gold lost a lot of its value because a lot of these Gulf states had been storing a lot of their wealth in the gold and they were selling it off to get liquid.

C. Derick Varn 11:38

There were two reasons. Gulf states have been hoarding them, and there were margin calls on people on a lot of things that are now invested in crypto because crypto became unstable, and you needed real liquid cash to offset that stability to avoid a margin call that would be really bad. Which, you know, the last if you have a lot of fictitious capital, the last thing you fucking want is a margin call because it's going to make that fictitious capital go away, disappear. Right. You know, we only know fictitious capital is fictitious in valorization, which is a fancy way of saying we only know if your val your estimated value was wrong when we sell shit. Well, this one thing Marx is good on that a lot of modern economists like just pretend. Like I had MMTers laugh at the idea of fictific capital and the fact they still take it seriously. But I'm like, well, when if Elon Musk has a margin call and he can and half of his stuff is traded in stocks, it may or may not fold. You don't really know. But we saw with meta when someone makes that call, it can be a big problem for you. So saw meta's revaluation and the disappearance of lots of value. Well, the thing is that value wasn't fucking real, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:48

Like and then it was and as you're saying, it only became unreal or it was only revealed as unreal as soon as it was tested and market conditions. Someone tried to buy it or sell it. That's when it becomes glaringly clear that it was fictitious. But if it had been able to be valorized under different conditions, then that same that though those same capitals wouldn't be fictitious, right?

C. Derick Varn 13:10

Like, right, no, it'd be real. I mean, if you can sell it, the moment you can sell it and you can get that that value in some commodity that exchanges for some, you know, or some currency that exchanges for some real commodity, and you can get that real commodity, be that land, you know, oil, gold, whatever, you've proven value. Like, and this is why the MMTers aren't totally wrong. Like, uh, fiat currency is dependent on this on the strength of the governments involved. And if that if that is valorizable for whatever you need, so you can trade it, you know, and get dollars will get you stuff, then then it's real. I mean, you know, whether or not it's backed by gold or oil or whatever, nominally the US dollar is backed by oil. It is still, and the reason why that is has to do with OPEC and the end of the Bretton Woods agreement, and it's Richard Nixon, yeah. But I think you're right to point out some of these people who predict things often are, I think, schizophrenic and do kind of imagine things in an easier way than what really exists. And I'll give you an example of this. Like, you know, I have been saying for a long time that there's no way that Ukraine can win the war in a Clausewitsian manner. But if you switch to fourth generation warfare mode, even the Ukrainian state could fold and they could bleed Russia for decades. We know this because it's happened to us with even weaker militaries than the Ukrainian one. And I think this is to people just ignore this because what it shows is all great militaries have a strategic disadvantage in a war where they are an occupier, all right. And that's that's that's true for regardless of who you are. You might go, oh, Israel's Israel doesn't work that way. Israel doesn't work that way because they're basically willing to rage a war of extermination, right? And they don't really have another place to go, they don't have a like their home country is occupying this as part of the settlement of their home country, so it has a logic of a civil war or war of extermination, like the Indian Wars in the United States, not an occupational war.

SPEAKER_01 15:31

It's all heimat, it's not like an out an offshore colony or something like that, right?

C. Derick Varn 15:35

Exactly, and it different rules apply. You know, you we've talked about this now twice, but I've been trying to get you to study war because leftists are really bad at studying war, not Engels or Trotsky, but yeah, no, no, but and not Lenin or even Stalin. I mean, although Stalin kind of fucked up at first and then got a shit together, but yeah, um, I think that there is there you've been trying to get me to study war.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

Well, thankfully, circumstances have conspired to make the study of war very uh visceral these days. I think that have you and I spoken since the Iran War began? I've I I've I've podcasted.

C. Derick Varn 16:21

I think we spoke right after the initial killing of the Ayatollah and key figures happened, but and it really fucked up my morning because like I had to change everything I was writing about.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

But oh yeah, yeah, that yeah. And then it dominated for good reason, obviously. Like anything that I was thinking about previous to that, or like planning on podcasting at least for the first several

Dollar Hegemony MMT Gold Crypto Stress

SPEAKER_01 16:47

weeks, just seemed absurd. Just like after October 7th, you know, when there really wasn't anything to talk about. We talked about Iran a lot, Andy and I. But you and I maybe now we've had a month to well, we definitely have had a month to like sit with this war and see what's going on. I feel like there's a lot of different angles to take this from. There are a lot of Iran boosters out there, there are a lot of people within uh former State Department people, former military people who think that the Trump Trump plan, such as it is, uh, is a complete disaster.

C. Derick Varn 17:23

What Trump plan? I mean, that's I really don't see an evidence of a Trump plan.

SPEAKER_01 17:27

Like I think it's clear now. Not I shouldn't say clear. I think that the real possibility exists, or at least the most plausible plan, as I as I understand it, hearing a lot of commentary on it over the last month, was that the Israelis had using their intelligence agents agencies turned various high figures within the IRGC and the regular military and political apparatus of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And we know that I think he was the head of not the Basjid, he might have been the head of the IRGC, I forget the gentleman's name, was hung and executed for being a spy. So I think that the initial plan was that they thought that the combination of these the civil unrest, which was real, but they helped stoke and arm and give intel to using Starlink or whatever the fuck that shit is, some combination of those protests and a decapitation strike combined with similar to what they did in Venezuela by buying off parts of the uh Bolivarian government, would lead to a situation where the plan A was you decapitate and you have a coup, basically.

C. Derick Varn 18:43

Uh yeah. So I'm with you on that as what the original plan was. Yes, I have a question for you. Do you believe the Israelis, given their infiltration of the Revolutionary Guard, was pretty thorough? And we know this because they had a lot of key targets. Could they have possibly believed that? I don't think so.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

I do not think the Israelis have believed, or Trump believed the Israelis.

C. Derick Varn 19:05

No, I think Trump believed the Israelis clearly, but what I'm saying, do you think the Israelis believed that when they fed him this? I don't think so. I don't think they could have.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

Like you think that they have a better sense of what's going on in the ground than say, like the CIA. I because I can't.

