A raid from behind the paywall at the Varn Vlog. This is a freewheeling chat between myself and Varn from ealy June. We loosely focus on the factors behind our current inflation, rooted in an ongoing conversation on MMT.

Beginning at the end of 2020, 1Dime and A New Conversation have conducted a series of discussions on Marxism today and its relationship with theories on postmodernity. The first discussion ended with a promise to expand on theories of accelerationism, and while we recently covered the book Inventing the Future, at last we've arrived at the topic!

Accelerationism is not a politics as such, but a notion through which we might analyse socialist strategy, and help us determine our approach to factors like the demands a workers movement should make today and how it might avoid the pitfalls of settling with short term gains at the cost of our ultimate goal.

The discussion covers what historical phase of capitalism ought a workers movement act, and the role of idealism in Marx's historical materialism. As the previous chat covered Williams and Srnicek Inventing the Future, much of the concept of accereration comes from their #Accelerate manifesto. It covers the difference between social progressivism and socialism, and how reactionary trends can happily coincide with the former, and questions which way we might want society to accelerate towards.

This is a chat recently conducted with Derick Varn over at Varn Vlog: 'Ed from a New Conversation (https://www.youtube.com/c/ANewConvers...) comes by to do a cross-over show with Varn on the legacy of Lenin's analysis of imperialism, other Marxist analyses of imperialism, the ambiguities of imperialism, and how capitalism may end if it doesn't end in socialism.

Support us over at https://www.patreon.com/varnvlog

Crew: Host: C. Derick Varn

Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip ( @aufhebenkultur )

Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake. (https://bitterlakeoakland.bandcamp.com/)

Intro Video Design: Jason Myles

Links and Social Media: Twitter: @skepoet '

A further chat between myself and 1Dime, based on Srnicek and Williams' book 'Inventing the Future'. This one covers socialist strategy, our material reality and the role of utopian thinking, as well as examining factors such as scope, scale and diverstiy of strategic revolutionary thinking.

This is the second conversation in the Mystery and Materialism series between myself and Eoin. He kicks things off by summing up his position from the last chat as stating a case for the importance of spirituality despite how uncool it is. My angle was to try to dispel existing antagonisms between spiritualism and materialism, despite the inherent ones existing because of traditional and new-age religions. In the previous episode I discussed spirituality in terms of human essence. Eoin advances here his explanation of spirituality as mystery with the illustration of water, gas and ice, all of which are different states of H2O. While these are distinct from one another, as H2O they experience a fourth distinction but one we do not so much. It remains all-encompassing despite the various states we find it in, as god might be to body, mind and spirit. Eoin situates this in the material by claiming we are doing ourselves a disservice by neglecting spirit, blocking our access to more free creativity, for instance, through our society’s heavy emphasis on body and mind. He raises the case of emotions, and how a greater recognition and understanding of them has led to the improvement in the human experience. The neglected field of spirit, he argues, could develop similarly, but is, and has been, too easily exploited and corrupted. I equate this tendency with the outsourcing of a tool or service, whereby traditionally we let priests lead heavily in our spirituality. Since then this arrangement has been in decline with no real uptake in a robust alternative, one shoddy alternative being new-age religions, and then their subsequent commodification. I then suggest that the happiness industry is a further cynical development of these principles, leading us toward even further individuated consumer-based trends, not only making up for this historic deficit, but also the material social deficit due to our increasing precarity under late-stage capitalism. Eoin contextualizes the need for an authentic spirituality, beyond these existing instances, with the principle of mystery – of death and loss and other challenges. He argues that attending to one’s spirit helps rationalize the outcomes of these moments, helping make sense of them in a bigger-picture sense, where a sort of poetry to the chaos or meaninglessness of life may come to be recognized. I posit the material context alongside this by recalling from the previous chat the idea that capitalism fundamentally determines social relations, and that its impact is negative regardless of one’s class. This, to my mind, eroded our spirit, but Eoin highlighted this was human spirit, and posited mystery as something that remained, which begged a further spiritual attention. In response to this I argue for an attention to the human spirit alone, that surely meaning through social relations is sufficient for life, that on one’s death bed, there could be satisfaction in having had fruitful social relations. I recognize the impact of mystery, but still feels that if an individual is doing their best in terms of social relations and bringing meaning to their life and attending to how they might feel about themselves on their death bed, then mystery doesn’t need to come to bare so much. Eoin recognizes the death-bed analogy as being a sufficient way to attend to the spirit, but I remind him that its attending to the human spirit, something, still, that can be radically rectified not so much through attention to spirit, but by turning back the capitalist mode of production. I extend the emphasis then by stating that if I found myself sufficient in the social and material (material because that is barrier to sufficiency in the social), then I would be defiant to ‘god’, whatever form it took; that in terms of any spiritual laws or tendencies we might recognize, as long as that socio-material base was met, they would not matter. Eoin’s response is that its still basically a new field, and reverts back to the advances in recognizing the importance of emotionality, arguing that more exploration down this line will lead to better outcomes and understandings of the human condition. Finally I suggest possibly that both post-capitalist socialization and the field of spirituality yet to be explored might amount to the same thing. Eoin emphasizes he’s not talking about a need to recognize ‘god’, but the field of spirituality, in which those social relations fall. To be continued…

I've raided 1Dime's patreon once again for our third chat covering postmodern capitalism and financialisation. This podcast followed the 1Dime documentary 'The Socialism of Warren Buffett: How The Stock Market Works'. Go check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT7Wv108UHg

This discussion covers materialism and spiritualism. The aim is not to place these two topics on a pole of opposition, as is often the case, but to explore an intersecting pole of agreement on what’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’ for the world.

