Ep 339 - Sociocide with Charles Derber

Steve Grumbine: 00:00:43

: All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. You know what? I. Let me just say this.I have been on a tear for months, years, and I have had people saying that I'm calling for revolution, "Grumbine's grifting revolution, and blah, blah, blah," and all this insane stuff that only a hater could say. And as I think about it, it's like, wow, how could they screw up what I'm saying that badly? I'm a relatively plain-spoken man.How could they get it so wrong?I've advocated strongly for organizing outside of the electoral process because what happens the electoral process, every two years, every four years, we pop up, you break down, you lose the connectivity. You got to reconstitute. And as you see already, I have quoted the Princeton study a thousand times, we do not live in a democracy, friends.And to ignore that, it's like a child trying to block out the truth because they can't handle the truth. You can almost hear that, that Tom Cruise to "You can't handle the truth" kind of moment, right?And at the end of the day, you can't handle the truth, apparently, if you're not able to get with an understanding of the way the country was founded, of the way that the Constitution was written and by whom and for whom. You got a class perspective. Who benefits? Wealthy white landowners, property holders, not the people out of doors.And now you finally got a guy like Trump coming in the door and what does Trump do? Trump goes, "Ah, mask off. Let me show you what you've been celebrating for all this time", except minus all the focus group tested lies that they put out to gaslight you. Okay? That's the difference, really. You're in a fascist state. You're about to be in a police state, by the way.You just saw austerity sweep the land with the latest Big Beautiful Bill. And then you've got the police and ICE funding jack to the gills. I wonder why. Because what is one of the core components of crime? Poverty.You make people desperate. Guess what desperate people do? They try to survive. What does that look like? You know what? Sometimes it looks like crime and what has gone on?Instead of funding the people they funded the police to make sure that they could wipe out the ne'er-do-goods. To jail the people up that dare speak out. It's called fascism, my friends. It was always there, but now it's mask off. Now it's like "You had something bad to say? Hold my beer, watch what happens now."And so I have talked to Professor Fishkin about deliberative democracy.I've talked to Erald Kolasi about the possibility of a cosmopole using sortition. I have talked to guys like Mike McCarthy talking about sortition.I've been talking to people everywhere. Hamza Hamouchene talking about the need for organizing outside of the electoral process, building mass working-class energy. And still people said, "Grumbine, silly revolution." This isn't a Grumbine thing. I'm just not the idiot that ignores what I learned five minutes ago.I synthesize it, I add it to the analysis. And so what did I do? My friend Charles Derber, who has been on this show before several times, came on and is coming on to discuss his new book.And his new book, guess what, speaks to the very things that I've been talking about. The book is called Bonfire: American Sociocide, Broken Relations and the Quest for Democracy. Okay, let me explain to you who Charles is.Charles Derber is a professor of sociology at Boston College, is the author of 29 books.The man is prolific. Including the most recent one, which I just told you, Bonfire: American Sociocide, Broken Relations and the Quest for Democracy. We've covered him several different times and I recommend highly all of his books.But I hope you'll enjoy this conversation because Charlie and I, we have an agreement. We have an understanding. I think we agree on almost all of the facets of this.And it's shocking because I am met with so much liberal machine propaganda and people that simp for just voting in a few more progressives and sourcing the vote and ignoring the structural barriers to doing those very things. And they want to jump straight to a general strike or they want to jump straight to something without actually preparing and earning that.And it is an earned experience because you must have the support structure in place. Ask any union person who has been on strike and how quickly the people cross the picket line when the strike funds run weak. Okay?So without further ado, let me bring all my guests and from here on out, I'm going to be calling you Charlie. Charles Derber, welcome to the show, sir.

Charles Derber: 00:05:31

: Thank you, Steve. Great to hear your voice again.

Steve Grumbine: 00:05:35

: You as well, man. You as well.Listen, I, I am super excited after our talk, prior to coming on and preparing where we were going with this thing, I feel particularly empowered because I don't want to be right. That's not my goal is to ever be right, but I don't want to ever mislead people. I want to be...I want to be right for the purposes of communicating correct answers for things that are materially consistent with our reality, with our current conditions, and really be useful. Right? It's one thing to talk theory. It's another thing to live in the real world and marry theory up with how you would approach real-life problems.So we've got some real-life problems here in your book, which is amazing, goes through quite a bit of it. I'd like you to talk to me a little bit about what your book's about.

