Episode 218 – Beware! the Counter-Revolution with C. Derick Varn

C. Derick Varn is a poet, teacher, and “arm-chair theorist” (his words, not ours), but Steve called on him for his deep knowledge of history, specifically the history of revolutions.

Varn takes a realistic and nuanced look at some of the popular myths about the brutality of key figures, like Stalin and Mao. He suggests placing them in the context of historical geopolitical economic conditions.  

I’m also just going to remind people that both the Bolshevik Revolution and the Chinese Revolution, in particular, come out of the context of world wars. They happen when they happen during the world wars for a reason. You have highly traumatized societies where the power has been broken because of the consequences of world war, even when the powers at hand are actually allied with the winners. 

Steve asks whether one should excuse abandoning civil liberties in order to protect the gains of a revolution against very real internal and external threats. “What civil liberties?” asks Varn. Some revolutions never even got rid of their monarchies.  

The episode considers Bolshevism, Trotskyism, and fascism. Varn talks about why both socialists and capitalists were attracted to fascism, looking, again, to the conditions of the time. 

C. Derick Varn is a poet, teacher, editor, podcaster, and broadcaster. He is the host of VarnVlog and co-host of Gaming Materialists. According to his Patreon, Varn Vlog is a podcast and youtube channel dedicated to delivering high-quality interviews and analyses on philosophy, art, political economy, culture, geopolitics, pop culture, and history. Support his work at patreon.com/varnvlog 

@skepoet on Twitter 

Macro N Cheese – Episode 218
Beware! the Counter-Revolution with C. Derick Varn
April 1, 2023

[00:00:00] C. Derick Varn [intro/music]: In the case of almost every one of these revolutions, you have the context of additional civil wars, which immediately break out. In some ways, it is very rare for a revolution not to end in one or two civil wars, sometimes more than that.

Now, we’re under conditions where it seems crazy because, on one hand, both parties want to start reshoring to shore up production lines and whatnot, and yet the Fed wants to raise unemployment with a declining workforce. There’s no way you can do both.

[00:01:35] Geoff Ginter [intro/music]: Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse all together. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43] Steve Grumbine: All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. This week my guest is C. Derick Varn. You know him from his Varn Vlog and YouTube channel. Derick is a poet, teacher and editor, podcaster, broadcaster. He is the host of Varn Vlog and co-host of Gaming Materialists. He’s worked in left wing editing and editor of left wing publications like Loyal Opposition to Modernity and the North Star.

He is currently working on a book with Christopher Lash and Shalon von Tine. And without further ado, let me bring on my guest, C. Derick Varn. How are you today sir?

[00:02:24] C. Derick Varn: I’m doing well, I’m doing well.

[00:02:27] Grumbine: We get a spring forward, we get a time change. We almost missed the interview and you just happen to be looking at Twitter messages in time for us to be able to pull off this interview relatively close to the scheduled time. So thank you for your flexibility.

[00:02:43] Varn: No problem.

[00:02:45] Grumbine: So a lot of discussions have been happening behind the scenes as people hear about socialism.

People that have probably never gave a consideration to socialism and most of what they’ve heard is tainted with C I A talking points, propaganda, Ayn Rand Society describing communism as they tend to in very derogatory terms. And we spent some time looking at the French Revolution, and I wanna start there because this will set up this conversation.

I believe Robespierre had taken on the left side of the French Revolution and he became the defacto leader. And during his time, he went from very aspirational goals with the Rights of Man and basically defanging the church and providing people with a classless society where everybody could participate.

But over time, a counter revolutionary force, the monarchists, the royalists, tried to take back power. And this effort of revolutionary force taking over — revolutionary force fending off counter-revolutionary force. This is like a dance that I think that each revolution goes through.

This happened in Haiti with Toussaint and Desallines, and then you definitely see it in real terms with the Bolshevik Revolution and then under Mao and even Stalin, and each of these events bring about a visceral counter-revolutionary force that seeks to take back the gains of the revolutionary entity that won whatever they won previously.

It seems to always devolve into a belief that this is an authoritarian, draconian, murderous regime, and this just doesn’t seem right to me, knowing the little that I have been able to glean from history. When you put somebody in a place where they’ve fundamentally changed society, changed the rules and the governance and the other side wants to take it back, that is a constant violent threat waiting at your doorstep. And being able to contend with that without violence;

I’m not sure how that happens. The rules of the game are dictated by the people trying to infiltrate or reclaim their ground. Are revolutions inherently perpetually violent? And in more specific terms, when we hear about socialism and communism, they tend to be conflated with authoritarianism. What is your perspective on that?

[00:05:31] Varn: I am a critic of many of the governments that we’re gonna talk about today, but I also will say in almost every one of the cases, I would have defended the revolutionary impulse. In the case of almost every one of these revolutions, you have the context of additional civil wars, which immediately break out.

In some ways, it is very rare for a revolution not to end in one or two civil wars, sometimes more than that. And while this seems to be talked about in the US context or in the capitalist world, however you wanna frame that as a problem of socialism or communism, I think it’s a problem of revolution and how you can pull off a revolution.

The United States avoided some of this in its national liberation, which I’m gonna put that in quotation marks . But only some. One, the actual bourgeois revolution in the United States took about a hundred years to happen. And by that I mean the United States is not a unified country that has fully gotten rid of compelled labor until the Civil War.

And even then, you have an immediate counter-revolutionary force in the crushing of reconstruction. Now I bring that up because you do have to pair that with France, and this is not to make an excuse for the white terror. There were at least 30,000 dead, almost 3000 in France. But Maximilian Robespierre was also in the midst of fighting a war in the Vendee, a particularly brutal war that actually threw their own view of who the enemy was into disarray.

Because of their attempt to abolish Catholicism, a lot of the French peasants rose up in the Vendee aligned with the monarchist forces, and that was actually far bloodier than anything that happened in the white terror. And it involved people dying on both sides. The other thing that happened is that Robespierre found that all these French colonies were modeling themselves on what was going on in France itself.

And then you have to deal with the French socialist government’s response to, say, Haiti. So what you see happen is all these social antagonisms just ripple out from the initial revolutionary force. They were already there. They were going to come out eventually anyway, but they all come out at once because there’s a fracture point. In those conditions,

paranoia is gonna kick in, but also it seems to me highly unlikely that it would not kick in. When I talk about, say, fundamental errors that lead to what you might call very bloody social Bonapartist reaction, and I can tell you what I mean by that. What one sees generally is that there is general chaos because of the antagonistic forces released by the revolution.

There is one figure of which people place a whole lot of faith to navigate that. Unitary executives are very common during revolutions, and again, you don’t have to go to the socialist world to see it. You can also see it in places like say the English Civil War in Cromwell. This is the most likely way that military heads will form in these situations because you need decisions made quickly.

Now, there are things you can do to prevent that, I think, but they’re not statistically speaking the most likely outcome. And again, if you look at the capitalist world, you see the same thing. When we talk about the French Revolution. We have to be clear that it’s both, in some ways, a socialist and bourgeois revolution at once.

Because even in the Montagnards, the Jacobins, we see capitalist forces and socialist forces using the government. And you can see this even in the rights granted in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, there’s things that read socialistically, and there’s things that read capitalistically. That’s because of ending one kind of class society and then contesting of what new kind of class society would come after it.

 Most Marxists, for example, wouldn’t think that socialism would’ve been possible, honestly, in immediate post-revolutionary France. But the outcome that you see there with the terror, I think is the veil of paranoia. And to see that as naturally resulting from socialism is to ignore that I can’t think of a revolution or civil war that doesn’t have certain elements of it. Even, let’s say the US Civil War, which one might even argue not when it comes to say the average southerner, but let’s say the Confederate generalship, that we probably should have been more brutal.

