Ep 331 - The Red Thread: A History of Socialist Tradition with C. Derick Varn - Part 1

Steve Grumbine: 00:00:42

: Hey folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. This week's episode is a part of a two-part series. It was originally a single episode that was almost three hours long.And we thought about it and it was like, I just don't know that we're going to be able to keep folks attention for three full hours. This is going to be very dense. It's going to be challenging. It is like a genealogy of leftist thought and it starts before the Communist Manifesto.It starts during a period of time where most would have been considered anarchists.You're talking about folks like [Pyotr Alexeyevich] Kropotkin and Marx before he had gained the kind of following that he later achieved and many other voices like [Pierre-Joseph] Proudhon. And it ultimately takes us up through the Sino-Soviet split and, and it takes us into modern times as well.So part one is going to be quite the lineage of leftist thought. And the hope is that you'll begin to realize how challenging it is in a modern society to quote, unquote, "Unite the left."Uniting the left is so important. Uniting the working class is so important.But when you understand the splinters of thought, the splinters of hero worship and more importantly, an unintended consequence of being out of power. LARPing [Live Action Role-Playing].We've got a lot of people out there that are LARPing in a society because people haven't quite discovered yet that we don't live in a democracy. They say it, they feel it, they see something's wrong.But still in the back of their head, they either a) believe that they can somehow or another go to a polling place, pull the lever and suddenly vote away the oligarchy, vote away the power of capital.And even just the slightest investigation into history, into the founding documents of the United States, you realize that it has never been about popular democracy. It has never been about "We the people."At best, you see a bourgeois democracy where the people with money, the people with power have say, but the people without have no say. In fact, there's a study that we saw in the early mid-21st century from Princeton that showed that we do not live in a democracy.So we've never had power. We have no power. Not power in the traditional sense anyway.Not power through the official channels and to begin to understand why it's so hard to bring a countervailing force to the current conversation.This podcast and the next one, the second part, will fill a great many holes, and I hope each of you take the time to listen, consider the steep hill we're up against, and begin to realize the more energy we pour into neoliberal establishment politics, the less time we're spending developing a real theory of power, a real theory of change, and real organizing power that emanates from the people, the working class.=============================================All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. My guest is a cool guy. I mean, this is a guy that I have watched thread every needle out there. I am not going to lie, he talks above my head frequently and that's good because that means I got something to learn. I enjoy that very much. His name is C. Derick Varn. You know him as the host of the Varn Vlog. He was a reader at Zero Books from 2015 to 2021.He's the author of the poetry collections Apocalyptics and Liberation and All the Bright Etcetera. He has hosted Symptomatic Redness with Amog Saul and Pop the Lane with Doug Lane, Former People with Steven Malchovich, P.H. Higgins and Shalon van Tine. He is a teacher, writer, poet, and armchair historical theorist with a background in philosophy, anthropology and literature. He spent most of the 2010s outside the US in the Republic of Korea, Mexico and Egypt. And I gotta tell you, he has led a really, really exciting life.And his thoughts and his ideas and concepts that he puts out there for people, I think are really mind joggers. And they're really intended to stretch. They stretch me anyway, let me just say that. So I asked Mr. C. Derick Varn to join us for this conversation because what I'm experiencing, and maybe you guys have experienced this as well, there's a very, very tall barrier to entry within socialist circles. It is almost like trying to walk into the Catholic Church. If you don't understand how to genuflect and take of the Lord's Supper and all the other things that go along with it, you can be left behind.You can immediately out yourself as not knowing anything or out yourself as being in the wrong sect of socialism, or maybe identify with the right sect and have someone really, really, really get angry at you for fear that you might be a Stalinist or some Leninist or some Maoist or any number of things.And in my seeking to truly understand revolutionary moments and try to understand working class struggle. I've invested myself in reading theory and reading history and going down each of these lanes.I decided I would ask Derick to come on and join me, kind of discuss the different subdivisions of socialism and why these folks get after each other so much. What these micro-slices are and some of the macro-slices.I'm sure there's significant differences and I'm sure that there is minor people's front of Judea and Judean people's front kind of stuff going on here.But I need to understand because I really desperately want to reach folks in this space and I want to be able to synthesize an understanding so that folks can hear the story of modern monetary theory and really put it together, because that's the material conditions of today. That is the way the system works today. So with that, Derick, welcome, man. Thank you so much for joining me tonight.