C. Derick Varn 19:22

They're the ones who did all the leck what did all the legwork in Iran. That's absolutely clear. They like we did not infiltrate the the the revolutionary. We'd love to, but we did not. The Shinbet and Mossad clearly had agents to do that. They also clearly had the ability to to deal with regional tensions and different factors. When the U.S. tried to intervene, for example, when they tried to get the Kurds to be a fighting force, it was clear that the CIA was literally leaking this to provoke an Iranian response against the Kurds so that to force them in the position the CIA was trying to do. And the Kurds refused. And the revolutionary government did not bite. You also had statements from Kurds in Syria basically warning their Iranian brothers not to do that because they fucking remember what happened to them.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

So I've talked about this alleged invasion. This was like in the first week or so that there was this at these allegations that Kurds from the autonomous regions in Iran were going to invade, right?

C. Derick Varn 20:30

Yeah, we're going to invade and fight the government and then probably like unite with the Iraqi with the Iraqi Kurds, blah blah blah.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

And that would have been the CIA, presumably, right?

C. Derick Varn 20:40

Because we have Yeah, the CIA was leaking this. And they were saying they were they were saying two or three days after the war that they were leaking this. It was the most ham-fisted intelligence operation out of the CIA I've ever fucking seen.

SPEAKER_01 20:53

I think, in answer to your previous question, which I think is an important one, I think that to say Israel, even to say the Mossad or to say Trump or to say the CIA gives more coherence to these structures than is real. I think that there are certainly elements within Israel, which let's not forget before October 7th was in a near civil war between its kind of Ashkenazi former laborite elite, which still runs the courts and a lot of the administration state, and certainly the higher echelons of the army.

C. Derick Varn 21:27

Yeah, the former Kadima people who are also former like right end of labor people, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

Right. Them on the one side, and then Netanyahu and this bastard, like settler Mizrahi, kind of Russian fascist coalition that he's pulled together. You know, they were at a point of civil war. And so I think that there's elements within Israel that that did believe this, probably Netanyahu's elements. I feel like Netanyahu, for political reasons, kind of had to believe it, because I think that these wars have taken on a political logic of their own. Like I'm not even sure that Netanyahu, although he is in the driver's seat, is really in in real control of the car given the corruption charges over his head and given the tenuous way in which his coalition may or may not fall apart come October, right? I also think, and I don't I don't want to be a basic bitch about this shit. Like I find I don't, I'm not sure that we want to like ascribe grand uh historical processes to like how people feel or their like psychology, mass psychology or whatever. But it is true, and I I get this from Alistair Crook, who is a great resource, not a Marxist by any means, but a a Hebrew speaker, a former British diplomat who reads the Hebrew press every single day. And knows Israel very well, lived there for a long time, and is a critic of Zionism. That there is, and you can see this bubbling to the surface, a kind of alternate epistemology that exists and is rising in it's a kind of bronze age one, right? It's a kind of attempt to take all what we would consider the old testament conceptions of morality, concepts like Amalek, you know, try to turn these into a form of governance and like a worldview and a world understanding. I think that large parts of the what we would consider the right, really the fascist right in Israel, is kind of taken. It seems like they're taken by ideas that seem deeply irrational to all of us, but make sense in like the settler kind of fascist context that we see as like kind of the bleeding edge of Zionism.

C. Derick Varn 23:42

The Shabbatniks one, the Chabadniks one. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like what

War Logic Occupiers And Fourth Gen

C. Derick Varn 23:47

I mean by that is like there's an attempt to take a form of modern Orthodox Judaism and strip it even of a lot of rabbinic refinement that's from the diaspora and turn it into a kind of virulent religious nationalism. Yes. And the other thing, as we talked about in the multiple kinds of Jewish supremacism that we mentioned in the last episode, is that the other option is the Ihu Barak one, as you saw in the Epstein files, which is basically an Ashkenazi racial regime that is progressive. So it's basically to put it in American terms, it's it's 2014 Richard Spencer versus 1988, uh, you know, the 700 club, but with a Jewish variance. And I think that's hard for people to take. One of the reasons why this has gotten severant in Israel is the reduction effect. And I talk about this a lot. Like, oh, Henry's here. Hold on.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

Henry, hi.

C. Derick Varn 24:54

Welcome to the public-facing part of uh diving into the wreckage. Our private fashion part will be completely separate and not related this time. So this is a completely free for everybody episode that will be coming out in the next like within a week and a half of us recording it because we're talking about very recent political events in France.

SPEAKER_01 25:17

In France. Do we have our French correspondent on the line? I feel like we must have our French correspondent. There he is. There's that. How's it going, Henry Wallace? Very good.

SPEAKER_05 25:31

How are you all today? Or this evening or whatever?

SPEAKER_01 25:34

Very good. I was just speaking with someone today, and they said about you. They said he has such a nice podcasting

Henry Joins France Municipal Elections

SPEAKER_01 25:41

voice.

SPEAKER_05 25:42

Oh, thank you. That's very kind.

SPEAKER_01 25:44

Don't thank me, thank them. Thank Anonymous. But it is true. I think you do have a really nice podcasting voice. Thanks for coming back with us. We're gonna talk about your adopted homeland, right? We're gonna talk about uh unbowed events over there in France.

SPEAKER_05 25:59

And I also have a book that I will be referencing for a new municipalism, communes, and the heart of the citizens' revolution.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

Okay, all right. Who's who's who's the book by?

SPEAKER_05 26:12

The book is by the Institut de Boisie, which is the Boise Institute, the Unbound Think Tank, and it is co-written by Cecile Gintrac, Manuel Menal, Alain Poplar, and Antoine Sales Papou, with a preface, of course, by Melancham himself.

SPEAKER_01 26:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_05 26:31

It's a solid, if you read French, it's a solid 207 pages all about city council elections and stuff like that, and what what the point of doing city uh government is in uh in a revolutionary context.

SPEAKER_01 26:47

Well, for those of us like I don't know, I I don't know what Varn reads, but I don't read French all that good. You can give us the cliff notes on it, so we're we're excited for that. Varn, you you let's uh let's let's start with that.

C. Derick Varn 27:01

You implied that I might even begin to speak French, it's kind of fucking funny. No, I don't know where you're no, I Derek Sivarne. I'm on Team Germany, and anyone who's ever tried to hear me pronounce a French name on my podcast knows damn well that I don't speak French. But I can you tell us about some of these figures that that that wrote the book because I do think a lot of the current French political milieu is not really known that well in America, weirdly, like there are less successful you know left movements that are far more where intermediate, you know, figures are far more known than the French one, which is far more successful. So can you tell us about the authors of the book and who they are?

