THIS IS REVOLUTION>podcast Ep. 87: A Brief History of Neoliberalism w/ C. Derick Varn

I came across C. Derick Varn sometime ago on a Zero Books show "Pop the Left".  An intellectual dynamo, but also a person that truly understands his working class roots.  Take a listen to our conversation, and Varn's deep dive into David Harvey's book, "A Brief History of Neoliberalism".

 

From C. Derick Varn Bio:

C. Derick has written political and philosophical work for the (Dis)Loyal Opposition to Modernity and The North Star as well as various lost ‘zines in the 1990s and early 2000s, although he feels distant from this prior work on left-renewal, and while still in a some kind of a Marxist framework, he is very skeptical of what most people call “the left.”  His other philosophical interests are virtue ethics, the philosophy of religion and secularity, and aesthetics.  He was written for Unlikely Stories 2.0, and blogged irregularly for The Partially Examined Life blog.   He co-hosted the Pop the Left podcast.  with Douglas Lain from late 2012 to 2014 and has recently reappeared on supplements on both Diet Soap and Zero Squared. He also co-produces and co-hosts two other podcasts, Symptomatic Redness (on political economy, philosophy, and history), and Former People Speak (on culture and the arts). His poetry has appeared at Unlikely Stories 2.0, Full of Crows, Writing Disorder,  Deuce Coupe, Rusty Truck, The Cartier Street Review,  JMWW,  Clutching at Straws, Union Station Magazine, Ann Arbor Review,  Yes, Poetry, Xenith, Piriene’s Fountain, and elsewhere. C. Derick Varn has served as managing editor for the now defunct Milkwood Review, art editor for Unlikely Stories 2.o, managing editor for the The North Star, and was  an editorial staffer for Arts and Letters: A Journal for Contemporary Culture in 2005-2006 and the Flannery O’Connor Review in 2005.  He won the Frankeye Davis Mayes/Academy of American Poets Prize in 2003. He is the co-founder and currently the Poetry Editor and co-managing editor at Former People.

 

"I’ve always treated neoliberalism as a political project carried out by the corporate capitalist class as they felt intensely threatened both politically and economically towards the end of the 1960s into the 1970s. They desperately wanted to launch a political project that would curb the power of labor.

In many respects the project was a counterrevolutionary project. It would nip in the bud what, at that time, were revolutionary movements in much of the developing world — Mozambique, Angola, China etc. — but also a rising tide of communist influences in countries like Italy and France and, to a lesser degree, the threat of a revival of that in Spain.

Even in the United States, trade unions had produced a Democratic Congress that was quite radical in its intent. In the early 1970s they, along with other social movements, forced a slew of reforms and reformist initiatives which were anti-corporate: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, consumer protections, and a whole set of things around empowering labor even more than it had been empowered before.

So in that situation there was, in effect, a global threat to the power of the corporate capitalist class and therefore the question was, “What to do?”. The ruling class wasn’t omniscient but they recognized that there were a number of fronts on which they had to struggle: the ideological front, the political front, and above all they had to struggle to curb the power of labor by whatever means possible. Out of this there emerged a political project which I would call neoliberalism."

-David Harvey from a 2016 Jacobin Interview

 

You can find C. Derick Varn on Pop the Left on Zero Books Here:

https://youtu.be/b6JGv4snLgc

 

Mortal Science Podcast

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mortal-science/id1292139730

 

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