Steve Grumbine: 00:06:48

C. Derick Varn:: Thank you for having me on. Modern monetary theory and its relationship to socialism is actually interesting in and of itself.The Marxist-MMT hybrids are new, but [Georg Friedrich] Knapp, sort of the founder of Chartalism, I mean, it's not MMT as we know it today, but he was from the German Historical School.And while his work was mostly picked up by Keynesians and Keynesian adjacent thinkers like [Author of "The Credit Theory of Money" - Alfred] Mitchell-Innes, he was actually related to people tied into Ferdinand Lassalle, who interestingly thought he was a Marxist. And I say thought he was a Marxist because Marx spent a lot of his career fighting him and undermining. But there is a relationship there.And unfortunately a lot of the history of the German Historical School is obscured. One, because it was Keynesians who picked up Knapp's work later for the most part.And two, because the last generation of the Historical School, called, I think the Youngest Historical School, they have confusing names, ended up with some other people who overlapped with Marxist analysis, namely Werner Sombart and also sort of famously Max Weber. Weber dies pretty early on in the Weimar period, and while he had some socialist incarnations, he kind of died a liberal.And Sombart considered himself a Marxist until the late 20s, where he took his hybrid German Historical School/ historical materialist thought, and became a Nazi. So, um, because of that, that history is really, really underexplored.I mean, I spent a lot of time, I would like to say I was in the stacks, but we're in the digital age now. So I was actually on EBSCOhost, using my wife's account and trying to look up as much on that as I could, because it did seem interesting to me that there is a MMT-Marxist hybrid revival.Because also modern monetary theorists and Marxists like Keynesians and Marxists have a contentious relationship that some people want to hybridize us and some people want us to fight each other to the death. So I think that kind of ambiguous relationship actually goes back to the early history of socialism, which is not what we're talking about today.I mean we're really talking about the history of communism in broad strokes. But these divisions, both academic and political, have made it very hard to understand the historical movements. And I'll give you an example of that.Fidel Castro used to say that he thought Trotskyism was erroneous, but Trotsky was a good communist and it was in the field of communist politics in which he was wrong. But Trotskyism by the 1960s had been co-opted to serve imperialism, American expansion, et cetera.And interestingly enough he was repaid for saying that by the Socialist Workers Party, which is the American branch of the classical Fourth International founded by Trotsky. Actually, in addition to defending the post-Khrushchev Soviet Union, they endorsed the Cuban revolution even though they were aligned with the USSR. And that actually was the beginning of the end of American Trotskyism. And one of the things that I find fascinating if you talk about American Trotskyism today, where do you think it comes from?What nation do we get most of our Trotskyists from? Well, it's not actually from here. I mean they still exist, but they're like a hundred now. A lot of them died in the 90s and aughts.Most of the Trotskyism that we have was imported from Britain during the alter-globalization movement.And today I find it very interesting that we even talk about Trotskyism because the Trotskyist obsessions after Trotsky's death in 1939 was on explaining the Soviet Union.And as the scholar Mike McNair said in a book called Revolutionary Strategy, none of the Trotskyists actually called how the Soviet Union was going to fall apart correctly.So in some ways I have found the fact that we're even having this debate somewhat proof that we haven't gotten past sectarian limits in understanding our own history. While yes, Ho Chi Minh thought is still in Vietnam, there's still Juche in the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] which has a contentious relationship to Marxist-Leninism.Sometimes it's declared itself to be Marxist-Leninist, other times it's not. I think it's back to using Marxist-Leninist language today.And there are the 5 to 85 varieties of Maoism which are radically different from each other. There isn't really a clear understanding in my point of view of how all these divisions happened.And so the debates between the Left opposition, and I'll explain to you what that means later, and the Marxist-Leninist center of the USSR to me seems to be a dehistoricized debate in that none of the currently existing states that claim the mantle of socialism actually believe or justify their rule in the same language and terminology that we saw used in the debates in the USSR in the 1920s. Now they all claim descendants of the USSR or of communist China in some way or another.And this had life and death consequences in the 1970s for a whole lot of people.But it's just not the case that when I explained to you like what ideologies believed that most people in these movements still believe them in the same way. Like for example, someone says, "I'm a follower of Stalin", I ask them, "What time period are you talking about?"Right? Like because what Stalin believed did change pretty thoroughly depending on what was going on at the time. If you are a Marxist-Leninist, you call that new synthesis and necessary innovation.If you are a left communist, a Trotskyist or a libertarian socialist of some variety, you're probably going to call that flip flopping or revisionism or even worse, just totally cynical. My own thoughts on the matter is that it's not that easy in any of these cases.So to get into the divisions in socialism, before we get to the big two that defined a whole lot of the mid-20th century, we do have to look back at the various ideological movements that called themselves "communism". And they didn't start with Marxism, to be quite honest.A lot of what we call pre-Marxist socialism Marx called "Utopian", some of it was "quasi-anarchistic". But the big ones was Peter Kropotkin and Kropotkinism, Fourierism, Saint-Simonism, Blanquism in France.And you might go, "Well all those names are pretty far removed." And the thing to remember is the 20th century really did shatter the appeal of a lot of these different kinds of communism.And I don't just mean because of the Cold War, I mean because basically various forms of Marxism, or Keynesianism in the social democratic countries won the day. And these ideas were major contributors to socialism.For example, "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need," comes from a French thinker, but arguably it even comes from Acts [of the Apostles] like it comes from the Bible. That's not an idea unique to Marx. Nor if you read the Critique of the Gotha Program closely, was it an idea Marx thought socialists could embody immediately.He thought that you had to kind of both materially develop and ideologically shed away capitalist society. And it would take a long time for that to happen. We have the pre-Marxist socialists, then you have the First International.And the First International, everyone thinks it's red and black, right? It's the anarchist and the Marxist. Except the anarchists didn't really call themselves anarchists yet.And the Marxists didn't call themselves Marxists yet. Marx was very important in the International, but he was really kind of representing a coalition of different factions.So there was the Chartist which was the English trade union movement, kind of the radical trade union movement. There was the Blanquist who were upholders of the Paris Commune but thought that a dictatorship of the proletariat was necessary.But how they define that was different than the way Marx did.There were the people who were the socialist in the second French Revolution who argued for state supported jobs guarantees and a right to work, but meaning the opposite of what we mean by it, like a right to work that there would be workhouses that paid well, provided for everyone by the governmentif there was a backstop in private industry. Let's see who else is there. There were the left end of the Italian Nationalist of which [Mikhail] Bakunin was originally part of.There were the anti-authoritarian Communists who would later become anarchists, which Bakunin was later associated with. There was the Proudhonist who if you've read Marx at all, were the primary. A whole lot of Marxist ire at socialists is aimed squarely at Proudhonists.And they were part of the First International. And it's kind of amazing that the First International took as long as it did to fall apart.What caused it to fall apart wasn't the series of debates by themselves. Marx debated with Blanquists pretty strongly. He debated with Proudhonists extremely strongly.But was the shift in debates around organizational structure between Bakunin, Marx and Engels, and both sides accused the other side of being authoritarian.So Bakunin accused Marx and Engels of not wanting to