Charles Derber: 00:06:28

: Thank you, Steve. I think one way to start. There was a great social theorist who once believed, like you do, that theory is one thing.It's got to connect with people's real lives. The guy was named C. Wright Mills. He was a sociologist and he's known for saying "Public issues are all tied and intertwined with private troubles."And I think it's very easy in America to separate the two. Sort of say "Politics is abstract. It's theoretical. Personal life is emotional and, you know, involves what people really engage with."And what I try to do in this book is take seriously the idea that we're in, as you say, a very dire political moment. And it's not entirely new.We've had a very strong authoritarian trend since the beginning of the country, as you said, and it's unfolded in many ways. But I think we are in a particularly dire moment of authoritarian and neo-fascist kinds of, of danger. Very close to the precipice.As you were saying about police state. This latest budget bill is going to fund $175 billion worth of ICE police and detention camps. And it's going to be a scary landscape.When you build an infrastructure like that, by the way, that's rewarding a lot of corporations that are going to make a ton of money as we round people up and put them in these camps. And then somebody has to build these camps and these are basically profitable prisons and then ship people off.Somebody's going to make a lot of money off this kind of police state.But what I try to do in this book called Bonfire, Steve, is to say that the emergence of this more naked, unmasked police state is, I think, reflected in things going on in everyday life in America that's very personal and to just give it a little bit of a flavor of what I mean. I start early in the book.I talk about a tribe in Uganda which was written up in a book called The Mountain People by an anthropologist named Colin Turnbull. And they're called the Ik, I-k. We might have talked about them in an earlier thing because I referred to them in my book The Wilding of America related to the same theme. But what happened to the Ik was Turnbull called them "the loveless people" because there was really no sense of relationship. There was no love.He called them the loveless people.If you and I had been brothers living among the Ik, Steve, if I had spent a day to go out and search for food so you could survive if you were sick, I would die.If I was trying to help you out, because the conditions of life were such that if I did anything but focus on my own need for food, that I was hungry and I was starving. If I tried to get Steve food so he wouldn't starve, I risked dying. So I became totally focused on myself.There was a me and there was no we in the Ik society. I think there's the individual cut off, atomized. There were other people around, but it's like individuals crossing and passing in the night.And there's no real sense of connection, relationship, trust, and the kind of thing that is the foundation of society. Now, we are not starving, most of us, although one out of every four to five children in America. But I think we live in an Ik-like atomized society.The book is called Bonfire, and the first book terms of the subtitle are American Sociocide. And in your billing of the book, Steve, you say, "Are we committing sociocide?"Which is a lovely phrase for capturing the book because the book is arguing that we are committing sociocide, which is a kind of collective suicide of society, a sort of breaking down of the bones that hold a society together. Actually, the word "bonfire," which I used for this book, it comes out of a 16th century British term which referred to the bonfire.We referred to the bones that hold society together get burned away.And I think particularly this has always been a characteristic of American capitalist culture based on markets and elites who have a big stake in not seeing social solidarity, community, emerge in people's lives. And it's pretty obvious why.If you allow strong connections, for example, in the workplace or in the community, you allow for the possibility of people who are in pretty dire states, which is the structural reality of capitalism. What is capitalism?It's where most wealth, most capital is concentrated among a tiny number of people and most other people have no capital, no economic capital. In the book, I say also no social capital. Social capital.Social capital is a term that was used by a French theorist named Pierre Bourdieu, by which he meant the kind of capital that is the kind of power and capacity that emerges when one is in a deep, sustainable social relationship. And the more one is building networks of aid and community and caring, that's building a kind of social capital, which is like economic capital. And capitalism is a very profound basis of power and humanity.And what I argue in this book is that for reasons that we can talk about as we become more Ik-like our social capital and financial economic capital are collapsing, particularly among the vast majority of people, leaving people feeling like the Ik without a lot of support, a lot of sense of being cared for.The programs, we've just seen a budget bill where the sort of minimal social safety nets and conditions that allow people to survive under these conditions are being further eroded.And in my view, we're becoming Ik-like. We are committing sociocide, meaning we are finding the ties that bind us together, weakening, fading, being cut, being burned in ways that leave us extremely vulnerable. I mean, emotionally, when you're isolated and atomized, you don't feel safe, you're afraid. It creates a sense of distrust. Among the Ik, people couldn't trust each other because they would say one thing, but they knew that they were going out to do simply that what would help themselves.And I think that the kind of economic and social conditions that have developed in America over many decades, but became particularly intense during the Reagan era and the rise of neoliberalism. Remember neoliberalism? It's a fancy term, but it just meant a kind of capitalism in which there is no collective.The only thing that matters was the individual. People live as free individual agents in the market.They try to create as much as they can to survive, much like the looking for food individually all through day and night, without the emotional capacity to think or care about other people or to really identify with any kind of sense of "we" beyond the hungry "me" that simply cannot get enough food or enough care to really feel safe.And the only other thing I want to add to that is why this matters today is that I think Trumpism and the kind of more unmasked authoritarianism that we're moving into in the current moment is a reflection of this breakdown of both economic capital and social capital among virtually all Americans except those at the very top. There are 800 billionaires in America who collectively, well put it bluntly, they have more wealth than the other 65 million American households.So you have 800 people and you have 300 million people. 330 million. And the 330 million are seeing their capital, both their economic capital and their social capital, rapidly eroding, fading.It's not secure. If you ask Americans today, "How are you going to make it through this week?" They say that about 65% say they're living paycheck to paycheck.One, they get sick, can't make it to work one day or week, they're not sure they're going to survive. That has a very Ik-like character. And then when they don't have sustainable relationships that they can count on, they feel alone on the brink.There was a report by the Surgeon General last year which has turned into a book called The Epidemic of Loneliness in America. And it focuses on the fact that a very high percentage of Americans today eat all their meals alone.People have gone from having as many as five or six friends they viewed as close, to maybe if they're lucky, two or three. About a quarter say they have no friends at all.And if you think about the workplace, one of the things that Marx said which was interesting about capitalism, is that it is dire for people who are the working class because they can't survive without depending on this tiny group of people who they need to provide the means of supporting themselves. They have to prostitute themselves to keep their jobs and eat.Before capitalism, people worked in farms or in their own homes in ways that capitalism broke down and for the purposes of mass production brought people together in social spaces where they could produce together. And it was very exploitative.But as Marx said, it created the conditions for possible movements beyond the kind of horrors and deep inequalities and tyrannies of capitalism.But what's been happening since the rise of neoliberalism in the Reagan era and intensified in the Trump era is that the very idea of collective workspace is itself being devastated.So that, for example, the robber barons of the first Gilded age in the 1890s: the Rockefellers, the JP Morgans, the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts and so forth, they exploited a generation of mass immigrant workers.These workers were poisoned and dying in the workplace and so forth, but they had a collective space that allowed some sense of longer term employment and longer term connection with fellow sufferers and fellow workers who could build some form of mutual aid and solidarity.Now, since we are in a second Gilded Age within the Reagan era, what's happened is that we've moved from this sort of sociopathic kind of work, you know, exploitive collective workplace to a model of employment where the very even concept of continuing employment has become problematic.So the legal concept of employment has been broken down into the gig job, or the contingent or temp or independent contractor, where there's no real sense of a continuing relationship at work. You take the Amazon worker.They're worked so intensely by Amazon because they know that in a couple of years these people are going to be gone. They're not going to be capable of working for longer periods. So you burn them out quickly.Which both, of course, is enormously destructive to their individuality, but also to their ability to connect with other workers, all of whom are being tortured in the same way, and who are transient, who are temporary. They're contingent workers, temp workers, and so forth. There's been predictions that about 65% of the workforce in the next 20 years will become contingent workers.And then the new robber barons include the Silicon Valley brothers, you know, the [Elon] Musks and the Peter Thiels and the [Marc] Andreesens and David Sachs and the people who mentored J.D. Vance, who are distinctive in creating this kind of new wiring of power called sort of a logarithmic power, which is breaking down any kind of collective workspace at all. The idea is to create as many workers as possible who are remote, not only temporary, but there won't be a collective physical workspace.The very thing that Marx thought might be a saving grace for capitalism, which is the building of a collective space of work, these new robber barons are working pretty intensely on and actually even breaking down the notion of a collective workspace. It's going back to the pre-capitalist model of workers being totally atomized in their actual productive relationships as well.And it's not accidental that the world's two richest men, who, as you know, Steve, are Musk and [Jeff] Bezos, the head of Amazon, have joined with Trump and are suing in court the unconstitutionality of unions. This has been a project of Musk and Bezos for some time, and Trump is totally in favor of it and supporting it.So there's a very clear instance of what I would call the Ik-ification, the sort of sociocide of the workplace, the breaking down of any kind of meaningful, sustainable, socially cohesive workspace for a bunch of individuals who are transient and exploitable because they no longer have the constitutional means.There was only a brief space in America where unions were legal after the Wagner Act in the New Deal, and we now have a billionaire class that is very dedicated to breaking down the very possibility of collective work. One, by destroying unions. Two, by making employment transient and short term. And three, by burning down the physical collective workspace itself.And so that kind of breakdown of solidarity at work is happening simultaneously in people's social life. So, Steve, if you take the family, there's a lot of data on both the family, marriage and friendship which is aligned with this.And this is complicated because there are reasons why people may be rejecting marriage and traditional relationships of all kinds because they were themselves exploitative, just like the original workplace of the new first robber barons was exploitative. But there has been a kind of more full scale bonfire of social relationships outside of work as well as in work.For example, the rate of marriage has gone way down. And by the time people are 40, about more than a quarter are not married. And of course, divorce rates are getting higher and higher.And this guy who was the surgeon general [Vivek Murthy], I include a lot of this data about isolation, the breakdown of friendship. This has always been dramatic to me. The number of Americans who eat alone every meal has dramatically increased.I mean, the data is quite diverse on this. The data is not fully reliable, but I've seen data that say as much as 2/3 of Americans say they eat most of their meals alone.