SPEAKER_05 27:55

Yeah, so the authors of the book are also associated, as I said, with the Boise Institute, which within the Unbound Movement is the structure that is actually led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Clément Squetet personally. And this is the structure that tries to integrate intellectuals and like theoretical production and also popular education in terms of the intensive like cadre formation program, all in sort of one space. And so people, you know, if you saw any of Mélenchon's in like when he came to America, the guy translating for him was Antoine Salas Papou. So the guy with the glasses that you might have seen in New York, that was Antoine. And then Alan Poplar, Emmanuel Menal. I've uh met both of these guys and talked to them. They're they're pretty solid militants. Cecile Gentrac, I've never spoken with, so I don't really, you know, I can't speak to everybody personally, but I've had like a pretty serious discussion with most of the people who wrote the book, and I think it's pretty interesting. It goes through like basically what is municipalism, how is what the unbound is proposing different than bookchin, etc. etc. And I guess if you don't mind, uh Varn and Sean, I would just like go over briefly the municipal results and like the context. Or do you want to wait for that for later?

SPEAKER_03 29:16

No, that's that's the point of the case.

SPEAKER_05 29:18

Okay, so basically in France, municipal elections happen all at the same time. So every city has its like city council race all at the same day. And it's like a two-round thing, like the presidency. So basically, you have to do well enough in the first round to either win outright or progress. The second round where you knock out kind of like losers from the contention. And then at the end, it's sort of semi-proportional, where even if you get like like in my city, they didn't do that great, the unbound, but they still got one person in city council. Does that make sense? So you don't have to win it all. You can win like a portion of the city council.

SPEAKER_01 29:57

It's not first

What New Municipalism Means In Practice

SPEAKER_01 29:57

past the post, it's like proportional.

SPEAKER_05 30:00

Yeah, it's like semi-proportional with multiple, it's confusing.

SPEAKER_01 30:03

Basically, is it like you're voting for slates or yeah, you vote for the whole list.

SPEAKER_05 30:07

So I think it's 42 or 47 or 40-something counselors, and the first counselor just sort of by you know, the head of the list is the mayoral candidate.

SPEAKER_01 30:19

And and I'm sorry to to stop you there, but are the duties of these mayors something similar to what we've recognized in the United States?

SPEAKER_05 30:28

Yeah, it's similar, and it's there's also similar problems. So, like I'm you know, we've talked a lot about Zaran Mamdani and the sort of limits and constraints that his mayoralty has in Anglo discourse, and in French discourse, like the mayor historically, like from the French Revolution, is actually very important because the mayor represents the sort of bottom-up power in the you know, old-timey French republican system, whereas like the prefect and the central government represent the top-down aspect. But over the last, I don't know, 20 years or so, basically with neoliberalism, the power of the French commune, which is the smallest like municipal, the commune and the city are basically the same thing, but a commune could be like a village or what whatever, has been limited by what we call agglomerations, which are similar to the development of counties. So counties have kind of developed over time in France, and these create issues where, or I guess maybe then county, we should say like metropolitan area. So, like the New York metropolitan area. Let's put it this way imagine if in New York City, Manhattan, Brooklyn, LeBron, Staten Island, Queens were all actually really independent cities still, and then the city government was more lightly overlaid, but it was getting to the point like it is today, where it's really that that overlay, which is the main thing. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 31:57

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like France suffers similar problems to what we have in the United States with our federal system. I'm not sure. Is is France a federal system when it comes to like funding municipalities? Is it like a bond market for cities or it's first of all, it's a unitary state.

SPEAKER_05 32:17

Okay, so there is no federalism in that sense, but there is like the problem of cities getting uh funds or not from the central government, and there's also a problem of different cities with different means having different budgets, and then like just to put it in very political terms, some cities, some communes are becoming sort of I don't want to say decorative, but if you live, for example, let's take a metropolitan, a metropolitan area like Nice. Nice is a large city with a lot of small communes around it. A lot of these communes are quite small, and the people there are connected to Nice for work and stuff like that, right? So a lot of these communes are gonna be basically turned into neighborhoods of the bigger cities and their actual real autonomy stripped because they're gonna end up in the same like water, transport, energy, schooling type system. And especially with like the water and and the basic resources, a main thing that the unbound have been trying to what they did run on was getting private finance and private, basically private companies out of municipal water altogether, and basically making sure that uh basic uh basic goods like water are a public institution that handles that.

SPEAKER_01 33:38

They're municipalized, basically. Yeah. I recall or I believe that you lived here in New York City for some time, right? That has been said. As a young person, you may or may not have spent time in New York City. What's interesting about this discussion, and I hope it's interesting to Varn and to the listeners too, is I'm trying to think now about the uniqueness of the American system and kind of what you're describing with the French system. And I think specifically of these bastard

Communes Metropoles And Local Power Limits

SPEAKER_01 34:08

organizations that we in the United States have created, public corporations to try to deal with issues of jurisdiction, uh, issues of like metropolitan governance. I'm thinking specifically of the metropolitan transport authority and the port authority of New York and New Jersey. These are ways to basically create structures that span across state lines that go to New Jersey, that go to Connecticut, that go to New York, that try to combine these metropolitan areas across state lines and kind of rationalize them. It sounds like to me that there is a process, like a slow motion process of like rationalization of uh the system in France, but it sounds like it's it's much more political there. Like here, these corporations were formed, I think, to kind of take the politics out of the whole thing. Is that fair to say, do you think?