smash the state and thus capitalist power fast enough. Marx accused Bakunin of wanting a secret dictatorship and wanting a small group of people to use terrorism to enforce their will and that was anti-democratic. And depending on your point of view, and I'm not trying to just split the baby here, I mean I've read both their debates and sometimes I'm like: well in some ways they were both right. And in other ways, I think the Bakuninists were more wrong. But nonetheless there were some issues with both strategies.Marx favored centralization, even though he wasn't a democratic centralist per se. That concept didn't exist quite yet.And Bakunin favored decentralization, but he was also accused of by Marx as starting anti-democratic factionalism. And Bakunin accused Marx and Engels of pulling rules stunts.And from reading the history on those specific accusations, it seems like both of them are actually correct. [Wow.] Marx was actually pulling some, let's say, internal lawfare and Bakunin was really building up a sect around himself.So that divided the International. There is a history of anarchist Internationals, and this is when anarchism really comes to its name.But I also want to point out when we talk about American anarchism, the American anarchism has very little to do with these early anarchists and anarchist internationalism at all. There was kind of a native tradition of anarchist thinkers in the United States, but they were mostly individualist anarchists.And then the more social oriented anarchists, they were kind of all... I mean, I mean, I hate to be this blunt about it, but they were kind of all wiped out by the 1950s.And so the anarchism that we know today by people like Murray Bookchin and Bob Black, as lionized by David Graeber and [Noam] Chomsky, they don't have a lot of historical connection to these other groups of anarchists like the syndicalists or the anarcho-Communists or the Platformists.Now I could spend all day just describing to you the classical versions of anarchism that emerged in the 19th and early 20th century and bore your readers to death.But needless to say, there is a rupture in anarchism today that I find really interesting because the people who pick up Proudhon or Bakunin are not picking it up out of a living tradition that they've been part of politically. They're picking it up from books. You might go, "Well, that's true for Marxists too."And I would go "kind of." but with Marxism, there are parties, both the CPUSA [Communist Party USA] and the De Leonist Socialist Party, for example, that do go back to just after the First International, even in the United States. There is a historical precedence there.The CPUSA starts in the 20s, but like the De Leonist Party actually started, I believe, in like 1905. So there's a pretty long history there. Okay, so that's the First International. It dissolved. Marxist and anarchist "never the twain shall meet again."Then there's The Second International. And this is actually a lot harder to explain.The Second International really comes out of the Socialist Party of Germany, which was one of the first parties in the European sense of the word that existed. There were British parties and American parties that were older. But the British parties were not mass participation based.They were based on factions in Parliament. And the American parties were... they were just like civic machines in the 19th century. They weren't ideological parties in the way that we think of it.So the SPD [Social Democratic Party of Germany] emerges and they start the Second International. And the Second International had a lot of parties in it.The US, all the European countries, a lot of the Asian countries had representatives in the Second International. But the SPD and Central Europe dominated the debates. And what caused the Second International to split was World War I.And it was considered a challenge to the internationalism. There were only three parties that opposed entering World War I and Americans,as bad as our Socialist Party often was in the early 20th century, we were one of the few countries that took the right side on that. We can give ourselves a pat on the back. But aside from the American Party, it was the Serbian Party, and then the Italian party took neutrality and the Russians split over it. So the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks had already split over different reasons.But the Bolsheviks left the Second International over World War I because Lenin took the Zimmerwald left position in its position of revolutionary defeatism, which was not just that the imperialist power loses. It was that to promote the wellbeing of the proletariat, one should undermine both imperialist powers, even when they are at war with each other.And to call for peace in the bourgeois wars because they felt like we were going to immediately enter a civil social war in all the capitalist states, although not necessarily at the same time.That's kind of a myth, that we needed to not be losing workers being drafted into a bourgeois war, that we should be trying to undermine our own empire's expansionist tendencies, but that the ideal situation was basically that all the imperialist and capitalist powers lose and only the Russians, and specifically the Bolsheviks and some of the Left Mensheviks took that stance. Okay. We've gotten a lot of names thrown at us and we've gotten two internationals. Then we have the Comintern, which is the Communist International.So if you think about the Internationals, the First International is called the Work[ing] Man[s] Association or the Workers International.Then there is the Socialist International, the Second International, and then there is the Communist International, the Comintern. The Comintern starts after the Revolution of 1917. It starts with two key documents which today is called, I believe this document is called the ABCs of Communism, which was written by[Nikolai] Bukharin and [Yevgeni] Preobrazhensky. Hopefully I said that right. I'm not good at the super long Russian names, but that was the Bolshevik program.Plus the 21 points which was the conditions of parties entering the Communist International or Third International that caused most of the socialist parties in the world to split. Okay. Now, of course at this time period, Russia's had a revolution. The German revolution, which in 1918/1919 fails and its failure leads to the establishment of the Weimar Republic. And this actually creates a bunch of problems.One of the problems it creates is this idea of a slowly expanding communist circle that had capitalist production techniques for the peasants and workers to join together and basically build their own "Soviets", which are workers councils. They're kind of different from syndicates and parties aligned with that to start taking over Europe and set up a communist bloc in Europe.When 1919 fails, that's a major setback.And the next big thing that divides the Bolsheviks is the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, which is where the Bolsheviks under the leadership of Lenin agreed not to basically declare war on everybody all at once to expand the revolution.Even though we think of Bukharin as a kind of market socialist and a member of the right opposition in the Soviet Union, at this time he was actually part of the left and he supposedly cried when this happened. So that's one development. The Third International causes a lot of things to happen. The American Socialist Party, for example, fragments.Priorly there had already been splits. So it wasn't like this was a first split in the Socialist Party.Okay, I mentioned Daniel De Leon, but Daniel De Leon's party had split from the Socialist Party because of disagreements with Eugene Debs and Victor Berger and a lot of other key members. Where De Leon even went so far as to set up his alternative IWW. [Industrial Workers of the World - the Wobblies]So there was two IWWs, one which was the Debs one, which Debs did found, and then one was De Leon one. So the sectarianism is not new. It's not primarily even starting with divisions in the Bolsheviks.But since Russia had such a successful revolution and the later revolutions in Europe were supported by it, and then consequently also revolutions in Asia were attached to it. Both in fact or in name. It really shifted the playground. Now a lot of stuff also happened in the Social Democratic parties.There's a couple other divisions. I haven't mentioned Left Communism yet or Austrio-Marxism, I can get to that.But those have been made re-relevant today, but they kind of disappeared for most of the 20th century. So long story short, the Second International folds.There is a second Second International (that's confusing), which starts incorporating first Lasallian-- so that's that La Ferdinand La Salle guy I mentioned earlier-- and then later what we might call proto-Keynesian ideologies.It was kind of led by [Eduard] Bernstein and[Rudolf] Hilferding. [Karl] Kautsky was kind of removed. And I need to. I guess I need to explain who these figures are because these are also different sectarian splits.

