Factually! with Adam Conover - America Has No Left Wing with Vivek Chibber

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

At the No Kings protests this past weekend, millions of Americans demonstrated against the fascist right wing. Despite the staggering number of people willing to take to the streets, why does it still seem like the left is powerless to stop the right on a political level? This week, Adam sits with NYU professor Vivek Chibber to discuss how America is really a country of two right wing political parties, the failings of the left to create a durable party, and what must be done to stand up to the right in a lasting way. Find Vivek's book at factuallypod.com/booksUpgrade your wallet today! Get 10% Off @Ridge with code FACTUALLY at https://www.Ridge.com/FACTUALLY! #Ridgepod--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. I don't know anything Hi there, welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. Thank you for joining me on the show again. You know, right now, the radical right wing in American politics is achieving its longest held dreams. Outright fascists are on the attack against immigrants, scientists, students, most women, park rangers, universities, and oh, park rangers, universities,

and oh, by the way, the entire city of fucking Los Angeles, and they are winning. You know, the right wing has gotten to the top of America's political power structure, largely by casting the left as an all-powerful force that dominates American politics and culture. And it's bizarre because that doesn't seem to actually be the case.

Liberal and progressive democratic politicians like Barack Obama or Gavin Newsom are made out to seem like Mao by the right, even though their policies are centrist, if anything. And if you look around, there actually is not really that much of an organized left-wing at all in America. There are no political power structures that are organizing for working people on a mass scale. The Democratic Party, which is organized sometimes, has seemed stunned and powerless

in the face of Trump's assault on our institutions of society. And the DSA, which is genuinely a left-wing organization, isn't exactly the vanguard of the proletariat. It mostly appeals to college-educated leftists who want to discuss and debate. Now, when we're looking for genuine sources of left-wing energy in America, well, the folks who are showing up

to fight ICE kidnappings in LA, they are inspiring. Their actions make it clear that there is real energy between anti-authoritarianism, anti-fascism, towards looking out for each other, towards real solidarity in America. But these protests are not gonna be able to defeat fascism on their own. We need some kind of party, some kind of movement,

some kind of organization to harness this left-wing energy. And that makes me wonder, why do we not have it currently? Why do we not have a muscular, pro-working class movement in America? Why have we almost never had one? Is this really too much to ask when such movements are common and even powerful in other countries? I mean, this is a moment of tremendous peril in America, yes,

but so many people are being oppressed, so many people are suffering. It's also a moment of tremendous potential Opportunity for a new type of politics. So why is the left missing that moment? Well to help answer that question. We have an incredible guest on the show today I found this conversation challenging and absolutely fascinating and enlightened me to so many elements of America's political culture and why we have the culture that we do,

why we have the systems of power and control that we do. And if you want to support this show and the conversations that we bring you week in, week out, I hope you'll head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every single one of our conversations ad free. You can also join our awesome online community full of people who love to discuss and debate these issues

just as much as you do. And of course, if you want to come see me on the road coming up soon I'm headed a lot of incredible cities Tulsa, Oklahoma, Oklahoma City Spokane, Washington Tacoma, Washington Brea, California I also have a bunch of other dates I've recently announced head to Adam Conover dotnet to see all my tour dates and get those tickets and now let's welcome this week's Guest his name is Vivek Chibber. He's a professor at NYU. He's the editor of Jacobin's spin-off journal, Catalyst, and he's the host of an incredible podcast

called Confronting Capitalism. He is one of the simply top flight left-wing intellectuals working in America today, and he has a lot of really challenging, fascinating ideas about what the left needs to do to revitalize itself and truly win gains for working people. I hope you'll welcome Vivek Chiver. Vivek, thank you so much for being on the show.

Glad to be here, Adam. Thanks. So I thought we'd start by talking about, you know, there's these immigration raids in Los Angeles. There's protests in the street about it. LA, where I live, has a sort of robust left-wing protest culture that pops up every couple years in response to stimuli, right, when something goes wrong. And yet it hasn't really resulted in a durable left-wing, like popular movement. Why is that and how can we build towards that sort of movement?

Protests, as a rule, never result in movements. Movements can generate protests, but protests don't generate movements. And that's because what protests are is people coming out of their homes, expressing discontent, expressing their anger at something. Then they've got to go home. Now, these are random individuals,

and they're angry about something or they're unhappy about something. But they go back home to their lives, and their lives take over once they're back. If you want a movement, it requires a permanent organization, some kind of durable organization consisting of individuals that is more than the sum of those parts. It has to have an office. It has to have people who are organizers, what people would call cadre. It has to be people whose job it is to go out and bring people out, but it has to have an office. It has to have people who are organizers, what people would call cadre. It has to be people whose job it is to go out and bring people out, but it has to also

go beyond the protest. They have to actually be trying to have some sort of presence in communities and workplaces so that people see the organization linked up with their own lives. If you don't have an organization, if all you have is like NGOs and nonprofits, they're not in the business of building movements. They're in the business of getting grant funding for themselves and making a show of social relevance. That's a very different matter than say a political party or a trade union or something

like that. So activism always results in an episodic, momentary eruption, and then people go back to their lives. That's very different from a movement. Yeah, we've seen that happen over and over again. Even just locally in LA, there'll be a spurt of protest. There'll be a little bit of movement in city politics or something like that, but then things go back to normal. We do have some organizations,

we have trade unions to a certain extent, but there's organizations like the DSA, but why in America do we lack those larger left-wing organizations that you're talking about? It's the million dollar question. In fact, it's probably the single most repeated question in American political science and historiography. It's called the question of American exceptionalism.

America is exceptional, not in the sense that God made it, but in the sense that it's the only rich country that never had a labor party, that never had a social democratic party. Every other, what we call advanced country in the world, industrial country, has had a labor party or a socialist party that's had a mass base for itself. The US never did.