Because it was the rump end of that that led basically a domestic terror campaign for, I don’t know, two and a half generation afterwards…

[00:11:33] Grumbine: Easily.

[00:11:34] Varn: Easily. Until they basically won at the state level. One can see that they almost won frankly, everything they wanted in the compromise that ended reconstruction. So do I think that they should have terrorized the southern whites who were not planters or in the Confederate leadership?

No, I don’t. In fact, I think one of the ironies of US history is that the South was basically turned into an internal periphery until the 1930s and 40s, which is where a lot of the political resentment comes from. The southern former planter class becomes a lot of the southern elite is able to use

racial politics to hide what is actually driving them. Now again, you asked about the French Revolution, but there’s similar dynamics there. So I think we have to ask ourselves, okay, well then why does this happen so much? You bring up Mao, Mao’s a harder case because yes, tons of people die in the various experiments in China.

But even during the great leap forward and the great proletarian revolution, life expectancy went up.

[00:12:54] Grumbine: Yep.

[00:12:55] Varn: It actually only stopped going up during the part of the Chinese Communist Party that westerners tend to like, which is the Deng period. And the reasons for that are complicated. A lot of it has to do with the complete liberalization.

And by here, I mean marketization of the school and education sectors of the rural part of China. So you had the end of the barefoot doctors, you had complete marketization of healthcare in rural China. You had the end of public schooling for girls in rural China. And so you saw within a few years, the life expectancy stopped growing.

And if people want to get my stats in that, there’s a scholar Dongping Han who has written quite a bit about that. So what do you say there? Was there no violence in the great proletarian cultural revolution? Well, there was. There was a ton of violence actually. And yes, there were times where the assassination of landlords was done.

Do I think that you had to assassinate those landlords? I don’t know. Probably not. But is that something I’m super worried about? No. What I was more worried about, about the great proletarian cultural revolution is there was a bunch of pent up social forces. Ethnic tensions that have to do with prior emperors playing groups off of each other, et cetera, that did burst out upon the scene. And Mao was actually actively, and Zhou Enlai, and one thing I think that we tend to do with these communist states is to see the government as totally prescribed in one person. In both the case of the Soviet Union and China, where this role was actually much more substantive, there were other executive leaders. Stalin wasn’t the president of the USSR, and there was one. Mao was not the president of China, and there was one. The consolidation of the executive into one person is actually relatively recent in China. For example, if you know the Chinese revolutionary history, Zhou Enlai is actually a good counterbalance to Mao and actually quite important for that.

Now, how many people died? For example, the Great Leap Forward, which was an incredibly deadly famine. It’s estimated between 15 and 55 million people died. But I’m gonna ask you a question. 55 million seems huge, yeah, and I don’t believe it.

[00:15:31] Grumbine: Right

[00:15:33] Varn: Now, there are people who put it even lower than 15. I think it’s probably more than that, honestly.

But I have a hard time imagining 55 million people can die, and yet life expectancy can go up. But I can imagine a huge famine tragedy from mismanagement hitting. But okay, let’s ask ourselves a question. We don’t talk about the potato famine as capitalists doing that, although it clearly was.

[00:16:00] Grumbine: Huh? Huh? Yeah.

[00:16:02] Varn: So yes, there’s a whole lot of “tu quoque” here, but that, I mean, there’s a whole lot of, you did it too, between socialists and capitalists.

And that’s not an answer to the horrors of the problem, but it’s also just immediately gonna throw out the, oh, it’s socialism and communism’s fault for why this is happening. You close off trade. This is what happened. While if you close off international trade, famines do become more likely – this is actually part of why most Marxists did see the necessity for world revolution, not just in one country.

It’s not like Marxists were dumb about that. And it’s also not true that even Bukharin, who’s the person who actually came up with Stalin’s slogan about socialism in one country, himself killed by Stalin, so it’s something to think about. But it’s not even the case there that the Bolsheviks went in with that as the theory. That was a concession to the German revolution failing.

They thought they had to build capacity, and actually Bukharin’s “socialism in one country” was basically, Hey, we have to keep the peasants aligned with the working class. The way to do that is through some acceptance of marketization. Our goal is to get rid of markets, but if we develop everything high enough, this won’t happen.

Ironically, and you’re gonna get a kick out of this Steve , I have a soft spot in my heart for Trotsky, but I actually have to point out that the great famines in the Soviet Union were because Stalin switched his developmental program to mirror that of what Trotsky was advocating the entire time. So, so there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what happened there.

[00:17:54] Grumbine: Just on that Stalin side of the famine. I understood that the kulaks, the farmers had said, we’re not gonna farm. We’re gonna reduce production. And they held somewhat of a bourgeois revolution of their own making.

[00:18:09] Varn: Right?

[00:18:10] Grumbine: And then Stalin reacted to that and took care of it.

[00:18:15] Varn: Yes. My point is he did that after he got rid of Bukharin. The issue is Bukharin realized that if you lost the larger peasantry without getting them on your side, and actually I’m gonna say something that I think it’s gonna shock people Mao realized this too,

[00:18:35] Grumbine: Yes.

[00:18:35] Varn: That they would be able to put in fracture points for collectivization.

And it’s interesting to me, for example, when you think about this. The Kulaks actually were a problem. I do think the anti-Kulak complaints went way too far, but the Kulaks really did stop production and that was going to be a problem. The other thing that you have to realize about the purges is something that Marxist Leninists tend to point out is that while the death of a lot of the old Bolshevik leadership can be directly placed on Stalin, the larger deaths in societies reporting and counter reporting, that happened during rapid industrialization.

And I tend to think myself that they were in a terrible situation because they were bracketed out from the world market and they need to get the economy going to survive. And they do what one of the original Russian Marxists, Georgei Plekhanov, warned against, which is what was said as state capitalism here. And this was not as an insult.

This was not the way Trotskyists of a certain tradition would use it in the sixties and seventies. This was like, okay, well you have to develop industrial capacity really fast, so it’s gonna lead to all kinds of social chaos because that’s a very brutal process to do really quickly. You’re basically gonna try to catch up with the west, which took them a hundred years to do so basically what it took Britain from say 1810 to 1910 to do with an empire in the Soviet Union in 20 years with no empire.

That’s going to be chaotic. The funny thing is their developmental plan more or less works, and we know it works. Because no one does a neoliberal developmental plan – that’s not even what the United States did. We never opened everything up for all investors to come in and do whatever while we were building up our capacity. Nor were we against just stealing technology.

We took it from Britain all the time. What Stalin’s five year plan did, and people should understand this when they go and look at history, even right wing forces in Asia, who are doing developmental programs, stole that. So even like Syngman Ree and Park Chung-hee in the Republic of Korea, in South Korea, who were diehard, militant anti-communists, their developmental plans are based off of Soviet developmental plans.

Same with the ruling party of Singapore, same thing. But I think in the case of the USSR proletarianization was particularly brutal, even if they were trying to mitigate against it by people getting their investment back. But it’s also true that during the high point of Soviet developmental period when they were growing faster than anywhere in the capitalist West from their own records, caloric intake was really low, where they were able to ration out to peasants cause they were trying to reinvest so fast.

What is absolutely not true, however, is this idea that you have rich party cadres. That’s just not true. There’s no evidence for massive wealth gap. Yes, party cadres were compensated a little better and I do think you can criticize that I think fairly. But the purchasing power gap in the Soviet Union during this time period between, say, a party leader and the average person is probably about 1/1000 of what it is between a CEO and a worker in say, America right now.

So what am I saying about all this? I’m saying that revolutions are violent social forces and they are, whether they’re socialists or not. They’re violent social forces for capitalist revolutions too. They almost always end up in civil wars. A lot of the times someone in the leadership position has to deal with very, very bad conditions, particularly if they don’t have any allies.

