Geopolitics of the Data Economy: Tech Monopoly, Neoliberalism, Resource Wars with ProleKult

Why are tech monopolies quietly building massive, "war-eating" data centers in global deserts? How does the infrastructure of artificial intelligence directly intersect with resource imperialism, greenwashing, and active combat zones? In this episode of Varn Vlog, James of Prole Kult fame joins us to unpack the terrifying realities of the modern geopolitical and tech economy.

 We kick off the conversation with a critical look at the stark environmental and spatial trade-offs of the digital age. From the accursed, floating isles of the UK to the arid deserts of the American West, tech oligarchs are accelerating a resource-extraction blueprint that threatens local ecosystems. James breaks down the material underpinnings of the AI bubble, explaining how immense computational demands require unprecedented amounts of water, electricity, and land, driving a new wave of localized climate strains and energy centralization.

Moving beyond infrastructure, we dive into the dark alignment between big tech logistics, state power, and global conflicts. We trace how military occupations and modern surveillance networks are increasingly trial-tested on marginalized populations before being automated and scaled globally. James also highlights powerful counter-narratives of resistance, detailing the profound human cost of ongoing blockades, historical violence, and the generational struggle for liberation.

Whether you are trying to understand the macroeconomic traps of corporate tech monopolies or seeking an unsparing analysis of how digital architecture enforces modern imperial hegemony, this raw and wide-ranging discussion is an essential guide.

✨ Check out the Prole Kult channel for deep-dive video essays exploring history, technology, and global political economy!

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

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Welcome And The Geopolitical Puzzle

C. Derick Varn 0:49

Hello, and welcome to the Varmblog. And today we are here with uh James of Pro Cult Fame. And we are talking about the geopolitical situation on our two continents, although you are in the accursed isles floating outside of a continent, I suppose. And I am in a desert that is about to open up a giant war-eating data center. So there's that. And I think I wanted to talk about kind of two things, and that is where is the geopolitical stage right now? From the standpoint of both Europe and America, it's very hard to gauge. I mean, if you were if you were even talking in January, you were thinking that Trump was going back to kind of naked imperialism, but of the Monroe Doctrine variety, and there was going to be a great respecting of a multipolar world, of which America was still trying to be the first among not quite equals, but you know, not inculcated into what we might call a transatlantic megastate. But today that does not seem true. And we are back embroiled in the traditional embroilment that has been a bane of quote unquote Western society since the days of T. E. Lawrence or T. Lawrence, and that is in the Middle East. And and yet it also seems like in the process of doing this, we are chipping the glass around NATO a little close to a fracture point. And the United States can't decide if it wants to treat its NATO allies as subordinates or even maybe enemies. And so I wanted to ask you, why do you think that is? And why also all the great predictions of a massive BRICS counterpower or whatever emerging also don't really seem to be panning out in such a clean way?

SPEAKER_00 3:18

Okay, so hey everyone, first of all, good to be back. And to get at those things, I think we need to really kind of begin to understand a few things about the kind of economic geop geopolitical position of the United States and how that's changed since kind of the mid-2010s, really. So one of the major kind of planks of that is the transition from the US being an energy importer to an energy exporter. So production of shale gas, particularly shale gas boom through the early 2010s, led to a position where by 2015, the US was beginning to be capable of exporting shale gas around the world. That was kind of concentrated by 2019,

America Becomes An Energy Exporter

SPEAKER_00 4:05

I think it was, that the US became the world's largest energy exporter, primarily on the back of LNG, liquefied natural gas, but not but also with certain kinds of oil derivatives. Although those are largely from Canada as well, which is worth worth mentioning. So you have those kind of that kind of fact that kind of happening at the same time as we have what is perceived to be as a kind of strategic loss, really, I suppose, in in Europe, which had been long brewing and is a loss to China, particularly. So the European market, what its largest trading partner was the United States. It's the United States, it's still its largest export destination, but its large port, largest source of imports comes from China. That had begun to happen in the early 2000s, particularly with renewable energy sources that were kind of over-accumulated from an early Chinese kind of overproduction boom, primarily due to the fact that state subsidies had created a position where multiple different private companies and state-owned enterprises were producing these things and didn't really have the capacity to install them domestically, which led to a rapid requirement for markets. That led to attempt to sell it to Europe, which kind of did work for a few years. But then 2008 happened. Europe kind of codified that with the new kind of green development plans that it had going on and decided, no, we want to kind of try and develop our own things, which didn't work out too well for Europe, as we'll get into, I'm sure. And that sort of hedged that for a period. And then, but then following that, um kind of following that period and then following the kind of US EU reliance on increasingly fossil fuels still, not outside apart from Germany, which kind of did have a turn particularly towards combinations of nuclear, and France obviously as well has nuclear, but Germany has like combinations, had combinations of nuclear, phase out of coal, and some renewable energy installed in that period. But that led to shortages of fossil fuels for industrial production, which is obviously quite crucial to particularly like the economic backbone of the EU, which is German, German industry and German car production, particularly. Now, those kind of factors led to an increasing reliance on fossil fuels within the EU bloc, and similarly Britain as well, although in that period we were kind of in the EU bloc, but that's that's for slightly different reasons, mainly the operational destruction of the nation's infrastructure through thatcherism. But you know, we kind of had uh reliance on oil imports as well. That led to increasing reliance on first kind of nations in the Gulf, uh, so Saudi, uh, Qatar, then also kind of Norway, and then finally, increasingly, as the shale boom kind of occurred in the US on the US. But also, the US doesn't produce things in the same way. Europe needed new manufacturing equipment, so at the same time as uh Europe becomes energy dependent on the United States, it becomes dependent on China for particularly inputs in machinery and heavy industry. And so you have a position there where both of those markets require Europe really to realize the the kind of commodities that they do have for sale, but they're at loggerheads with each other in various different ways, particularly because China is the world's largest importer of energy in the world, and if the US is the largest exporter of energy, and China is not its primary market, or even really one of its markets, its competitors are all selling to China, right? And that leaves you in a very difficult position with that. So you've got all these kind of things going on. You have the perennial problem of Russia as well, and Russian oil and gas dependency in Europe too. It leads to an incredibly complicated conflictual situation where the US's dominance has been kind of its commodity dominance has been partly dependent, not entirely, but largely dependent, on realizing commodity sales and profits in the European market. It has been largely reliant on, increasingly reliant on fossil fuel exports, uh, particularly as a way of hedging the dollar and its international role. It has been increasingly losing market share to China within Europe, and China is the way in which most of its oil and gas competitors are being able to realize their sales. And you can see that quite clearly with, say, the Strait of Formers, where 80% of the traffic, uh 80% of Asia's oil goes through the Strait of Formers, right? 80%. And that's out of a total world amount of 20%. And most of that's going to China, right? Like the vast majority of that is going to China, particularly Iran's. I think it's 11% of LNG travels through there, and again, mostly to Asia. So in those kind of statistics, you can see a kind of number of different kinds of and those kind of material processes. You can see this is a really complicated geopolitical web based on kind of mutual dependence on factors that are conflictual. So in order to stabilize the European market, China and the US would have had to work together, but they also have self-undermining positions in the rest of their market shares and positions, right? They can't do that. And therefore, that places the US ruling class in an increasingly strange position in relation to the European ruling class. You also have a sort of ideological factor to take into account. This is consistent. This is perhaps the only consistent thing about Trump in his entire political career. That and you know, that and maybe kind of certain things about uh uh uh domestic kind of rental prices and things like that. But the the main kind of the main kind of thread in terms of geopolitics is that Trump has always viewed the US's allies as leeches upon the United States. You can see this in interview materials from the 1980s, you can see this in various different ways. And subsequent kind of he has always kind of enmeshed this kind of theory or position that the US had in its national security strategies in the 2010s of great power competition, they were calling it then, between the US, Russia, and China. But Trump always quite explicitly included Europe in that equation as a competitor, right? And always quite explicitly kind of noted that the Chinese and Russian influence in Europe needed to be pushed out. And so you can actually really try begin to chart a host of strategic but garbled moves once you kind of understand that pattern, in my view. It's that that they are the kind of strategy that the US has pursued is consistent in some ways, in that it is trying to push, say, Russia out of European energy supply. That was the kind of previous Trump administration's main kind of thrust with the way it handled the Nord Stream 2 pipeline by placing sanctions on German companies and so on and so forth, and eventually plausibly blowing it up, although that was probably Ukraine. But then how those things get laundered is a is a really complicated process anyway. So I wouldn't want to necessarily call that. But it ultimately comes to that, right? And making political conditions untenable through trade deals and so on and so forth for that. What then also you can kind of see that leverage being placed on Iran in that period as well. The pull-out of the GCPOA was primarily, in my opinion, to drive a wedge between China and European politicians and state representatives over the question of the GCPOA as Europe was trying to scramble. So it scuppered an energy source, not a big one for in terms of like raw imports from Iran, but it scupped a political alliance in that respect and therefore left the European bourgeoisie trying to show that they could act independently of the US. And you had this set up through multiple trade mechanisms that never got off the ground, which showed kind of China and Russia that they're politically impotent and all this talk about sovereignty from the US or an independent policy ultimately came to nothing, thus driving a practical wedge between them in that respect. So I think there's a there is a there is a through line, but then it's also incoherent because it's dealing with a dec position of decline and crisis conditions through that.

C. Derick Varn 12:40

It does, but it I think for a lot of both left strategies, both social democratic and frankly some anti-imperialists who seem to be kind of confused about what national liberation means. There's been a renewal of talks of kind of left nationalism in pretty much all the English-speaking countries that I know of. In the United States, this has manifested in a spectrum of ways. From Vivek Chibbers, like workeress populism to MMT reforms that view the bond market and the international market as like a non-issue.

Left Nationalism And MMT Illusions

C. Derick Varn 13:28

I've even interviewed Warren Mosler a couple years ago, and I made a lot of people mad because even though my interview was somewhat sympathetic, I was shocked at how they thought the international market works, which is basically it doesn't, and that the state is the setter of all not only prices, but also international prices. And that may have been true for the United States, kind of, on things purchased specifically by the military and on labor, which is nationally bound, but is not on anything else. And I have been sort of trying to figure out what people are gonna do when it is clear that one hands are tied by even the great powers in ways that that I think make people uncomfortable because they seem to want to think that that states are more autonomous from capital than they are. I don't know, I don't know if you have the same problem in Britain, or what are you seeing with that? But this seems to have complicated that, and there seems to be a confusion by m all the different factions on the left on exactly how to respond, just like there's confusion on the left about how to deal with things like China and Russia not supporting Gaza and the UN, they just abstained and stuff like this that seemed to throw American leftists into a spiral, they just didn't know how to handle it. So what do you make of that?