SPEAKER_05 35:00

Yeah, but it's a similar process. Like, think about it this way. If you're in the metropolitan, we'll just call it the authority. If you live in it's literally the metropole in France, which is like an overloaded term, but if you're in the metropolitan authority uh and you're like buddy with the mayor, you can get a little bit, you're not gonna go full power broker, but you can get a little bit of that kind of technocratic carve out, not really exposed to any one electorate. You see what I mean? So a major theme of the new com the new municipalism is trying to recenter actual democracy in like a local uh political context of the commune, and to make the commune, which in the French Revolution and subsequently was very important in the left, uh, to recenter the commune as the sort of the the heart of our political life. Just to very rapidly just talk about what happened. So they did a full court press against the unbowed before these elections. A neo-Nazi got killed in Lyon. The unbowed were basically blamed for him being killed by Antifa, allegedly. They honored a neo-Nazi in the National Assembly. They called Jean-Luc Mélenchon, they did the full anti-Semitic full court press over remarks that he made about Jeffrey Epstein. And then at the end of the day, as you can read in New International Magazine with our article A Step Forward for LFI by Unbound Communist President Francis Parney, we had a pretty big win. We've got 10 cities, one basically outright, uh, that represent 600,000 people. There are going to be 400 communes with unbound city members, like city council people, and a total impact over the lives of 16 million people. And the biggest commune, I think we won, was Saint-Denis with Bali Bagayoko. So the old like red uh crown of Paris has now passed the unbound, which was interesting because Bali won with an alliance, actually, a slate that was like United Unbound Communist Party slate. And then another, and a Bali Bagayoko, as Shudossi, is is an unbound communist. And then another unbound communist, Pierre Monet, won a small village of 160 people. So we've got 150,000 people, we've got you know 160 people. And what I really liked about the the Bali Bagayoko campaign is that he wins, right? So he's gonna win this like north suburb of Paris. Let's just say like Brooklyn to make it simple. And then, you know, what's the immediate thing that the media does? What do you think they're gonna do straight off the bat, Sean or or Derek?

C. Derick Varn 37:44

Uh they're going to probably misrepresent the the what is a hand, but or not cover it, one of the two.

SPEAKER_05 37:52

Oh, well, since he's black, they just decide to compare him to a like a monkey or a primitive tribesman. Okay.

C. Derick Varn 37:58

Straight up old-fashioned French right-wing racism. Got it.

SPEAKER_05 38:02

Like, yeah, from like a like a quote unquote anarchist, uh you know, public intellectual who goes on right wing TV. So this is like the you know, this is the level of discourse, and then the political uh critique was they're gonna turn basically a no-go zone into like the the the purge because they're gonna disarm the police.

SPEAKER_01 38:23

Oh, that sounds very familiar now. Okay.

SPEAKER_05 38:26

Because that we did actually run on disarming the police. So that part is true, but I don't think it's gonna lead to the purge.

SPEAKER_01 38:34

You have gun control in France, right? It's difficult.

SPEAKER_05 38:37

Oh, yeah, we got lots of gun control, but lots of gun control.

SPEAKER_01 38:40

Yeah, so maybe it'll be a good one.

SPEAKER_05 38:42

I know you're a strong Second Amendment supporter, Sean.

SPEAKER_01 38:45

Me, I'm I'm a two-way guy, yeah. It's part of

Wins Backlash Racism And Policing Claims

SPEAKER_01 38:47

our Republican tradition. We have our own. Maybe you guys have different ideas over there, but that's fine, you know, different strokes for different folks.

SPEAKER_05 38:56

Well, yeah, so that's the the situation, and now we're heading into the presidential election next year, so we have to like deliver on the the the communes, you know what I mean? Like if we don't disarm the police, then it's gonna be not good for the presidentials.

SPEAKER_01 39:13

So what besides racism? Okay, what what did the right wing? And I know that there's like a Zimmoor right wing, and then there's like a what what are they called now? National re ressemblement, yeah. The national rally, the national rally, and then there's the kind of traditional Republican Party, right? I think they're called the Sarkozy. What what were the arguments against France and Bao's policy when it comes to the communes?

SPEAKER_05 39:44

Oh, well, I mean, besides racism, they that's like the that's to that's granted, yeah. Yeah, besides racism, I think the main arguments are just like these are crazy radicals who are gonna, you know, the same kind of stuff you hear about Zoran Mamdani, even though Zoran has an objectively much tamer program. It's just the same kind of argumentation, there's nothing really that political. I mean, like, it's hard for me because racism is like the motivating element. I think there's also the question of like beyond even just racism in like the pure sense, what are we doing with this like economy? Like, uh what are we doing with like who is the city for? Uh it wasn't even necessarily against the right, but like Saint-Denis, a major theme was uh gentrification, with Bali Bagayoki being an anti-gentrification candidate. So that and that was just against the socialist party. So with the right, I mean it's even more of a question of like, is the city a tourist trap? Is it a hub for like finance? Like, what is the point of the city?

SPEAKER_01 40:58

And in France, similar to America, is there like a an anti-urban right like beyond the racism again? Because we take that for granted. But there's like, is there a kind of rural, sort of pastoral, anti-urban right that exists?

SPEAKER_05 41:14

I mean, there are people that hate Paris because it's just a classic resentment of like capital and province, you know? Yeah, but I in terms of like primitivist kind of or pastoralist, I I don't encounter that much, at least not in the press. It's more, I think it's just more about like, for example, for the presidentials that are coming up, and we have to understand that the municipal elections are all preparation for the presidential elections, right? Because the presidentials are literally next year. One of the the like the repo republica similar kind of candidates came out and said, My goal is for the French people to work more, more hours per week, and longer if elected.

C. Derick Varn 42:01

That's uh pretty brazen.

SPEAKER_01 42:06

I not even what's his dick face. Macron ran on that, right? He ran on like reform of the pension system or whatever, but he wasn't directly saying that the French needed to, he kind of did a bait and switch, is that right? Or is this a new sort of thing?

SPEAKER_05 42:22

I don't know that Macron did a bait and switch, but it's um Macron did like sort of neoliberal Obama type campaign of being like, I'm beyond you know, the the divisions of left and right, you know what I mean? And now we just have a more kind of like that center is completely broken down, and now it's either you know the radical left, or there are still some, you know, like the socialist party, I think wants to try to inherit Macron and like take the center back, but then most of the energy is either to the left or the right, and the people on the right are either business class guys saying, Sean, you need to work more and make less money, or you know, Derek, we're gonna get the you know the Muslims out of here, and you know, then you're gonna have healthcare. Like that's the that's the level of discourse. I mean, the reality is the unvoute the only people publishing like 200-page books about city politics.

SPEAKER_01 43:20

Interesting. I have a question, Henry, and I want to bring it back to like maybe the inheritance of our show. You know, we used to be called the anti-fod. And what uh the earliest social movements maybe we had a beat on, or at least that I can remember, were the the yellow vests, right?

SPEAKER_05 43:38

Oh, yes.

SPEAKER_01 43:39

And I wonder what this like municipalist turn says or how it relates to that movement, because as I understand it, you know, it wasn't, of course, just an economic struggle that took place, although it was tied to I think gas taxes, gas subsidies. It was also a kind of a sense of alienation from the broader process of like the French economy and politics, and a kind of alienation of the exurbs in France. Is this municipalism that you're talking about, this attempt to revive the commune politically tied to that? Or is that what people are referencing?