But I think people will notice in the recounting of this history, however authoritarian you think the USSR was. In some ways, even post-Stalin USSR was more authoritarian than it probably needed to be. And like I said, I have my criticisms there because there was a paranoia in its military culture that actually led it not to use and produce technologies that probably would have saved it later on. But I think the idea that this is unique to socialism, it’s just historically ignorant. You have to ignore how the capitalist nations became what they were and nation building in general is not a pretty process. I think that’s something we have to deal with. Now, we can talk about ways to mitigate against that.

I think there are fundamental errors that are made in every one of these cases, but to think that, for example, that was just socialism, that caused all that. Honestly, I think some later Trotskyists throw out, oh, Stalin was just a uniquely bad egg. And I’m like, no, maybe you can talk about why you don’t want to put a revolutionary war leader in charge of a state.

You know? But Stalin was not particularly uniquely brutal, or uniquely power hungry. And in fact… But it is true, even Stephen Kotkin’s biography make it pretty clear that at times he had actually offered to resign. Now again, I sound soft on the Stalin here. I’m actually not a Stalin apologist, but I think we have to be realistic about why that situation was what it was.

If, for example, the Soviet Union had had more allies outside of the Warsaw Pact and any of them being fairly developed countries that had had socialist revolutions. I don’t think a whole lot of what happened would have happened at all. Now, that’s a counterfactual. We didn’t live in that world.

[00:24:54] Grumbine: Right.

[00:24:55] Varn: It’s not useful to cry about at this point, but it is something I think we should note. Because if the Germans had actually succeeded in their revolution and not had certain elements of the Social Democrats help the right, I highly doubt that Stalin would’ve had to do the brutal developmentalist stuff that he did because they would have had access to the technologies developed by capitalist Germany in a socialist Germany, which was always kind of the plan.

[00:25:36] Grumbine: I’m raised in the US I presume you are as well. And therefore, we did not get missed by the red scare history that was pumped through this country in every meaningful way.

[00:25:49] Varn: Absolutely.

[00:25:50] Grumbine: And so every angle of history has been tainted by that. And so we’ve heard mostly criticisms of Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and every possible anti-capitalist revolutionary leader, including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Cuba.

[00:26:13] Varn: Yeah. Cuba’s the one that gets me actually, because Cuba’s Revolutionary history, while violent, is like nothing compared with [the US]. There are some big, huge mistakes in Cuban history. I think a lot of it had to do with their response to the AIDS crisis, frankly. But, when you talk to me about places that I wouldn’t mind living, Cuba sounds okay.

[00:26:35] Grumbine: It’s really nice, actually, but that brings me to the point of – I’m a junior varsity materialist, trying to get my letterman here. At the time these things occurred, analyzing history within its element and not trying to redesign it based on modern sensibilities. That’s a challenge, but it’s necessary to really understand. And, Fidel Castro had many attempts on his life. There was a constant effort to kill Castro

[00:27:05] Varn: Yeah.

[00:27:06] Grumbine: And would I be willing to accept an oppressive regime that was there to support the working class? That’s primary target was on the bourgeois, the capitalist, the counter revolutionary force. It was there to prevent them from harming us in our gains. Would I be willing to accept certain degradation of civil liberties? And I think at some level, you’ve gotta be honest that civil liberties are something that takes time to develop

[00:27:38] Varn: Also, what civil liberties did people have in societies before?

[00:27:42] Grumbine: Exactly. Yes.

[00:27:44] Varn: We’re talking about Czarist Russia, or Batista’s Cuba, or Vietnam as run by the French and then the Americans.

[00:27:54] Grumbine: Yep.

[00:27:56] Varn: We can go on. The issue here is the horrifying stories that you hear out of China after the Boxer Rebellion, but before the Revolution, are pretty amazing.

We don’t talk about it, but more people died in the, quote, “Boxer Rebellion” – which was really a civil war – than the US Civil War by a significant amount, for example. For a lot of these societies, they didn’t only not have civil rights as we understand them in modern liberal society, but also they were coming out of incredibly violent, brutal pre-histories.

And I’m also just gonna remind people that both the Bolshevik Revolution and the Chinese Revolution in particular come out of the context of World War. They happen when they happen during the world wars for a reason. You have highly traumatized societies where the powers been broken because of the consequences of World War, even when the powers at hand are actually allied with the winners.

It becomes something that it’s hard to imagine. For example, if, say, the provisional liberal government, which highly divided amongst itself, had stayed in power in Russia, there still would’ve been a white civil war more than likely cuz there were still old Russian nobility who were either going to internally coup the provisional government or were going to attack it.

And that would’ve probably been pretty brutal. And I suspect just like in the case of, say, the nationalists in China, that you would’ve seen just as Bonapartist a figure emerge as anything under socialism. So we’re making comparisons on the standpoint of now. And when you talk about civil rights, taking a long time… One of the classical Marxist phrases is that socialism is necessary to complete the bourgeois revolution and that the bourgeois revolution was incomplete. Now a lot of us go, oh, well that sounds all abstract. You gotta remember though, in the 19th century, we’re talking about bourgeois revolutions that really didn’t even get rid of their monarchies. For example, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Britain still has one. [Laughter]

So the richest man in Britain is still a feudal landlord. So just wanna point that out. And we would violently suppress even liberal governments as soon as they were doing something like land reform. And by land reform, usually all that meant was giving people land rights that was held by some colonial and/or semi-feudal power.

And the US started even doing coups and stuff around that. So part of the problem that you have, particularly in the context of the 1920s and 30s, is you have Britain and the successor empire – us – getting involved in places with no respect for, quote, “civil rights” at all, and leading to the need for a more and more defensive response.

Now, that’s a conservatizing gesture. I mean, conservatizing here as just socially conservatizing because you’re under attack. And if people don’t believe being under attack is conservatizing, I ask them, think about what the US has been able to pull off internally because people are afraid of constant internal attack since 9/11.

And you might go, oh yeah, they’ve gotten away with a lot – off of a basically not real threat.

[00:31:50] Grumbine: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:51] Varn: So imagine when the threats are actually substantively real. Now I know I sound like an apologist for these regimes. I do think there are things you can do in a revolutionary party to make these outcomes less likely.

And interestingly enough, I think places like Cuba have done them. One of the things I will say is Cuba’s municipal government is more democratic than people realize. It’s actually true for a lot of places. Provincial government in China is pretty democratic. There are things that you can do that I think the Bolsheviks could have done that could have mitigated against some of the worst disasters of Yezhovshchina or the purges.

But once those choices are made, a lot of the things are irreversible and in no case would you hear me say that the choice is socialism. That would’ve been what you didn’t need to do. And in fact a lot of the problems that you have is it’s really hard to develop a socialist economy when no one’s gonna trade with you.

That is why in classical Marxism, they really thought it was important for the revolutions to happen actually in a lot of the core countries because they were afraid that if they happened in a lot of the peripheral countries, that the building up of forces would be really, really brutal. Now, Marx and Engels don’t write a lot about that, but I’ve talked about Plekhanov and Kautsky and a lot of the early Marxists did write about that.

[00:33:28] Grumbine: Is this not the fundamental divide between Stalin and Trotsky?

[00:33:33] Varn: Which one?

[00:33:34] Grumbine: Trotsky believed you needed to have world socialism for you to actually have socialism, and Stalin was committed to the Soviet.

[00:33:43] Varn: So it is the particular divide after the 1930s. But what I find ironic about that as well, Stalin did pick up Bukharin’s “socialism in one country.” Stalin never thought that they were gonna just keep socialism in the Soviet Union. That’s why there was a Comintern. And for those of you who don’t know what a Comintern is, the Comintern was the Third International, the International Congress of Communist Parties.

