Jamie Merchant, the author of Endgame, joins us to talk about the current chaos. Start with the spectacle and you miss the structure. We step past the daily outrage to map Trumpism as a regime built by a new insurgent fraction of capital—tech oligarchs, private equity, and venture investors—who are eager to smash norms, rewrite rules, and route public money through tariffs, defense contracts, and boutique industrial policy. Their rise squeezes out the old asset-management establishment, pushes it toward the Democrats, and locks the opposition into a politics of “normality” that cannot mobilize the base or contest power.

We trace the media’s role in this shift: a long slide from public-service reporting to algorithmic engagement that rewards emotional spikes and partisan framing. Biden’s term tried to stabilize the system with CHIPS, infrastructure, and managed globalization, but even light-touch AI regulation, the SVB collapse, and worker pushback inside tech drove Valley elites rightward. Meanwhile, the stock market’s euphoria masks a real economy straining under a profitability crisis. AI’s massive data-center build may juice capex and energy demand, but unless it raises productivity broadly, we’re sitting on a bubble that deepens monopoly dynamics without delivering shared growth.

Zooming out, we argue we’re living through a new state-capitalist era with less capacity: the government takes bigger stakes, centralizes power in the executive, and leans on tariffs as revenue, even as planning expertise and administrative muscle erode. The postwar managerial state—Keynesian levers, technocratic confidence, public legitimacy—is gone. That’s why policy-first left populism keeps hitting a wall. Without a living, rooted class subject, electoral surges can’t endure. We sketch a different route: rebuild working-class civil society—mutual aid, cultural institutions, education, and cross-sector networks that bridge immigrants, service workers, industrial remnants, and professionals. Strategy begins where the regime is weakest: in the social substrate it can’t manage or monetize.

Hear candid takes on the investor realignment behind Trumpism, the AI bubble loop, why Democrats are structurally stuck, and how to make organizing matter when the state can’t—or won’t—govern for the whole. If this resonates, share it with a friend, subscribe, and leave a review to help others find the show.

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

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian

What if the “techno-feudalism” boom is a symptom of our confusion rather than a diagnosis of the age? We sit down with Alex Hochuli (Bungacast, American Affairs) to interrogate the feudal metaphor and make a sharper case: we’re living through total capitalism’s decay, not a return to lords and serfs. That lens helps make sense of platform tolls, anti-market monopolies, surveillance, and institutional rot without pretending we’ve exited capitalism’s basic relations of production.

We trace why the feudal story resonates—unfreedom feels real—then test it against history. Feudalism meant manorial production, oath-bound sovereignty, and overlapping legal orders; our world runs on consolidated states, global supply chains, and platform intermediaries that convert risk into reliable rents. The better comparison is peripherization: practices once common in the periphery now shape the core, from precarious work to state-enabled accumulation. That shift helps explain why labor leverage has collapsed despite rising public sympathy: dispersed service shops, automated production, and logistics-dependence blunt traditional organizing power.

China enters as Rorschach test: state capitalism, social credit, and surveillance make the feudal label tempting, yet the core logic remains capitalist, steered by growth imperatives and legitimacy management. We explore AI’s forked path—job-displacing windfall or costly stagnation—and why care-economy fixes won’t build a livable future on their own. If everyone secretly wants social democracy back, we ask what could replace the vanished conditions that once made it possible.

The conversation ends with “dark hope.” Drop the costume drama, name the system we have, and fight for a directly political project that builds capacity: housing, grids, industry, and public institutions that actually work. Speak against oligarchy in terms a broad public can hear. If you’re ready to trade clever metaphors for concrete ambition, hit play, share with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show.

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

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian

Politics feels louder than ever and somehow emptier too. We open the hood on liberalism—what it claims to be, how it actually behaves, and why Trump’s rise didn’t just bend norms but exposed tensions baked into the system. With Dillion from Untrodden, we trace the fault lines between liberal commitments to stability and civil discourse and the gravitational pull toward executive power, media spectacle, and anti‑politics.

Step by step, we chart the historical map: from the 18th Brumaire and Bonapartism to today’s illiberal temptations, and why figures like Orban or Berlusconi echo past crises more than they break from them. We ask whether liberalism’s best asset—pragmatic governance—can survive without a clearer core, and whether the left’s sharpest critiques can help rebuild a coherent center of gravity rather than just tear it down. We also examine identity politics’ moral heat with little policy light, the post‑pandemic sorting of temperaments over ideologies, and the unsettling ease with which tech billionaires switch lanes as incentives shift.