Steve Grumbine: 00:25:25

: Yes, they are. I know a little bit about Kautsky and so forth, but go ahead.

Steve Grumbine: 00:25:28

C. Derick Varn:: Right. Kautsky represented the center of the Second International and a lot of ideas that we attribute to Bolshevism, he actually is the person who came up with them. [Wow.] But what, what is interesting about Kautsky is that what Lenin was mad at him about, I mean, Kautsky was in some ways one of the two thinkers. The other one is [Georgi] Plekhanov that had the most influence on Lenin. Plekhanov is the kind of the founder of the Mensheviks. But of whom he considered a traitor because he was so milquetoast in World War I.Now Lenin will often accuse him of supporting World War I. Technically we know now that he didn't.He abstained from the vote and then when they voted a second time for democratic centralist purposes, he erased the no votes. So the fact that he did not vote for the war was left out, but he did not feel like he could support the war.So he actually left the SPD for a while and joined something called the USPD which in English would mean the Independent Social Democratic Party. There was also the right of the SPD, which included elements that we would call now proto-fascist, believe it or not.But also the Ebert government of the pre-Weimar Republic was tied to that.And there was also the Bernsteinian revisionist and I'm not going to spend a whole long time on this, but basically Bernstein abandoned the idea that a revolution was necessary. He thought that Marxism was going to lead to communism due to development of the bourgeois state and social democracy.Actually kind of similar to an enemy of communism, Joseph Schumpeter.Thus all you needed to do was kind of promote alliances with progressives in the capitalist states to encourage social development and to take over monopolies later that would lead to communism. That was kind of the first debate.But what is interesting about that debate is that the revisionists weren't kicked out of the party, they were just argued down.There were also people who were socialists in the SPD, just like there were these kind of people in the US Socialist Party who were racist and jingoist. There was even a pro-imperial element and minor faction in the SPD. And then there was also the left in the SPD which is associated with people like Karl Liebknecht, Wilhelm Liebknecht's son, and Rosa Luxemburg. And Lenin was associated with the left of the SPD before the Bolsheviks split with the Second International.So this leads us up to Trotsky, Stalin and Leninism. One of the confusing things about Leninism, though, if I'm going to be quite honest with you, Steve, is that there's a bunch of Leninists.We talk about two of them, Trotsky and Trotskyism, and Marxist-Leninism.But Marxist-Leninism, when I get to that later, I'm going to list a long list of ideologies, some of which are more different from each other than Stalin and Trotsky were from each other.

Steve Grumbine: 00:28:19

: Wow.

Steve Grumbine: 00:28:21

C. Derick Varn:: So you can see why a lot of people get very confused here.

Steve Grumbine: 00:28:24

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:28:25

C. Derick Varn:: So Stalin was always a Bolshevik early on, when I say he was always a Bolshevik, his first political foray was with the Bolsheviks. He was originally like training to be an Orthodox priest in the Georgian end of the movement.Trotsky, more tied to Russia, was a leader in the Petrograd movement, but also was a Menshevik for a long time, he was in the left Mensheviks who were closer to the Bolsheviks. But he didn't come over initially in the Bolshevik-Menshevik split.He came over a few years later and there was already talks of a Trotskyism in 1904 from, I think it's Radlusky who was a Russian Liberal Party member or a cadet.So Trotsky was already being denounced as having his own ideology even before he was part of the Bolshevik's. Trotsky and Stalin were kind of two different kind of leaders that Lenin really seemed to invest in.Lenin was also fairly close to Bukharin, although Bukharin often pissed him off. But if you think about, like the intellectual luminaries of the Bolsheviks, it was Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin.But Stalin and Trotsky had the advantage of actually being more than intellectual luminaries. Stalin was a leader of the underground resistance and in Georgia, he spent a long time fishing in Siberia because of that.And that's actually why he wasn't as integral to the actual October Revolution as he would have liked to be. [Right] But he was kind of the CEO brain of this. And a lot of people will say "Stalin's really vulgar. Stalin wasn't super smart." Stalin was highly educated. We know that he and Trotsky both had massive libraries, and we know they had massive libraries because you can find them and study them. So the idea that Stalin was just kind of a hick from Georgia, not my Georgia, but the other one, is just false. He was educated for the clergy.He was also an effective underground cadre member and an effective advocate on the back end. Whereas Trotsky was used as a polemicist against Kautsky often. Trotsky was also a very successful general in the Red army who played an important role in 1917.But his real claim to fame was the Red Terror and the Russian Civil War. So that's where Trotsky's leadership in the Red Army really propelled him forward. Lenin complained about both these men, honestly.He also empowered both these men. He made Stalin the first general secretary of the party. And he also gave Trotsky a lot of important roles in the establishment of the Bolsheviks.I mean, he was one of the heads of the Red Army. So this is something to think about when we talk about their relationship to Lenin. The debate really comes to a head once Lenin dies.But even before that happens, there was already tension around different time periods of Lenin's own thinking around socialism in one country.

Intermission: 00:31:30

: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website, realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

Intermission: 00:31:51

C. Derick Varn:: Remember, the big deal for the Russians was that initially in [Lenin's books] What Is To Be Done and State and Revolution, there was an assumption that the Germans were going to overthrow their bourgeoisie. They were a kind of what we would now call today a core periphery country. So they were on the outskirts of the developed capitalist world.They didn't have that much imperial holdings because they unified late.And since they unified later than France and England and Spain, they also were not in the imperial game in the same way as England, France, Portugal and Spain. This led them, according to actually not just according to Bolshevik theory. A lot of people thought this.This lack of empire meant that they actually had to develop their industry more efficiently than the English or the French and definitely more than the Portuguese and the Spanish.So it was hoped that the Russians and the Germans could join up once the revisionists were purged or came to their senses, and the supporters of social chauvinism were purged or came to their senses.And you would have the industrial production and the industrial proletariat of a highly proletarianized country like Germany and the mass and power of Eurasia together. That didn't happen because the Freikorps put a lot of the revolutionaries down, most famously Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, but a lot of people.In 1918, this led Lenin to speculate about the possibility of socialism in one country. And the first real break between us, Bukharin and Stalin and [Lev] Kamenev, [Grigory] Zinoviev and Trotsky really starts to develop. But that's really early, actually. it's important to note that Trotsky doesn't get exiled until 1929 and he only lives for 10 years in exile, which is, I think, something other people miss. He gets the ice pick in the head in Mexico City in 1939. So this is the beginning of increasing ideological splits.Now after 1921, there was a formal faction ban in the Bolshevik party. Before then there have been factions or tendencies as we might call them. There were still de facto factions after 1921. There was a left, a right and a center, just like there had been in the Second International.  And the Council Communists, a group mainly from part of Germany and from the Netherlands, had split already from the Third International.They were very excited about it at first in by the third Congress, I think that's 1919. So there already had been a split. But these people weren't in Russia like I mentioned. They were elsewhere.And there was already a split between the Social Democrats and the Communists, which began in 1914. So we already have splits abounding. But in this time period you start seeing ideological tensions develop within the Bolshevik party.The first tension is Lenin had a concept that he developed pretty early on, all the way back when he was a Menshevik, where he modified the dictatorship of the proletariat to the dictatorship or the proletariat and peasant. He was to abandon that later. But this is part of what Stalin was early on and definitely Bukharin was referring to. The Red Terror had been brutal.In fact, Lenin encouraged it, but he also had to put a stop to it. And Lenin did put a stop to it in 1921 because they had gone too far in basically terrorizing the peasants.Now if you think it was Stalin doing that, you'd be wrong. The person who led and justified the Red Terror to Kautsky was Trotsky.