Steve Grumbine: 00:22:32

: That's insane.

Charles Derber: 00:22:33

: Which is just one little sign of how this Ik-ification, this breakdown of connections with other people is going on. And I say all of this is connected to a lot of different things. It's connected to the rise of gun violence.And I have a chapter on which is related to political violence, but it's broader.It's related to this broader disconnection and distrust and fear that people have when people are alone and without support and without access to sustainable income or social support, they feel scared. And people are now buying guns because they do feel afraid.And beyond this, the climate change is intensifying this because, as with the Ik, what climate change is doing is making the viable space. What is it they're predicting that maybe as many as 40% of American homes are not going to be insurable as we race this big budget bill cut heavily back. It eliminated all of the subsidies for solar and wind energy so that we're going to move into more expensive fossil energy again. And as seawater rises, about 60% of Americans live near a coast.So people are going to be forced inland trying to compete for very scarce, increasingly scarce areas of livable, inhabitable land as the climate intensifies. I'm in Boston here. We had 100 degrees the other day.

Steve Grumbine: 00:24:03

: Let me jump in real quick, if you don't mind. You've hit a lot of really important points and I didn't want them to get too far past. So my comments didn't seem irrelevant to the conversation.

Charles Derber: 00:24:13

: Yeah, sure. Well, I see. Please.

Steve Grumbine: 00:24:15

: Yes, to me, one of the things that this podcast and our organization endeavors is to explain to people how federal finance works.And so much of the drive and the celebration, quite frankly, of a lot of people for all these cuts and the insanity that's going on is a fundamental lack of understanding how our currency works.And I don't want to get too far down this path, but the point is that we are a modern monetary theory, class-based organization that tries to explain how these things work. And there's literally no financial constraint on our federal government other than political will.The fact that we don't have a democracy prevent us from, instead of cutting all the spending, literally doubling the spending if the resources are available for purchase. And they would be. And the point is that they are using a term called "austerity" to discipline not only the working class, but to keep us desperate.Because how else can the capital order maintain its grip over society? When you're desperate, you're going to do things very differently. And this goes back, in my opinion, to Ayn Rand. It goes back further than that.But Ayn Rand is the queen of the libertarian objectivist, the great man theory and all the rest of it that goes into that.