It was a successor to the second Comintern, which broke apart in response to World War I. So the idea that Stalin just thought that they were gonna do socialism just in the USSR – which was already an international bloc, I will add – is ludicrous. Now, here’s where things get complicated. During the 1920s in particular, and because of, I think, understandable resentment to where a lot of the social democrats went.

There was what is called third periodism where Stalin identified the social democrats as social fascists and was unwilling to work with the united front, which united front was socialist parties banding together internationally, and this was a disaster in Europe. Fascism is tied into this, almost undeniably, but it actually was kind of good for the United States.

That’s actually the high period of socialist organizing in the US because we don’t have another socialist party in the United States. We had the Socialist Party who was in allegiance with the Populist Party at times, but that was it. Once the populist party loses its base in sharecroppers, basically, William Jennings Bryan, and a lot of its leaders have to make concessions with the Democratic party, which is why that kinda is the natural party for the popular front, which is how Stalin pivots after Hitler invades.

Okay. We have to fight fascism. We need to form a popular front and work with bourgeois governments. I think a lot of the mistakes the Soviet Union makes as far as its relationship to socialists outside of the Soviet Union, have to do with the fact that they can’t figure out who the allies are. And the other problem with that though, and this is where I’m slightly more sympathetic to Stalin, it’s unclear who the allies are.

If you see fascism as a threat, but you think, okay, it’s retrograde nationalist socialism with very conservative and jingoistic elements, stuff that Lenin condemned, Marx condemned, et cetera, but it is nominally against parts of the bourgeoisie,what do you do? Now, I think the answer is NOT the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

And I do think that’s one of the things where Stalin really screwed up. But I actually don’t think it’s an easy question is actually where I’m getting on this. It’s not an easy question because you know what the British Empire in particular has done.

[00:37:18] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on Periscope, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.

[00:38:09] Grumbine: The Bolshevik Revolution was a bunch of unsophisticated people where the conditions were ripe. World War I took its toll and people were fatigued. But in that period of time, Churchill and elites in the US salivated over Mussolini and Gestapo-like capitalism,

[00:38:30] Varn: Right.

[00:38:32] Grumbine: and yet the Bolshevik Revolution really shook the world. It fundamentally shifted everyone’s fear.

[00:38:39] Varn: The New Deal would not have happened without the Bolshevik revolution.

[00:38:43] Grumbine: With that in mind, pretty much everything changed at the Bolshevik Revolution globally because capital overreacted, and Clara Mattei, one of my favorite authors who wrote The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Fascism and Austerity, she is opining that economists brought out the idea of the triune austerity model that became institutionalized – with fiscal and monetary austerity and then making labor unstable. So this three-pronged approach to oppressing labor occurred in this time. And so you have the rest of the world reacting to try to do everything it can to prevent what they saw happen in Russia. Is this not a larger ideological threat?

Did this not fundamentally create much of the strife that offensive/counter-offensive as the US deployed the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the IMF, the Peace Corps, all these different non-governmental organizations that were there to counter the rise of socialism and communism?

[00:39:56] Varn: Yeah, so there’s a lot to pick apart in that question. One thing about fascism is fascism is a particularly dogged problem, and I’m really a scholar of the left and right opposition of the Bolsheviks these days. And by right opposition, I don’t mean right wing, I mean that they were more concessionary to social democracy.

The left opposition is Trotskyism, Zivonievism, et cetera. We don’t talk about pretty much anything but Trotskyism. And one of the things is the history of Trotskyism is actually pretty distorted because it was seized upon by the American state during the period of the new left as the focus of left history, opportunistically. So while I don’t agree with Stalinists that most Trotskyism was funded by the fascists or whatever, but I do think that our particular version of Trotskyism comes out of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the 1950s, and then a kind of active rebranding of Trotskyism and a focus on Trotskyism that was a distraction from understanding what was actually going on in the Soviet Union.

To answer though your question about fascism. During the crisis of the 1930s, most classical Marxists be they Bolsheviks or outside of the Bolsheviks, thought that we were in our near terminal crisis of capital. It fit the predictions. They had called it pretty correctly about the nature of markets and the likelihood that it was going to break out in an inter-imperial war.

What happens, however, is you start getting these defectors, and one thing I think that makes fascism really hard to understand, and particularly Italian fascism – German Nazism is actually more particular – is that it has strong support of the bourgeoisie, even though it does discipline the bourgeoisie more than say the liberal elite.

It speaks the language of proletarian nationalism. So if you are a communist, it uses that rhetoric and its leadership is about 50% former communists and socialists. Mussolini himself was part of the left faction of the socialist youth. A whole lot of former communists and socialists are in the ranks of the fascists.

What’s interesting though is well then why are the national bourgeoisie supporting him so much? Why are the international bourgeoisie supporting him so much if it’s made up of communists? Well, it’s because it’s explicitly a collaborationist project, and by collaborationist I mean it’s explicit. The promise of fascism from people like Giovan Gentile, one of the primary theorists of fascism, it was praised by Lenin at one point. So I want people to understand how complicated this history is.

[00:42:46] Grumbine: Indeed.

[00:42:49] Varn: He was offering a kind of quasi socialist developmentalism that talked about disciplining all the classes and keeping them together. Now, for those of you who know the fundamental tenets of Marxism, the most important proposition of Marxism is all history is class struggle. How that class struggle fights out, we’re actually pretty open on, but that it’s a class struggle is the primary thing.

So the idea that you could run a state where all social classes worked in harmony and remain social classes, that doesn’t make sense to us. But it was very useful for a lot of capitalists who had seen that the classical mode of capitalism, the quote unquote entrepreneurial capitalism was dying. Now, when I say the entrepreneurial capitalism, I do not mean that there was not state involvement in the development of capitalism.

There absolutely was anyone who studied the history of capital, even if they’re not a Marxist. You can read the French scholar Braudel, who goes into how the state’s involved in the creation of capitalism in France, England, and the Italian city states as early as the 1600s. But there is a fundamental difference in the way capital is organized.

And if you look at the way capital is organized in the 19th century, before the Soviet Union, before the New Deal, before trade unionism, before chartalism even, what you see is a system that concentrates wealth at the top in an unsustainable way, kinda like now. Hmm. That has very weak governments that is different from now and that is highly unstable.

The number of depressions and recessions that were had just in the United States between say 1850 and 1910 is pretty astounding. And it was impoverishing. It was pretty clear that things were getting really bad, just even in the core of the capitalist world, which in the 19th century would’ve been London.

One fact that I like to remind people of, maybe they don’t know it, but social relations in London had decayed to the point that about 40% of the women in London, according to some stats I’ve read, were sex workers. And actually, I should be more specific, they were prostitutes. Why? Because you were either a household servant, an heiress, or you were married. And if you, for whatever reason, were shut out of that, that was the only option for you. That’s how decayed social relations were. It was pretty clear to the old elites of which FDR was one, that that was unsustainable, that eventually if they didn’t do something about that, that they really would be in a kind of Bolshevik revolution in the cores of capital. And that absolutely terrified them.

And fascism was one of the ways they saw to buy that off. The other way, and I know this is gonna make me unpopular in MMT circles, is Keynesianism. And the funny thing about Keynesianism is, for a while it kind of worked. But that’s why they were looking that way. And yes, I think it was a fundamental threat. What you see with fascism that’s kind of terrifying is you do have this invention of an austerity order.

Now, is that actually inherent in the fascist economics? It’s hard to say. It was definitely true in Spain with the Falange. The Falange are weird though. The Nazis are actually all over the place economically. Sometimes they’re actually flirting with what is called shachtism, which is a loose money “socialism.”