Steve Grumbine: 00:35:33

: Aha.

Steve Grumbine: 00:35:36

C. Derick Varn:: So there's a lot of counterfactuals that are unprovable about whether or not the purges and the Kulag [Kulak] war, I call it a war. I mean, the Soviet Union doesn't. But it was effectively war would have happened under Trotsky.And the one bit of evidence that we have is that Trotsky supported collectivization. Always. He was always there.He thought a battle with the peasants was inevitable and that while you could appease them some with the new economic policies, that there was always going to be a headwinds there. And his main opponent was Bukharin. And in fact, he hated Bukharin more than he hated Stalin.

Steve Grumbine: 00:36:14

: Wow. Okay, now that's something... 

Steve Grumbine: 00:36:15

C. Derick Varn:: Right? Stalin effectively had them both killed, but he hated Bukharin more.So when we talk about this, we often read it through the lens of the 1960s and 70s, but at the time the factions are actually not entirely clear because Stalin during his early period in the early 20s, had the backing of Kamenev and Zinoviev, as I mentioned. Now, I'm not going to go into what those people were like, but they were later on associated with the Left Opposition.But during this time period they were kind of a triumvirate, which kept Trotsky out of more power. And it was only in the late 20s when Zinoviev and Kamenev and Lenin's widow [Nadezhda Krupskaya] sided with Trotsky in the Left Opposition. So this all happens.Okay, what's going on in Europe?Well, this is where you have demarcations in Stalinism, because when I talk about the differences and actually the ideological differences between these groups and I feel weird calling a Stalinism, because Stalinism isn't what they called themselves. It's a slur. Just like Trotskyism or Trotskyite isn't what Trotskyists called themselves, it's a slur.Trotsky called himself a Leninist and Trotskyists to this day will call themselves Leninists. Stalin called himself a Marxist-Leninist.And interestingly, considering that they both considered themselves orthodox Marxist, although Stalin did go so far as into 1936 and 1938 imply the Engels was wrong or he didn't imply, he said. And I can tell you about what, when we get to that, we can see here that the socialism one country debate is a big deal. And it's because it doesn't really get settled until Lenin's dead.Because the period that it comes up, 1919 to 1922, is in some ways one of the most violent periods of non-explicit wartime in European history. They had a lot of other stuff to deal with than debate whether or not socialism in one country was possible.The issue that you have is that, and the scholar Erik van Ree is really good on this, and he wrote a kind of, I think brilliant exposition of what Stalin actually thought. But one of the things that happened in this time period is that they're suffering shortages, they're trying to keep the peasants on board after the Red Terror. Russia is war weary. It's lost about a third of its male population, which was to happen in the USSR, or Russia, three more times in the 20th century, by the way.And they're trying to figure out what to do. Kautsky had argued with Trotsky. I don't love that all these people have similar names.

Steve Grumbine: 00:38:50

: Good on you to remember them all though, brother.