SPEAKER_00 14:58

And I mean, I think I think the the kind of the British left has some of these problems to a certain extent, although I think that our left's illusions in them have somewhat withered already. And that's probably uh I don't want to say it's a direct material, like this happened and that's why, but that's probably based in British decline and the end of Britain as the world's financial centre, right? Like that breeds a certain awareness of the fact that production chains are real and you don't have any of them anymore. Like, so I think that that that kind of leads to a position where explaining that's really complicated because on the one hand, you kind of have I feel like there's kind of two issues I want to pull apart there. There's the kind of idea of the US position and this MMT stuff and the capacity to purchase and all that kind of stuff and be insulated from these by great powers and kind of be, you know, not as dependent on capital and things like that, that people are kind of on the left have have that kind of illusion. I think they do to a certain extent.

C. Derick Varn 16:05

I certainly see that in your left, I think less in Britain folded in you don't have any industrial capacity, so it's too harder to believe. Yeah. Not it's not that you don't have any, and then everyone, when I say these things, there are technicalities like when I was talking about GDP per capita in Ireland versus the UK and it being higher in Ireland. Everyone's like, well, Ireland, you know, fixes all this and it's all skewed. And I'm like, of course it's skewed, but do you think it's not skewed in Britain? Like, what do you are you are you telling me that Britain is like massively more honest in its reporting practices than Ireland? I don't know. I but anyway.

SPEAKER_00 16:45

Can't really imagine that given that they're both shaped by EU directives anyway. So like but yeah, I think like when you look at kind of kind of the that kind of position on the left and that that that kind of having to come to face with the reality of distributed forms of production, supply chains in terms of actual composition and ownership, input producers and downstream consequences, these kind of like material problems in production, which are things that often I think the value theorists don't bother themselves with as much, to be quite honest, and particularly kind of on the Marxist left these days. We kind of seem to shy away from the materiality of production quite a lot. And I think that yeah, sorry, go ahead.

C. Derick Varn 17:32

No, I was thinking about this with like Sora Mao's book, which I felt like both shied away from the material choices of individual bourgeoisie and also shied away from the materiality of production as a whole. Like that's mute compulsion for those of which I don't think is a terrible book, but I do think like there's just this way in which we teach we treat it super abstractly. And and honestly, MMTers do a little bit less so, but MMTers view the economy, and I've I've I've talked about this a lot, even though production is part of their theory. And like, if you actually dive deep into like modern neo-chartelist and modern monetary theory, they do actually admit that production capacity is the limit of the economy's ability not to have inflation. But I don't know what they do with that, but they mostly look at things from a bank book perspective, they just look at the the the accounting flows. And I am struck by Marx specifically saying that you know you can do that, but you're not gonna understand things as well as if you look at commodity flows, which frankly are more useful than currency flows, and figuring out where the economy actually is.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

Yeah, and and I I think there's there's kind of so Marxist MMTs, I think, get around this by and kind of maintain that level of abstraction, from my understanding, by utilization of volume two incorrectly of capital, right? Like volume two deals with some very specific problems of exchange, which were kind of important for industrial British capitalism in in the 1800s, in the late 1800s, which were things like you know, the were gluts of commodities that needed to be sold, the the value capacity wasn't there to realize them in Britain, right? So they needed to be sold. So you were looking for money in that case, you were looking for a way of realizing it. Now, money is super abundant to the extent that we have like well debt is something like 567% of world GDP, which means that we have that that's you know, uh you kind of credit capital being given out by monopoly banks and so on and so forth, finance capital, if you want to use that term, although I think the the utility of the merger between money capital, finance capital, banking capital, and industrial capital may have broken down a bit as a metaphor for understanding that anymore. So I think that when you kind of look at that, you end up with a position where the money supply is super abundant already. Inflation at a consumer level isn't really driven by anything to do with the money supply, to be quite honest. It's driven to do with by, it's driven by increasing constraints on production, right? And you can look at it this in a number of ways. Competition is one key one. The competition for markets for realization between different capitals, whether they're constituted as state-owned enterprises or private businesses, whether they're constituted as particular fractions of an industry or actual kind of like industries as a whole, whether they're constituted as cartels, although we're increasingly seeing an end of international cartelization quite clearly indicated by the UAE's exit from OPEC that's just occurred. So whenever you're looking at these kind of things, you're now looking at uh that kind of competition going on. You're also looking at increasing material constraints on production. So the energy return on investment is a really important thing to understand, particularly in a context where we're looking at oil wars and oil crises and things like that, right? So one of the things that people will say is that Trump's kind of like on the right, this is a kind of rhetorical strategy to try to position Trump as some kind of strategic genius, which is so transparently untrue. And you see, you do see it on the left as well, to a certain extent, where you know the coup in Caracas was motivated by freeing up Venezuelan oil reserves so that the US could withstand the oil shock and therefore capitalize on the m hole in the market left by the exit of Gulf oil supplies. That might well have been the intent, but it's extremely, extremely heavy crude oil they have in Venezuela, which has

Inflation Starts With Material Limits

SPEAKER_00 21:45

an energy return on investment where every one unit of and every three units of energy you produce, you have to invest one back into the production of that leaves you with like extremely thin profit margins. There are ways that they could increase that, but that's going to include increase that energy return on investment favorably in terms of profit, but that's it requires incredible reinvestment in like productive technologies, expensive productive technologies as well. In Europe, we also have this kind of pervasive discussion now where you can fill the gap left by fossil fuels, particularly gas, because that is the quote unquote transition fuel that Europe has failed uh in moving away from coal and oil for uh toward renewables. And there's this there's this kind of left liberal center left narrative that you see now, which is now filtering out, I think, into the revolutionary left of well, we can just do renewable energies then. And like, yeah. No, you can't. Yeah, exactly. You can invest in it. It won't be built in time. It's intermittent supply. It's too fucked to handle it. So all of these different things about the materiality of production in terms of combating inflation are like the core now. What we're seeing is the devaluation of human labor through real material scarcities and real problems in production. And that can't be combated by any of the kind of monetarist strategies that the contemporary left holds. Not in America either. And we can root that in a very fundamental change in the dollar historically, throughout the entirety of the US imperialism's so-called unipolarity, although I don't really like that term. Dominance is probably better.

C. Derick Varn 23:27

Yeah, I was gonna say we weren't really a unified, we weren't really a unipol. And if we ever were, it was like for at most a decade. Between 1996 to 2006, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 23:40

Yeah. And you could maybe compare say it was part of a bipolar world order whilst the Marshall Plan was going on, right? But like that's kind of it. But like when you get to kind of that for the entirety of that so-called unipolarity or dominance, commodity prices have moved inversely to the dollar. So when commodities have gone down, the dollar's gone up. When commodities have gone up, the dollars go down. That reversed after the US of oil and gas. That relationship changed. And that shows that you know that monetarist policy is ending because now the US strategy has explicitly positioned itself. US capital has explicitly positioned itself as a provider of raw materials. Like you can't do that if you're then trying to run a consumerist economy on that basis. You need people to be able to buy into your market, not expend their that not expend their currency on just like the raw materials they need to then sell you things. That doesn't that doesn't work economically, right? So it's flipped all these relationships on its head, and

When The Dollar Stops Deflating Commodities

SPEAKER_00 24:47

that leaves you in an incredibly difficult position because currency spread's going to stall, if not stop, it's slowly doing so. It will take a long time to do so. But that that's going to change the cross-border payment systems and the ability of the US capital to just buy things on world debt. And that monetarist position is just not going to be possible anymore. The left reaction beyond that is seems to be one of kind of despair or some kind of national program for reindustrialization, which have their own problems we can go into if you want to.

C. Derick Varn 25:19

No, I'd love to because I I like to call this dumb smokestack socialism. But but the idea, you know, I I know people don't like it when well, I just like people. I know my Marxist Leninist fans don't like it when I'm like pick up some seemingly left communist talking points like I have from Phil Nil. But Phil Nil's right about the organic rates of capital. And and I can translate that into normal speak for those who don't speak Marxists, and so I'm going to do so. People complain that I don't do that enough, so I'm going to.

Smokestack Socialism And Tariff Fallout

C. Derick Varn 26:15

If you try to bring that back to the core, which was ostensibly what they were going to try to do with the Trump tariff policies, they ended up doing the opposite, and we can talk about why, and you know why, but our audience probably doesn't completely understand it. But, you know, more or less they're dumb and broke all their supply chains. And you are right, we are now a major raw material exporter. If you think about what the US is now known for, it was known for being a finisher. Now we provide a shit ton of raw materials and we finish a few things, but our tariff regime has actually kind of finished killing our finishing economy. So, and for those of you, that's a big fancy way of like, yes, we do actually make things in the United States, but we used to just, you know, put the fancy wobbles in at the end and do the really precision work here. And part of that was because the cost of our labor. Which is also tied to the US being the uh the currency hegemon with no commodity backing, which you know, I know a lot of people don't understand, but basically, if you're going to command people use your dollar, you can only do it through the military so much if you don't have products in the market. So you still have to be a massive producer. Whereas right now, we're you're right, we're shifting to a massive production of raw materials, both in energy and in and some things like steel. We we we we still haven't got into like you know rare metals because we don't have a lot of them, or if they if we do have them, they're like under New York. So, you know, it's that's harder to deal with. But that puts us in a very interesting place for our consumer economy, and you have seen our consumer economy get more and more excited about turning every goddamn thing into a rent uh to offset raw commodity prices. The problem that I think we're gonna have is like there's no de-inflationary way out of this now. I I don't know how you curtail inflation in this kind of scenario. And I also think you have a market that is hiding that it's in this raw, kind of not super profitable, honestly, commodity production by jacking up uh rent-seeking tech things, which are not in general profitable. But what people don't seem to have realized is we've tied them all into the military so that so that you can continue spiking the stats. And I know that sounds conspiratorial, but there's a reason why AI was incorporated into so much of the government, and part of that is to reduce government workforce and and hope that you can cut down cost, although cutting down cost with this government is also absurd. We could talk about that too if you want to. But to cut cost on to be able to pay down bond payments, but also it's that there's this want to shift into different kinds of employment, and that's not really working all that much either. There's just, you know, the they can throw as much money as they want to at ice, but if no one wants to work for them, it's not going to do much. I want I mean, I guess this is just to pick up on your analysis and further develop it here, but it is it is an interesting prospect because people are caught off guard and they're mystified by the Mag 7 without realizing that that's that those are juked. And the only parts of that are actually super profitable are the commodity-producing parts of it, which are the actual data transition chipsets, of which we have real limits coming up on how we can keep them open. I mean, the what the the data center they want to build here in Utah will literally use more power than the entire state by double. And even though they're promising to give it its own off-grid power plant, it's gonna have to get natural gas or coal from that power from the same supply everyone else does. So it's still gonna have a knock-on effect. And I don't know how you curtail that.