Charles Derber: 00:25:34

: And she wrote a book for this bestseller called The Virtue of Selfishness, you remember.

Steve Grumbine: 00:25:37

: Oh yes, I was thinking, you know, obviously The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and all the other lies and nonsense that she sells, but this is being played out on a whole different scale because you've got guys like Peter Thiel and his AI world and Palantir that are literally trying to bring back apocalyptic politics, the politics of the "end of times" and that "We've got to be there to fight the Armageddon." And all these things are being baked into the overarching mindset that they're trying to reinvigorate.Now, obviously the radical right-wing Christians, the Christo-fascists, and I'm a Christian, so I'm not talking about all Christians there, but the Christo-fascists that want this kind of end times world are literally slopping this up. You could see it in the funding of the genocide in Gaza.And yes, folks, it is a genocide, by the way, regardless of what many of your friends or heroes may say.And within that space, if you understand that the federal currency-issuing government can finance all of our collective wellbeing, that none should fail and none should slip through the cracks. That we could literally do that.

Charles Derber: 00:26:49

: And Steve, I just want to add that this end times teleology, the sort of philosophy of people like Peter Thiel, it has a kind of viability in a society where people are in fact feeling.

Steve Grumbine: 00:27:00

: Yes.

Charles Derber: 00:27:01

:  I think what I was trying to say all along was that if you're lacking any kind of secure economic future and your social capital, your, the sort of basic relationships, have faded to the point that you feel alone in the world or very vulnerable, it does feel a little bit like end times. You are scared. You are afraid. It can be more nuanced. It's interesting, among the people who are most in end times, so to speak. This is some of the stuff I talk about in the book. The people that are most cut off from other people lack mutual aid, lack the social relationships that of eating together are working-class people.There's been a sort of idea that, "Well, it's more individualistic people, professional, cosmopolitan in the cities who are more isolated or more individualistic."  But the working-class people live in civic deserts.That part of the things that create the possibility of social capital, social connection, a meaningful relationship. So public space, public gardens, public cafes.Most working-class people are living in civic deserts because they can't afford to be in the small number of areas which have been financing publicly inhabitable space. And so I just want to say the end times is crucial in understanding, in my view, the culture and the politics of Trumpism.Because Trumpism is speaking to people who are literally facing end times in some sense, that when you have relationships, feel alone in the world, or feel like your relationships are transient, or your work is temporary and you really don't have long term security of any kind, it does feel like end times. And what do you do? You look to whoever is going to promise you the kind of security and safety that can get you out of this end times that's very real. When you go to bed at night and you feel scared because you're not necessarily, you know, the majority of Americans are not connected.It's interesting. Even the younger generation is having much less sexuality these days.There are all kinds of things and social media plays a huge role that we haven't mentioned yet in breaking people apart. All of this creates fear. And fear and isolation are the breeding ground of fascism, of authoritarianism and Trumpism. They always have been.At least this is the part of the core of what I'm arguing and showing in Bonfire is that when you have a population of people, particularly working people, who are melding the combination of extreme economic security with extreme community, social insecurity, loss of social capital and economic capital, you have an end times culture which is a breeding ground of fascism. When people say, "How can I feel safe?"This guy, this billionaire Trump is saying, "He's going to take on all these problems of these immigrants and all these liberal elitists and universities who don't care about working people like me, the Democrats, who really don't care about working people and are just taking care of people of color or women." And they're right.The Democratic Party is totally complicit because it's been running on identity politics and abandoning that small area of New Deal politics where at least there was the beginning of some kind of collective identity in American politics because of the extreme depression crisis that emerged in the '30s.I want to come back to you, Steve, but I just want to say the end times that you mention is a very, I think, emotionally real thing in the lives of millions of people. And it feeds all kinds of things, including, especially in this moment, an authoritarian state which says, "I'm going to take care of you.I'm going to finally give you the sort of safety and the sort of respect that you deserve as a patriotic American, as you're being threatened by these alien people who are immigrants or people of color, who are not Christian and don't reflect the real values of what America is all about." And Trump has used this rhetoric that goes back in far-right populism and Christian nationalism for many decades.It's not new, but it's now playing to an end times culture that is an experience on the ground of people in their real lives that I think feels against [end] times because they have no way to feel safe and secure over time. And they don't feel safe to bring kids in the world. They don't feel safe that their marriage is going to last.There's certainly their job and the affordability of their home or the affordability of education or healthcare. Trump is signing that away today.All the things that have been sort of the New Deal, you know, very minimal foundation for the sense of surviving in this society are being burned away.And it's only through a new kind of coming together, which is, you know, as we're talking, there are millions of people out on the streets beginning to protest today.And I think one of the functions of, and one of the importance of this new resistance movement is that it's building on the ground and in local communities. The kind of connections on the street that people are not able to find in their normal lives.