SPEAKER_05 44:17

Yes, directly. It's directly tied to that. And I can speak to this very explicitly. So during the L of S, I was living in Saint-Denis, and one of our we had a list of demands that we we we developed through the movement of the LFS, and one of our demands was that that that developed overall in the movement was called the REAC or the uh referendum of citizen initiative, which is basically the idea that we don't want to just vote for like politicians, random citizens want the uh ability to like force.

Yellow Vests Legacy RIC Water Services

SPEAKER_05 44:47

Basically, to force referenda on policy, to force reverenda on key questions. And this was an idea that like people want to be able to have more of a say in what's going on. And, you know, people were holding up signs for the RIC and getting their eyes blown out with these like quote unquote non-lethal weapons called flashballs, the LBD and stuff like this. So now Bali Bagayoko is coming on a municipal campaign where he's saying, We're gonna do the RIC. I'm gonna take away the flashballs first thing. You see what I mean? Like he's really calling back to Elvest saying, like, the L Vest in Saint-Denis were demanding for public services to be improved. And like, what does that mean, Sean? What that means is a lot of actual like public uh institutions, like when you go to get your papers done or you need to see a doctor or whatever, are being like digitalized. And the the days where you can just like go and walk in to the the city hall or to the prefecture and get your stuff, your your stuff done at a like a counter with a human being, a lot of places they're taking that away. And this basically makes doing a lot of this kind of work impossible for normal people because technology actually sucks, right? So one of the things I'll stand about is like, no, we're going to maintain the counter where people can come and actually get their their stuff done. And like if you're in a heavily immigrant city like Saint-Denis, that's actually very important, right? And we're gonna you know make sure that the first, I think it's the first 25, I have to look at the number, but it's like the first 25 cubic meters or something like this. The the basically the amount of water that a person normally would use for their basic necessities, that's now free and guaranteed. That's taken out of the market, right? And then we're gonna jack up the price on people who have like swimming pools and like overuse water, right? So like there's a whole list of things like this that echo back to to Yellow Vest uh demands. And you know in a real way, this is the call like in Saint-Denis. If Bagayoko delivers, then this Yellow Vest movement will be in a sort of Walter Binamin sense redeemed, like it will win its demands.

SPEAKER_01 46:58

Interesting. Varn, you got any questions?

C. Derick Varn 47:02

Not particularly. I I I do think that this sort of strategy is interesting in that it finds parallels in in the US system, but there's no real like version of it here. There's not one of the things that that that like French federalism is both different, but also the LFI has more out like municipal bases than say the DSA, which is very concentrated into heavily populated regions and some cities, but they don't have like a a clear federal path towards counterpower. Well, the LFI does, and I wanted to maybe to like draw that out a little bit because it does seem to me that you know we uh you know, even you sometimes make the comparison to the DSA, but like the LFI is light years ahead of the DSA and both its infiltration into French society and its ability to appeal to places that are not obviously historically leftist.

SPEAKER_05 48:13

So, yeah, so there is there, but I mean we also should like be real that you know New York is a lot bigger of a city than Saint Denis. Absolutely, absolutely so that is that is like a major asterisk of like what Mamdani has in front of him is actually like a huge, a monumental task. And we are trying like the the unbound are trying to deliver their program at a smaller scale, although with more experiments concurrently, you know what I mean, more smaller concurrent experiments, and with this notion that like I think this is the big difference, actually, is that the whole new municipalism is not confederalist in a bookchin sense. And I don't think that Mamdani is a confederalist, but bear with me. The issue is that Mamdani has no strategic, as far as I understand, there's no like strategy beyond New York, right? For DSA. Like they want a big city, but there's not like, okay, so how does that relate to the national strategy? Whereas for the new municipalism here, there is a strategy, which is these cities are all going to be laboratories and support structures for the Citizens Revolution, with which the next sort of like date on the calendar to try to take power electorally is next year. Does that make sense? So we're telling people like start campaigning now for the presidency. Now we have like 10 cities in which we can start to show people that like actually it's possible to take the guns away from the police. Actually, it's possible to have like a decent public services and to start an ecological transition. Because if we take power nationally, we need to bifurcate the economy and break like with fossil fuels and also handle this like insane international situation, right? So like there's a lot of shit to do that's gonna need a local and a legislative and a presidential level, and like we have legislators, and after, just for for reference, after the presidential, the next election is the legislative. So you have to keep that in mind. We're gonna do like back-to-back municipal, presidential, legislative. So we could like run the fucking table, or we could all end up against the wall. And I just want to be really, you know, like that's a real possibility. And we're being demonized to a degree that DSA is not. That's also true.

SPEAKER_01 50:35

I want to put a pin in that because I do think this is a dangerous time for the world, and so it sounds like in France too, and I want you to speak on that. I guess I have a very broad question for you, and you might be uniquely equipped to answer it, which is why is a forward-thinking kind of um planned idealist movement possible in France

Local Labs For A National Run

SPEAKER_01 50:57

right now when in the United States it seems like we're not even a sack of potatoes, as our friend Mac Christmas says, we're like Pringles. We're we're like unorganizable even more than a sack of potatoes. Why is it that France retains this ability to have like something akin to mass politics, or at least like a conception of the future that's better than just like we're gonna soldier on day by day, we're gonna create the best New York City municipal government since Bill de Blasio. Why is that? What what does France have that we don't?

SPEAKER_05 51:33

Well, first of all, shout out to Matt. I hope he's doing well. The pringle, although Pringles in a can are more organized than potatoes in a sack.

SPEAKER_01 51:40

So yeah, that's I they are more processed, that's for sure. I think that's part of the analogy, right?

SPEAKER_05 51:46

They're highly processed and stacked very neatly. They're very neatly, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 51:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 51:51

But why is it different? I mean, there's a lot. This could be a whole episode in itself. I'll try to be very brief.

SPEAKER_01 51:58

I think that's starting and then we can uh expand upon it on the next episode. So give us the bullet points.