And socialism here appears in quotation marks. And other times, like during Hitler’s rise, they were pretty austere. It really depended on a whole lot of debates within the Nazis. One of the things that you just realized is fascists don’t have a coherent economic theory,

[00:47:07] Grumbine: Right.

[00:47:08] Varn: …which is something Trotsky said, but because Trosky said that he thought that they weren’t really gonna be that dangerous, that they were just gonna peter out.

And while I think in the long run it’s kind of true, in the short run, I don’t know, you can kill like half the planet. So, you know, it seems like a world historical tragedy not to catch that. So I will say the capitalist world was far more enamored, particularly early on, with at least the a Italian fascists.

You’re absolutely right to point out Mussolini specifically, the Germans were a little bit harder for people to get on board with. I also think it was less well understood, weirdly. It also seemed like the culmination, if you’re one of these capitalist industrialists, and it’s hard to see this now because we have lived this weird mirror image world of neoliberalism, which is not the capitalist world of the 19th century, but likes to try to convince you that it is.

If you wanna talk about the ideologues of austerity and neoliberalism, they’re always trying to pretend that we’re in some entrepreneurial capital period, and we’re absolutely not.

[00:48:22] Grumbine: Right. [Laughter]

[00:48:23] Varn: They know that too. Their theory actually indicates that they know it. They’re constantly talking about public-private partnerships creating new markets.

But yeah, fascism was seen as a way to restore development to capital because capital profit rates were becoming… the tendency of the rate of profit of to fall in Marxism. What that kind of means is, whether or not you think it’s under-consumption or overproduction that’s beyond our discussion today, because those are complicated Marxist theoretical debates.

But either way, what you have is a very brutal business cycle. Now we still have the business cycle. It’s still with us, but it’s not like what it was in the 19th century. You don’t see mass impoverishment and huge movements of population in the same way because basically the “creative destruction” of that is eventually just destruction.

And even the capitalists realize it. So I think they were looking for any way out of that situation. And the other thing that had happened is, whether we like it or not, World War I had massively expanded the state. and socialists and communists had noticed this. Bukharin’s book on imperialism is actually talking about this in 1910.

These capitalists are having to rely on the government to secure more and more of capital stability. And they’re gonna need to accumulate for that, not because they need money, because that’s the misunderstanding. Because they need things.

[00:49:56] Grumbine: Resources.

[00:49:57] Varn: Yeah. They need resources, and they need access to resources.

And that’s gonna lead to more and more competition. And it’s gonna be led by the state who have more or less integrated into capital and in some ways, the Marxist line from the 1930s is, well fascism is what capitalism is gonna do in this crisis – so it’s “fascism is capitalism in the crisis” – began to look really true because you started seeing these really strong state governments that had, “fascist characteristics” develop everywhere in the capitalist world.

And that’s the other thing. When we talk about Stalin and the Soviet Union in particular, one thing that’s interesting when you think about the 1920s and 30s in the United States is now we can’t imagine the United States disciplining the bourgeoisie, except maybe a case of someone like [Jeffrey] Epstein or something.

But in general, we can’t in this period. They were definitely willing to do it, but they weren’t doing it to help the workers. I’m sure that FDR didn’t mind that. I don’t think FDR is a villain in history.

[00:51:10] Grumbine: He’s complicated.

[00:51:11] Varn: Yeah it’s actually a very complicated scenario. But basically by the time you get rid of Henry Wallace, the good guys have lost within the contradictions of the FDR political world.

When Truman takes over, it’s pretty much done from there. And I think basically what you have is an attempt to consolidate and stabilize capitalism through state mechanisms. And for a long time it very much seemed like this was gonna be done by fascism. What the Bretton Woods Agreement realized is, well, Keynesianism was softer and doesn’t risk the kind of social instability and, I don’t know, mass death that fascism does, but does some of the same things. And I think for those of you who think I’m being too hard on the New Deal, Keynesianism and all that, this is also where a lot of the right’s conflation of Keynesianism with socialism and fascism all as one thing really comes from. And all this is to say, I’m not here to tell you that what happened during the 1930s and 40s in the Soviet Union was super fucking great.

But even if Trotsky had won and had a less purge-y response, I still think they would’ve had the same problems with the Kulaks because Trotsky was gonna pursue the same policy there. And I think he would’ve had an even harder time with the world powers because he’s explicitly talking about world revolution all the time.

Whereas Stalin’s still talking about world revolution, but is really tamping it down. And whether you agree with that or not, and I ultimately don’t, but I kind of think in the logic of, I don’t know, two world wars, do I really wanna put everyone on the planet against me? When all I have is a coalition of underdeveloped states and the Warsaw Pact?

We gotta remember, China hasn’t happened yet. Cuba hasn’t happened yet. Most of the national liberation movements in Africa haven’t happened yet. It really does look like the Soviet bloc and the Warsaw Pact alone. And then, and I think this also complicates things, the socialist world starts dividing against itself as soon as Stalin dies.

And it’s not just China versus the USSR, although the Sino Soviet split is, if we talk about most of the 20th century being a response to the Bolshevik revolution, which I think it is. We also have to talk about most of what happens up to 1992 was really about the US getting China on its side in the Sino Soviet split. And it’s sort of the ultimate counter revolution.

[00:54:04] Grumbine: My big concern here is this: the libertarian right. The neoliberal, the Chicago school, the Powell memo, all those Birchers. We’re dealing with bad people trying to get rid of any vestige of the New Deal and social democracy in this country. And they haven’t been shy about it.

[00:54:26] Varn: Just to point this out to your listeners, the Birchers explicitly modeled themselves on the Bolsheviks in their political structure. So whatever they say about how awful authoritarian the Bolsheviks are, they kind of like that authoritarianism. That’s actually the stuff about the Bolsheviks…

[00:54:45] Grumbine: They embraced, huh? Well, I see lefties saying, let’s have a constitutional convention.

[00:54:52] Varn: Oh yeah. Right now the right would love a constitutional convention because it would basically get rid of the bill of rights.

[00:54:58] Grumbine: Well, they would have a balanced budget amendment before anybody even had a chance to hit the gavel. There’s so many things that would be just catastrophic. But in this particular case though, you can clearly see that the right has been really working overtime. And January 6th. How loud do I want to be about that?

If I’m a lefty and I was looking to create a revolution, it might look like that. I don’t know. I’m not here to judge. I don’t know what that would look like, but I do know that the right has been light years ahead and you see a little bit of a red brown alliance going on right now. A weird conflation of anti-establishment forces.

And I’m just wondering this neoliberal order that we’ve been living under since Carter, ultimately our country is heading down this path toward ridiculous wealth inequality and depression on so many levels, and yet people are basically unaware that it’s happening. For the most part, people are going through life, waking up in the morning, drinking their coffee, going to work, going home, this is a modern counter revolution to the FDR Revolution. 60 years in wait.

[00:56:18] Varn: So I am on a show called This Is Revolution, and we refer to basically everything after say, the middle of the Eisenhower administration as the long counter-revolution. And one of the things I say about that is for all my talk about the complicatedness of FDR and while maybe we shouldn’t be holding him out as a hero, I do think he basically saved both capitalism, but also did create a regime that was livable.

It kind of was capitalism with a human face for about 30 years. That human face is gone. And I always find it interesting when you listen to the right and the dissident right, how incoherent they’re getting because in some ways they also realize that human face is gone. Every now and then my liberal friends are like, but what do they even want?

They sound like they’re against capital now. They are against the progressive parts of it and there are certain progressive parts of capital. And the reason why they’re against it is it hurts their power, but also what they want is a more brutal, more racialist, everything bad version of what we have built up upon now.