Steve Grumbine: 00:38:53

C. Derick Varn:: Trotsky had argued with Kautsky that the revolution in Russia was premature, that they didn't go through a bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia first.And Plekhanov and the Mensheviks had actually insisted on that, that they needed to get capitalism fully up and running and in Russia before they could have socialism. Which puts you in a weird position, right, because you're trying to help the capitalists develop so you can fight them later.And Kautsky said because you came prematurely, you don't have the majority of the population on your side. And because you don't have the majority of the population on your side, you have to use terror tactics.And Trotsky's response was basically, "Yeah, we do, it sucks, but maybe if you guys had done your job, we wouldn't be in the situation." But at the same time, this is leading Stalin who this is what Stalin's intellectual powerhouse movement was.Stalin had participated in the Second International debates about the national question and national liberation. Right? There were basically four positions.One position we don't really talk about, that's a social chauvinist position that was not considered all that serious by these people. Then there was the Otto Bauer position in the Second International associated with the Austro-Marxists of civic nationalism, governmental unity.So basically like you would have like a Jewish autonomous self-government overlapping with an Austrian autonomous self-government. And we have to remember that the Austro-Marxists were in the Austrian Hungarian Empire which was a multiethnic state.Then the left of that debate, which was Rosa Luxembourg and Anton Pannekoek associated with the Dutch Council Communists that I mentioned earlier, who argued that "No, you just need one communist government, it doesn't matter what their nations are."And then Lenin and Stalin, although their positions aren't exactly the same, but took a position of national liberation and internationalism, meaning that nations should have semi-autonomous governments based on language and culture, but they should be unified in the international. So it's kind of a middle position. And that was what Stalin really advocated for in Georgia.And one thing to remember about Georgia is it's in the Caucasus and it's also multiethnic.So the national question was what Stalin thought about the most and before he became a leader in the Soviet Union was the only real intellectual question that he was seen as contributing to. But it was a super important one.And you can see there's kind of a continuity here why Stalin would be attracted to the socialism in one country idea, but he didn't come up with it, Bukharin did. And exactly what it meant or whether or not there'd be a global revolution.Stalin didn't say he was giving up on a global revolution until 1936, although that may have been to calm down Western fears. And he only officially said it in official Soviet ideology in 1938. Okay, so those are kind of the precursor differences.What are the ideological differences? It's easier to say what they are with Trotskyism, because Trotskyism kind of develops as an ideology once Trotsky leaves the Soviet Union.There are some ideas that he had very early on, socialist internationalism, stuff like that. But it's hard to say that the Marxist Leninists gave up socialist internationalism. They really kind of didn't.But there was three positions in these debates in 1921. There's the Trotskyist position, which is if you don't make the revolution international.Now a lot of people say, "Oh, he's saying you need to have global revolution all at once." Trotsky actually didn't believe that. Later Trotskyists do. But Trotsky didn't believe that. There were people who were kind of like Remnickists.This is kind of associated with Kamenev and Zinoviev, who thought that you could have socialism in one country for a little while, but if you didn't expand it somewhat relatively soon, that it might fall back into capitalism.And then there was Bukharin's position, which is that, "Yes, we want an international. We want world Communism, but there is no reason that socialism in one country would automatically lead to a return to capitalism." Now, there are some nuances here.For example, socialism in one country, Stalin said it had to be a large country like Russia or the United States or China, that it couldn't really be smaller countries. So smaller countries would still need to join the International.Even though Stalin was a promoter of socialism in one country, he still believed in international communism enough that he had a Comintern until 1942. And even after the Comintern was disbanded after the war, there's another association called the Cominform, which we don't really talk about very much.There was more of a diplomatic association and the Warsaw Pact, which was more of a substantive political agreement that emerged after World War II.Okay, so that's the first big difference. The second big difference is Stalin had a two or even three stage notion of revolution and Trotsky had an idea called the permanent revolution.Trotsky basically believed that once a bourgeois democratic revolution happened, that as soon as productive forces were high enough to support it, there would be a financial crisis that would force the bourgeoisie into retrenchment and that the various national proletarians would be able to overthrow that bourgeoisie in a permanent revolution. And that that revolution had to be maintained to fight off bureaucracy developing and becoming a new class. Stalin thought that was kind of dumb. I mean, I don't really know how else to say it.He accused Trotsky of things that I think was false, but he did accuse him of some things that I think may have been true, which that if you try to expand too fast, the Soviet Union's going to get defeated by capitalist forces and we're going to lose anyway. Also because of stuff hinted at by Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Program, which was a big deal for Lenin.Lenin's one of the people who really focused on it, but was not so much of a big deal for Stalin, but he still referred to it. You needed a kind of transitionary revolution, so you needed a political revolution and then a social economic revolution.And then later Mao divides this up into three parts. You need a political revolution, you need a social economic revolution, and you need a cultural revolution.So Trotsky, you have one continuous revolution that happens almost immediately as soon as you get productive forces up and running in a bourgeois democratic, after a bourgeois democratic revolution, and then you have a kind of permanent revolution there.Now, one of the things I find funny is despite all the debates between like Maoist forms of Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist forms of Marxist-Leninists, is they actually agree on bureaucracy and the problems of bureaucracy. That's why the cultural revolution happened. And so that's the second difference.Another difference from Trotsky, from all other forms of communism, is traditionally socialists and Communists had what was called a minimum and maximum program.So you had a program that you called to in the bourgeois democratic states to kind of come to power and then you have a maximum program which was to build communism once you did come to power. Now the Bolsheviks thought they were in the maximum program because they've had the revolution.Trotsky came up with this concept in the late 30s called the transitional program.And that was because he thought that, and to be fair, the Marxist-Leninists early on thought this too, that there's going to be an economic crisis that was going to make capitalism untenable after World War II was over, and that you were going to need a transitional program to get there, to try to have an electoral movement to do that. And so that is something unique to Trotskyists. Now different Trotskyists disagree about what the transitional program is.

Steve Grumbine: 00:46:30

: Interesting.

Steve Grumbine: 00:46:31

C. Derick Varn:: So we'll get to the difference between Trotskyists, because that gets wild. There's that difference in belief. So, so far we have a bunch of differences. Now I'll tell you what isn't different. They're all democratic centralist.They all believe in a vanguard party. They all believe in anti-imperialism. Their theories for anti-imperialism become different by the 1940s and 50s.But Trotsky's dead in 1939, so you can't put all the differences on Trotsky. This is kind of the basic differences. I mean, there's a lot more specific stuff that they accuse each other of.The Stalin accuses Trotsky being a fascist collaborator, which I don't think is valid. Although I will say there is a little bit of interestingness here.The Trotskyist International encouraged states not already in World War II to stay out of it. All right? So yeah, so they like encouraged America to oppose World War II, which I find kind of interesting. Those are the big differences.There are little differences, but that's where things are by the 1930s. Okay, now there are other forms of Leninism. So this is where things get crazy. So there are neo-Kautskyist-Leninists. They're kind of a new thing.And then they're also Bordigist. [Amadeo] Bordiga was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party along with [Palmiro] Togliatti and [Antonio] Gramsci.He got chastised in Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, which was the congress papers of the third Congress of the International. But he was a loyalist and he stayed in. He considered himself a true Leninist. And unlike Lenin, he hated democracy.He hated democracy more than Stalin did. Stalin ostensibly believed in democracy might have different notion of whether or not you think Stalin ran a democratic government.In some ways they think the USSR is more democratic than the West said it was. In other ways, I don't think it ever lived up to its ideal. Bordiga thought all democracy was, and he developed a new concept, called organic centralism. And he was majorly important in Italy in the 20s. But he kind of disappeared. He gets arrested and thrown in prison and ends up on the same island as Gramsci for a while.Then when he gets released, I think in 1931, he leaves politics altogether until 1948 and comes back and he's like this ultra-Leninist who's also an ultra-leftist. He gets along with nobody. So there's that group of Leninists and there's the neo-Kautskyist.Then there's some other differences that are harder to pin down.There's this concept from the Second International and picked up by the early Third International and maintained by Trotsky called the United Front. And I'm going to try to make it simple. Trotsky believed in the United Front from above and below.And what that meant is that you could form groups to fight right-wing forces like the fascist or ultra nationalist or whatever with progressive capitalists, if you never joined a governing coalition with them. So you don't try to rule the country. You abstain from most electoral activity that isn't oppositional.So you do engage in electoralism, but it's basically just, you know, to put it vulgarly, fuck shit up. And you do not actively support the progressive end of nationalists. But you also don't attack them when you're fighting the other side.Stalin in the, what we call the third period form of Stalinism, that's from 1927 to 1936. This is also where the doctrine of social fascism comes up.Social fascism is different than fascism because it's basically what Stalin accuses the Social Democrats of being. Now people like, "Oh, that's stupid." I do think it was going too far and I think it was disastrous in Europe.But I will say, remember what I said about there being actual racialist and racial nationalist and imperialist in the Second International? [Yes] It wasn't totally made up.A lot of the right wing of the Second International, as documented by [Israeli historian] Zeev Sternhell, who was not a Marxist-Leninist, ended up associated with fascists. That was true. Now Hilferding and the center of the Social Democrats, they were not fascist enablers. I don't believe they were.And we can accuse the third period Marxist-Leninist of being vulgar here. And I bring this up because this is a contention between Bordiga and Italy and Stalin. But Bordiga was also one of these people...He criticized Trotsky for believing in a united front from above and below. He's like, "no, no, there should only be a united front in below.You should never form any political alliances with the capitalist parties at all, ever, for any reason. Not even when you separate yourself out and refuse to do a ruling government with them. You should fight them at all times, but you can work with non-socialist and workers organizations." That was Bordiga's policy. He gets removed from the Italian Communist Party, like I said, he gets arrested, he disappears for a long time.But bring this back over to Russia. That was also the part of the policy of the German Communist Party and the Russians from 1927 to 1936. What happens in 1936?Well, the Popular Front is formed in Italy and France, kind of outside of the Comintern, to fight fascists.And when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was the agreement between the Nazis and the USSR falls apart, Stalin adopts the French and Italian strategy for the entire Comintern.So you had this period of "It's okay to work with people who are in unions who are not communists, but it's not okay to join political parties with them," to a period of "Not only is it okay to join political parties in them, it's even okay to sit in a resistance government with them." That's a major change.