SPEAKER_05 52:05

I think basically the difference is that in after the the Second World War, the communists in France were not purged from society in like red scares, but entered into government and helped rewrite the constitution of the country. So, like, that's the simple answer. If you want just like one simple historical answer, the communists in you know were not associated with like death camps and you know all this excesses, but were associated with, oh, those were the people that were the most hardcore fighting the Nazis. Those are like the actual national heroes. And so that led to a left which was much more broad-based and legitimate for a longer time, even though we all know the failures of Eurocommunism, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But just like long term, we still have a socialist party and a communist party in this country because of those things. And also the fact that France has like its own military and is relatively economically powerful compared to other European countries, and has this like massive global footprint with you know colonies and former colonies all over the world, and like it's more of a real power than like I don't know, Liechtenstein or something, right? So the the point being is all that is background, and then just very briefly, why is the unbound successful? I I will argue, and again, I'm gonna make you know Derek and the other mug people mad, because the Bolshevik social democratic sort of 20th century consensus is wrong, because that consensus is wrong, and the theories of Melancham are correct in terms of what is actually needed in this time. You need a movement that's open-ended and gaseous enough for lots of people to join it and get implicated without having to get in this kind of hierarchical internal democracy structure. And like every other left group in France that tries to redo the Bolshevik social democratic SPD model is marginal and splitting. Like the new anti-capitalist party, now there's two of them, and they're tiny.

SPEAKER_01 54:19

All the other little left expanding.

SPEAKER_05 54:21

They're expanding, they're multiplying, Sean.

SPEAKER_01 54:24

Multiplying at an incredible pace.

SPEAKER_05 54:26

But yeah, I just think I think it's those two things. It's the like the back, you know, the basic social condition of the left not being as demonized, and then the sec and the country being a little bit more autonomous compared to like, I don't know, Puerto Rico, and then you have uh just a left that is innovative and like more in tune with social movements. Like, what what is the relationship with I don't know, DSA and social movements? Like, how do those things relate? Where's the like formal interface for that? Where's the think tank? Where is the you know what I mean? Where are the books? I don't know where those are.

SPEAKER_01 55:01

Yeah, no, I I think those are very adequate answers. And I guess my only question for you would be is uh France unbound a mass party? Are they doing mass politics, or is Melanchon's sort of theory that you can have a more limited buy and and still have like a diverse and powerful political movement?

SPEAKER_05 55:21

No, I would say it's mass in the sense that like the theory is that you have like the unbound is just the political in the strict sense, just the formal political expression of an overall ongoing social revolution that we've been seeing across the world for decades now, right? So, like the unbound is the movement of the squares in parliament.

C. Derick Varn 55:45

I I guess you know, I pressed you on this when you were on my show, but I'm gonna press you on this a little bit harder today. How is this not just post-Euro communist left populism? And and it is more successful than that has historically been, but what makes it more successful? Why is this how are we not gonna be talking about this in 10 years the way we talk about Podemos or Sariza or any of that?

SPEAKER_05 56:13

So the reason I there's a couple of reasons. The first of all is that there's more work gone in by more people to actually prepare for taking power. So there's like you know lots and lots of materials and plans and things drawn up and concrete experiments of like how do we actually make public institutions public? So let me give a very concrete example. One of the debates in France for the last year is what to do with this like steel, the steel works owned by Arcelor Metal, who is like this big multinational, and they're trying to lay all these people off and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. And one of the common demands in the left has been to nationalize the thing, and that way everybody, all the union workers there will like keep their jobs and will maintain like industrial capacity in the country. And within the unbound, there's been a debate about okay, yeah, nationalize it, great, but we tried that in the 80s and it didn't work with Mitterrand. So, what do we how do we actually nationalize things? And part of the whole municipalism is trying to think about how we can break with this sort of like old left way of thinking of nationalization as of per se, and think more about actually socializing the the means of production and socializing parts of the economy. And how do we actually socialize the you know political life? So, like, how do we restructure a city council or city government such that it actually you know is fully democratic in a more participatory way? And so that means, for example, breaking up the the city council itself and having like multiple neighborhood councils, which all sort of feed into that broader city council, and trying to sort of de-emphasize the role of particular local big whigs and like cronies and things like that. And that, you know, that's a very integrated theory that goes from like, all right, what do we do with water to what do we do with the steel mills, to what do we do with the dollar and international relations and our expansive overseas uh empire or post-empire, or however you want to talk about it. And all of it is integrated into a movement with all these people in it. And I just don't believe that Sariza ever had that or Podemos ever had that. Like I don't believe they ever had anything that rigorous and that deep. And why is it successful? Sorry, I'm answering your questions in reverse order. Why is it successful is because the mode of organization of the network, by by building a network and by just assuming the fact that we're gonna have a lot of churn, we're gonna have a lot of people that come in, a lot of people that go out, we're gonna have a lot of people that aren't necessarily that reliable, but want to do something. How can we maximize like maximally engage all those people and equip them to move the ball forward? It's just a a very different way of thinking

Why France Still Has Mass Politics

SPEAKER_05 59:17

of than party building. It's just two different projects.

C. Derick Varn 59:22

Absolutely. I mean, uh that latter bit, despite my association with mug, I'd actually agree with you. In fact, one of my critiques of mug, for those of you who don't know what mug is, it's Marxist Unity Group and then DSA, is that they want to do party building without replicating the other institutions that made party building historically possible. So they start with the SP Day or the Bolsheviks or whatever, but they don't look at the hundred years of history prior and then try to deal with that in a modern context, which is also something that's a little bit difficult to do because in some ways we're more like the 19th century, but in other ways that are frankly fucking obvious we're not. So I I think that's I mean, I think that's a good point. I do I do find it interesting, and maybe this is something that that also differentiates this from other forms of left populism, is that you know, the quote unquote popular classes, aka the working class and migrant labor, etc. etc., was very well represented in the voter base of of uh France on Baud this round. And I don't know that that was necessarily true for Pademos. It's a little bit interesting on whether that was true for Ceriza, and we could we could talk about that. I mean, Ceriza hemorrhaged that support and actual ruling. And it's also like you see this it's it's very different than say what's going on with our uh with our party or your party, I think it's our party. In in the UK, which is kind of gone like is kind of made a hash of Corbin's legacy very, very quickly. I mean, it's made it very clear that Corbin is not a Melishon figure, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:21

Um I think it it it it it valorized his legacy, right? When put to the test, uh it appears that he didn't have what it took to be a party builder this entire time, but yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:33

But but I do think to be a party builder, you have to be a hard ass. You know what I mean? Like you have to be a terrifying person who people hate, and like I'm gonna own the fact that that is kind of like I have a reputation for being difficult. I mean, what do you want?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:47

You I don't believe that for a second.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:49

I do. Um but you have to be real hard. I mean, like, yeah, no, you do have to keep the program strong, you have to be real hard, you have to be a man of steel.