And just clarify what you mean by a labor party, social democrat, as opposed to what we do have. What we have is two corporate parties. Gore Vidal, the great Gore Vidal once said, the United States has one party with two right wings. So it's basically, there are two basically corporate parties. They differ in that one of them around mid-century did experience some sort of presence on the

part of trade unions, and then after the 60s was identified with what you today might call social justice movements, the Democratic Party. But there was never a party that was rooted in the working class that has, as part of its program, some kind of socialist or anti-capitalist agenda. In Europe, in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, you had what we call social democratic parties, which were historically parties that had two aspects to them that no American parties ever had.

One is they were born out of the trade union movement, or they very early on linked themselves up to the trade union movement, so that was their identity. The second is that they had real political programs, a political platform that was primarily and even exclusively oriented towards advancing working class interests, working class interests, not corporate interests. US has never had that. Now there's a variety of reasons why that's the case what why that's the case Part of it has to do with the fact that the US

Democratized very very early. So the US actually had the franchise for working-class white men About a hundred years before any other country did hmm in Europe Working class men had to fight for their political rights So who's gonna do that because the people lined up against their political rights were the wealthy. So working class men and women had to organize their own political parties to campaign for democratic rights. Because every single political party in Europe up until the 1900s was a rich person's party. They weren't going to fight for democratic rights. The United States, because the American Revolution got people democratic rights early,

they got sucked up into the system without having to organize their own parties. That has a lot to do with why a labor party was never born. But in those other countries, that organization for those voting rights had to come through the labor movement. That's everywhere. Every single place where you got democracy, it was through working class parties fighting for it. Wow So but it's just a historical accident. There must be other reasons in the United

That was the prime I think the primer I mean there's a big debate on this primary reason was that other there's another reason but that the US Conquered more and more of the Western regions as it grew Which means that working-class people who were unhappy with their situation as it grew, which means that working class people who were unhappy with their situation were just able to go out and get some land with themselves instead of having to fight through a union and through then a political party.

So this was called the frontier, the American frontier kept expanding. Then the final reason was that it was the US, not just because of the racial mix, but also the ethnic mix, it had a working class that was very divided for a very long time. And because of that, coming together in a party

was also hard for it. These are the three, I would say, big reasons. The one is early democratization. The second is the frontier, which gives you kind of a safety valve for people who are unhappy. Whereas in Europe, you had nowhere to go. If you were unhappy, you had to organize yourself. And the third was that there's a lot of ethnic

and racial tension inside the class that made it hard to come together in viable organizations. Yeah, there's the history of... During the period when the labor movement was strongest in the United States, there was racial tension within it and large amounts of workers being left out because of... Union leaderships were racist to an extent. Yeah. That's right. In the AFL, in the 19th, early 20th century, its leadership was, they were members of the Klan.

Yeah. So that makes it hard to bring in black workers. I mean, do you see prospects for a working class movement to grow in the United States? Or I've heard you speak elsewhere and say that you know the left is at its lowest point in yeah in history yeah it's it's never been this bad and I can we can go into how I what the badness is and you know and we can go into the causes later but as to your actual question, the prospects in capitalism are always there.

And that's because capitalism is built on a fundamental clash of interests between employers and employees everywhere. And employees are always on the losing end of things because they have very little power against their bosses. So there's always a reason for them to come together. There's always a reason for them to come together. There's always a reason to band together. It's just that right now the workplace has changed so much since the last time there was a union movement and work conditions have changed so much and the social landscape is

so different. Now I'm comparing it to the 30s, 40s, 50s. We just are in a place where we haven't figured out how to navigate that situation right now, unions are still kind of searching, how do you organize against Amazon? How do you organize in the tech sector? How do you organize when most of your workers are in the service industry, not in the manufacturing sector? These are new challenges and we just don't have the answers to it. But the raw material, the raw material, which is poor people, working people, getting shafted

and having to work 12 hour days and not having job security and being unhappy with their bosses, that's still very much there. Around 80% of Americans hate their jobs. They think they work shit jobs. You just have to figure out a way of taking that anger, harnessing it into a collective organization, rather than in ugly kinds of social manifestations and things like that. Yeah, and the potential is there.

There are so many bright spots in the American working class. If you look at the culinary union in Las Vegas, which has united thousands of really low wage workers in the hospitality industry to have an incredible healthcare plan, incredible pension plan, like they have a lot of power in that city and they use it and guard it really jealously.

But organizing that kind of union or any kind of organization like that is very, very difficult and it sort of feels like the organizations that should, the unions that we currently have are so busy fending off attacks or at the very least just maintaining their current power. The unions, I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, are both very much in that mode of, you know, we what we already have is so difficult to maintain. That is our primary focus and

expansion is sometimes the furthest thing from one's mind. It's very hard, Adam. There are many, many obstacles. One big one is American labor law. Labor law was instituted across the capitalist world in the 20s and 30s in order to try to level the playing field between employers and employees. And it came out of working class struggles.

You start on the assumption that playing field is uneven and employers always have the advantage. So now when you're organizing a union, the biggest problem is, all right, we're in a union, how do we get that guy to now negotiate with us? How do we get a contract out of it? Employers just have the right to say, screw off, I'm not doing a thing, I'll just hire some other people. Yeah. So what labor law does everywhere is to say to employers, look, once your employees have

decided they want to be in a union, you're actually legally obliged now to negotiate with them. Okay, so that's a way of leveling the playing field, right? It's taking away the advantage of exit for the employer. American labor law is unique in that even after you've decided you want, first of all, actually forming a union is exceedingly difficult because once you say you want to be in a union, there's this month-long period where employers now get exclusive access to their employees for propaganda

campaigns, threats, all kinds of things, right? Unions have to stay out of the workplace. Then once you've actually voted for the union, now most unions are even unable to get a contract from the employer because there's no legal obligation. You can negotiate, but you don't have to give them a contract. So here's the- Here they just go, oh, we'll negotiate with you in six months. And they drag it out for years and they never get a contract.