Steve Grumbine: 00:52:06

: Yes.

Steve Grumbine: 00:52:07

C. Derick Varn:: Now, there were hints of this already in Stalin thinking and they mostly show up in China. But at this time period, you see a major shift in orientation.This is why, for example, I believe the Communist Party of the United States ran candidates before 1936, most famously William Z. Foster. And then they ran candidates again, I believe, in the late 50s.And it was always Gus Hall and occasionally with Angela Davis as vice president. They never got more than 2% of the vote.But for most of the 20th century, the CPUSA has not run its own candidates because of a Popular Front strategy. It is untrue that they endorse Democrats, but they have often just said, "It was premature because Republicans are the actual fascists."Or maybe the actual fascist now were too dangerous to risk your own candidate and splitting the progressive vote. Like I said, there were periods where that wasn't true both before 1936 and then after... when does Gus Hall first run? I think it's the late 1950s.So that's why they do that. Now you might go, "Well, that's weird."This is why you can have Marxist-Leninists who have a entryist position towards the Democratic Party and Marxist-Leninists who don't. It depends on whether or not they're listening to Stalin from 1927 to 1936 or Stalin from 1938 to 1951. This is kind of an interesting issue. Okay.We got all these ideologies. These are the major differences.The reason why I'm hesitant to say the other major differences between the Marxist-Leninist and the Trotskyist is it really does depend on what kind of Marxist- Leninist you are as to what other differences you have from Trotskyism.

Steve Grumbine: 00:53:49

: Just out of curiosity, how many people in these time periods? And obviously this is not an exact thing, but there's a certain uber, "I know everything" kind of mindset. Was this common knowledge amongst the people?Were they all adequately...?

Steve Grumbine: 00:54:05

C. Derick Varn:: Absolutely not.

Steve Grumbine: 00:54:06

: Okay, that's what I'm trying to understand. This is still elite circles talking elite theory amongst other elites. This is still kind of...

Steve Grumbine: 00:54:14

C. Derick Varn:: Or you're involved in active civil wars if you're not an elite. Okay, so like.So for example, in the United States, it was very hard to get a lot of this information, particularly after 1951, because the Cold War made it very difficult. And then some of the documents, explains the Second International, Steven, are still not translated.There are some people in Britain trying to translate them now. Now, I find this fascinating because what it implies is the reason why we have so much of the Russian information is two reasons.One is the New Left and the other is the CIA. And I don't even mean the CIA is like perpetuating lies, although they did that plenty. I mean, they encouraged scholarship on this.They did not encourage scholarship on Marxism or Communism in general. Yes, this is fairly elite theory, or it's you're actually involved in revolutions with actual governments, with actual workers, and people are actually killing each other. Those are the ways you know this. And some of it we are only learning now because some of the earlier documents have only recently been translated.We only had access to the Soviet and Chinese archives for a brief period of time. We don't anymore. So basically you could go in and study it from like 1998 to like 2009.And a lot of the archives aren't so much open for Americans, although the Chinese are not that secretive about this stuff. There are books available in English written by people from countries that do have access to get into the Chinese archives if you really want to.For some of them, as long as it's before 1982.

Steve Grumbine: 00:55:39

: Interesting.

Steve Grumbine: 00:55:42

C. Derick Varn:: So there's a lot going on here. Plus the CIA's involvement in all this makes this very, very difficult to trace.And the other thing that I'll say about in the United States, both the SWP [Socialist Workers Party], the Trotskyist are one of the main Trotskyist groups in the CPUSA. From the 1950s forward, both were full of COINTELPRO [Counter Intelligence Program] agents. And we know it because those documents have been mostly declassified now.

Steve Grumbine: 00:56:06

: Wow.

Steve Grumbine: 00:56:07

C. Derick Varn:: So there's a very much fog of war on this stuff until the 21st century. So yeah, most of the people in America, most of the students arguing about this in the 1960s didn't know this stuff.

Steve Grumbine: 00:56:17

:

Steve Grumbine: 00:56:18

C. Derick Varn:: They barely had access to it. And then Marxist-Leninism kind of goes haywire after Khrushchev's secret speech. Now I am of a contradictory position towards Khrushchev.Just like I have a kind of complicated relationship to Stalin, I have a very complicated relationship towards Khrushchev. He made the Sino-Soviet split almost inevitable, although that had started under Stalin, if we're honest.I think part of the motivation of the secret speech was to save his own ass, to be quite frank, because he was implicated in a lot of the stuff during the purges.And he came up with a doctrine of detente and peaceful coexistence which he extrapolated from Stalin, but basically set the Soviet Union up for some real problems later on like IMF loans. Oh yeah. But I also think of the post-classical period USSR leaders, he wasn't nearly the worst one at all. So, you know, I'm very torn on him.It's a similar to why I'm torn on Mao in the 70s because I think he does some things that are kind of unforgivable. But Marxist-Leninism really goes haywire after this period and there's a bunch of reasons why. But you'd already had the Trotsky-Stalin split.Now you know, Marxist-Leninists will talk about "Trotskyism's never won a revolution." I'm like, "Yeah, fair enough. But Trotsky led the Red Army during revolution. So that's not the own you think it is."                                                                                 

Steve Grumbine: 00:57:44

: Right.