SPEAKER_00 30:25

Yeah, I mean, on the data center kind of thing. I think you're right about the kind of profit realization mechanism that you have there and the way that that's attempting to realize demand. And you saw this in putative stages with cryptocurrency, right? It's the attempt to back a currency with some kind of materiality, which was just burning fucking electricity then, right? Like that was that was the idea, and it didn't work because it's still a speculative currency and it doesn't have any stable backing or real exchange use in the world. So it can't serve as a universal equivalent, which is Marx's you know phrase for what money really is. Then you kind of have this kind of position with the kind of realization of all these kind of commodity productions into new tech infrastructure and so on and so forth, as you as you kind of pointed out there. And as you say, there are hard limits. Energy's one, water's another, but then

Data Centers, Rare Earths, Greenland

SPEAKER_00 31:14

there's the tricky one, which kind of goes back to the compet competition. Those ones are plausible that you can, you know, delay it, you can impoverish your population for a bit more and those kind of things and still kind of crank out the numbers. But if you have that, then hit the very hard limits of mineral dependency, and then we go back to the competitive playing field, right? And we we look and see, oh, right, so the US is the world's largest energy exporter, the UA China is the world's largest energy importer. Oh, China is the world's largest producer of rare earth minerals. Oh, that the US detect centers dependent upon that, and now those exports have been limited. And the only other solutions to that appear to be the Arctic, which is what the Greenland thing is all about, right? It's about mineral reserves, which I think has the largest proven mineral reserves on earth in Greenland, and some oil and gas, but I think that's probably much less of an objective given the present kind of scale gas. Because we don't really need it. No. Europe does, but yeah. So that leaves kind of uh like this kind of thing hitting really hard limits in terms of this kind of tech boom hitting really hard limits in its material basis. Again, like these things can't be done. The job creation and so on and so forth can't be done. And it leads you into this position, and I'm glad you brought up kind of the organic composition of capital, because I think it it's one of these theories that people kind of go, oh, there's a crisis, the Marxist is going to say the organic composition of capital is too high in a sort of jokey way. And I think that is a problem with like Trotsky sects and Leninist sects, and it's something that I've replicated in my own work at points in the past. And I think we all have when we kind of learn about crisis theory within Marxism. And it's not true that the overaccumulation of capital or the rise in the organic composition is the only crisis mechanism in Marx. He names about 50. But like it is a core structural breakdown that that indicates toward. It is a process by which the form of production that comes the kind of substance of production comes into conflict with the actual relations of production to kind of take that part from the preface to the critique of political economy. And I think that that is a really important observation when we look at these things, because we're looking, you know, the common orthodox Marxist explanation, the most popular Marxist explanation for World War, the World Wars was the overaccumulation of capital led to a situation of complete dependence and competition, which forced imperialists to go to war with each other, to redivide territories and also destroy capital and also suppress the value of labor power and also extract more raw materials, etc. And I think we're seeing that again in a very staggered, strange way, because what we're seeing now is that it's in all honesty, it's very likely that capitalism would need to have a world war in order to have a world war. Right. Like it's the the inputs aren't there for them to maintain, for kind of any imperialist project to maintain direct confrontation with a peer. We can see that in Ukraine. We can see that in Iran, right? It can't be done. It really just can't be done. The supply chains are too complicated. The main competitors in the field are too author or too diametrically opposed. China needs energy, the US needs minerals. They have dominance on one, the other has dominance on the other. That doesn't provide a recipe for active warfare, right? That leads you into a position of complete kind of dependence where you're also like trying to destroy each other all the time. Um, I mean, the US much more aggressively, so it must be said, but China quite strategically by withholding mineral reserves or so on and so forth. But the world economy is now laid out in a position where we're entering into a kind of absolute contradiction in value terms, where this can't be maintained. There's no way out of an inflationary spiral, there's no way out of the problems of productivity, the stagnation that has been stagnant for the last, like, I mean in the West for the last three decades. There's no way out of kind of, and now that's even in the kind of so-called the the prong predicted in the 90s uh industrialization of Africa, which never came to be, that that was expected to bolster productivity. Well, it hasn't, and it hasn't happened. Uh similarly, yeah, you know, you although you see the rise in the Indian economy now, you see the kind of rise of obviously the Chinese economy, the Brazilian economy too, those are based on kind of not really kind of massive increases in productivity or industrial investment. They're in predicate, I mean, Brazil's primarily predicated on the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Then you also have like kind of India, which has a bit more kind of to do with production, but again, massively overexposed and vulnerable to climate shocks. And so all of these things put the world economy in an increasingly complicated quagmire of contradictions, which it can't really address. And the US is one example of that, the way in which the economy is kind of moving from the position of dominance into coming to have to face things like its debt, coming to have to face things like the distribution and kind of dispersal of its production lines. You can see that kind of playing out in in Britain as well, with the end of kind of financialization and the complete vulnerability to economic shocks, shocks that we face here, where, you know, the price of fertilizer for our farmers has already gone up by 70% since the Iran war started. The price of energy is expected to rise by like I think £392 was what they landed on following the stall that the government's managed to give us until July. The price of petrol's, I think, about doubled. It's it's not sustainable and it is a massive devaluation, which contradicts the fundamental functioning of the economy. But the release valves that kind of Marx's theory of kind of overaccumulation and capital composition gives don't function anymore. Like, so it places this in this kind of impossible crisis and increasing irrationality, which allows for strategic, in my opinion, allows for strategic objectives to exist side by side with madness.

C. Derick Varn 37:43

Right. Which, you know, which is the rational core to otherwise obvious madness. I mean, you know, the uh believing, for example, that you could treat uh the Ayatollah like you treated Maduro, and that I mean, it's not even more than the US. The Israeli madness has been like, okay, so you divided the Gulf states and now they don't want to play with you at all. You're even pissing off a lot of American Christians, which is kind of hard to do. You guys have gotten like a crazy pass because of evangelical hangups, and that's that's ending.

Bourgeois Planning Fails In Real Time

C. Derick Varn 38:27

It does seem like you have a lot of actors who are now acting in ways that are to say irrational. I mean, in in the case of Trump, something isn't rational, but to say irrational in general is wrong, it is just so instrumentally rational that and so immediate and so only rational from an immediate context and does not look at the larger contradictions at hand, it does make me wonder. And I also want your your thoughts on this, because I do think we have a decadent bourgeoisie, and people think that I mean that just in the Epstein file sense, and I think that's fine enough, but that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that they're no longer able to deal with their own contradictions at all. That there is a crisis in bourgeois planning, both in the way that they handle things geopolitically and also the way they handle things domestically. Like, for example, there does seem to be a real want to squeeze blood out of a turnip in a way that like people haven't really tried to do since the UK in the 17th century. So what what do you make of that? Like this idea that you're gonna both peripheralize the core and still have a community consumer economy at all.

SPEAKER_00 39:48

Like yeah, I I don't think that's possible, but I think it's it's a logical kind of it's logical in some ways, right? So if we look at this in a kind of dryly rational way, which is like how I like to look at it to start with, I don't think it explains it, but it provides you some good, solid factorial explan explanatory elements, right? So we have kind of since since the kind of neoliberal term to use the phrase, what we call the neoliberal term, then you kind of have this you know professionalization of politics and lobbies, like that played out in successive cycles and produced a new kind of intellectual kind of form for politics in policy studies and in all these kind of different areas that played out over the 70s, 80s, and 90s, had its main debates then. And these are still the things that are taught on policy study courses, um, in kind of in development studies courses, these kind of things, these debates that occurred from in policy studies, policy process studies, critical discourse analysis, all these kind of different things that kind of led us up to a professional, NGO-oriented, lobby-oriented political class that stands as a sort of functionary to the bourgeoisie in the sense that it is an intermediary between bourgeois politicians and capital proper. And you have that playing out successfully. It's relatively good at doing things that are quite instrumental within a consumer society. It's relatively good kind of understanding, oh, consumer sentiment is low, maybe we should try and push this tax policy, get people spending a bit more. It's relatively good at understanding short-term political coalition building. It's relatively good at understanding how to make something that isn't, isn't it? You can't tell people it's deregulation, but you want deregulation, so you come up with a fancy way of doing it. And you have a staggered policy process that's doomed to fail on implementation. Things like that. Very competent, competent kind of intermediary through big money and all these kind of things. However, as that political context has shifted and the material elements that we've discussed have kind of shifted, you've had to see, and I kind of feel like this is something that I find a lot when I'm reading, particularly in kind of the system contemporary policy theory literature or sustainable development literature, you find people finding increasingly bizarre and inventive ways to rediscover politics. And for a while this absolutely ideologically bamboozled me. And then I realized it because, oh, the material basis of bourgeois politics has shifted so substantially, and the material kind of actual requirements of capital have shifted so substantially that that means that all of the skills that they built up in the neoliberal period are essentially useless for managing the political crises that they five face now. And trying to reapply them as coherent disciplines, which they do because there's you know path dependency, whether you want to say that's kind of uh sunk cost fallacy or not, I would say it probably is at this point, then you kind of end up with uh a position where you have all these incredibly trained people who are the people who are going to shape those intermediaries, which is not where politics proper happens, but it's where directives are passed and communication occurs, which is where a lot of things get lost. And that's how policy ultimately forms. It's a miscommunication process in a lot of ways, particularly now. And that leads you to a position where you have this professionalized, professionalized strata, particularly in the West, incapable of understanding the crises it now faces because it's using analytical devices that were developed for a completely different context to try and understand them, talk itself into repeatedly rediscovering crises and having absolutely no policy response but those it's now path dependent on. And you can see that really clearly in like the sustainable energy debates we're seeing in response to the Iran war, right? Where you've got like, on the one hand, you've got the center-right press in Britain, like the telegraph saying things like, no, we need to reopen our own gas fields. And then you've got the Guardian, the centre-left press, saying, No, we need to change to renewable energies right now. And those are just path-dependent arguments. So like that's all they are. They're not a new reaction to the actual crisis that we're facing. And I think you can see that in the same thing. At the same time, you also have a bourgeoisie that is increasingly crisis ridden, is facing real structural problems and barriers to investment in terms of profitability, in terms of kind of competition, in terms of disruption to supply chains and so on and so forth, that is also increasingly find itself in fractions again. And you can see that in differences in foreign policy, which was sort of the core of the disagreement between the first Trump administration and the kind of traditional Republican. Right, was that the first Trump administration, as I said, really wanted to include Europe within competition? The older Republicans really didn't. Um, similarly, you kind of have this playing out with kind of more, I guess I would I would call them extremists, but are they anymore? With the kind of um evangelical kind of core in in the US and the kind of way in which they interpret this kind of crisis of power in relation to the traditional Republican base and try to shift along it. Well, that has to lead you into the more extremist parts of your ideology, right? And in doing so, that's also going to mean that you cut off the kind of other people who I would consider extremists within the Trump Project, um, or at least advocates for the Trump Project, but were softer, perhaps, like Tucker Carlson, people like that. They get cut out of the equation because they're not quite as capable of moving into that kind of path-dependence area. The Democrats end up path-dependent on kind of a middle ground of sort of trying to retreat to a sort of perspective that neoliberalism is somehow on the left now. Similarly, the Labour Party does, right, in Britain. And you have all of these kind of arguments because the assumption is that they're defending a rational center, but actually what they're doing is they're path-dependent upon a similar kind of professionalized process that has absolutely no vision of a future and uses tools from a completely different context to try and understand now, whilst incapable of materially resolving the contradictions of capitalism and increasingly exposed to a kind of semi-personal universe through the expansion of information technologies and artificial like large language models. And I also think you may also have a substantial amount of the bourgeoisie who have AI psychosis as well.