C. Derick Varn 1:02:00

Well, I mean, I I do think it's interesting that you talk about LFI being really good on knowing that people are gonna come in and out because the DSA doesn't really deal with that. I mean, one of the things that I've pointed out is even though the DSA has grown to a hundred and five thousand right now, although I still think 10% of it's in New York, a that's tiny composed of the LFI, but also B, there's no real dealing with churn, and it's a major problem in every single one of the DSA structures. So, like many democratic institutions where people head up, you know, representatives head up, particularly working groups or whatever, they fade when individuals leave. I mean, I've I've studied you know my chapter for 10 years before I joined it, and I can tell you that like what group or whatever exists is very based on who the membership is. And the membership is almost completely different in 2006 than it was in 2020 and then it was in 2017 when I first encountered it. And there's not really a systemization for dealing with that. So I wanted to ask you like France and Bow seems to accept this, have structures for dealing with this. Can you go into specifics about those structures? Because I think this really does need to be studied.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:28

Yeah, so basically, the there are no intermediate structures, and I will uh I will uh write, I'm actually translating a text that was recently published by Melon Shaw with Parney and I think Papu and some of the other people wrote called like how it how it's to be done, which or or how to do it, or I'm still working on the translation, but it's basically this sort of condensed form of all of the the theoretical books into like why is the movement set up this way, what are we trying to do, blah blah blah blah. But basically, what you have to think about is like somebody like Sean. Let's take Sean for example. Sean's pretty politically solid, right? Sean is like more solid than the average person, but he also has like you know his whole personal life and his podcasts, and you know, his uh crippling uh dirt addiction to like benzene or whatever, right? So there's like we have all these things that we're all like.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:21

How'd you know I worked on the Golanas Canal?

SPEAKER_05 1:04:25

Yeah, but like uh we're we're all doing this stuff, and we don't have necessarily time. Like, I don't know if Sean, do you have time to like sit in meetings?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:34

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I don't really actually have time, but I make time for it. I have to make time for ILC.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:40

Okay, you make time for meetings, you're one of those kind of leftists. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:43

Well, yeah, you know, I I think that uh everybody has to like go above and beyond if they believe in something strongly. And I I think that what we're pointing to is that France Unbowed, similar to what ILC is trying to create, and it sounds like DSA is having a hard time with, requires a rank and file, you know, and a rank and file is is a group that comes and goes, but is ultimately at the end of the day the shock troops that you had that you need in order to have like a diverse and interesting and strong organization. It's different from what definitely true.

C. Derick Varn 1:05:16

I'll be honest with this though, Sean. I do make time for some meetings. I've joined the DSA, I have been to all of two meetings that they joined, because they are constant and they often aren't about things that I am invested in the DSA about, even though I continue to support the DSA. So, for example, I'm I was a member of the labor working group. The labor working group in my in my city went back on hiatus, even though we recently got attacked by by the state government, and we won that through grassroots activism. But the DSA doesn't have anybody outside of a few about three dedicated cadres in a chapter of over a hundred who have

Organizing Without Meeting Culture Using The App

C. Derick Varn 1:06:07

any sway in labor, despite the fact that there are union members in the organization, they are not in any like capacity to just run this group because all this group could imagine really doing, they didn't even coordinate really well. They were either encouraging people to become labor staffers or encourage people to sought to form new unions in an economy where no one is hiring. And also, it's very easy for DSA members to have out themselves as salters, which means they're not going to get hired. And so I make time for the monthly meetings for the labor union co. Uh workers worker center group that I'm I'm with. And I do try to make the general meetings and I vote on everything in the DSA because I can vote even without being there. I just have to enter my credentials into their voting thingy. But I can't make those meetings. And they are, like I said, they're constant. There's up to three or four a week. Weirdly, I think it encourages people to be paper members because they're overwhelmed.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:20

But anyway, so that that's also a major divergence, and one of the reasons why I think the unbound are more successful because the culture is against meetings. So basically, if you like the whole thing, it's a at popular action. The local unit is the action group. Okay. And anyone can start one. So maybe, Sean, you're happy with your meeting. And look, left meeting culture is a certain social milieu like I understand that people like it. It's structures your week. It's like church, you know, people go, and afterward you can get like a matcha or something with somebody that you like. Like I'm I'm not opposed to people having friends or sometimes we have to talk about things, do we not? We're here podcasting. But generally speaking, I think it would be excessive if we had like a weekly disreckage appointment. Like that would be overmuch, you know. Maybe. And so the and so the point being is like somebody like Derek, or somebody like me, frankly, who has a wife and two children. And if I do more than X number of meetings per month, my wife starts yelling at me.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:20

Rightfully so.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:21

I rightfully so. And we love my wife, she's great. But the point being is like I cannot invest that much in meetings. So what am I gonna do? And a lot of people are in my situation. Like, if you're a working adult with a family or with any kind of responsibilities, you can't just like sit in endless meetings about meetings, which is like a common French problem in like business culture and culture. So we call it meeting itis, right? So the whole thing is like I can start a local group, I don't need anybody's authorization, I don't need anybody's permission. I can just go on popular action, create my account, create a local group. People can join my local group without even knowing me because they can just look at the map and say, Oh, there's a guy who made a group in my neighborhood, I can join his group, and I can immediately get materials from the national organization without any local or regional or whatever intermediate structure. Okay, and if I want, I can organize with my group and other local groups, and we can like kind of federate, or if I think that Sean is a jackass, I don't want to work with him, I don't have to. And so I'm just freed to act.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:30

It's both, and it says that I'm a jackass on the app, or you could your editorial that that would be a great move.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:39

Like if somebody gets purged, they just get like a jackass stamp on their you know account.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:43

It's like a donkey.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:44

But no, it it's an app, yeah, like a big donkey just stamped on there. No, but I mean like it allows people. I mean, look, anybody that's done any left organizing knows that you join a group and then there's internal politics, and then there's people that don't like each other, and then somebody fucks somebody's wife, and you know what I mean? And it goes on and on and on.