Intermission: 00:32:31

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Charles Derber: 00:32:55

: One of the most important things of the resistance which is coming together, you know, the No Kings protests, these are crucial in the political mobilization of some sort of solidarity that we can't find elsewhere.And it's going to be happening on the streets, but has to build into social networks, mutual aid societies, and all kinds of local communal efforts, if only just to stay together out in the streets.Like the Occupy movement, which brought people out for a while on the streets and where people had places to talk to each other and to build relationships. It's interesting. One of the things I show in the book Bonfire is that Trump people came out on to Trump rallies because it was the one place that they could meet people they knew. There were these Trump Joes who would go from Trump rally to Trump rally because they would know the people who were also be at the rally.And they came to eat with them and connect with them, and this became their way of building some sort of community. And Trump exploits this extremely powerfully.And he's doing this using social media and the metaverse and so forth in a way that speaks to many of these issues. So I'm just queuing off your end times idea, Steve, and please go on.But I just feel that it's important to say that Trumpism and what I show in the book is that people are feeling it's end times and they have a right to feel that way because their life is in peril. And what's happened with the signing of this bill has put millions of people at risk of dying from inadequate health care lacking...This is the biggest redistribution of wealth in history. There's never been a greater shift of wealth from poor and working people to rich people.And a lot of people are going to die when you combine that with the ongoing environmental crisis, which is all part of this thing, and the gun crisis, and the massive shutdown of hospitals, colleges, and so forth. It is end times.And the only way of dealing with that is mobilizing and building through the resistance and through people on the ground, in their local communities, new ways of coming together to collectively say, "We will never accept this."And you know, we've got a lot to confront and it's going to take a lot of courage because as you said, there's 175 billion new dollars going to the literal infrastructure of the police state, the ICE personnel, the deportation camps, detention camps and so forth.

Steve Grumbine: 00:35:29

: The brown shirts are coming.

Charles Derber: 00:35:30

: The brown shirts are coming.I do a lot of thinking about how in the Nazi era, the Enabling Act, which essentially broke down the legislature, sort of permitted what happened on March 3rd. Hitler came in January of '33. The Communists and leftists were killed off within a few months.The Social Democrat Party was destroyed in May of that year, and unions were outlawed. A lot of these things. But now I think you're going to see this begin to intensify in the United States.The kind of image of the police state is all building on this end times teleology that's based on an emotional reality of everyday people who are maybe people who are highly educated and economically protected to some degree. There's a 10 or 20% of people in the United States who are somewhat protected against these things.But the masses of working people and low-income people in America, the great majority, are not being protected. And that does feel like end times to them. The question is, where are they going to go? I'll give you a hopeful thing for me, Steve.German fascism survived because German people, even some Jews felt that as long as they were not being sent to the camps that they would be safe. And they normalized the police state that Hitler was beginning to create. You know, the Weimar Republic before Hitler had been highly civilized.The cities were full of all kinds of progressive forces. And this all happened very quickly. I think that the police state imagery is very real.I think one of the more hopeful things is that the masses of people that have come out in support of the immigrants and the kind of deportation of these foreign international students and people I know right around Boston as immigrants, in a town like Waltham, which is a city of Boston, where Brandeis University is and where I live, near Boston College [University], immigrants are being pulled off the street and their neighbors, who are American citizens and white, are saying, "You can't take them." They're going on. You're seeing this all over the country. That gives me some hope because people on the streets are coming out.I never was sure this would be the case. And in Germany, the German mainstream did not come out in support of the Jews or the Gypsies or the Slavs or the Socialists or the Communists.But I did not know that Americans in Utah or Nebraska or Kentucky would come out in support of immigrants who worked in diners that they went to or in the Walmart's or wherever.And so I feel like there's an element of empathy and connection that is still sustained in many ordinary Americans, despite all these sociocidal pressures and all the anxieties and fears and isolation that an atomized population suffering.I'd been struck by the strength of people's sort of sense of horror when people know who served them coffee in a diner or something, or a driver of a local bus to school or something, when those people get dragged away by these masked police-state ICE people who are being funded now. They're the new numbers. I'm sure you've seen this, Steve. Miller, [of the] Immigration branch, has said, "We're going to detain and deport a million people a year."So they're serious about building this infrastructure. And they're already hard at work. They're now, what is it, 56,000 being detained per month. And Americans are responding to this.And that's a sign that the resistance can still build a kind of sense of solidarity when the overt virtues of an unmasked police state, an authoritarianism that's just unembarrassingly, nakedly visible, is that it can tap horror and resistance that one might not have thought was possible.And so this idea of unmasking authoritarianism, which is a way of talking about Trumpism, is taking a form of authoritarianism that's always been very powerful in America, but relatively masked for many people, is now being unmasked.This is the subject of my current book and a new book I'm writing on called Wired for Authoritarianism, which is really an unmasking of these authoritarian police state characteristics of American capitalism that go way back.So I still have hope and I still believe that a resistance is possible and that it's in right now as we're talking, there are hundreds of thousands of people out on the street showing that they still have belief in some other people and the possibility of connecting with other people to make a difference.

Steve Grumbine: 00:40:23

: Well stated. I have my concerns with the No Kings marches and stuff. They turn out to basically be voter enrollment for the Democratic Party.And it tends to not be what we want it to be.You know, my belief on this is we need to build power outside of the electoral system, outside of the parties, where they can be corrupted and controlled by elites within the parties. And one of the big concerns I have right now is that when you look, Obama deported millions and millions of people. Biden deported millions of people.They were just not unmasked. They still had what Hillary would call their inside voice and their outside voice. Right? So they were still putting on the mask.And I guess you could say the one nice thing about Trump is the fact that he's mask off. You see your enemy coming straight ahead.