C. Derick Varn 46:37

Right. Well, there's a couple of things uh that I wanna I mean, because what we have is both the rational and irrational together. We have, I mean, we talked a lot about the strat the professional strata, which is the interfacing sect, and one of the things section of the economy, and makes up a lot of the economy, actually. In the United States, it's arguably more than the entire industrial productive sector in terms of employment. But the issue that you have is one, it was very clear as the baby boomers in our country were leaving life and the market, thus the labor market, that that it became very clear to capitalists after COVID that they needed to rein in even this sector of the economy. And two, that large sections of that professional class have been downloaded with mobile in the United States since the 1980s. And three, and this is under-discussed, particularly in Americans throwing around PMC talk. Ironically, one of the worst people in policy analysis actually did one of the better analysis of this when they were talking about the PMC and how it wasn't really a class, even though he was still calling it, Kristen Polarie was still calling it a class. He said, no, if you look at the the PMC, they're the professional strata, they are increasingly actually proletarianized in the sense that they have a wage relationship, and they're proletarianized in the in the more popular sense as a misunderstanding of the term, is they're getting poorer. There are too many of them, but that's because of the realignment in the market. But there's no way to further align back. And I think one of the things I want to pull out then is the bourgeoisie themselves have not had the interface to make decisions like this or make even sacrifices since the middle of the 20th century. The end of Fordism has meant that these intercessory stratas of society and the economy have been the dominant way they think. And there's also in in the United States, more than Europe, but in both, an increased market short-termism to keep to keep the nominal markets up, but it's nominal. Like there is a lot of fictitious capital around right now. If, for example, people have been wondering why prices aren't coming down on houses when they're not selling, and I'm like, well, part of that is because the moment you break the fictitious capital illusion, and you you you drop your price, you actually drop the price for the entire neighborhood and you'll have a spiral. So there's an incentive to eat the cost for as long as possible. And to and for the states to allow more and more tax write-offs on this, that, and the other, so that it so that you can keep that inflated. And when it falls, it's not likely to lead to massive consumer, consumer boom and like housing either, because the only people who will have the money to even deal with this will be large corporations who can buy large swaps of cheap property at a time. Everybody else, including small investors, will not be there to do it. And the other thing that you're seeing is something that is extreme in the US, which is private equity liquidating literally everything. Like they're even going into the trades and trying to look you know trying to liquidate them on a on a on a model that would cause them to be collapsed. They're trying to gig workify healthcare. And what we've seen, and I think Jamie Oliver, not Jamie Oliver, that's the British hook. Jamie Merchant, thank you, has been writing about is you had a battle between publicly traded capital in the United States that was largely dependent on these fine-and-consumer goods, and private equity, which is largely a rating mechanism, and that the corporate strategy of the Democrats favored the former, the corporate strategy of the Republicans favors the latter, but eventually, if the latter gets all that it does, there's nothing left for it to parasite on. It is a host killing mechanism. So I guess the question is if neoliberalism seems to be over because it can't manage capital profitability anymore, but doesn't seem to be over because they're still privatizing everything. Can we actually talk take crisis theory a little bit more seriously, even if we're not saying that's going to automatically end capitalism? Because I don't think it necessarily is. What's your thoughts?

SPEAKER_00 51:35

I think we have to take crisis theory more seriously, and that's kind of something that we've been advocating on the channel for a long time. I think crudely at first, but like getting there now. Something I have I have got plans to write a book on at a certain point when when I kind of get a bit free time to do so. But I think the the core of kind of the direction. So we've kind of seen we still we get this kind of we have seen, I think, within since 2008, within Marxist literature, quite a pushback against over-accumulation theory in a way that I don't think we have seen since kind of the initial Bernstein pushback. You know, you have a lot of kind of Marxist literature that's you know, in the 70s and 80s it was very popular to say this is the

Breakdown Theory And Marxist Disputes

SPEAKER_00 52:23

end of capitalism. Now it's not that popular. A few people do it, but it's kind of not as popular. And you also have kind of incredibly dense theoretical works from Bordellini, Bordelloni, something I can't quite pronounce it, foretelling the end of capitalism, which goes into kind of the various different strands of Marxist discipline and also not just Marxists, but various different kind of predictions of the end of capital. You also kind of have kind of Harvey's, um David Harvey's increasing renunciation of the kind of ender-capital theory, kind of turned it into a revisionist, reformist. I don't like revisionist, a reformist approach to kind of holding up capital at this point.

C. Derick Varn 53:10

Yeah, I don't like revisionist either because it has too many fucking meanings.

SPEAKER_00 53:14

Yeah, yeah, it has too many meanings, and you know, are we talking about Bernstein? Are we talking about what? Are we talking about yeah, anyway? But yeah, when we get to I think we already have an episode where we discuss that actually. Yeah, so but when we get to kind of the actual contemporary problems, aside from kind of the publication of Grossman's collected works, which I think is a positive step for Marxist overaccumulation theory, there and some work in Britain and by a few kind of empiricist economists, there hasn't really been that much work done on it in a long time. And I think the starting point, beyond like proclaiming it, and I think the starting point has to be really, first of all, understanding Marx's work on this is incomplete. It's woefully incomplete. It's like a fragmented chapter which discusses the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, some counter-tendencies, and then has some kind of ancillary notes that probably were meant for a different part of the chapter attached to it. And, you know, it's interesting, but the vast majority of capital volume three is on rent, and it's clear that the kind of tendency of the rate of profit would more thoroughly have integrated rent as a as Marx consistently portrays it throughout capital to me as a parasitic form taking away profitability from productive capital. And I think that would have been something that he would have probably developed through volume two and volume three, were they more completed and through theories of surplus value, you can sort of see the outline of some of those theories. But he didn't do that work, right? He didn't, he did, he gave us some preparatory notes. Similarly, Grossman's kind of revival of the theory in the 30s following the kind of I mean you have the Bernstein-Kowski debate, but Kautsky frantic doesn't really update the theory so much as rhetorically defend it really effectively. Then you kind of have the kind of, and as I think we said on that episode, Bernstein was empirically right at the time as well. Like there was no reason to think that what Marx was arguing was going to happen in Germany. Then you kind of have the Grossman update to this, which gives you kind of a really good polemic which explains the world wars as a symptom of capital accumulation, is really influential in sort of certain small economic circle circles, leads to poor Matic's work and gets associated with the ultra-left kind of position, the left.

C. Derick Varn 55:43

Yeah, even though I mean, in today we have this turn against the Frankfurt School, but I would like to remind people that Grossman was kicked out of the Frankfurt School for being too positivistic, aka being too soft in the Soviet Union after 1937. That's why he got kicked out. And I've I I find it interesting who likes Grossman because you're right, Maddox gets associated with it. Weirdly, Trotskyists now get associated with it, which is also strange considering that Grossman was not a Trotskyist at all, and neither was Maddox. But I think that's a function of Rick Kuhn in Australia being one of the people really pushing this, and Banagee in India being one of the first people to translate some of Grossman's texts, which ironically were published in America, but were not translated into English.

SPEAKER_00 56:37

Yes, yeah, very, very and we only actually find I think it was like two years ago that we finally got the full full edition of the law of accumulation in translated into English, because Banaji's translation is only yeah, it's an abridged version, isn't it? Um and spotty as well. And also to resolve a very, very weird debate within Indian Trotskyism. So like, yeah, it's gonna it's gonna have some some strange kind of applications there. But yeah, no, so but we've kind of come to a position where that work hasn't happened, right? That this is theory that everyone knows is associated with Marx. Everyone knows that Marx has a theory of breakdown to a certain degree and crisis to a certain degree, and it's definitely thought to be important, and it's definitely thought to have meaning, but the work hasn't been done to like really, really develop that and theoretically kind of push it forward.

C. Derick Varn 57:34

I think we'll talk about why, because I think there's I mean, I I do want to ask you like, what do you make of the monthly review school's rejection of of that from for their own for Monopoly Capital? What do you make of the analytic Marxist? Because there like it was it was you know, I think it's gotten more intense, but but in in academic Marxism, this has been rejected like nearly across the board by every school, but in weirdly different ways, which which confuses me and makes me think that what we have is post hoc rationalizations for attempting to reject it that are political, not not consistent. Because like why we reject it in world systems theory, although actually Wallerstein doesn't, interestingly, why we reject it in in political Marxism, why we reject it in analytical Marxism, why we reject it in value form theory and whatever the fuck Heinrich's doing, and why we reject it in the monthly review school are not the same. No, but they have the same function.

SPEAKER_00 58:46

Yes, they have the same function.

C. Derick Varn 58:48

So what do you think is going on there? I think it's right.

SPEAKER_00 58:53

So I mean, there's a lot of different as you say, there's a lot of different positions folded into that. I think honestly, it's because it's because of the it's because the end of the kind of political fallout of the the orthodoxy constructed by the SPD, right? And where that leads you politically. I think that's where it all really kind of originates, and it becomes this sort of hot-button issue that ties to a historical controversy that was much, much more devastating and much more embroiled in class structure than about any of the analytical or political positions it actually ended up adopting, that really kind of then conditions the way people deal with the theory. I think it's untenable within certain approaches within academic Marxism, right? I think it's not a kind of a tenable theory because it's unfalsifiable. In its present form, it's unfalsifiable if you adopt it. So that that would be kind of another reason. I think the other theorizations around it have been to do with the fact that there is a confusion, I think, within what Marx's unfinished theory is saying and what later adherents are saying, where kind of for Grossmann, it's the end of accumulation that's posited by this, right? That's what that's what Grossman sees this theory as positing. For Sonretel, another kind of who actually does use breakdown theory in his account of German fascism, he said that it was it was the end of a form of capitalism. Like that form of industrialized kind of investing kind of individual capitalists ended and then led to he doesn't he he says that that had to be reconstituted through fascism, through direct bloody murder, and etc. And probably the most intelligent understanding of the class structure of German fascism, I think, has been produced largely because he worked as a secretary for the institute that broke at the power cluster around Hitler. But you know, it is it does have an instrumental use within that. But it has run into its political victories, they are very slim, its political utility is quite slim. The pol the monthly review school has two reasons for rejecting it. I think one's ecological, in my view, and this is the less talked about, and it's the one to do with Oh, what's his name? Sorry, uh he died very recently, the ecological Marxist Paul.