Even stuff as right wing as Q-Anon is actually, many people half realizing this, but turning away into irrationalism, unreason, to not fully grasp it. And that’s partly propaganda. No one wants to see themselves, even if you’re working class as part of a society that was premised on liberal notions of equality, but is the most unequal society the world has ever known.

That’s really hard to look at and it’s far more condemning than people realize. This is an old Marxist-Leninist talking point from the aughts, but I’ll bring it up because it happens to be true. Even in terms of mass incarceration, we beat the Soviet Union during the high period of the gulags. We have now surpassed that in both absolute and relative numbers.

Now are our prisons as bad? Depends on the prison, but probably not. But to me that’s kind of a “so what” question. You have to keep effectively 1/10th of your society tied to the criminal justice system at all times. That’s still true. So yes, you see a real nasty counterrevolution and you see people who get scooped up in counter-systemic stuff.

You were talking about red-brown alliance? I was hinting about that in the creation of fascism in the first place.

[00:58:56] Grumbine: Yep.

The Italian fascists were in weird detante with factions, sometimes in even formally very radical socialists and conservative nationalists. And that’s coming back on the horizon. One thing I will also tell people, when people talk about, oh, we’re gonna have a new Stalin, or we’re gonna have a new Mao.

Frankly, Steve, I don’t think that’s possible now. Not because I think that we can’t have brutal atrocity. We easily could, but those governments existed in coming out of semi feudal or feudal or pre-modern imperial societies, depending on what we’re talking about. And they existed at a level of development that no one in the world is at, we’re not gonna see that again.

That’s not gonna happen again. And in some ways, this is where I roll my eyes about Trotskyists vs Marxist-Leninists, because we don’t live in that world anymore. We need to understand it. We need to understand it as honestly as we possibly can and you do have to cut away from years of indoctrination. I will admit a lot of people are gonna believe a lot of frankly dumb things about the Soviet Union because they’ve been lied to for so long. And so your natural response is just to invert that.

Now, I don’t think that’s good enough, but I understand why people do it. In the 1990s, you and I remember that. I’m over 40. A lot of this BS was a lot easier to believe,

Yes. Well, you had no internet. You had no ability to get information unless you were willing to sit in a library. Things were very different in how we get information.

[01:00:41] Varn: And the forties Keynesian comrpomise hadn’t been completely undone in its benefits either.

[01:00:46] Grumbine: Yes.

[01:00:47] Varn: We were still living off of those dividends in a way, and also the Soviet Union had just fallen, so none of that was clear at all to anyone. I remember I was arguing with someone on the internet because that’s just what you do these days..

And they were talking about the American worker really was turned against the Russian worker after the Soviet Union. And I was like the American worker in 1993 had no idea what the Chicago boys were up to. Would they have felt good about it? I don’t know. No one knows it’s a counterfactual because they didn’t know.

It is much easier to learn this stuff now. It’s also easier to learn a lot of BS. And I think that… you talked about red-brownism. I think the problem that you have right now, Steve, is you have two different right wings. You have a kind of incoherent populist right. And I say it’s incoherent explicitly because it has elements of populism, but when you actually saw what Trump did, until Covid, he was still basically running like a neoliberal .

As soon as he could, he got rid of his paleo conservatives and started making concessions to neoconservatives again, something that we shouldn’t forget. But I think there’s a real truth to the fact that one of the reasons why Trump was so incoherent during the Covid period is the last thing he could do was admit to part of his coalition that state intervention was really working. So he had to spout a whole lot of nonsense and keep his coalition together.

[01:02:17] Grumbine: Right.

[01:02:18] Varn: And it leads to this weird thing where the Trumpists can’t even claim the only good they actually did [laughs] was the economy. So I think this is where this incoherence comes from. But I think a lot of the liberal left, for example, you were talking about the January 6th stuff. I don’t know if a revolution in America is gonna look like an insurrection like that, if only because of nuclear weapons.

[01:02:44] Grumbine: Right.

[01:02:45] Varn: But all that said, there is a section of the American liberal left who is both afraid that the military are all secret Trumpists, but kind of hope that if they’re right about the Trumpists and they actually do a coup that a military dictatorship is what they get out of it.

And I don’t think they realize that’s what they hope for. But if you see what they actually do with the Democrats… If, for example, that January 6th stuff had been even more serious, the military would’ve stepped in. And the idea that liberals were pushing that there would just be a civil war and the US military would, I don’t know, because a third of the rank and file would just listen to these right-wingers is nutty to me. So why would they push that Civil War narrative? I definitely forget that until about 2001 they were like, “we’re near Civil War,” which was a ridiculous proposition I want to add.

[01:03:47] Grumbine: Sure.

[01:03:48] Varn: The idea that the military would sit that out means you’re ignoring the largest military that the world has ever known and just thinking it’s gonna be neutral in its home base? That’s absurd.

[01:04:00] Grumbine: Absolutely absurd.

[01:04:01] Varn: So what we’re actually stuck in is between two different rights: a kind of competent technocratic right wing that is really sort of the centrist consensus – and we should see it as right wing – and an incoherent, populist right wing that’s emerging out of this failure of neoliberalism, but is in some ways more austere and worse because there are elements of it that really do wanna bring us back to their version of the 1870s, which wasn’t even what was going on in the 1870s.

One of the things about the libertarians, they’re trying to convince you that the world would look like the 1950s if we had the political economy of 1840.

[01:04:47] Grumbine: [Laughter] Ridiculous.

[01:04:49] Varn: Which is an insane proposition. It’s clearly ridiculous and part of me thinks that they know it. You have to almost admire (I say this so much facetiously) but admire the libertarian who doesn’t become a weird nationalist when things get hard because you’re like, well, you obviously are a true believer, and that has integrity. It also shows that you are dumb. But there’s a reason why when things get really hard, those libertarians become basically nationalists,

[01:05:22] Grumbine: That’s right. They earned the title, LOLbertarian.

[01:05:27] Varn: Right. So just like there’s a reason why libertarians are all against moral hazard when a bank fails, but they also don’t want the FDIC to exist. So it’s clear to me though that everyone’s trying to push austerity. And I will say this, I’ve kind of given up on the Democrats as being even a capitalist check on it, because of just idiotic concessions.

Ro Khanna signing the anti socialism bill. You guys don’t realize that they’re gonna call everything socialist anyway. And that bill condemns everyone from Norway to the Khmer Rouge, which is insane you would even say those in the same breath.

[01:06:12] Grumbine: Yep.

[01:06:13] Varn: And when you think about that, and when you look at that, you guys are giving ideological cover for people who are gonna call the social programs you’re vouching for “socialism”, which you just signed up to condemn. Yep. And they’re still gonna call you a socialist. It’s not like you won any cred from that.

[01:06:29] Grumbine: Nope.

[01:06:30] Varn: So it makes me think that they kind of know, even though – and I don’t know how you feel about this, Steve – I think that without the social interventions of Covid, we would’ve had a massive crash in 2020 anyway.

[01:06:43] Grumbine: I’m an MMTer, and I know for a fact that not only could we have nationalized payroll during this and kept everyone home and kept businesses happy, kept people happy. We could have done anything. We didn’t.

[01:06:57] Varn: Absolutely. We haven’t talked about this today. I think you know that I am MMT sympathetic. One day, maybe we could talk about the parts of it that I am less convinced on, but here’s what I will tell you. If we’d have spurred real productive capacity through printing money in certain ways, we would’ve been building towards the reinvestment that we’re struggling to do now.

Now we’re under conditions where it seems crazy because on one hand, both parties want to start reshoring to shore up production lines and whatnot, and yet the Fed wants to raise unemployment with a declining workforce, which means there’s no way you can do both.