Charles Derber: 00:41:16

: Right.

Steve Grumbine: 00:41:17

: You don't have to worry about that knife that Malcolm X talked about being shoved in your back by the white liberal, which Martin Luther King absolutely despised, who craved law and order over justice.And it just adds, because I am absolutely on board with your assessment of Reagan and Trump, but I also would like to throw in that Jimmy Carter was our first neoliberal president and the guy was the one prepping the way for austerity.And Bill Clinton said, "Hold my beer. Let me show you Reaganism on steroids," with his balanced budget and austerity there and reinventing government as he threw "welfare queens", as he would call it, off of the roll and made single moms not have access to welfare. And lo and behold, Obama took the public option right off the table when he had the opportunity to provide us with a pathway out.Instead, he gave a most massive handout to insurance companies. Another neoliberal thing. So this is why.

Charles Derber: 00:42:14

: Absolutely right. The Democratic Party is very complicit. Clinton said, "We're no longer the party of a collective. We're going to abandon the New Deal.We're going to become an identity politics party, pitting groups of minorities and women against each other for whatever crumbs they could get." In the Obama era, as I'm sure, Steve, the racial wealth gap massively increased.The gap between the small elite of wealthy blacks and most black, you know, much less better off, exploded in the Obama era. And it was just a telling instance of how the identity politics of the Democratic Party has kind of pitted people.You know, it's been bad for the most oppressed groups in society.And it's divided further, the very people who need to come together to challenge the collective system that they're all confronting, which is increasingly visible, as you say, in an open police state.But, I think one of the dangers I worry about in the resistance that we haven't talked about is, although it's implicit in what we're saying, is the normalization of the pre-Trump era. Trump is an unmasking force. I mean, it's horrifying, and the damage he's doing is overwhelming, and we haven't seen the half of it yet.But nonetheless, if the resistance becomes an effort simply to return to the pre-Trump era [Brunch] to normalize everything before Trump, which is a big part of the resistance, it's going to defeat itself. Because if you normalize the pre-Trump era, you go back to the sociocidal neoliberal forces that is going to create a new Trump.I mean, yes, what created the Trump era, it was the conditions of life that were massed before Trump came along, which will come back into play and a new Trump will come along.In fact, probably a smarter Trump, which now that they've mobilized and the more the infrastructure of the naked police state will be visible, in some ways, new Trump in a normalized post Trump era will be even more dangerous. So there's a lot of work to do in the resistance. At the same time, nothing good can happen without the resistance. And it has to happen.It's going to have to spread through all sectors of the society and it's going to take a lot of courage. Almost everybody I know is afraid. My students are afraid. They're afraid they won't get work. My colleagues are afraid in the university.They're afraid they got fired by the university or will not get a job. Neighbors are afraid. When people are fearful, they're isolated and they're being subjected to real reasons they really should be afraid.It is incredibly important that people come together in forces that can persevere.If you look at some kinds of protests like the Arab Spring in Egypt in 2011, you had a lot of people out in the streets, but it collapsed because people did not create the kind of enduring networks that could survive this in, say, Morocco, in contrast to Egypt, and in Tunisia. Poland, for example, 10, 15 years ago, when these Arab Spring type things or populist revolts came out, some of them survived because [these] protests on the streets morphed and were aligned with either existing labor organizations or community based organizations, which had credibility in terms of people's sense of safety and feeling that they had some forms of money and capacity in terms of community-based power and leadership that they could build on. And so in Morocco, unlike in Egypt, you had a change of government and a movement toward a different kind of society. Still very vulnerable, but I think that's important. You need a lot of numbers. The 3.5% rule, which says if you get 3.5% of the population out on the streets, you have the first condition for success, but thesecond condition is it has to persevere. It can't just be in the street and then collapse.It means that the people out in the streets and the universities that are joining together in collective petitions and legislative efforts and so forth. All that has to be built into networks of ongoing, continuing support and organizations that are durable and can last over time. Because...

Steve Grumbine: 00:46:43

: Can I interject real quick, Charles, just real quick? I want to read the quote. Me and you talked about this offline, but I get attacked frequently for saying, "Well, what's your plan, Steve?"Like, like somehow or another I am the architect of the revolution, so to speak. And what I'm doing, I've come to believe that you cannot change a problem you can't specifically identify.If you can't address the problem, you're always going to be putting band aids on heart attacks. You're not doing the right thing. And so I wrote this and I want to get your take on this for this podcast.I said, "I want you to realize how far off we are from a meaningful expression of working-class power.People are more focused on a New York City Democratic Party primary winner than, than the idea of building up capacity outside of the electoral system to earn the kind of direct action, like a meaningful general strike that would change the world. Strikes only work when people can afford to survive away from work. Ask any union how people cross the line when the strike funds are weak.Without mutual aid networks linked coast to coast, without hostels network coast to coast, without transportation networked coast to coast, without food networks linked and without legal aid networks linked coast to coast, media communications, you have nothing."And to me, the fundamental problem with all of these things is they're pop-up kind of actions without demands and people are not understanding what it takes.I mean, we are up against powers that are so great, so enormous, so funded, and so well technologically supported that it requires a kind of solidarity that is earned, a kind of sovereignty away from the system where we can literally stand tall in the face of the storm and not be fearful of people collapsing and leaving the struggle because they can't afford to stay in the struggle. And the cost of struggle becomes greater than the cost of just bowing down to this kind of fascist tendency.I'm interested on your specific take on what I said, I mean...