So here in place, like right now there's something of an uptick in unionization, but here's the dirty little secret. It's almost all of the new unions are coming up in venues where employers are not challenging the new union or the union drive. So it's in places like museums, libraries, universities, places like that. In the last, say, 30 years, in instances where employers resist a union drive, success rates are around 8%. Yeah.

So this is why unions, when they have a toehold, their main fight is just to stay alive, just to stay in the business. And they're hesitant to pour money into new unionization drives because their hit rate is so, so low. But the problem is that it's a chicken and egg problem. Unless you actually... They're sitting on top of billions of dollars. Yeah. The labor movement generally. The labor movement generally is sitting on top of billions. What are you going to do

with it? You'd better start pouring it into organizing because you're hanging on by a thread now. Yeah. Yeah. The landscape is horrible. The worst of any country because the law actually empowers employers instead of leveling the playing field. But if you don't do this, you're dead in the water. We're looking at a few more years before the labor movement basically vanishes. Especially not to the attack in the public sector unions

is full throttle. So there's no choice now. Yeah, but you do not see the labor movement like having an understanding of this. I mean, I have been to AFL-CIO events. I've spoken to folks in part of sort of big labor or the upper echelons, and you do not really feel that urgency.

It's still, oh, if there's a hot shop, we'll organize them, or we have our project, we're trying to do this. Sean Fain set up a big target about the UAW is gonna go after the large portion of American auto manufacturing they don't cover. But that's really the one exception. Well, even there, UAW, the last 20 years, has mostly been organizing graduate students.

It hasn't really done a whole lot to expand into new sectors in manufacturing or transport or something. So look, there's a rationale behind it, but there's no excuse for it. And this labor leadership has just become much too conservative, too timid, and frankly too comfortable.

They make a lot of money. Well, individual people, the unions themselves are not like for-profit entities. No, but these union leaders are, I mean, look, it's hard work and all that, but they're pulling in, many of them are presidents of several unions, each one brings in six figure salaries. So you can understand why they're afraid to rock the boat, but that boat is sinking really, really fast.

And if they don't do something, what happened in the thirties was that labor leaders were also somewhat timid then, nothing like now, but they were timid then. Workers took over. They organized their own unions. The CIO came out of that. Maybe something like that is needed, but the raw material is there. The landscape is horrible. Labor law is lined up against him, but you're in the labor movement and you'd better go

back to making it a movement rather than simply an institution, which is what it is now. Yeah. Folks, who would you feel comfortable sharing your phone number and home address with? Friends, of course. Someone you just met, probably not, unless they have that certain something. But how about a total stranger on the internet?

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McMuffin for a dollar get more than you expect with new McValue at McDonald's Prices and participation may vary valid for item of equal or lesser value. I mean, I guess what that connects me to is the idea that the workers are gonna rise up and do it themselves. Like so much of what you are talking about, the beginning of American labor law was because there was mass unrest

among workers across the country. People were just pissed off and there was mass unrest among workers across the country. People were just pissed off and there was violence and et cetera, of course much more violence waged against these workers than by them. But that was a different time and a different place and a different sort of like sort of ideological currents running through the society. Do you see any prospect for mass unrest among workers now,

especially when the capitalist class has propagandized so effectively about, hey, just start driving Uber and that's your way out? Well, one thing to keep in mind is that there's a little bit of a mythology around the mass unrest back in the 20s and 30s. There was mass unrest. There was a lot of local organizing, but it wasn't Joe Friday coming out of his apartment and flat and saying, hey, I'm going to organize my neighbors. It was all, it was political people doing it. So if you, in those,

in those factories where we'd say now there was like this plinth sit down strike or places like that, it was communists. It was people in the communist party, people in the socialist party. So there's a difference. Yeah, the unions didn't themselves organize more workers, but left-wing organizers organized those workers. It's pretty rare, pretty rare, almost, I mean, really rare for workers to just organize themselves without there being some kind of catalyst, some kind of small group of people who is agitating, that's doing the logistical work, that's exhorting people, that's figuring out the strategies.

Because look, for a worker to go out and take on his boss, it's really risky. They're going to be fired. Nine times out of 10, they're just going to lose their jobs. And they're hanging on by a thread as it is. So that kind of risk taking is unusual, which means the question to ask for today is, A, is there a possibility for a bottom up revival of the labor movement? And B, who's going to do it? Because it has to be done by somebody.

And again, the good news is in the 30s when the labor upsurge took place, the size of the American Communist Party was just a few thousand people. But they were fanatically, single-mindedly devoted to being in workplaces. The Communist Party would send people into a new city, into let's say Detroit or something. And the party headquarters, they would set up shop. And then every day when their party activists came back to the office, they would be asked, how many workers have you brought into the union?

How many neighborhood organizations have you organized? How large are the party cells in your workplace now? They didn't ask about triggers and cultural cues and whether or not they're watching the right TV shows and whether their diets are appropriately vegan the right TV shows, and whether their diets are appropriately vegan. They ask them, how many workers have you organized? So the lesson is a relatively small group of people can have a huge impact if they're positioned well, if they're in the right places, and they know how to talk to ordinary people

instead of talking down to them, instead of lecturing them, instead of finger wagging at them. Without that kind of party, I don't see a bottom-up revival of the labor movement. I do think that there's people in groups like the Democratic Socialists of America who are trying to replicate that model. It's just that, as I said earlier, they haven't yet figured out this new landscape, how to do it. They're in the thousands by now,

and we don't hear a lot about them, but they had a big impact in the UAW, and they couldn't have a big impact elsewhere. Who, the DSA? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm interested in that comparison, because I've seen DSA chapters in local politics do a lot of great work as an organizing vehicle,

but they also have a reputation of being, hey, this is where college educated white leftists go for a social club basically, and to debate and feel active, often to sort of wage some of the cultural battles that you're talking about, or it's a debating society for dirtbag leftists, right? Which is, that's the-

Oh, not even the dirtbag leftists are the better ones. Ah ha ha ha ha ha. It's really just very culturally elite kind of virtue signaling types. There's a lot of, I would guess, that's the vast majority, but I think it's always gonna be that way. The DSA is a, they don't even have an ideological

condition to join, they just, hey, do you like what we stand for? And here, give us whatever the dues are and you can join. So you should expect it's mostly going to be filled with morally well-intentioned but politically ill-informed people who are going to bring in all their class baggage with them into the organization. And it has no intention of changing that. They love the fact that they're very, very big.

So as a result, I think most of their branches are just ineffectual because, you know, activism is hard. It requires demanding things of your members. And the DSA is in no position to make demands on its membership because they can just leave tomorrow. Right. It's, yeah, it's a loose enough organization that it becomes like, hey, show up.

But if you want to show up, if you want to stop showing up, you can at any time. Again, I'm not trying to shit on the DSA. I've seen them do great work, but I'm curious about what the distinction is. I mean, so the Communist Party, as being this really dedicated organizing vehicle 100 years ago, I mean, that organization was smashed, right,

by our government and by the rest of the forces of American society. It was scattered to the winds. It was made anathema, something that you had to denounce, right, literally before Congress, but even before that, it was a dodgy thing to be a part of. It seems like the American system mobilizes itself against organizations like that.

And so how can one be built under those conditions? You just do it. Great answer. Nobody said it's gonna be easy. Yeah. But it was done, it was much. With a $5 meal deal with new McValue, you pick a Mcdouble or a McChicken, then get a small fry, a small drink, and a four-piece McNuggets.

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They sent him into the black. There's times I know people who were in the Black Panther party who said we'd go to meetings and most of the people in the room were FBI informants. We just didn't know it at the time. It was so thoroughly infiltrated. They destroyed it by making you do crazy things and all that. Right now you don't need the FBI. Most of the left is nuts.

So getting to the point where we're serious enough, where we pose a threat, where they'll start worrying about infiltrating the left or smashing and all that. So far down the line, we just have to, right now the challenge is picking up the left off its back, getting it on its feet and relating to working people again. And we just have to, right now the challenge is picking up the left off its back, getting it on its feet and relating to working people again. So yeah, it's going to be hard, but you know, don't get into the game if you intend to whine

about it. When you say that most of the left is nuts, what do you mean? Or I guess to get more specific about that, what are the problems that the left has culturally that prevent organization? Well, what happened, as you said, I would say by the late 70s, the left was smashed in the United States. What do we mean by the left? If you're talking about a left, you can think about it in one of two ways.

Historically, what the left has meant is some sort of organized presence which can actually make an impact on the political scene. A party, trade unions, something like that. So that you actually can shift the political culture and the political agenda a little bit. So the left means some kind of organized presence. The second way you can talk about it is a kind of a vibe. Lefty intellectuals, the cultural sphere, individuals who have certain inclinations.

Today if there is a left in the US at all, it's the latter. It's people who are kind of left inclined, huge progressive values, and they're almost entirely located within the college educated scene. Right? All right, so that's the left today. Well, what's happened is that once the left became primarily upwardly mobile professional people, they changed the content of what it means to be a leftist. Until the 70s, if you're on the left, it meant you were for the working class. You were for working people.

Even if you were from the middle class, it directed your activities so that it would in some way or form through a variety of connections, somewhere in that chain of connections, you would be helping the working class movement in some way, the anti-imperialist movement in some way, the anti-imperialist movement in some way. Once the working class organizations were destroyed, you just kind of had a middle class culture that became more and more inward looking rather than outward looking. And campuses became the main place where people on the left debated among themselves. Campuses had always been important, always.

But that was where you came to the left to be sent out into unions or a party. It was the place where movement or leftism in your life, you came to the left, but you didn't stay in the left in campus politics. You moved out. What happened by the 80s was that was the only place where you found left politics. And so left politics came to reflect the culture of campuses, the culture of people in campuses. And a lot of that is just this crazy part.

It's performative. You get point scoring for being the most ultra person in the room, the most intransigent. And since you are not disciplined by the reality of whether or not your tactics and your strategy are having a real effect in the world. It's hypothetical. Hypothetical and performative.

The cool points, the coolness points come from being extreme. This isn't far enough. I want to go further. This isn't enough. I want to go, I want to do more." So the reality check of whether or not your ideas are being cashed out through real gains for people disappears. And instead, what comes is point scoring in rhetorical debates and in performativity. So a kind of a extremism over time can take over.

I'll tell you one, this is unpopular. The other reason, it's kind of nuts, is it attracted a lot of nutty people. You know, when the left is driven to the margins, which is what happened in the 80s and 90s, it's no longer in the mainstream because the unions are gone, the party isn't there, and you're on campuses. So how do left organizations on campus attract upwardly mobile people? They're not going to attract them by saying, hey, join the working class. They attract them by saying, hey, are you unhappy? It's capitalism that's making you unhappy.

Come to us. We'll figure out a way. So the people who come to... I can attest to this biographically because 90s when I was in the US US I saw this. The people who come are people who are just upwardly mobile, frustrated, middle class people who think being on the left will give them more friends or deal with their pathologies or their neuroses, their unhappiness. So the way I used to put it in the back was a broken left attracts broken people.