[01:07:46] Grumbine: Institutionalized knowledge is a dangerous thing when it goes beyond the debate, and that’s what they’ve done. With their trinity of austerity and that interest rates, it’s just a standard flow. We got inflation, we have interest rates, doesn’t matter what the conditions are. This is our go-to move.

[01:08:01] Varn: Yeah. And it’s funny because if you know they’re go-to move, well, they even know that the reason why they said it worked in the seventies and eighties during the Volcker shock, they know that that’s bullshit.

[01:08:12] Grumbine: Exactly. [Laughs]

[01:08:13] Varn: So they’re not saying that anymore, but they’re still doing it. Now they’re saying they’re using it to discipline the labor force. So you’re gonna save us from an inflationary recession by crashing the economy so that even though we’re losing workers because of the end of the baby boom and Covid, et cetera, and also self-imposed immigration restrictions, that you are just going to…raise interest rates until the economy breaks? So that we’ll have a high unemployment so that you can cut costs by disciplining labor when most of the costs from even your own stats does not come from labor?

Yeah. That’s when I start sounding a little bit class conspiratorial. They’re doing this to break labor. They’re not even trying to stop

[01:09:03] Grumbine: By the way, that’s where I’m at. I’m already there.

[01:09:05] Varn: Because you could have done a whole lot during Covid and you didn’t do that. They did more than the federal government has done since probably the Great Society, true. But it’s still sort of anemic as a world response of ostensibly the second most productive economy on the planet. And why did you do that?

Again, it’s interesting, but I know you’re an MMTer, but I also think – this actually doesn’t contradict MMT, but something to think about – that without the kinds of interventions we got during the pandemic, I do think we would’ve had a pretty serious recession by 2020. 2021. We already saw the kind of banking volatility, which we’re seeing right now as the interest rates are raising.

We actually also saw in 2019, it just didn’t pop off before pandemic hit. So the thing about MMT, and this is where I think it’s right, is you can do things, particularly if you target your currency…

[01:10:04] Grumbine: Yep.

[01:10:04] Varn: …to mitigate against the business cycle. And we know you can because everyone in the world, including the Soviet Union, was predicting a massive contraction of capital in the 1950s that was mitigated against by good money taxation policy and good industrial policy.

So it didn’t have to ever be that way, but it was definitely heading towards it, and they seem to want it now. We haven’t had a good recession. We have to have an awful one. And what I’m afraid of, To some degree, Steve, is that because the left doesn’t have a conception of its own history and because it’s not really unified, this is gonna pop off in a way that’s gonna end up being a right versus right battle. And the left is just gonna be standing there siding with Biden and feeling stupid and not even part of the game. That’s my fear.

[01:10:54] Grumbine: Absolutely terrifying and a sentiment that I agree with wholeheartedly by the way. What I consider to be the tatters of whatever left is in the United States, it’s quite clear that whatever it is has no power, no real shared identity or understanding of history. And unfortunately it doesn’t look like it’s got the strength to be able to counter what I see on the other side, an army on the right. And you’re right, we’re gonna be spectators to our own demise and I don’t see any way of changing that unfortunately.

So Derick, thank you.

[01:11:31] Varn: Oh, thank you.

[01:11:33] Grumbine: This was absolutely special for me. I love these kind of conversations where we blend history and philosophy and you have a very coherent understanding of all the above, and I truly count this a wonderful discussion. I appreciate your time.

[01:11:50] Varn: Thank you and I really appreciate your time and your show and I’m glad that there are MMTers moving more significantly left wing. One thing that I’ve learned is MMT really is, whether norms in it or in parts of it, it is sort of a neutral thing, so it can be used in all kinds of ways. It’s not just good enough to have the right monetary theory.

And the last thing I’d like to add, understanding this history is important, but there’s no reason to be tied up in replaying it. I do sort of think this rush to replay sectarian commitments from a hundred years ago. To me shows you, well, we’re back in disarray again. Because when’s the last time we saw this? In the seventies. And what happened in the seventies?

Well, the beginning of neoliberalism. I unfortunately think it’s a natural habit to try to go to the past when things seem bad and you don’t see your own way. And as we talked about, you’ve been lied to about the past.

[01:12:52] Grumbine: Yes.

[01:12:53] Varn: As I’ve told people, I’m sorry, I don’t think fighting over Stalin versus Trotsky when I don’t even think either one of those programs are possible today is a useful part of our time. But it is useful to understand the history and try to get why certain things would’ve happened. And I would also say, I’m not saying that people shouldn’t have morals and they should, we shouldn’t want the events of the Soviet Union’s early period to happen again. But it is also important to go, okay, but why beyond bad guy bad, or socialism bad, did they happen? Because if we want to avoid them, if we’re ever in that situation again, we have to understand them a lot better.

[01:13:37] Grumbine: Yes. Education is key. And with that, tell everybody where we can find more of your work. I know we’ve called out some of that in the beginning. It’s great. You work with Pascal Robert over at This is Revolution. Where else?

[01:13:51] Varn: Yeah, so you can find my work at Varn Vlog. I also do a supplement over at Sublation Media once a month called Pop the Left, which is about the problems of contemporary leftism. You can find me at This is Revolution. I usually appear on the Wednesday show, which is unfortunately named White Boy Wednesday although it’s funny because only two of us are white, and I’ve been on a bunch of shows. I’ve been on a podcasting thing for, God, for 11 years.

[01:14:24] Grumbine: Wow.

[01:14:25] Varn: Which is crazy. And so if you just look up my name, you’ll find archive shows. If you’re really interested, I do have a Patreon. I know we’re in a weird, alienated microtransaction climate, which is gross. I do have all my archive there in one place, at least most of it, and you can find there, but just find plenty of stuff for free. Just search my name, just make sure you spell it right,

[01:14:50] Grumbine: Got it. And that would be C dot Derick, d e r i c k. Varn.

[01:14:57] Varn: Yeah. And then Varn is V a r n.

[01:15:00] Grumbine: Awesome. Well it was wonderful and I appreciate this was the interview that almost didn’t happen. I’m glad it did and I look forward to talking to you about things offline cuz I have so much more I want to talk to you about that exceeds this podcast. It’s great to finally get to talk.

[01:15:18] Varn: Nice. It’s nice to talk to you too. I’ve been listening to your show for a while. I always want to get a grasp of what’s going in the MMT world, and it seems like it’s going in two directions, so we’ll see where it goes.

[01:15:29] Grumbine: There’s definitely some factions. Guess that’s a result of growth.

[01:15:34] Varn: It’s the nature of the beast.

[01:15:36] Grumbine: Absolutely. My name’s Steve Grumbine with my guest, C. Derick Varn. Please, if you can become a Patreon subscriber of ours, we are a nonprofit that is funded wholly by your donations, Patreon slash real progressives. And come to our website, realprogressives.org, go under our media and you can find all of my stuff as the Rogue Scholar. And you can find Macro N Cheese episodes. We are over 200 plus now. And again, Varn, thank you so much. And we are outta here.

[01:16:15] End Credits: Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.