Rather than rehearse stale talking points, we get practical about coalitions. What can Marxists and liberals realistically build together? Where do alliance models like the united front make sense, and where do they fail? We argue for a new baseline: mutual recognition, radical honesty, and a shared willingness to protect civil society and institutional checks as nonnegotiables. From unions to city budgets, the places where people shoulder common obligations are where trust can be rebuilt and rhetoric can give way to results.

If you’re tired of vibes posing as politics and want a serious, good‑faith reckoning with liberalism’s crisis and the left’s role in solving it, this conversation is for you. Listen, share with a friend who disagrees with you, and tell us: what principle would you refuse to compromise in any coalition? Subscribe and leave a review to keep these cross‑currents alive.

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

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic

Start with a simple question: if investment drives productivity and growth, what happens to a society that keeps choosing consumption over capacity? We trace a straight line from Marx’s core mechanics to Kalecki’s equations, then use that line to cut through fashionable theory detours—value-form shortcuts, communization fantasies, and techno-feudal hot takes. The result is a clearer picture of why profits can soar while real investment sags, why the dollar’s “miracle” masks fragility, and why printing more money can’t manufacture machine tools, skills, or energy.

We lay out four regimes that help decode the past 70 years: Fordist reinvestment that pushed productivity up, extractive reinvestment that scaled capacity through coercion, subsistence stagnation where neither investment nor exploitation rises, and neoliberalism’s defining mix—low investment, high exploitation, and asset hoarding. From there, we unpack how U.S. trade deficits and financial inflows fed capitalist consumption while weakening the incentive to build. Debt and soft budgets smoothed the ride, but they didn’t fix profitability on new capital or reverse the long slide in productivity growth. The numbers point to a coming snap-back to trend, not a new golden age.

China’s path raises the stakes. Sustained high investment, tighter discipline on capitalist consumption, and strategic upgrading are pushing the global cost curve down and forcing others to respond. That doesn’t make China post-capitalist; it does show how targeted capacity-building can escape the stagnation trap. The practical lesson isn’t romantic—it’s logistical. Real constraints matter: inputs, machine tools, power, training, and time. Risk management beats magical thinking; autarky is a myth, but resilience is a plan. We argue for redirecting surplus toward compounding productivity, treating statistics as instruments not idols, and rebuilding the industrial backbone that reduces market domination over everyday life.

If you’re tired of theories that skip the engine room, this conversation connects the dials: profits, investment, productivity, debt, trade, and class incentives. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves charts more than slogans, and tell us: what’s the first capacity you’d rebuild?

Links referenced:
https://open.substack.com/pub/nicolasdvillarreal/p/contra-capital-as-abstract-domination?r=2m9aw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

https://open.substack.com/pub/nicolasdvillarreal/p/an-economic-theory-of-maximalist?r=2m9aw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

https://open.substack.com/pub/nicolasdvillarreal/p/a-sketch-of-a-revision-to-orthodoxy?r=2m9aw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

Send us a text

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

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic

What if America’s “anti-intellectualism” isn’t a decline in smarts but a culture built to distrust theory? We trace that paradox from Puritan moral rigor and pragmatist “cash value” truths to the postwar professional class that speaks in a neutral tone while hiding its class origins. With Hofstadter, Lasch, and Gouldner as our guides, we unpack how speech codes, funding models, and media ecosystems shape who gets to be an “intellectual” and whose knowledge counts.

We dig into Lasch’s portraits of turn‑of‑the‑century radicals—Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, Lincoln Steffens—showing how bohemia, policy reform, and romantic revolt often masked a middle‑class distance from worker life. Hofstadter helps explain why theory gets cast as elitist, how evangelical charisma and “common sense” produce a populism that can slip into conspiracy, and why so many bright people end up suspicious of abstraction. Then Gouldner reframes the post‑WWII landscape: a technical‑professional new class whose legitimacy depends on universality, even as its language quietly excludes working‑class speech and experience.

From there, we get practical. We compare elite “neutrality” to the hard realities of endowments and medical revenue, and we explore what counter‑publics look like now: labor clubs that teach Robert’s Rules and strike strategy alongside Marx, Bourdieu, and Joe Burns. We talk code‑switching without erasing origins, and we sketch ways to build worker‑centered study that doesn’t pander—spaces where rigor and relevance live together. Gramsci’s “organic intellectual” still matters here: every worker thinks and theorizes, with or without credentials.

If this resonates, help us grow the counter‑public: subscribe, share the episode with a friend who loves big ideas, and leave a review with one question you want us to tackle next.