Coming into the 2000s, that's where we were. I would also imagine many of those people have a sincere belief in some leftist positions or problems in the world. Yeah, but their solutions to them tend to reflect their own class position. So let's take the issue of race or gender. You're very serious about racism. You're a college-educated person of color or a woman, and you're very serious about gender. You're going to articulate gender issues or race issues the way you experience them.

This is just sociology 101, right? And so if you're not a working class person or not in the workplace yourself, the way you experience race is going to be different because you are a aspirant college professor or a tech engineer or something like that. You may be well intentioned and you may pose the problem of race, gender, sexuality, but your solutions to those problems are going to be reflective of your place in the world. And that's why we talk about identity politics a lot, and maybe in this interview we will. It's not that the left says you shouldn't take race seriously. It says that the way race is experienced by working class brown and black people is very

different from the way it's experienced by tenured college professors or small business owners or something like that. That's the difference between a left that takes up social issues when it's rooted in the lives of working people and a left that takes up social issues when it's rooted in the aspirations and the frustrations of the professional class. Is that your critique of identity politics generally? Because I've heard you speak about this before and you're a critic, I mean you use the phrase woke-ism or woke which is, you know, that is such a contested word

and it's become a slur on the right that I often find it not useful for me. But why do you use it and is that what it's referring to specifically the racial experience of this sort of like upper intellectual class. Yeah. I mean, I think it's fair to say that woke is kind of meaningless now because it's just been taken over by the right and they use it to refer to any claims around race or gender

or something like that, or even economic demands. But the reason they're effective is that there was something real there. Something actually was taking over identity politics in the last four or five years. Because you have to ask why does the right think it can use this word as a slur? It doesn't use trade unions as a slur. It doesn't use workers demands as a slur. It uses woke as a slur. And the reason is something did happen in identity politics. I look at wokery as a kind of a mutation within identity

politics. So let's define all these terms. Sure please. Look the socialists have all socialists for a hundred years were not only sensitive to race and gender struggles they led the movements around all the anti-racist movements in the United States after the 1920s were all led by socialists You know all in the the anti-racist leaders in the CIO were all Black and they were all coming out of or orbiting around the Communist Party What have been educated what about the you know, the the Southern Civil Rights Movement, you know the Martin Luther King movement They were all they were all socialists. Mm-hmm. Martin. They were all old lefties. They were all so A Philip Randolph was a Marxist.

Beard Rustin was a Marxist. I mean, they made this biopic of him. They barely mention it. It all centers on the fact that he's gay. But he was never closeted about his sexuality. They completely ignored the fact that he was the last of the great socialists. Martin Luther King was a socialist.

Everybody around the SCLC was a socialist. It was the old left. The left led the movement for racial equality in this country. So it's kind of ridiculous to say that Marxists don't take race seriously. It's what the current college educated left says to distance itself from that very tradition and to columnate that tradition. The point is, Marxists always were in the forefront of these struggles, but they were always contemptuous of what today we call identity politics.

Why? Yeah, what do you mean by identity politics? Identity politics is the vision of race or the vision of, say, gender, social issues that reflects elites' views or solutions to the problem of race. So let's take, again, let's just stick with race or gender. The identitarian conception of race focuses overwhelmingly, almost exclusively, on this thing called discrimination. Now, discrimination is real, and it affects all black and brown people.

The technical definition of discrimination is, do you get a job that's reflective of the actual skills and the actual abilities you have? Either you're not allowed to have the job at all, or you paid less, the glass ceiling situation. So the idea is we get rid of discrimination, you get racial justice. But now, for a lot of women and for a lot of people of color, the issue isn't that they're getting inadequately paid for the job they're doing, or that they didn't get the job for which they have the skills. The issue is, even if they fully get paid for the job they're doing, it's going to be a shit wage.

So if you got a job at Walmart, and you get exactly the wage that a white worker is getting or a male is getting, you don't have a living wage. Or if you don't get the job at all, fine. At that section of the labor market where you're applying for jobs, the other job that you do get where you're not discriminated against is still going to be a shit job. So you have two visions of jobs now. One is the upwardly mobile section of women and people of color who are in fact experiencing a glass ceiling and who are maybe only getting 80 to 90% of what their white male compatriots

are getting. For them, what they're trying to get is the full value of their skills, the full value of their abilities. And they see discrimination as something that is blocking their acquiring the full value. So they have no problem with their position in the class structure. What they want is to get the full returns for that position in the class structure. But for a working class woman or a working class person of color, if you take away discrimination, they're still screwed.

So their battle is not against discrimination. It's for jobs themselves. If you take away discrimination, they're still screwed. Yeah. So their battle is not against discrimination. It's for jobs themselves. It's for social services. If you're an upwardly mobile person, you probably got a pretty good health plan for yourself. For about 40 or 50% of the American working class, they got no health plan. For them, they need socialized medicine. So there's no such thing as race

politics. There's race politics and gender politics as envisioned by elites. And then there's the kind of race and gender politics that's been articulated by and fought for by labor parties and by the working class movement. When we use the word people like myself on the left, identity politics, we are referring not to the struggle for race justice because we've always fought for that. What we're referring to is the way in which race justice is narrowed down by elites to simply fight for the concerns of the wealthy, wealthy women, wealthy people of color. Who in their right minds should be supportive of that unless you belong to that class

Well, thank you for that. I would love to talk through The past few years in social and racial justice in America because from my perspective Look, I was doing material on television about the enormous disparities in criminal justice Prosecution in America right the the immense over-policing of black communities, the immense over-incarceration, you know, which in my view is like one of our great national sins currently. And, you know, I was doing content on television about this in like 2018 or so, going, this is horrible, we need to do something about it, there's a rising movement about it. Then, you know, we have the george floyd moment right we have all these

various uh... you know upsurges of interest in this uh... the word woke is born sort of out of the streets literally you know stay woke was a a cry from the streets be aware of what's happening be aware of you know the intense amount of uh... racial injustice that is being waged on the poorest people in American society.