C. Derick Varn 1:01:25

Oh not John Bowman's Paul was a first Paul.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:31

Yeah. Sorry, Paul. Yeah, author of Marx and Nature. Paul Burkett. Paul Burkett, yeah. He rejects it very much because he's rejecting a sort of kind of catastrophicizing politics within Green philosophy, right? Like that that's kind of his reason for rejecting it. He goes, capital can continue to accumulate as long as the earth has an end. I think that's an absurd position like to take until the last human being drops. Doesn't really work for any kind of social system at all, but it's not, it's, it's, it's still kind of a more political rejection. The rest of the monthly review school, Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital, which I actually agree with Matik's criticisms of, he wrote a very good review of that book that's kind of basically explains that the way they treat markets isn't plausible in the long term and ends up kind of prefiguring a lot of the crisis factors that we see now. So you kind of have that reason for that. I don't for what the reason for that rejection, again, I think is within kind of an intent to intervene within your development studies and the academic intenability of it, as well as to integrate it into a theory which could account for the increased amount of US dominance that they saw and the increased integration in with Europe, which could continue to account for those things. As well as the kind of those kind of problems. Other analytical Marxists, I guess within Harvey's kind of framework, it's a matter of political geography, and therefore the expansion of capital and things like that is still remains a possibility so long as there's subsistence agriculture.

C. Derick Varn 1:03:18

GA Cohen's based off of literal Whiggish history, so yeah, that would be a problem. And and then the others actually believe in marginalism, and they just throw out the I mean Harvey does too, actually, throw out the they throw out labor theory of value, but also the critique of labor theory of value in doing so. So because Marx is dialectical, you dump shits, but like we're not advocating labor theory of value in a simple way. We well, but anyway, but they throw it out uh partly off of chafra calculations and whatnot, and partly, I mean, one of the things I do think we have to just be honest about all the all the sex ML, Trotskyist, Maoist, Maoist being the least, but they all predict an imminent internal contradiction of capital in the 1950s, it didn't happen. And I I do think that's also a player and why you know people pick this stuff off. But you know, I do think it's just weird now because you have people telling me that like there are more profits than ever in capital. I'm like, there's more revenues, yeah, but you're not separating nominal from real wealth at all, like at all.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:33

So and you're not accounting for the inordinate scale of rent either, right? Like the burden that that places on things, or like problems in distribution or any of these different kinds of contradictory crisis factors. I mean, like some of the crisis factors in Marx are like so easy to explain, and this is the other problem. I think this is another problem in terms of why people kind of reject the organic composition of capital and the falling rate of profit as a thing, is that because there's an inflexibility in terms of how we frame frame frame, how it has been framed intellectually since Marx, as this is crisis theory, which is not really what it is. Crisis theory, there's loads of crisis theories within Marx. There's fucking, as I say, I think there's about 50 crisis theories within Marx, right? Like disruptions to exchange, disruptions to production, disruptions to this, that, the other, problems of the goods spoiling on the way. Like the accounts for a hell of a lot of things, right? Then, but then what breakdown theory is a struct I I would analytically separate them as those are crisis theories, and this is a breakdown theory. And the breakdown theory is a structural impediment which has must be resolved by certain ways of reconfiguring value relations. And that's where I think the the real kind of work has always needed to be done with things like the counter tendencies to the rate of profit, falling rate of profit, right? These are all political social processes. They're elastic to a certain degree. The deepening of the exploitation of labor, the export of capital around the world, the devaluation of capital and the investment in new machinery, all of the an increase in productivity or intensity of labor. Each of these are elastic phenomena. However, and I think this is where the real theorizing about crisis comes in and breakdown could becomes relevant again to our current age. Some of those are breaking down, right? So devaluation of capital, one of the largest ways when you can't do that in pure value terms, uh which you can't really for assets and infrastructure, particularly, which is where huge amounts of production. Profit productive capital are, then you have to physically destroy them. You do that not consciously, but competition leads you to do that through war. War, therefore, becomes a release valve for the devaluation of overaccumulated capital. However, as we kind of discussed throughout the first part of our conversation today, there are now like real material contradictions. And that brings me back to like capitalism would need to have a world war to have a world war now, because of the reconfiguration of material supply chains, because of the overaccumulation of certain infrastructure and certain problems. And that provides a real material limit to one of the counter tendencies of the falling rate of profit. And that's where we get to social and political breakdowns. The prospect isn't like a sort of axiomatic breakdown of capitalism. It's an increasingly constrained capacity for it to reconfigure its relationships. And I think that's where we kind of that's why I would really because that seems like more like something that Marx would actually argue than capitalism's going to end because there's too much capital, right? Like, like that just seems more consistent with the kind of logical framework of a Marxist approach to social relations and production than overaccumulation will simply make the value form in viable. How do you want to kind of proceed?

C. Derick Varn 1:08:15

One thing I was going to ask you, I've been thinking a lot about this. I take a lot from systems theory and complexity theory, and I do it where I think Marxism has gaps. And I know they're not like Marxist dialectics and systems theory aren't exactly the same thing, although they do have a chain linked and bulg and Bogdanov. And also kind of in historical materialism as it developed and tried to incorporate things that we would later on call cybernetics in the Soviet period. I wanted to ask you though, like when you talk about the inability for capitalism to easily reconstitute itself, I think that's probably a better way to understand the situation, other than capitalism's constraints. And to me, this is the I don't want I don't want to get too physics y because there's a lot of misunderstanding of entropy versus versus like various forms of noise and physics, but that there is a sense in which these tendencies towards creative destruction that Schubert described are diminishing returns and their ability to pay out in the profitability, right? And the other systems get more and more complicated and require more and more inputs to hold up, which does seem to have the final thing. Like even I have been skeptical of the immiseration thesis, but it does seem like we are finally seeing some of those things that we talked about on the immiseration of the working class, not just in the not just in the periphery anymore, but increasingly in the various cores of capital. Why do you think this gives us a reason to explain that? Because what is typically being done, even by some leftists, but definitely by liberals, is explaining this solely in terms of corporate greed, which I find to be misleading. One of which is because again, we seem to have this confusion between nominal and real value.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:30

Yeah. So I yeah, I would, I would agree. I I think that gives us a much big, bigger and smaller political field. Um again, all things kind of come with the opposite. So the pro so the immiseration thesis, I think, is holding is now, I think I agree with you. We're seeing that play out on increasingly within within the so whether whether you want to call it the West, the imperialist core, whatever you want to call it. And I think that that is starting to play out in the US in quite a profound way now. I think it's been playing out in Europe in a staggered, slow, and steady decline for quite a long time. And I think it's playing out in Britain in the hollowing out of all things on earth. So it's it's becoming increasingly pressing and increasingly important to explain in terms other than corporate greed. One explanation corporate greed is a slippery, liberal, mealy-mouthed term, in my

Money Hoards Replace Greed Stories

SPEAKER_00 1:11:36

opinion, because what we're actually talking about are money hoards. And money hoarding is not about greed, it's a function of capitalists, capitalists, the capitalist mode of production. And you can see this even in the simple reproduction model Marx gives in volume two of Capitalism, where uh of capital, where he describes a situation where production is not expanding in this in this framework, it's not getting bigger, profits aren't growing, everything's fine, it's just reproducing itself in an ordinary way. Well, unfortunately, the thing that all classical political economy left out was the fact that constant capital in machines, raw materials, ancillary materials exist, and therefore you are going to need to have a money hoard, even to perform simple accumulation, because at a certain point your machine's going to break. And when your machine breaks, you need to have the capital there to replace it. And as these systems have grown in complexity, and as these systems have grown in terms of the inputs and the cost for new investment, replacing the instruments of production has increased, the need and the scale, the scale of money hoarding has increased. Just to manage the actual like functioning materially of the world economy, you need a massive, massive money hoard. Because at any point, something that takes, I don't know, a decade to produce and requires inputs from every corner of the globe could break, and you need to replace it. So even on a very functional level, that's a necessary kind of component of capitalist political economy. It's not something kind of abstract or based in this kind of political kind of thing. Now, of course, there is greed, and of course there is price gouging, and of course these things exist, but the the mere function of the thing determines a huge amount of the political economy, and the basis for those emotions to have such a hold, those proclivities or whatever, to have such a hold on the world economy is based in a sort of a fact of social relations rather than a fact and a function of social relations rather than something that can be addressed through redistributive poly policy. Because, and you know, you can look at this in various different ways in the classic kind of arguments that kind of capitalist political economists, uh neoliberal political economists, give against this is obviously couched in a kind of cost-benefit emotionalism. Um but and and marginal utility, well, not even marginal, just utility theory, but a utility theory of value, I want to say, sorry, but it is kind of still has got a point to it, what they're saying, right? Is that if you have an investment-based model of production, you do need someone to make an investment. And they do need more money than everyone else in order to do that. That's just simply a fact of that. Now, that doesn't mean the rest of their arguments and how they interpret that are correct, because they're not, and that doesn't mean their utility theory of value is correct, because it's not, but it does again show that there is an awareness that there is like an actual functional thing. And I think that this is where we kind of get drawn into kind of this kind of floating off into abstractions, whether or not they're like value-based abstractions on the kind of role of money in MNT theory, or kind of more kind of political abstractions based on perceiving a feature of gross inequality in our world in the form of money hoarding and going, well, that can't have any functional purpose because I'm considering it through, quite frankly, the frame of a household budget rather than the function it actually plays in the world economy. And what you know, the capitalism is the privatization of social wealth, right? And ultimately, this immense social wealth that exists in these money hordes does need to continue to exist for capitalism to function. That that's just again a fact. However, when you kind of then try to use that to then return to the is a miseration thesis explanation, right? Because it is also true that that is privatized social wealth and that that is placing people in incredible misery, you end up having to frame that as a structural problem. You can't frame that around kind of biting around the edges reforms. You can have those and you should fight for them where they're possible and politically attainable, like you absolutely should, because otherwise you end up sitting on your hands and criticizing a struggle from distance, which gains you no political credibility and no basis in the social movement. And all social movements fight for reforms whether or not they're the objectives of those social movements. However, you end up in a position where you kind of you kind of then have to kind of yeah. So yeah, it's it those those kind of arguments are there, and you need to have that structural kind of solution to things. But that becomes incredibly difficult with the other element of the miseration thesis, right? Which I think is the negative I noted when we started discussing this, which is as people get poorer, their social resources are actually further privatized by capital, right? As people get poorer, they have to sell their labor more often. How many jobs is the average number of jobs that someone who's working in the US is holding now? It's above it's above one. It's like 1.8 to almost two. Okay, yeah. And that's just to meet basic social reproduction things, right? Like, not even like a good form of life for most of those people, but just keep getting we're not meeting basic social reproduction, we're not at replacement rates.

C. Derick Varn 1:17:40

Oh yeah. You know, like we were only at replacement rates before from from immigration, and we've knocked that off. And in fact, actually, we are chasing people. I mean, we're chasing quote unquote natural-born citizens out of the country. Yeah, we have the we have a brain drain for the first time in the United States of a significant amount.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:02

Like most of them coming to uh Europe, I believe, actually.