C. Derick Varn 1:10:01

I didn't do it, it wasn't DSA people often aren't married, but go ahead.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:06

Sorry, that was a call out to gold guy de board, and if you read the letters of the situationists, they were savage with each other.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:12

I I I I I I ask about the app thing because it actually I I might want to want a guy on the inside to steal the proprietary coding so that we could use it for the ILC over here because it is a real question in this day and age how you organize across space and across time, and how you maintain, as you're talking about, the bonds of solidarity necessary to have an organization without, as you also rightly say, a kind of onerous meeting ism, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:10:41

And I I yeah, without without the local section, what do we have? We have the app, and we've had the app since 2016. So, what if it's the since Bernie, if they had an app for DSA and that's how everything was organized? Do you see what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:55

Yeah, absolutely. And I and I wonder the I guess when when it's is considered like an action group, I wonder what the connection between what we might call like actionism and and the organization is. Is there like uh like a manifestation sort of like demo undercurrent to all of this, or does an action group just mean cadre that comes together in a particular region and is like in charge of all unbound activity in that region?

SPEAKER_05 1:11:27

What like what so there's no being in charge of a region that doesn't exist? So like if we lived on the same block and we hated each other, we could operate two autonomous groups.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:37

Okay. So it's multiplicative instead of subtractive, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:42

Yeah, it's multiplicative, and then the point of the action is like an action group. Like, I think the the probably the typical action group is gonna have one monthly meeting. Okay. Some have bi-monthly, but I would say that the average group is probably a monthly meeting, and that could be online, it could be at like a cafe, it doesn't have to have like a local headquarters. And then what people are gonna do is they're gonna hand out flyers, they're gonna put up posters, they're gonna go to protests, they're gonna organize protests, they're gonna set up like stands. Like I was recently at a thing in my town where basically people set up like a big like circus tent type, you know, thing where you have like pavilions where they just had information about all of the like war crimes and everything going on right now, and we're just expressing solidarity with you know people in Palestine and Lebanon and Iran, you know, the whole thing. And folks were like, it was Easter Sunday, and people are coming through and like you know, talking about what's going on, and you know, we it's just a way of like engaging the public about politics. You see what I mean? So that's like the core of the thing, going door to door. Like people go door to door not just to get people to vote for a particular candidate, but to talk about like we need to make the water system public. You see what I mean? Yeah, so it's like you're trying to do base like uh activism constantly without it being a peak and valley about like okay, now we're gonna get Zoran elected. And look, peaks and valleys exist, right? But the think about it this way if the peaks and valleys are like the the undulations, we want the floor of the undulation to be higher and higher, so that we go from a yellow vest to like a 50% drop and not a hundred percent drop. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 1:13:26

That's kind of and it's kind of built into the the way that you organize yourselves. Yeah, I have to I I can't say too too much longer. It is getting late here in New York.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:35

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:35

I would and I know it's very late where you are. I guess I was bidden by a friend of the show. You guys both know him and love him, Ross Wolf. We were hanging out at the park today. There's a woodcock in town. It's like he's all the rage. Like the woodcock is in Bryant Park and he does his little woodcock dance, and everybody gathers around, like hundreds of people just there to see the woodcock. Anyways, he said, Oh, you're gonna talk to Henry today. I want you to ask him about Orthodox Christianity.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:06

Okay, do it.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:07

He he's like, I want you to ask him about you know, like the kind of schismatic sects, like the people that thought that drinking milk was gonna allow them to meet Jesus or the old believers who went off into Siberia. Ross wanted me to ask you what your thoughts on are on the relationship between orthodoxy traditionally and the state, why there's no reformation within orthodoxy. These are questions which I think would probably bore the pants off most people, but I was told to ask you them, and I'm gonna ask you for the next episode to think about these questions, how you integrate maybe this world, this history, this spirituality with uh your broader politics. I love to know we're gonna talk about it. You could do that, you could do that for for me and Ross. I mean, I feel like later in April we're gonna have to get together and have that conversation.

C. Derick Varn 1:14:56

Barn is very interested in this too because oh, okay, good. My my anthropology background is forensic and religious, perfect, which is a weird combination, admittedly, because I kind of avoided all cultural anthropology except for religious anthropology.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:12

But it's all like interestingly, knowing what anthropology was like in the 90s and 2000s, spirituality probably grounded you in reality more than most of oh, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:15:21

Cultural, cultural, we're not gonna talk about cultural anthropology. You'll have me rant for two hours because I kind of give given that it's Easter Monday.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:29

I just want to wish Ross, you know, uh Christ is risen, happy Easter, Christos Anesti. Even though for us it's next week, so happy Palm Sunday to the Orthodox.

C. Derick Varn 1:15:40

You got a while, you got a couple weeks.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:42

Yeah, you got we got an extra week, but yeah, I'm happy to do that, and uh, we can talk about that another time when you have time. Have fun with the woodcock. The woodcock is a manifestation of the sophianic energy of God Himself. So you should. When you when you look at the Woodcock, you can look through the Woodcock to the ultimate.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:02

To the ultimate.

C. Derick Varn 1:16:03

Well, I'll tell the woodcock as a symbol on, not a symbol.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:06

But anyway, hey, listen, let me say to both you, Varn and uh Henry, uh, A, it's always great to talk to you guys. This was a lot of fun and very informative. If you guys feel the need to talk further on this, please continue without me. If you don't, then that's fine too.

C. Derick Varn 1:16:22

But I just can wrap up. I'm gonna let Kim Crows up. But I actually do think we should in a couple of months do this religious discussion. I'm serious.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:30

Oh, yeah, let's do it. I actually have a broad interest in this and a lot to say about it, and a lot of questions for you, Henry, and and you, Varn. So let's do it, it'd be fun. Maybe we can make a mini-series out of it.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:42

Hell yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:43

In the meantime, thanks, guys, and yeah, we'll we'll talk soon. Love you too.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:47

Hopefully, we'll all get to come to New York this summer. Yeah, yeah. And uh, I'll be able around, but we'll we'll see how that goes.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:53

Dude, if you could, that'd be awesome.

C. Derick Varn 1:16:54

We'll just yeah, I will be in I will be in New York in late July, which is uh rare. I bought this is the second time I've been in New York in like 15 years or so.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:04

Yeah, we'd love to see you too, man. So maybe we can work that out as well. All right, guys. I'm gonna like take my leave. You guys have a good one. Later.

C. Derick Varn 1:17:12

You too. Bye.

unknown 1:17:13

Bye.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:23

One light to reckon, like on me. What's life to leave it, feel?