And then, oh my God, it seems like we have a moment where we are reckoning with this. My Hollywood manager, who is certainly on the upper class of American society, calls me and says, oh my God, what's happening? What can we do about this? And I was like, yeah, man, you'll start reading up, join the struggle.

It felt like a moment when we were coming together for that. And then fast forward a couple years later, the criminal justice reform is not something that you can even discuss in American politics anymore and be taken seriously because it's been, woke has been turned into a slur and that falls underneath it. And so what I'm sort of trying to track is

how this broad-based street-led movement to repair something that really is affecting the poorest in society became, you know, A, a slur on the right, and B, how did, I guess in your view, the concerns of, you know, wealthy elites on the liberal side take over? What happened here?

Basic axiom in politics is whenever there's a political opening, the people who are the most organized will be the ones who take advantage of it. You're absolutely right. What happened in 2020, 2021 was a historic shift in American culture in the wake of George Floyd's murder because the uprising that kind of enveloped American society was something we've never seen. What happened in the wake of that, there were two directions that it could have gone in. Had there been an actual political organization in the United States, a political party that

was A, connected to this movement and B, wanted to use that leverage to push for real social reforms. Had that happened, I think that movement could have turned into all the things you are talking about. An actual drive towards prison reform, towards police reform, towards real money being poured into black and brown communities which experienced the worst of not just the policing but also the crime. All that could have happened.

But no such organization existed. What existed was one political party with two right wings. And the Democrats in particular were really worried about this because, remember, this is also at the moment of the second Bernie Sanders campaign, which did really, really well in the Democratic primaries. And was really resonating, even though the media wants you to not understand it, it was resonating with working class black and brown people massively. So for the Democrats, they were facing a real dilemma in that a neoliberal kind of social

justice-y program platform that they've carved out over the past 20 years, which is a very elite program, was being challenged by this populist revolt inside the democratic primaries. And at that time, if you recall, the black establishment had lined up behind Biden. James Clyburn and the Southern Democratic leadership had lined up behind him and kind of delivered the Southern vote to Clyburn. and kind of delivered the Southern vote to Clyburn. In the wake of George Floyd, when these explosions took place, in my view, the real concern of the Democrats, especially the Democrats, was that these two things might coalesce.

The movement on the streets for racial justice might now come together with this populist movement for economic justice. And now you would get, for the first time since the 1930s and 40s, you would get the kind of movement for economic justice. And now you would get, for the first time since the 1930s and 40s, you would get the kind of movement for racial justice you saw with the SCLC and with the CIO, where racial justice means justice for working class Latinos, working class black Americans. Which means a colossal sea change in the Democratic Party's platform. It means basically

you're going to have to overturn that party and take out of the grips of the Barack Obamas and the Clintons and all these people, right? Yeah. Well, you might remember what happened right after the murder and the initial movement, what happens is Nancy Pelosi, Jamie Dimon, and all these people have this very theatrical moment where they say, this is a defining issue of our time, race. And what do they do? They don't say, we need massive healthcare reform, massive housing, we need public housing,

we need to fund these schools. What they say is, we need racial sensitivity training, we need more black CEOs, and we need more affirmative action in elite... They didn't say we're going to increase funding to community colleges, which is where the black working class goes. They didn't say we're going to increase funding to state schools, which is where the lower echelons of the skilled black workers go. They say we want more black entry into elite institutions and more black managers, Latino managers. So what they do is they essentially turn this

into an opportunity for the professional classes, which is their base within the electorate. The people who needed real reforms had no vehicle. They had no party, no trade unions. This became instead a windfall for the nonprofits and for the black and brown professional, upwardly mobile professional classes. And they kind of went, they became drunk. What happened in universities, you know, it was very authoritarian. What was being done under the banner of racial justice in universities, if you didn't hold to particular versions of anti-racism, you were

columnated. If you were a conservative, you were in fact intimidated. Conservatives felt intimidated on American campuses. If you came to give a talk in which you presented a criticism of affirmative action or something like that, you weren't allowed to speak. Students would themselves either shout you down or even deans would take their sides. This became the public version of wokery. This is what it became known for. And that's why the right has fastened onto it because people didn't like it. So what you had was a legitimate concern for race, a legitimate concern for racism being

hegemonized, being taken over by elites and being pushed by the Democratic Party and the corporate sector. It's really important to understand the leading elements of the corporate sector were behind this narrowing down of racial justice after 2020. That's gone now. They want to have nothing to do with it now, and there's reasons for that. But it was the American political and economic elite for a moment terrified of what might happen with the race justice movement unless they funneled it into more manageable quarters quarters and use it as a way of cultivating a more firm grip by people who they trust over these movements, which is black and brown elites.

And that's what happened. So that is how it gets funneled into, I mean, what we're at the time literally called DEI programs. And then that becomes another slur on the right. So the narrowing that the Democratic Party, that the corporate class sort of engaged in of the racial justice movement becomes the perfect thing for the right to then demonize. Yeah, and now the result is anytime you bring up race, you're woke. Yeah. So now what they've done is they say the far left is all these things that people hate, the thought control,

the authoritarianism, the cultural extremism and all this stuff. But they've also smuggled into it legitimate demands that working people want to make for healthcare, for economic rights, for workplace reform. That all becomes woke now. And so it's a fight for the left to say, look, that other stuff, all the cultural stuff, it's not really what we want. We want real issues to touch people's lives. And it sounds like what you're arguing is that,

you know, what the right is demonizing as leftism, the DEI programs, is actually not leftism at all. It's the liberal side of it. It's the- No, frankly, it's just the ruling class. It's the elite side of it. If you're a liberal, you should be appalled by the fact that universities are not allowing debates.