These are the primary readings we discuss:

-The American Intellectual Elite by Charles Kadushin
- Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter
- The New Radicalism in America: The Intellectual as Social Type by Christopher Lasch
- The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class by Alvin Gouldner
- The Missing Generation: Academics and the Communist Party from the
Depression to the Cold War by Ellen Schrecker

Send us a text

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

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic

The hardest problems don’t fit into a slogan. We invited the editors behind Heatwave Magazine to unpack why national fixes can’t solve planetary crises, why tariffs and “reindustrialization” won’t restore a high‑wage equilibrium, and how social democracy keeps running headfirst into profitability and energy limits. We talk plainly about China’s energy transition and youth unemployment, Mexico’s narco‑capitalist dual power, and why so much left media looks away from contradictions that actually shape daily life.

Our conversation moves from print as a living hub—short, sharp pieces that travel through bookstores, Discords, and reading groups—to the strategic dead ends of culture-only union optimism and Twitter-only militancy. Riots are real—often the form class conflict takes when every other route is blocked—but without institutions that bridge street power to social reproduction and production, movements burn out. We explore what those institutions could be: not a party blueprint, not a co‑op panacea, but durable infrastructures for shared analysis, care, and coordination across borders.

We also cut through the growth vs degrowth stalemate by asking different questions: what forms of energy and production reorganize land, labor, and life without reproducing domination? How do we build imagination when most people have never known another way to live? From beavers and watersheds to logistics chokepoints and labor’s changing composition, we map the terrain as it is—messy, global, and unforgiving—so we can act with clarity instead of wishful thinking.

If you’re tired of easy answers and ready to engage the hard constraints shaping our future, this one’s for you. Listen, share, and tell us where you think the real leverage lies. And if the conversation sparks something, subscribe, leave a review, and pass it to a comrade who needs a sharp tool, not a shiny slogan.

Send us a text

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

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic

What if the renewed fascination with Domenico Losurdo says more about our appetite for stability than about Marxism’s future? We sit down with Ross Wolfe to unpack how a Verso‑to‑Monthly Review pipeline, a revived faith in China’s statecraft, and the polemical stretching of “Western Marxism” built a Dengist common sense on the contemporary left. The story runs through publishing politics, bad categories, and a philosophical move that recodes the twentieth century’s defeats as proof that the state must be forever.

We press on the scholarship: where Losurdo distorts Perry Anderson, ignores Russell Jacoby’s tighter frame, and sidelines entire currents like British Marxism, the Situationists, and Johnson–Forest. We reopen the Italian debates—Operaismo, Tronti, Althusser—and ask whether Sartre’s and workerist priorities were really blind to anti‑colonial struggle or simply refused to romanticize models that never fit advanced capitalism. From there, we tackle the hinge: Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Does it license a permanent state, or did Marx and Lenin get it right that the state’s existence tracks class antagonism and should wither as class society is abolished?

The conversation widens to strategy. We examine the labor‑aristocracy thesis, the quiet third‑worldism that relieves organizers of responsibility at home, and the way China’s present contradictions—major trade with Israel, BRICS diplomacy, GDP slowdown, regional rivalries—undercut claims that socialism can be national. If history “could only go this way,” what is left to change? We make the case for rebuilding class independence and international coordination in the core and periphery alike, not lowering horizons to match yesterday’s outcomes.

Subscribe, share, and leave a review to keep these long‑form dives alive. Then tell us: should the left reclaim the withering of the state—or retire it?

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

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic

What happens when a Protestant Christian delves into the philosophy of Russia's most controversial thinker? Jay Rogers, a heart transplant survivor and longtime student of Russian culture, takes us on a fascinating journey through his engagement with Alexander Dugan's Fourth Political Theory.

Having traveled extensively throughout Russia and Ukraine during the pivotal post-Soviet years, Rogers brings unique firsthand experience to this conversation. He explains how his observations of Christianity's revival among the Russian intelligentsia and his disillusionment with mainstream Western media narratives led him to explore alternative political perspectives.

Rogers artfully unpacks the connections between Dugan, Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations," and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's prophetic warnings about Western liberalism. He argues that these thinkers anticipated our current global shift from nation-states to civilization-states—a transformation reshaping international relations before our eyes.

At the heart of this discussion lies a profound critique of liberalism's impact on Christianity. Rogers suggests that the liberal emphasis on individual autonomy fundamentally contradicts the community-centered teachings of scripture. This realization helped him understand why traditional values are making a comeback across political lines, creating unexpected alliances between previously opposed groups.

Perhaps most compelling is Rogers' nuanced view of cultural diversity. Drawing from his experiences as a teacher in Florida, he rejects both xenophobia and liberal multiculturalism, instead advocating for a world where distinct civilizations can coexist and learn from each other while maintaining their unique identities.

Whether you're politically conservative, progressive, or somewhere in between, this conversation challenges conventional categories and offers fresh perspectives on our rapidly changing world. Discover why engaging with challenging thinkers like Dugan might be essential for anyone seeking to understand—and shape—our collective future.

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

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic