Varn Vlog

Welcome back to the Vlog. Today, we are joined by acclaimed Egyptian journalist, activist, and labor historian Hossam el-Hamalawy to discuss his vital text out from Verso Books, Counter-Revolution in Egypt: State and Barracks. A common mistake among Western commentators is to view the regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as a simple replication of the old Mubarak-Sadat dictatorship. El-Hamalawy lays bare why this historical framing is fundamentally wrong: counter-revolutions do not restore old orde...

Welcome back to the Vlog. Today, we are joined by Dr. Annie McClanahan (Associate Professor of English at UC Irvine) to discuss her groundbreaking book, Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work. While some spaces on the internet are still stuck rehashing old 19th-century debates about whether service workers even count as part of the working class, our current economic reality shows that services account for 60% to 80% of the entire workforce. The standard, hourly g...

Welcome back to VarnVlog. Today, we are joined by James of Prole Kult for an extensive, two-hour interrogation of eco-socialist strategy, environmental geopolitics, and the escalating ecological costs of the modern tech economy. Our theoretical baseline is his essential text out from Iskra Books, For the Land: Capital as Extinction. We confront a terrifying contemporary reality: under the spectacular weight of the large language model (LLM) and generative AI revolution, large swaths of the g...

Welcome back to the blog. Today, we are staging an uncommon but necessary conversation to slice through the amateurishness of internet leftist subcultures. We are joined by Chris—better known online as Black Red Guard (BRG)—a prominent Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (MLM) political educator and active cadre inside the St. Louis chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). To the average onlooker, the word "Maoism" conjures images of uncritical support for Deng Xiaoping's reforms, Xi Jinpi...

Welcome back to the vlog. Today, we are staging an exhaustive, macro-analytical conversation with political theorist and author Benjamin Studebaker to unpack his recent landmark intervention in Isonomia Quarterly: "Trade Wars or Social Wars?" While modern political commentators treat the rising economic friction between the United States and its Western allies as a series of isolated commercial disputes, Studebaker argues that these tensions are deeply structural. Ever since successive U.S. ...