But the liberal intelligentsia itself degenerated in the wake, I think since the 2016-17. I think the Bernie moment really made people take sides. And a lot of what I thought were progressive liberals didn't want to have anything to do. The way my wife puts it is they don't hate him They just hate the people he represents and so they went to the side of the more conservative identitarianism Which later parts of it morphed into what we call? Wilkery I don't have any problem with saying don't use the word fine

But something real happened something real happened after 2020 Which bastardized race and gender politics in a way that has been very counterproductive. I wonder though, if like to give the credit to the people who led this narrowing of the movement, so many of the organizations that you're talking about, NGOs, nonprofits, the Democratic Party, unions, that engaged in simply making professional advancement

easier for black and brown people. A lot of that was because those organizations had racial discrimination embedded through them. And you had the younger generation, the lower level of staffers at various unions, nonprofits, et cetera, saying, hey, I mean, in the structure that we're a part of, we are experiencing racism in our lives and we want it to be corrected.

I mean, that happened in the Writers Guild that I'm a member of. Every organization in America had some sort of racial reckoning in that way, but it was in good faith, like the people doing it wanted it to happen, right? They were facing struggles. Some of it was, Adam, but look, it was always the case, even in the 30s and 40s, it was much worse in professional organizations, much, much worse than it is today. We're talking now, this is 60 years after the Civil Rights Act. American culture has more evolved, even in professional organizations, on race and gender

issues. In the 30s and 40s, it was hell. You were actively lampooned and teased and treated like crap if you were a woman or a black person or a Latino inside the professional world, or a Jew inside the professional world. Well, when they fought for race justice, they understood that if we focus on the needs of everyday working class men and women, it's of course going to also make things better for professionals. That was true today too. It remains true. There is a responsibility on the part of people like me and people like you,

when we try to talk about discrimination and race and gender, to realize that for most of the people in this country, race and gender affects their very ability to make a living and not just their professional advancement. So yeah, you're right. In good faith, we can say that space that I inhabit should be free of racism, even if it's an elite space. That space that I inhabit should be free of sexual discrimination and gender discrimination. But it is on us to not narrow down the demands to just that space. That's the difference between a political culture in which left-wing and socialist views

have real salience and one in which the middle class and the elites have come to dominate it to the point where they think that as long as they are fighting for their own very narrow needs, that's all they have to do. I think that the moral onus is on people in the writer's guild, people in universities to say, no man, it's not just about me. And it's not enough to say I'm just going to fight where I am because where I am is not bad. And even if I don't get all the goodies, I'm still getting a lot of goodies. But I think, I mean, isn't part of the problem, as you say, that there was no mass organization

or movement to join. And so what are people to do but to look around themselves and say, well, I'll make my own little plot of earth better. Well, no one's saying you shouldn't fight in those sites. What one is saying is still, you're a cultural artist, I'm a professor, you propagandize. You do what you can to direct attention to those other spaces. In universities, it wasn't just that people were saying, let's just hire more women, hire more people of color.

They were also generating a research and intellectual agenda that tried to bury the actual class politics of the United States. If you bring up class in the cultural left today, you're a white supremacist, even if you happen to be a person of color. There's been an active, very active, aggressive assault on left-wing ideas, using race and gender to columniate the left. Tell me more about that. Well, the left has never taken race seriously.

The left has never taken gender seriously. The left has been white supremacist. The left is an enlightenment project. Marxism is a white male heteronormative project. This is all coming out of the same people who will say that they are committed to this kind of identitarian cultural politics. Well, a friend of mine likes to say that there's this debate or you could say a kind of an antagonism between enlightenment, socialist intellectuals and identity politics people.

We didn't start that. It's just that something weird happened that by the 90s and 2000s, people who were called radical intellectuals or race or gender experts, every time they brought up what they were working on, they would start with a kick in the teeth to Marxism or to socialism. Why are they doing that? It's pretty clear. If you're an academic and you want to make it and you call yourself a radical, if you want to get advanced, you better show you're not that kind of radical.

You're not the kind of radical. You're not the Marxist radical. You're the more evolved, the more enlightened one, which... And you show that by two things. You first give a kick in the teeth to the Marxist to make sure that's your entry card into the club. Hey, I'm respectable. I'm not that. And then you show that my radicalism is going to do something for you, you in the seminar room, you in this lecture hall, you, the same class as me. That's the kind of radicalism I am.

Radicalism I advance. It's not a radicalism of the unwashed masses who come and serve your tables, who wash your car because screw them. The culture itself, it advances the identity, the agenda, not just by ignoring the class stuff, but by actively condemning it. Now that shows you more than anything else that it's the worldview of a certain class of people. It's a class of people who have an instinctive disdain for this tradition on the left. Where does that come from?

A lot of it is homegrown. In the United States, there's a long tradition of anti-communism and it's a very easy thing to slide into. But I'm seeing it everywhere. It's happening in India right now as well. In South Africa, where I spent some time, same thing is happening in universities. So I think what it's more expressive of is the instinctive dislike for class politics, for working class politics that upwardly mobile people have, whether they're South African, Indian or American. And what happened in the 90s onward is that identity politics gave them a respectability

that they didn't have in the 50s and 60s on the left. In the 50s and 60s, if you were an anti-communist, you were center, center right. What's happened since then is that radicalism has been transformed so that you can call yourself radical, you can call yourself left-wing and still be a garden variety American anti-communist. That wasn't true in the 1960s and 70s. When SDS was formed in the 1950s and 60s, they called themselves radical, these students. They automatically went to socialism and Marxism... Today they go to ethnic politics and race politics and they look at Marxism as this kind of old white male hangover that they are entitled to never take seriously.