C. Derick Varn 1:18:05

Yeah, Spain being the easiest to get into. Um Ireland being the second easiest. So well that's interesting. Uh we'll we'll see that. I mean, there was a lot of haymade here because for the first time in US history, there are more Americans moving to Ireland than I than I than Irish moving to America. That's wow. Like which uh historically, I mean, we're probably more Irish than British because that's where historically they've gone is here. Um, so uh we're more I well, actually, we're we're more Irish and more German, probably. Yeah, like our actual origins at this point. But I I uh I am very amused by all this because it's such a reversal, but at the same time, the American left here has not really known where to look. They've tried to look to China, but as I've told people, like even if you think that that this Chinese state capitalism is transitioning to socialism over you know the time frames set up by Chairman Gi. What the fuck does that mean for you?

SPEAKER_00 1:19:20

Why like nothing for like hell? So and also, yeah, I guess no matter how you look at that, and I think there's a few different ways you can look at the kind of development pattern in China, and they're all equally legible from a point of distance. But like if you look at the you know, the last time I was on, we were discussing kind of the settlement pattern and the distribution of populations and concentration of production that capitalism requires, certainly. And socialism has even if it what even if you did consider China a socialist state, you would have to then have to have the consideration that okay, they openly acknowledge they're using capital for development, which development develops a form of urbanity and production which is incompatible with the biophysical properties of living on planet Earth. So even if you do think that development's going to lead to you know full communism in China by 2050, it's gonna be based on a pattern of urbanity and production that is incompatible with the biophysical limits of living on planet Earth. So it's not it's not it's not a great, not a great strategy. In terms of like looking to kind of other examples on kind of the organization and things like that. This is something that all left movements suffer from. Bruner's really clear on this. We'll always try to take up banners and try and find a solution to these things, either adopting names in our own things or hopelessly seeking allegiances. And unfortunately, the problem again comes down to the social basis of the working class where you are. Otherwise, how are you going to launch any struggle about anything? How are you going to do anything? And I think this is a problem I have with essentially all forms of left politics, and it's not something I have an answer to at this point either. Because, like, look, we get this kind of argument that we see a lot on the kind of dedicatedly anti-imperialist left. And I'm an anti-imperialist Marxist, don't get me wrong, and I understand like imperialism is a very important contradiction to argue around. But you can't say like we need to give solidarity to X number of oppressed countries or states or populations as our primary duty, unless you have a political and social constituency by which you can actually do that. Otherwise, what you're doing is just saying, I need to say this over and over and over again, and nothing will change. And

Organizing Without A Real Constituency

SPEAKER_00 1:21:57

like, that's not a political strategy, it's it's wish fulfillment at worst, and it's kind of like path dependency upon rhetorical strategies at best.

C. Derick Varn 1:22:09

And so the dumbest form of path dependency, the one that's only in words, like yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:17

And it occurs to me, I know I was complaining about earlier that kind of the mediating strata of the the kind of professionalized uh strata of kind of policy making and and politics in the Western world is path-dependent upon concepts that haven't worked. Well that have worked but don't work anymore.

C. Derick Varn 1:22:41

And for two reasons, I think we on the left are on a very similar position in that we're path-dependent upon ideas that had some purchase in both smaller population sizes and more direct relationships to production than we often experience within these nations now, and more concentrated populations of workers, again, also smaller, and therefore smaller, more concentrated, but also more concentrated, not just in a physical area, but also in specific industry, which is just not true today.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:23

Yeah, exactly. Which allows for you know a worker politic to emerge within a constituency that is relatively coherent and you know you know it's easier to be significant within that, within that to a degree. Also, less media access and things like that. And I don't want to kind of go down an age of confusion thing, but if you were the articulate Marxist in a factory, you were the articulate Marxist in the factory, right? And that that does mean something in terms of organizing and capacity building, a crucial thing, because another thing that we kind of often leave out of accounts of great movements is the the the immediate skills they provided people with literacy. They provided people with like bingo, yeah, these kind of things, which are core skills and that people needed to begin to learn and interpret the world, and obviously does do a huge amount to shape their ontology. Like it depends on what.

C. Derick Varn 1:24:22

I mean, in the United States, we we'll be able to provide literacy again soon if we can still read.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:31

Go ahead. I mean, literacy is becoming a much more complicated concept, I think.

C. Derick Varn 1:24:39

Uh yeah, put it my way. Oh to be fair, you in the UK are only slightly better. So try and be the zoom in.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:52

Um maybe not. But yeah, you had these political processes and constituencies you could appeal to with ideas that you that did work within those contexts. Now we're path-dependent upon those ideas in various different ways in contexts that don't allow for them to work. And equally were path-dependent in the same in the kind of newer theory, not to kind of I don't like to, I don't think the social basis entirely determines a politic. It does condition it though. And who are the who is the new strata of leftists and left-wing people since the 1970s and 1980s? Where does that come from? Well, it comes from this mediating class in academic terms, largely, and applying theories that have been developed within that class to explain subalterns or oppressed populations or whatever they want to kind of try and explain them with them, and applying that to an immiserated population with increasingly alienated and much larger population size, dispersed from production, largely working service jobs, if any at all, is not gonna work. It's just not a strategy.

C. Derick Varn 1:26:19

Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean, like if like I was telling you off off air that one third of men are completely outside of the of looking for work, they are in British status. What is it, economically inviable or economically inactive?

SPEAKER_00 1:26:36

Economically inactive.

C. Derick Varn 1:26:37

Yeah. So even though our unemployment rate is like five percent, our actual unemployment rate among men is much higher. Our unemployment rate among women is going up. Well, and again, actually, it's not unemployment rate, it's women also leaving the workforce because childcare here is insane. It's it costs more now to send someone to preschool than it does to send them to a year of college. So that's fun. So, I mean, we have a true social reproduction crisis. Uh, Europe's had a slow burning and stochastic social reproduction crisis. We're having a self-imposed acute one, which was driving a lot of conservatation amongst like Gen Z boys, but doesn't seem to be doing that anymore because they frankly don't have enough hope to even be reactionary. That's and that shows up in voter stats. And I agree with you on this strata. In fact, I hope I wrote, you know, a co-wrote pamphlet with Daniel Tut specifically on this problem, the proletarianization of white collar work from professionals, but that still have a bizarre consciousness because they're so tied into either what was effectively a labor aristocratic stata that gave what was given a lot of power by the state to do primary research because capital wasn't doing it for war and for capitalist development. But that is ending because it's gotten too frankly, administratively heavy. And there is a real sense that even like I was talking to Nicholas Villa Real right this, China's, you know, quote unquote socialist transition has less regulation than even our deregulated markets here in the states, because we have so many levels of government. And we have more than Europeans do, which is kind of staggering, really, and makes also Trying to compare like cost of state from the US to Europe very difficult because most of the state's like social welfare nets and whatnot are not paid for, are managed by the federal government. They're managed by the states, which is awfully convenient for MMTers because they can use this to explain why our social safety net doesn't work. They won't explain how other people's social safety net doesn't work, though. Because the our social safety net is all in areas that don't have currency sovereignty. You know, the California can't print money. And neither can Mamdani, and neither can the state of New York. Which does mean that that there are real constraints for tax basis for these municipal services. I also like, yes, it is true that they are clawing stuff back in an insane amount, but what is also interesting is despite all the rhetoric and despite all the concern about interest payments, it is true that liberals aren't wrong in America, that these conservative austerity governments actually spend more money on weirder things that have no social inputs than or no obvious social inputs than liberals do. But again, they're not dealing with why that's happening. Like like me talking about, well, why they're throwing all this money into the AI. I'm like, well, because if they don't the 0.5% private economic growth that has existed under Trump goes away. And it's downstream state spending. It's one of the things that uh I was gonna say political market, I said political Marxists didn't believe in the falling rate of value. Some of them do, actually, and that's Brenner. Or the falling rate of the tendency of the rate of profits to fall, not a falling rate of value. That's different. And Brenner was talking, was was, however, trying to spin this with Dylan Riley into this idea that you could have Keynesianism that didn't return profitability. And I said in response to that, that no, you just have Keynesianism that doesn't work. And that's what we're seeing. And I think it's moving from what we might call government program, hidden government programs for things like nursing and all that, to just outright parasitic primitive accumulation upon the the national basis of the economy itself. And that can look like greed, but the thing is, like, they don't I don't know how else they get most of these industries survive. And a lot of them aren't, to be quite frank. So, and this is only going to get more diffuse. One of the things I was telling my New York friends is I was like, you know, you guys think that capital flight's not a threat for you, but there are laws being passed right now that allow people to buy stocks directly from the issuer as opposed to going through the exchange that are coming out in the United States. So you'll be able to buy, I think it's Amazon and Apple stock directly. Do you think Wall Street survives that for very long? Like, you know, um I don't I yeah, yeah. There are major changes coming that people aren't looking at. Yeah. Um to kind of break the backs of these urban liberal metropoles. And here's the thing, they might work. They could very much. I don't know that it's gonna return value anywhere, but it it could very much mean that like the already crippled economic base of New York and California, which are everybody's great, for lack of a better term, white hope. Although in New York's case, not quite so white, there's not a lot of evidence that that's gonna be all that effective. And calling back at the margins with things like peditaire taxes, which are more than we've seen, are still so minor that I don't even think it's gonna fix Mondani's budget shortfall, much less enable him to do massive expansions of the social welfare net. And the problem that a lot of these populists have in America is that since they're operating off of these theories that you're talking about, they often hit walls that they just don't understand. The bond market. The the I mean, Mamdanny's actually handled it way better than the other progressive mayors, but it's it's still been like you haven't been able to really handle capital flight, and the idea that capital flight's impossible from these major urban areas baffles me. It's like no you don't the only reason that New York and California have a lot of the monopolies they do as laws that are being changed.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:01

Yeah, yeah. And it's that that yeah, it's kind of a again, that that kind of capital flights impossible thing. It seems to be a feature rather than a bug of financial centers, from what I kinda gather, to be honest. Like it seems quite common. You know, you see it in uh London very much, things like that. But then you can also see that that I that is happening again. Yeah, I think I said before the show that like Manchester's turning into a secondary Ex.

C. Derick Varn 1:34:31

So like Andis is already a secondary London, so yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:35

So, you know, that's writing. And you can even trace that back. I mean, Banaji does that kind of dynamic trace really well through a brief history of commercial capitalism in terms of how capital flight can reconfigure certain profitable relationships to a degree, but only with merchant capital, really.

C. Derick Varn 1:34:57

Yeah, uh so this is one of the things I'm gonna going to talk about. We Marxist uh there are two corresponding problems that we have. One is a theory to over-perioritize and frankly make up shit. Like people who are continuously telling me that we're entering neo-feudalism or techno-neo-feudalism, and we don't have value relations, and I just literally laugh at them because they don't understand that rents were always part of capital, read capital volume three, you fucking moron. Yeah. Um, like clearly you you did not get past the dog ear capital volume one. So that's one problem. Two is the Marxism is disproven because we don't use gold uh weirdness. That one's fun. The MMTers throw that at us all the time. And you know, I'm like, well, if you don't think if you don't think real commodities matter, why does oil still matter? And why why can't even these highly rent-based economies survive? Like, why is it when you look at the mag 7, the profitable parts are still in physical commodity outlays, not in high investment rent seeking?