Initially the discussion zones in on the materialist principles embodied by Engels at Marx’s grace when he said, ‘mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion’. The point being that before humanity can rightly conceive of such ideas as includes religion and spirituality, its material needs must be met. While perhaps we ought to attend to our spirit as we do our mind and body, the discussion reveals the poignancy of this point in placing current trends of spiritualism on par with the nutritionally and educational deficiencies we find in food and learning under capitalism. With this, and while we have specific and commonly held notions of ideal food and education, the notion of spiritualism perhaps needs rearticulating, distinguishing it from its three previous historic instances of organized religion, new-ageism and the current technologically mediated trends geared at emotional betterment and improved productivity. This is a post-theistic spiritual framework.

The focus moves on to nature versus nurture, discussing the differences between a capitalist and possible communist system in conditioning human nature and its various negative expressions. Regardless of access to wealth currently, both the rich and poor commit anti-social behaviour, suggesting that regardless of the material impact of communism, people will still behave badly. This is true, and its not the design of communism to negate the wild variance of human nature. However, the compulsion under capitalism to pursue profits nurtures human nature in radically different ways than would be the case under communism. The brutality of social relations as conditioned by capitalism renders the individual disconnected, as neighbours become mere vectors in their pursuit of profit and survival. This leads to poor mental (spiritual?) health, therapy for which is, too, radically structured by capitalism. Without the social emphasis on profits, reproduction and care could take the place of production and economic growth. The systemic, material context has profound effects on how human nature is nurtured.

Under communism, social and material relations might be so radically otherwise that the need to explicitly rearticulate spirituality might not be necessary, as such lack as we experience under capitalism may not occur. Our spirits may be full. However, this is merely human spirit and is distinct to our yearning due to the lack we experience when it comes to mystery and what lies beyond our comprehension. The intro/outro music was created by Eoin. Get in touch if you'd like to hear more.

In terms of the human emancipation sought by socialism, some might draw similarities between John Stuart Mill's Harm Principle and Marx's vision of Communism. However, Mill's liberalism ignores the context that conditions the ability of the individual to practice their liberty, a context squarely focused on by Marx, a distinction that generates an insurmountable divide between the two traditions. It is possible that the habit of ignoring such contexts is derived from the experience of the bourgeoisie as they determined their society from between the aristocracy and peasantry of feudal Europe, an experience no doubt lending itself to a particular self-made vision of the individual that perseveres despite the context one faces. This borugeois liberty is certainly imbued with a disdain for those unable to exercise independence, as if such a failure to do so was a choice.

From John Locke, through the likes of Gustav Le Bon, up to Ludwig von Mises, Samuel Huntington and Margaret Thatcher, we can chart this burgeois disdain for the poor through the last three centuries, and from it, surmise the limits of their liberty. The erosion of social solidarity and the suppression of groups with no financial recourse, left only to act collectively to gain leverage against an oppressive capitalist economy, are symptomatic of bourgeois liberalism. Yet as Mill's harm principle states merely that one must not attempt to hinder the liberty of others, today's billionaire class, distanced from the negative impacts of their daily decisions, are excused by this principle. For the system bourgeois liberalism envisions is that whereby each individual cares for themselves and buffers from the unintended negative impacts of the system, a colletaral deemed worthy when placed in the balance with liberty. And this will remain the case as long as we ignore the context that conditions the individual's ability to exercise their own liberty.

In recognising this context, the left does not seek to wrap everyone in cotton wool, as this is an absurd extreme of such a logic. But our current situation is close to its opposite, the absurd extreme of the alternative logic of exploitation. The capitalist system has always generated philanthropists who endeavour to mitigate against this exploitation. But never have they sought to redress the systemic possibility of such systemic manifesations. This podcast argues that we must acknowledge the material impositions of powerful people, that due to these impositions most people lack the capacity to exercise their liberty, and that therefore Mill's harm principle, in championing the liberty to conduct business in a capitalist economy, is a self-undermining principle without scope for reconciliation. The frame for such a critique is opened up when instead of interpreting Mill through the lens of individualism, we do so through a lens of class. The generation of surplus value by capitalist enterprise and its collection by owners of capital drives a continuously widening wedge between those few owners and the vast majority of people who must sell their labour to those enterprises in order to survive. What is more, once the ability of capitalists to generate surplus labour has diminished, they turn from economics to war, at the front of which dies millions of those poor with nothing to survive by but the sale of their labour.

How do we reconcile capitalism with liberalism and Mill's harm principle when capitalism objectively impedes the ability of individuals to pursue their own good in their own way? Mill's harm principle pits humanity instead in a constant and violent struggle with itself. We need to recognise that possessive individualism is a patently incorrect stance, that the context that conditions individuals' ability to act is as important if not more so, than their endowments, and that capitalism is a compulsion binding humanity to constant struggle rather than any form of emancipation. If we seek human emancipation we must pursue a moneyless, classless society where we can at least choose to acknowledge human vulnerability in the face of their particular contexts. This is neither moral nor ideational, but a material necessity for the socialist mode of production whereby each individual works according to their ability, and what is produced is consumed then in terms of need. This requires solidarity among workers and is antithetical to bourgeois liberalism.