Charles Derber: 00:48:56

:  Yes, I think it's beautiful actually, Steve, I told you I would like to see a copy of that. And it's consistent with a lot of the kinds of things I believe. But let me quote a little bit.You know, I've done a lot of work with my friend Noam Chomsky, and actually I'm working on several new things that are sort of aligned with him and a couple of new books that we're doing together. One of the famous things that Noam often says is that "I don't like either/ors."So the way I think Noam would respond to what you said is there's absolute, I think, sometimes called an anarcho-socialist.He believes that we need to build these sorts of community-based networks of working people in the community and the workplace in everyday life exactly of the form that you describe. And I think he would applaud it forcefully. At the same time, I think he would say, "Steve, I'm reluctant to embrace an either/or thing."So, for example, my guess would be, and this is somewhat consistent with the way my writing and thinking in Bonfire and other books, is that these are not totally contradictory. They can run into contradiction.But the idea, for example, you mentioned [Zohran] Mamdani's victory in New York and the possibility of that becoming a kind of flash in the pan that distracts us from the long-term project of building outside the electoral system. That is essential. And I think I sort of share the view that these are not contradictory ideas, that they in some sense they do depend on each other.That the possibility of building the kinds of long-term structures that you're pointing to, you know, deep in the fabric of social life and of everyday survival and support is not possible outside by totally abandoning the electoral system.I think just as trying to simply focus on particular elections without looking at the underlying foundations of social power and social connection cannot happen. I think more than you do, Steve, I think I sort of see an intertwining of these things too.I mean, Mamdani's victory is likely, in my judgment, to, you know, energize a huge number of people in the Bronx and Queens and the other New York boroughs. Over a million people voted for him.Things in their everyday life, part of which will be, you know, related to elections in the electoral process, but much of which will be just building connections in their community that Mamdani has talked about. So I think your insights are profoundly important.I think the idea that you can build an electoral coalition without looking at the underlying conditions of people's, you know, what is keeping people connected and living on, surviving on a day-to-day economic basis and social basis is crucially important. I think it's a really important observation, but I don't think I disassociate that there's a danger.I mean, certainly trying to connect with the Democratic Party as part of this broader transformation is dangerous because the Democratic Party is a corporate party and is leading people into corporate paths that are contradictory to the social communities that we need and the economic communities that we need to build. Whether it's the Bernie Sanders, I mean, when these people coming out for fighting oligarchy things, they're hearing words that they're trying to translate into their own life experience.And so if you say, "Do I think that AOC and Bernie Sanders and Mamdani are distracting us from the real work that has to be done?" I'm saying, "I don't think so." I'm saying that they are simply one vehicle by which the real work can begin to develop. The Democratic Party is responsible.I mean, the Democratic Party handed Trump the country.And so I'm totally on board with the idea that if you play the electoral politics game in a way that essentially, you know, embraces corporate oligarchies and the billionaire class, you're never going to win. But there are ways of doing grassroots politics that I think can help build the longer term. You know, I'm writing about committing sociocide. Well, you're talking about, I think, the kind of everyday life, social, economic kind of building, resistance building, life building that goes on in movements and goes on in communities. That is the key. But it's got to intertwine with these larger, more durable organizations that have some capacity, like large unions or new unions.Again, going back to the Morocco versus Egypt example, you know, spontaneous George Floyd, Black Lives Matter saying the Occupy movements could not connect enough with enduring organizational capacity, did not build enough organizational capacity. And some of that organizational capacity does have to take the form of politics. So I think I'm sort of in a middle ground.

Steve Grumbine: 00:54:19

: Let me ask you this question, because this is serious to me. Right?You've seen the Democratic Party kill movements throughout history, the Rainbow Coalition, every one of these movements that pops up gets absorbed and gets killed, just gets crushed and snuffed out.And when I think back to Fred Hampton and I look at those kinds of struggles where they built parallel systems. They built education. They built these sustainable elements that allowed people to be bold and not be swayed by party politics.And there's this perverse kind of thing that comes in with this "abundance" crowd, which is basically Reaganism warmed over, that will now become the new light bulb for the Democratic Party.

Charles Derber: 00:55:03

: Absolutely.

Steve Grumbine: 00:55:04

: Because these effers are literally Ronald Reagan rehashed. What is this is like his 12th term now?

Charles Derber: 00:55:11

: Right, right.

Steve Grumbine: 00:55:12

: And so when you think about that, there is this perversion. I'm not going to call it anything other than that. I'm going to call it a perversion. They come at you and they say, "We must be pragmatic.We must be pragmatic." And so they start getting you to cave in before you even know what your issue is.And then once you tell them your issue, "I want you to stop killing the people in Gaza." And then you can see these people coming out of the DNC convention laughing at the protesters, laughing at them. Okay, this kind of perverse, and it is, these bourgeois elite liberals.The reason why this is so problematic to me, Charlie, is because when I think about class struggle, I don't see Republican and Democrat, I see working class people. And if you put the working class into one bucket, now, mind you, everybody's got diverse interests.But if you stop organizing based on party and start organizing based on class, your numbers grow and just majorly.And now all of a sudden the ability to break down some of those walls through deliberative discussion, actually meeting people at their point of need and say, "I feel the same as you." And then now all of a sudden we've got a commonality that we didn't have before.You don't have that with the artificial construct of the party because the parties don't represent the working class. Neither of them do.