SPEAKER_02 1:36:16

You know, and explainable within the theory, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:36:20

Right. It's totally explainable with our theory, but it's not explainable within theirs.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:26

So and so is the money supply, right? Like, I mean, even in volume one, Marx is talking about how promissory notes and things like that were actually not relating to the gold supply within the banks and accumulated beyond that. And then in volume two, I think he says something like the more the the greater the money hordes become, the more abstract they become, and the let more divorce from actual money produ like gold production they become. Yeah, uh, so yeah, it's perfectly explainable. It's a it's money, money, the money commodity is defined by generally not being that much of a commodity in Marx. So I don't really, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:37:06

It's

Why Commodity Reality Still Bites

C. Derick Varn 1:37:07

it's a commodity that has very little, very little cost, so it's not like and I'm like, there's always a relationship to commodity though, because this is when my always challenge the M and Ters like, why can't any country just do it? Why does it have to be suspiciously the former British Empire plus Japan that can do it? You know, like and and doesn't seem to be able to do it now, and then also why do you think bomb markets are important? Oh, they're just to discipline labor, and I'm like no, they're not. They're they tie in external factors in the same way that taxes tie people in, but you have to pay out for that. That you you just don't see you you're only looking at one end of the balance sheet. But I think a lot of that is because I mean, like, maybe we can talk about a couple of things. You and I will both be accused of being doomers, and and like people who listen to Pro cult will probably know that you are probably even more pessimistic on the immediate term than I am. But, you know, in a world also where doomer and conspiracy slop is everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. I feel like, you know, that we're not, we're just trying to be consistent with the analysis, and the analysis is kind of bleak right now. If you look at like, okay, so you have a you the only coherent subject is uh is an increasingly proletarianized white-collar class who has either managerial or petite bourgeois habits from their prior formations that have been inculcated through schooling, that's gonna take a long time to break. You have a de-skilled working class that is increasingly in services and is not mass even in areas that are still heavily industrial outside of China. Again, organic composition of capital problem. You have this you know, I was talking to someone and I brought this up on two classes, but like I'm in two podcasts. Funny, I think of those classes now. But I was thinking about this in terms of like like the working class stick that you see. I I I am I am involved in the DSA and our local DSA chapter is supporting a union guy for their nomination for state senate for the Democratic Party, and it's doing okay. It's not I don't think it's doing poorly, it's also not doing super great. But I did notice like what district it was emerging out of, and it was the richer district near the university. And I also said the irony of like the John Fetterman bullshit and a lot of the R Revolution workerist candidates is they're actually made to appeal to white-collar people who are resentful of other white-collar people for not, you know, bringing their Fordism back or whatever. And I mean, you really see this, like you see the the where this plays the best. It actually isn't in blue-collar neighborhoods. And I was asking people, you know, why is it that Jacobin's always talking about unions, but like can't tell you what actual union life is like and what the limits of it are and why they're not why only the only growth in unions have been these small service sector unions who

Workerism Without Workers And Weak Unions

C. Derick Varn 1:40:40

can't get good contracts. And it's not, and when I say they can't get good contracts, I don't just mean their bosses are being greedy. I mean there often isn't the profitability to provide them with decent contracts, they can get better working conditions, and that's usually about it. What do you make of that? I mean, what what what do you see in that tendency and why has that been why is that plaguing us right now?

SPEAKER_00 1:41:06

In terms of these kind of the demographics you outlined and the kind of thing.

C. Derick Varn 1:41:09

Yeah, like like yeah, like what do you think it is with this with a certain amount of downwardly mobile white-colored people who really want the middle of the 20th century back?

SPEAKER_00 1:41:21

Yeah, I mean Yeah, I guess because the middle of the 20th century was like it provides legible culture, cultural artifacts to them, I think, in the sense that it appeals to a certain view of there. There's an interesting study uh about kind of the different ways in which kind of parenthood was developed in the 1990s and the 1980s. Um white-collar, particularly in the US, white-collar kind of workers versus kind of poorer sections, but also this applies to the Britain too. And you have this kind of difference where the middle class or white-collar kind of labor aristocratic, there's so many terms for it, uh, kind of uh families, uh, viewed child development in terms of stages which led into kind of a child wanting to become independent of its parents. And independence was viewed really kind of incoherently by the different kinds of people surveyed in these studies, but led to a kind of view that that was the ultimate thing for childhood development. Whereas poorer families viewed independence as a kind of natural attribute of a child and viewed discipline as the core thing that a child needs to be taught. Now, the children of those who are now facing proletarianization of those that kind of process, I think there's an element of, I don't want to get like psychological about it, but there's if if there's a material kind of basis for a long strat strategy of kind of parenthood and kind of how people should be approaching the world, and that's really severely kind of influenced people. That's one thing. Similarly, I think the kinds of labor that those kind of workers end up doing, those kind of professionalized jobs, promote a pride in work that is sorely absent from jobs associated with lower household incomes and so on and so forth now. Like no one's proud to be well, people are, but not often proud to be like a service worker at a gas station or a service worker at McDonald's or something like that. People are proud to be in the various different kinds of white-collar jobs that they own.

C. Derick Varn 1:43:45

And that and the blue-collar jobs that are valorized are trades that are still largely artisanal, to be quite frank.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:52

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And those kind of things and that kind of sentiment appeals to the workerist politics that you see within the mid-20th century, right? It appeals to some of the rhetoric around that. Similarly, I think it's also a way of I think there's a way of downwardly mobile classes being attracted into Marxist politics that or left politics that is to do with, I think there's a certain resentment politic, as you identified earlier. There's a hatred toward other white-collar workers. And I think that that's also to do with I mean they do suck. I'm going to agree. I'm going to agree with a guilt thing going on there too. And in some ways, I think when the more radical someone gets, I think it can begin as a genuine desire to sort of like cast off that thing, that baggage as they've now come to the stunning realization that there is a proletariat and they're going to be joining it soon. But but also that well, they're already part of it in a technical sense, but you know, you know what I mean, the popular sense. And like that can lead to kind of like an intense desire to kind of really, really throw off those chains and throw themselves into more radical spheres. I also think that the radical spheres have been set up materially to attract them from a ri really bad reading of the student movement in the 1980s and the kind of civil rights movement uh in Britain, the student movement in the 1980s, and then in in the US, I'd say more like the later civil rights movement.

C. Derick Varn 1:45:27

The civil rights movement, then the student movement. Although our student movement is before yours.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:32

So yeah. And the Green Movement as well, draws in all those different student spheres and views the university as a really coherent organizing place, which leads to a lot of these young proletarianized people coming across Marxist politics in that phase of their life when they have more time to think, study, and act. And then as they go into the reality of the job market becoming an increasingly bit embittered political constituency as well.

C. Derick Varn 1:45:58

They tend to be David Sorotoites or whatever, which I mean, you know, uh, I guess that's like our equivalent to Paul Mason. Uh he's got, I mean, Sorota has slightly better politics, but like Nahop. I do I do think about this a lot though, because you you see this like valorization of workerism, and yet these people are also just as confused. You can tell their imago of workerism is wrong because they focus, they don't understand how how contract-based the are contractor and contract-based a lot of the trades are. So it's even hard to call those people truly proletarians. They are somewhat actually still petit bourgeois, the way that these professionals themselves used to be. Although that is changing very very rapidly here as people are being encouraged to enter the trade, so is private equity, and that's changing that incredibly fast. The other thing that you'll see is uh uh so you have this increasingly proletarianized mental strata that that that likes to valorize itself as the worker, but you know, I I was talking about this the other day. I was like, I went to uh I'm a member of a worker center, and I was like, it is funny that this is entirely government workers, and you can't even get the blue-collar government workers here. Like the the transportation and fire department, like I know you don't want cops, I get it. Like, you know, even though they're the second largest union, I don't really want them here either. But there's only one, I was at an event with like a hundred people. There's like one teacher, no, no, no transportation union, no firefighters union, no miners union. Now we don't really have other heavy industry here in Utah, but they're not there and they are unionized. Yeah, you don't have the teachers union, which is the largest union. What you have are the nurses union who are radical, they're probably they're far more radical than teachers union and very well owned, but they're they're all pre-majority here. They don't have the right to, in most cases, actual, actually do contracts. And you have service sector expansions and like ski patrollers and other things that are small clusters on margin, and you have activists and government workers in the bureaucracy, not even in like teaching or nursing or whatever. They're government workers who like work downstream of, you know, I don't know, the people who do surveying and the libraries. And I'm like, even when we have union stuff, the union stuff that can actually get leftists out there are all white-collar unions. And they like to, to the public, like act like they're blue-collar unions, but they're not. And our union situation here is dire. The private sector unions are dying rapidly, and now the public sector unions kind of are too. There's been a lot of slams of the public sector unions in the federal government. State governments have been trying to claw stuff back. And to be quite honest with you, there it doesn't help that a lot of the unions have been associated with things like really unpopular progressive policies and school systems in California that weren't even implemented in other places, but the union was somehow linked to it. So this means that this workerism that that a lot of the left is portraying isn't dealing with the reality of the situation. And the other thing that I wanted to talk to you about, I agree with you on those studies on like class ideas about raising people up. I actually find it funny. As a person who came out of who's moved from the blue-collar to the white-collar world, you know, I I started my my father was was actually hit was downwardly mobile, but it was from mill workers. My stepfather was actually downwardly mobile, but was from more educated government employee staff. And my mother was a waitress who became a nurse in the 19 in the late 1990s when she was in her 40s, and she didn't stay a nurse long. But I come out of that world, right? Highly lumpenized world, very lots of poverty. And I moved up, which I've actually I've actually pointed out one is very rare on the left, and you only see in academics like what former blue-collar people move into the left they tend to be they still tend to come out of academia i'm also one of those and two there's this total misunderstanding of social attitudes that are based in things that are actually logical and leads to both a valorization of workers but like actually also not dealing with them or talking to them in any sincere or serious way or limiting yourself to certain fields where you feel like you have more influence and in the United States you see this with electoralists beginning to turn on the union strategy again or to like think that it's failed which it maybe has but they're still talking about like working class this working class that while not admitting they only really represent a pretty specific strata of it and I wanted to bring that up because the other thing that we're seeing is what Daniel Tutt and I have called lumpenization not not not as a not as a stable social class although I do think that exists are I'll use the Clyde Burrow not as a stable social category because it's not really a class because it doesn't really have one relationship to production or one relationship to production that produces it but we can you know we can try to fix marks as we see it. But we're seeing lumpanized attitudes across multiple classes now the attitudes associated with the lump and proletariat are actually broadly speaking in the service sectors in in the trades too and even in these white collar workers as they get more downward and are more addicted to things like like to me this is a real problem. And it was first incapparated in the American left by everything capitalism does is not your fault but also maybe it's good though. And now that's gone away and we just see like people having no idea what to do with massive pornography addiction social media addiction uh and look I know pornography addiction is complicated maybe I shouldn't use that term I actually don't think it's the social threat that conservatives do but I do think it tells you something one of the things that I was actually pointing out