Guest Bio 

C. Derick Varn is a poet, teacher, and arm-chair theorist and used to be an expatriate but has returned to the US. C. Derick has worked as lecturer on english literature, composition, and intercultural communication as well as a high school teacher in literature, writing, critical thinking and ethics and lives with his partner, and a bunch of books, and writes at night. His other philosophical interests are virtue ethics, the philosophy of religion and secularity, and aesthetics. He won the Frankeye Davis Mayes/Academy of American Poets Prize in 2003 and is the co-founder and currently the Poetry Editor and co-managing editor at Former People.

https://symptomaticcommentary.wordpress.com/about/ 

PEOPLE

Maximilien Robespierre 

“Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre was a French lawyer who became one of the primary leaders of the French Revolution.” 

https://www.worldhistory.org/Maximilien_Robespierre/ 

Mao Zedong 

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mao-Zedong 

Joseph Stalin 

https://www.pbs.org/redfiles/bios/all_bio_joseph_stalin.htm 

Oliver Cromwell  

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Oliver-Cromwell/ 

Montagnards (The Mountain)  

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/The_Mountain 

https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/girondins-and-montagnards/ 

Leon Trotsky 

“Leon Trotsky was a communist theorist and agitator, a leader in Russia’s October Revolution in 1917, and later commissar of foreign affairs and of war in the Soviet Union. In the struggle for power following Vladimir Lenin’s death, however, Joseph Stalin emerged as victor, while Trotsky was removed from all positions of power and later exiled. He remained the leader of an anti-Stalinist opposition abroad until his assassination by a Stalinist agent.” 

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leon-Trotsky 

Fulgencio Batista 

http://www.historyofcuba.com/history/batista.htm 

Fidel Castro 

https://www.biography.com/political-figures/fidel-castro 

Che Guevara 

https://www.history.com/topics/south-america/che-guevara 

William Jennings Bryan 

https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/bryan-william-jennings 

Winston Churchill  

https://www.gov.uk/government/history/past-prime-ministers/winston-churchill 

Benito Mussolini 

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was the founder of Fascism and leader of Italy from 1922 to 1943. He allied Italy with Nazi Germany and Japan in World War Two. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/mussolini_benito.shtml 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt  

https://www.fdrlibrary.org/fdr 

https://www.whitehousehistory.org/bios/franklin-roosevelt 

Henry Wallace  

“Henry Agard Wallace was an American politician, journalist, farmer, and businessman who served as the 33rd vice president of the United States under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.” -From Wikipedia  

https://millercenter.org/president/fdroosevelt/essays/wallace-1941-vicepresident 

Harry Truman 

https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/education/trivia/biographical-sketch-harry-truman 

Giovanni Gentile 

“Giovanni Gentile was an Italian philosopher, educator, and politician. Described by himself and by Benito Mussolini as the “philosopher of Fascism”, he was influential in providing an intellectual foundation for Italian fascism, and ghostwrote part of The Doctrine of Fascism (1932) with Mussolini.” 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Gentile 

Ayn Rand 

https://aynrand.org 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/10/new-age-ayn-rand-conquered-trump-white-house-silicon-valley 

INSTITUTIONS

Warsaw Pact 

“The Warsaw Treaty Organization (also known as the Warsaw Pact) was a political and military alliance established on May 14, 1955 between the Soviet Union and several Eastern European countries. The Soviet Union formed this alliance as a counterbalance to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a collective security alliance concluded between the United States, Canada and Western European nations in 1949.” 

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1953-1960/warsaw-treaty 

Congress for Cultural Freedom 

https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKcongressCF.htm 

Felange 

Falange, in full: Falange Española (“Spanish Phalanx”) was an extreme nationalist political group founded in Spain in 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the former dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera.  

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Falange 

John Birch Society 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society 

https://jbs.org/about/ 

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/16/the-john-birch-society-is-alive-and-well-in-the-lone-star-state-215377/ 

EVENTS

French Revolution  

https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/french-revolution 

Bolshevik Revolution  

https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/russian-revolution 

Vendeé Uprising 

https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/vendee-uprising/ 

The White Terror 

The White Terror (French: Terreur Blanche) was a period during the French Revolution in 1795 when a wave of violent attacks swept across much of France. The victims of this violence were people identified as being associated with the Reign of Terror; followers of Robespierre and Marat, and members of local Jacobin clubs.  

https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/First_White_Terror 

Great Leap Forward  

https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Leap-Forward 

Deng Xiaopong (Deng Period) 

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Deng-Xiaoping 

Reconstruction  

https://www.britannica.com/event/Reconstruction-United-States-history 

The Potato Blight (Ireland Potato Famine) 

http://www.ighm.org/learn.html 

Bourgeois Revolution  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeois_revolution 

The Red Scare  

https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States/The-Red-Scare 

Five Year Plans 

“In the Soviet Union the first Five-Year Plan (1928–32), implemented by Joseph Stalin, concentrated on developing heavy industry and collectivizing agriculture, at the cost of a drastic fall in consumer goods.” 

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Five-Year-Plans 

Comintern 

“Third International, also called Communist International, byname Comintern, was an association of national communist parties and was founded in 1919. Though its stated purpose was the promotion of world revolution, the Comintern functioned chiefly as an organ of Soviet control over the international communist movement.” 

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Third-International 

Third Periodism  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Period 

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 

https://www.britannica.com/event/German-Soviet-Nonaggression-Pact 

United Front 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_front 

Bretton Woods Conference 

The United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference was held in July 1944 at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire 

https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/bretton-woods-created 

CONCEPTS

Social Bonapartist 

Marxism and Leninism developed a vocabulary of political terms that included Bonapartism, derived from their analysis of the career of Napoleon Bonaparte. Karl Marx used “Bonapartism” to refer to a situation in which counter-revolutionary military officers seize power from revolutionaries, and use selective reforms to co-opt the radicalism of the popular classes. Marx argued that in the process, Bonapartists preserve and mask the power of a narrower ruling class. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonapartism 

Unitary Executive Theory 

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/714860 

Jacobinism 

“The Jacobins, founded in 1789 by the Breton deputies to the National Assembly, were the most famous and powerful of the political clubs or societies of the French Revolution.” 

https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/jacobinism 

Keynesianism 

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/keynesianeconomics.asp 

Chartalism 

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/chartalism.asp 

https://www.levyinstitute.org/topics/chartalism 

New Left 

“The New Left was a broad political movement mainly in the 1960s and 1970s consisting of activists in the Western world who campaigned for a broad range of social issues such as civil and political rights, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, gender roles and drug policy reforms. Some see the New Left as an oppositional reaction to earlier Marxist and labor union movements for social justice that focused on dialectical materialism and social class, while others who used the term see the movement as a continuation and revitalization of traditional leftist goals.”  -from Wikipedia  

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/22/the-making-of-the-new-left 

Tu Quoque (Logical Fallacy)  

“Tu quoque is a type of ad hominem argument in which an accused person turns an allegation back on his or her accuser, thus creating a logical fallacy.” 

https://www.thoughtco.com/tu-quoque-logical-fallacy-1692568 

World Revolution  

https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/world-revolution 

Boxer Rebellion  

https://www.britannica.com/event/Boxer-Rebellion 

Schachtism 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjalmar_Schacht 

Paleo Conservative  

“Someone whose politics are conservative in a way that is traditional, old-fashioned, or far to the right, especially as relates to social issues” 

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/paleoconservative 

Red-Brown Alliance 

https://countercurrents.org/2019/04/debunking-myths-of-red-brown-alliances/ 

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/the-far-left-and-far-right-find-it-astonishingly-easy-to-unite.html 

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/02/16/akht-f16.html 

Gulag 

https://www.britannica.com/place/Gulag 

Kulak 

“Vladimir Lenin saw the kulak as a “village bourgeoisie” that would be crushed by a socialist revolution. This was achieved during Joseph Stalin‘s “revolution from the top” that mandated collectivization and dekulakization.” 

https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/kulaks 

PUBLICATIONS

Books by C. Derick Varn 

https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/4271654.C_Derick_Varn 

Varn Vlog 

https://youtube.com/@VarnVlog

Pop the Left Podcast 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pop-the-left/id624079620 

Gaming Materialists 

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLexMCrFjzZeR5nNIKCL0bpiPYzO9v5qz6

The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism by Clara Mattei  

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-capital-order-how-economists-invented-austerity-and-paved-the-way-to-fascism-clara-e-mattei/18335391?ean=9780226818399 

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