Steve Grumbine: 00:57:45

C. Derick Varn:: But it is true that after Trotsky's death, Trotskyism is a mass movement in Latin America and even parts of Asia, but they kind of don't take power anywhere. All right? And weirdly, Trotskyism really becomes more viable in the 1960s. There's a lot of unions started by people related to Marxist-Leninists.There's a lot of unions started by anarchists. There is one union started by Trotskyists in the United States and that's the Teamsters. So that's fun. They just aren't as successful.There's a variety of theories as to why this is the case, but one of the main things is Trotskyism starts splitting amongst itself immediately.All right? Before Trotsky's even dead, you have James Burnham and Max Shachtman leaving the SWP to form a tendency because they thought the Trotskyists were too soft on the Soviet Union. All right? I want to let that sink in.

Steve Grumbine: 00:58:39

: Oh my God.

Steve Grumbine: 00:58:40

C. Derick Varn:: Eventually, Burnham becomes a kind of Ur-villain of history. He's kind of a founder of both neoconservative and Paleo-conservatism in America and a major figure in the OSS [Office of Strategic Services].And also he kind of whitewashes, he is Italian fascist. So Burnham's a fun guy. And Shachtman. Shachtman is not a neoconservative himself. That's kind of a myth.But Shachtman, kind of soft, abandons Trotskyism in the 50s. He becomes the head of the post Cold War 1960s socialist party in America and he dissolves it.And his major ideological successors either become neoconservatives or they become [Michael] Harringtonites, one of the two factions that founded the DSA in America.

Steve Grumbine: 00:59:22

: No kidding.

Steve Grumbine: 00:59:23

C. Derick Varn:: That's Shachtman's line. Shachtman also inspired the Independent Socialists who joined with the International Socialists later.That the key figure from that movement is Hal Draper. I really like Draper's scholarship, but that's a division there.Now that's just in America, Trotskyism breaks off into, quote, orthodox Trotskyism, third Campism, Mandalism, Pabloism, Passadism, et cetera. All right, Orthodox Trotskyism is Soviet Defensist. So what does that mean?Interestingly, after Stalin's dead and Trotsky's dead, there were a few parties that become interested in talking about the deformed worker state in the Soviet Union. But defending the Soviet Union against the capitalist, that also means that by the 60s they're fighting Maoists who claim lineage to Stalin.Because some of the Maoists hate the Soviet Union more than the Trotskyists do. [Wow.] One of the reasons why I know that socialism in the West really failed is that we don't acknowledge all this.

Steve Grumbine: 01:00:28

: First I've heard this. I'm loving it. It's such an incredible deep dive. And I'm sure you're saying I'm just scraping the surface, you know, it's like, wow.

Steve Grumbine: 01:00:36

C. Derick Varn:: Yeah, I'm trying to go as fast as I can. 

Steve Grumbine: 01:00:39

: Actually you're doing amazing. Thank you, Derek.

Steve Grumbine: 01:00:40

C. Derick Varn:: All right, thank you so much.

Steve Grumbine: 01:00:42

: And here is a teaser for next Week's episode, Part 2 with C. Derick Varn.

Narrator: 01:00:49

: If you're hearing this, congrats. You made it through Part one of the Red Thread with C. Derick Varn.And we thank you for patronizing the crucial content we create as we attempt to awaken the miseducated and disinformed masses. We covered a lot of heavy, highbrow and frankly hidden from history highlights as we explored the nooks and crannies of socialist lore.But we have plenty more where that came from as Derick and Steve banged out an additional hour of stupendous contentious yet refreshingly unpretentious dialogue like critiquing everyone's favorite mass murdering dictator, Uncle Joe Stalin.

Narrator: 01:01:27

C. Derick Varn:: My critique of Stalin is that he wanted peace too much with the West and that was a compromise period. That's not a critique you hear all that often and a lot of people would be horrified by it.

Narrator: 01:01:39

: They also touch on the exaggerated death counts attributed to communism in the USSR, China, etc.

Narrator: 01:01:46

C. Derick Varn:: During the cultural Revolution, as bloody as it got, life expectancy continued to rise in China. So the idea that it was like everybody killing everybody else and it was all led by Mao personally, there just isn't a lot of evidence for that.

Narrator: 01:01:59

: As well as Lenin and Mao's differing opinions on imperialism.

Narrator: 01:02:04

C. Derick Varn:: So Mao thought that imperialism was a bigger problem than capitalism. Now Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky would all say imperialism as we know it is a result of capitalism. Now flip the order.

Narrator: 01:02:18

: They pinpoint the origins of the Tankie slur that left anti-communists employ on the regular and discuss Marxist monetary theory or combining the class and cash analysis which is what we do here and feel it's so important to the bigger picture, the bigger fight.

Narrator: 01:02:34

C. Derick Varn:: One of the codes for quote Marxist-Leninist is to call them Tankies. That's a reference to rolling the tanks into Hungary and the Hungarian insurrection.What I find funny about that is there are Trotskyists who have supported rolling the tanks in and there were even a few Maoists, arguably Marxist-Leninists and thus Stalinist who opposed it. Mao himself didn't, so that's fine.Why I got interested in modern monetary theory is I realized that while Marx does mention non commodity and credit money, there is a truth to the fact that Marx did not really think about fiat currencies all that seriously because he didn't think any state was powerful enough to enforce it in his lifetime.

Narrator: 01:03:18

: So please folks, come back next Saturday for the remainder of this disquisitionship of the probletariat.A little joke, and come chill with us as we debate and discuss this further on Tuesday night, Macro and Chill, where Varn himself may be in attendance, to dig deeper into nuance, if that's your thing.

Steve Grumbine: 01:03:38

: With that, on behalf of my guest, C. Derick Varn, myself Steve Grumbine, on behalf of the podcast Macro N Cheese. We are out of here.01:03:55 Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by our volunteer team at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To become a donor please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com, or realprogressives.org.