Lumpenization And Digital Social Pathologies

C. Derick Varn 1:53:21

to people is like part of the nature of sex work in the United States is increasingly as a as a true substitute for all other forms of social reproduction and that's very not good that is not a moralization of sex work at all but it's just like when people are using OnlyFans as substitutes for dating entirely not because you have a robot acting like a girlfriend in private messages that's a problem. Yeah and that shows the breakdown of social reproductive capacity which has a bunch of other social pathologies attached to it and I find it maddening that I can't get leftists to talk about these things as social pathologies that are that are even tied into geopolitics.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:11

Yeah I I think to kind of come in on that then I'm gonna have to run soon but to kind of tie in to that kind of like general kind of so you presented a number of different strata and kind of attitudes to town social class and I think you were kind of evidencing this not only not only proletization proletarianization but class decomposition and the various different ideological forms and pathologies that come with it. And I think that those are all incredibly important. So we kind of have in in material terms I think and you can see this in in in Britain very clearly but you can see it in the US definitely now and the the kind of differences we've talked about between kind of the the proletariat as Marx analyzed it or has existed in the 20th century versus now and the kind of relationship it has to production and also to itself as a class via that change in relation to production from the change in con smaller concentrated populations meeting in singular workplaces or singular industries and having very definite, very direct relationships to each other and that through those processes to a more dispersed service oriented poorer section of the class an increasingly proletarianized white collar section in the US or labour aristocratic was probably easier for a kind of international audience to kind of legibly understand in terms of the class dynamics professionalized strata andor managing profession professional managerial strata not class and that kind of section of the working class and these kind of more dispersed relations are forming as those things. And I think that that leads to in my opinion I think you've hit on something really important by the combination of these things. So all of those things are tied to geopolitics because they're symptoms of a waning imperialism and then a waning kind of pole of wealth accumulation in an increasingly competitive competitive and cap and destructive form of accumulation across the globe as capital increasingly fails to reconfigure and reproduce itself at the level of class that articulates itself I think in in in these in this decomposition in this kind of spreading out and decomposition as productivity increases and machinery requires far fewer workers leaving only service jobs or smaller kind of forms of income and increasing lumpenization through uh the gig economy and the informality that has given and the ease of access to things that would have been formally associated with criminality. And I think that that does definitely play into things like the OnlyFans or things like internet addiction and the number of different kinds of ways in which people deal with that and proliferate through that and the different forms of speech act that occur through social media as well which are forms of speech act that you wouldn't have said in public in previous kind of periods right you you Yeah because you'll get hit frankly yeah or or in certain cases arrested. Right. Or yeah and you still lie in the UK to be fair but it's very true. But there are you know and but these are I think these all these do tie into a kind of class decomposition because what you're seeing is an increasing wielding I think on the left where this pertains to the left to tie it back into that an increasing wielding of past forms of i i ideological forms and past dependencies that we kind of discussed earlier into what is essentially an antisocial justification and into what is essentially an antisocial politics in many cases if it can even or maybe pre-political anti-social anti-politics is what I'm actually this is I guess if the if the 21st century has produced anything new within the Marxist movement or within the communist movement this is probably it right when we were talking about it it's this decomposed composition of various different kinds of people being proletarianized. I think poor lumpen people do figure within this as well internet addiction is a huge problem and kind of as you were talking about earlier that kind of unemployed section of young men when they aren't being drawn to conservatism can be drawn quite quickly into Marxist spheres as well similarly unemployed young women and things like that within those kind of areas of life I think this weird thing though where you like I mean a conservative friend of mine always says well why do you would you see all these like doctors and nursing students hanging out with homeless people and I'm like well those are the people who can engage in activism the most easily like but anyway but I think with the cultural transformation and the change in the kind of productive relations and the kind of images that people wield from that past from a politics that did make sense in that context it is and combined with these new modern pathologies through internet access and digital communications infrastructure AI you should definitely be figured within that as well and I think that leads to a section of the left an increasingly loud section that is is not really organized out of quite basic activist groupings generally but takes up a lot of space and a lot of ideological air because it is incredibly forceful in terms of how people are integrated into the left and it speaks to an increasing problem of class composition through a kind of anti-social politics which allows people to continue to hold resentment and allows them to continue to exist in in in in that kind of way whilst also seeking out social relations within a social movement context. And that's something that I think can is is symptomatic of a kind of decomposition of class I think a Marxist kind of response to this and you were saying earlier about kind of like both of us get called doomers I certainly get called a doomer. I'm not a doomer I wouldn't be fucking doing this.

C. Derick Varn 2:00:25

Yeah if I was a doomer I would be like just preaching doom it's actually more profitable.

SPEAKER_00 2:00:29

Yeah I think I'm gonna go like full laissez faire like fuck

Anti Social Left Politics And Strategy

SPEAKER_00 2:00:32

it all I'm gonna go and make my money and like lie down doing literally anything else you know Zach Coat did. Anyway actually like the actual approach to these things is that you people keep going that we need a new analysis of class or that we need to recenter class or that we need to attack on these identity issues. I don't think that's the correct way to frame that by the way I think that racism, sexism, misogyny etc are all very important things to fight in the world. But like these They don't fundamentally change class relations I mean they're part of them but they're part of them yeah and you know Marx always talks about a struggle between and within classes anyway. And I think that there's but to to resolve those I I there isn't like a core strategy and it's not going to come from an analytical precept. This is the thing that I think that is why I end up getting called a doomer because I can point out all these different tendencies and they're just real like you can you can read about them and like you know look up the economic stuff we talked about. You can look up the different kind of ways in which people are engaging in left-wing politics and if you're not persuaded by how vile it can be and how performatively vile it can be a lot of the time then I think maybe you might be part of that pathological tendency to be quite honestly. But I think that the only way you can really consistently try to move beyond that is engage with what is there in a pro-social strategic way, pointing out the actual material limits to people to try and get them to recenter on an actual strategic view of now a political view of now that allows us to move beyond repeating mistakes allows us to move beyond kind of reframing them and wielding them as antisocial politics as we've kind of discussed here and allows us to really interrogate that social distribution of peoples.

C. Derick Varn 2:02:32

That's all we got unfortunately right yeah and I I talk about I talk a lot about the children's crusade except the children are now in their 40s but by that I mean just wielding people who were who had enough time to do a lot of free labor um as the primary motivations and they do it in things like canvassing for politicians which can make you feel like you're winning until you look at policies versus elected which is usually pretty depressing. And also socialist and progressive electives have the least likely uh incumbent re-election rate of like any group so which is still over 50% but it's still bad it's something like 65 to 70% depending on how you calculate where the national average of incumbency re-election in the United States is like 95%. And then you you take all that together and then you're also just seeing like you're not making headway even on the reforms that you're talking about like everything the left has talked about in the United States since the revival of the left after Occupy Wall Street has gotten materially ideologically and objectively worse. Yeah I can't think of a senior issue that they have had a large scale win on that has had any significant pull on reversing immiseration reversing falls in the poverty fuck even closing like racial income and wealth gaps they failed on that too so it's it's just it's a it's a depressing moment. We're gonna wrap up today on this downer of a of a worldview but I you know I I people get mad at me about it because they're like give us hope and I'm like the hope that you're gonna have is by giving up shit that you that either doesn't work and are and frankly in some cases when you actually break it down literally can't work. It's not even a matter of like it's it's what you're wanting to do is impossible.

SPEAKER_00 2:04:37

The hope thing always baffles me right because give us hope I'm sorry that comes from an inner belief in a politic and its correctness not from like an external phenomena. Hope if you want a seeking it from external phenomena is a placebo for strategy.

C. Derick Varn 2:04:54

Right. No hope is what we fucking do and make ourselves and if we are not in the consistent position to make it only understanding why we're not in the position to make it would lead us to be in the position to make it unless we just hope the sarcastic shit happens and somehow I don't know we bumble our way towards communism which does seem to be like what a lot of people seem to take actually I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:17

Yeah and also like stop looking for emotional support from political theory anyone who's thinking that Christ.

C. Derick Varn 2:05:24

Yeah go like it you and I off stage were talking about Mark Fisher but I've always said that like I agree with Mark Fisher's critique of of like the therapeutic and whatnot but the idea that you're gonna handle your your deep depression by engaging in reformist politics seems to be a way to not do either well exactly um and dear god don't use sectarian or even non-sectarian political formations as your primary social outlet holy shit that seems like a bad idea I mean like in the age where like there was more actual pro cult to you know use your name that made that made some more sense but like you know I work with a group that has a labor choir and it's kind of cool it same songs from the 1920s all the time and tries to update it a little bit but it's it's kind of cool fine the the thing is though getting people to feel like they're going to church but for a union actually only really worked when everybody went to fucking church. Like you're not getting any nostalgia from singing glory glory hall hallelujah to you know all power to the union anymore you just you know just changing those God words out for union words doesn't work in the same way when no one fucking goes to church in the first place but yeah I don't know and and I still think it's better that's better than nothing. I mean you know but yeah I I I'm gonna end on that I'm gonna go ahead and uh ask you to come back on in a couple maybe a month or two because I do want to get more into greenwashing in the left and the and the growth degrowth oh my god I'm tired of both sides of this argument debate. Yeah yeah I'd be happy to do strong opinions on both yeah I imagine you do and I I am interpreted weirdly as like a bright green socialist which I find very funny since I say most of that shit's meant being necessary for a transition but ultimately won't work in and of itself. So but anyway thank you for coming on what what's going on over at Procult?

SPEAKER_00 2:07:49

Uh so at the moment we have we put out two videos on the Iran war we've got a and another approaching Marxism coming up on sects and organization which we'll look at the Marxist analysis of the Marx's analysis of the sect form a little bit of dra on draper and then expanding that into a modern context. And then we have an interview with Palestinian author who recently Palestinian diaspora author who recently published his memoir Scars on Medals looking at his kind of experience both living within Palestine and experiencing violence as a child and then the story of him searching for his uncle who fled after participation within the first intifada in Europe

What’s Next On Pro Cult

SPEAKER_00 2:08:36

after having lost contact for many years. It's a fascinating story it's a really interesting book and uh yeah so that's what we've got coming up and I am still laboring away on the second part of Four Land which will look at failure of mitigate climate and biodiversity mitigation and adaptation strategies under capital.

C. Derick Varn 2:08:57

So yeah and if you think you're doomers on political economy wait till we talk about political ecology oh yeah uh anyway on that note thank you so so much and we'll see you again soon thank you very much