Charles Derber: 00:56:34

: And we're in a country, Steve, where class politics, part class parties have not existed. We have a two party, a Bush and Bush-light system.So you're describing a kind of political process which is by definition incapable of creating transformation and real social change because both parties are unquestionably aligned with the corporate capitalist order. And Bush and Bush-light are going to produce a form of incredibly horrible capitalism. And no doubt about it.But that doesn't mean that you can't build political parties that are class oriented, whose vision is class based. We just don't have any experience of it in, you know, at least in the last 50, 75 years in the United States, a New Deal had a little bit of that.I mean, I think in post-fascist Europe, the social Democratic parties began to build very modest forms of post-fascist [institutions]. The European countries had been destroyed by fascism. You know, they were not allowed to re-militarize.And you could build new parties that were not militaristic parties, that had some real commitment to basic social services, that fundamental positive rights, not these negative rights that America has to be left alone. The meaning of a right in America, in American conservatism is the right to be left alone.But in the social democratic political traditions of Europe, the meaning of a right is the right to connect that we share with people in your class, in your community, to collectively enjoy, to have as a right your healthcare, your education, your work and so forth.So if you build that kind of post-fascist, which is what we need now, a post-fascist kind of politics, which is class based, which is based on the idea of positive rights based on class, which is that if you're a working person, you have a fundamental constitutional right to health care, to education, to meaningful work, to affordable housing, then I think you begin to see some possibility of melding of politics and parties with broader, transformative revolutionary struggles that play out in people's actual lives and...

Steve Grumbine: 00:59:01

: A vanguard of sorts. Yeah, I think I'm in agreement with you there, sir.

Charles Derber: 00:59:05

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:59:06

: So do me a favor.

Charles Derber: 00:59:08

: Yeah, no, go ahead, Steve.

Steve Grumbine: 00:59:09

: We're approaching that time and I just want to give you a chance to, like, if we didn't cover something about your book that we really need to read, what do you think they need to hear? What is your final takeaway here to bring us to the close?

Charles Derber: 00:59:23

: There's a chapter on American fascism, and we are in a fascist moment, a police state moment. And I try to show in the book that even the idea of fascism, while it's scary, has an abstraction to it.I tend to write in a very accessible way that's not technical, it's not academic. It's very much in the spirit of ordinary people being able to read it and activists helping find useful ways of moving in the world with it.And I think this book in particular, because it's focusing on this idea of people being pulled apart rather than being brought together. And the kind of very personal, very emotional nature of this is that I think a reason I'd hope people would find this book interesting.I mean, feminism taught us that, you know, politics begins in the bedroom. That's very personal, it's very emotive.And I think that the themes I'm developing in this book, Bonfire, and about American sociocide, what I'm hoping to do is that they connect very deep personal and emotional experiences that are at the heart of our everyday life experience with these really dire but more abstract political struggles that it's very hard for people to make an experience as real. You know, that, as you say, party politics and politics in general has a kind of abstraction and unreality to people.So I hope what this book can do is help people connect their own personal experience, their relationships with people they care about, their relationships at work, their ways of thinking about political parties, with this current crisis we're in now. I think it'll give people an angle that they haven't seen before about how very fundamental issues about social relationships and personal life are sort of at the foundation, both at work and in home, in the rise of this police state that we're facing right now and that we need to find in our own emotional space, the heart space, the social space where, you know, the most humane and creative and hopeful things develop that I think the book maybe will help people identify what that very foundational emotional space connects with Trumpism and the broader authoritarianism and police state that we're facing and hopefully shape their way of building an alternative, of building a kind of resistance that's both personal and political and that can make a difference both in their own lives and in the broader society together. And Steve, I want to thank you again because you give wonderful and generous space to your authors and guests.And I think, as I told you in our pre-air conversation, I want to get into print some of the things that you've said about the fundamental importance of building these mutual aid networks across society because they're the foundation of all political action and change.

Steve Grumbine: 01:02:20

: Yeah. Thank you so much, Charlie. I appreciate it so, so much. Folks, I just want to say to you, thank you for riding through this with us.This was a very, very powerful conversation. I love Charlie's perspective. He is a guy who is really trying to peel back the layers of the onion. And for me, who is a layperson, I'm a well-read layperson, but I'm a layperson, right?I like to be around people that have the time and have the proclivity to do the real research and tie these things together and into coherent analysis. And that's what Charles does. I really appreciate your work here.And now for the people out there that are used to this podcast, you should know this is Real Progressives, which is a 501[c]3, not for profit. We live and die on your donations. And I mean a lot of people just go to the big platforms and they keep dumping money on them.We're doing stuff that other people aren't doing and we really need your support.If what we're saying resonates with you, if you think that we're being true and honest and trying to provide you with information and tools, please consider becoming a donor. You can go to patreon.com/real progressives.You can also go to our Substack which is realprogressives.substack.com and you can also go into the website which is www. There's the old person to me, realprogressives.org and you can go to our donate section and become a monthly donor. Please.No amount is too small and no amount is too large. And quite frankly, at the end of the year, you can write it off in your taxes. So there's the "What's in it for me?" element.I'm hoping that you find the content worth supporting. We need your support.With that, on behalf of my guest Charles Derber, the podcast Macro N Cheese for the organization Real Progressives, we are out of here.01:04:19 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.