So of course that means that they're going to be easily funneled into the Democratic Party into the NGO sector because that's what it's for. As you're talking, so much of what you're saying rings true for me. But I also have a fear about it, which is that the capitalist classes, the ruling classes have used racial division to disrupt working class movements

or to separate people. I mean, just from a basic analysis of early American history is that the racial discrimination against black people was part of keeping white working class people happy because at least you're better than somebody, right? At least you're better than these folks. Same as we were talking about racial division

really being the sin of the middle of the century labor movement in America that kept it hobbled. And I've seen plenty of organizing campaigns in workplaces now where the bosses will say, Hey, have you noticed to the black people in the bargaining unit, have you noticed that everyone on the organizing committee is white? Like, have you noticed that they're not really looking out for you? And so this is like a deliberate strategy. Right now we're in a moment where that strategy is slurring wokeism and racial justice of any kind. And so I do worry when I hear you lead with this stuff, I'm like, is there a similar compromise with,

hey, right now if you wanna come across as an iconoclast, you know, you should say, oh, wokeism is bad, to go along with the new division in race in America. Does that make sense? No. Ha ha ha ha ha. I'm putting it in a strong way. Most people just hate that stuff. People just, they associate it with a certain kind

of radical posturing and snobbery and holier than thou and that kind of thing. Instead if you just go to people and say, look man, the bargaining committee shouldn't be all white, don't you agree? They'll say, yeah, we agree. It shouldn't be all white. The whites will say that and the people of color will say that as well. I think that what the left should do is the basic philosophy should be mutual respect, mutual sharing of

risks and costs, and a hatred for the right kind of people. And that should include wealthy people of color and wealthy women. So the dividing line is a class line. And if the people who happen to be people of color or women are using gender or race to push aside the concerns of working class women and working class people of color, they should be criticized. And if they use social justice language to try to justify what they're doing, then that should be criticized. That social justice language to try to justify what they're doing, then that should be criticized. That social justice language ought to be criticized.

In the minds, maybe we have different impressions, but my impression is in the minds of most people out there who are not in the culture industry or in universities, they look at woke, wokery as a kind of cultural snobbishness, as a kind of fanaticism, as a way of finger wagging at ordinary people. And if that's how they feel, I'm not going to tell them that that stuff not real. It is real. I'm happy to use a different word for it. But you're saying that the word woke has been taken over by the right, so we shouldn't criticize it. My view is it's the practices that are associated with the word that really matter, and we shouldn't

use the rights capture of the word to forgive the practices. Those practices are awful and we should be criticizing them. Yeah, I worry about the left running away from the quest for racial justice. To me- When has that happened? It has never happened. When has the left run away from the quest for racial justice to me. I'm gonna start happen. It has never happened When has the left run away from the quest for social justice or racial justice? It's always led all the fights and it continues to do so today I want to make sure that that's not what we're doing and I and you know to the to me

I've always been motivated by What I think of as racial solidarity when I I'm in a situation and there are folks who are experiencing discrimination, I wanna have solidarity with their experience and I wanna support them and that's how we build a broad movement together. And what I worry about is that I hear everybody, I hear liberals, I hear leftists,

I hear people on the right saying, ah, the wokeismism has gotta go, and they refer to all discussion of race, as you said. And I think it's hard for us when I'm in a, say, again, my own experience is being in union leadership, and not that we've had great struggles in my own, but you have tough conversations sometimes. And it's hard to tell when,

well, I wanna express racial solidarity with the people that I'm working with, but you know, are we, if someone from a liberal perspective or a right perspective says, oh, that's just woke-ism, it's hard to grapple with when that's the case and when it isn't, you know?

Like, it'd be- So just ignore the word. Just say, well, it's not wokeism, this is just solidarity. I don't see the issue. I don't see the problem. Fair enough, we can move on. It's difficult to make the right cut, right,

between when I hear you speak about it, right? I feel like you're maybe making a different cut than like a lot of other people are. Yeah, I am. When they're using the word. And that's what I'm just trying to narrow down so we know exactly what we're talking about. Look, it's really important not to get caught up in words

when you're having political debates. Yeah. The reason I said that wokeism should be criticized is that prior to the rights taking over of the word, what I saw on the left being palmed off under Wokery was a very, very narrow class perspective on social justice issues. It was a direct consequence of that class's anxiety in the wake of George Floyd's murder, of the possibility of race justice bringing in working people again, which the Democratic

party had been working assiduously for 20 years to push out. So it was very important to say this isn't racial justice. Racial justice is impossible unless it reflects the needs of working people. Now the right comes and says, that stuff is horrible. And the choice for us is, do we say, well, the right's saying it's horrible so we have to defend it, or do we say, yeah, that stuff is horrible. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. The right happens to be correct on this.

Our politics come from our own vision of the world, our own social analysis, and our own assessment of who we're trying to organize. They don't come as a kind of a reflex to what the right is saying. If you find in your work that denigrating the word woke gets in your way, then don't denigrate it. I guess I'm grappling with you denigrating a little bit and I think part of it for me is that, again, the criminal justice in America is a really central issue to me

and I'm heartbroken that it's left our political discussion entirely and part of what I feel has happened, if I bring up those issues today, right, in whatever political context I want, everyone from the people on the right to the liberals will think, oh, that's wokeism, right? That is what they'll think about.

But the solution isn't to embrace the word. The solution is to say, no, it's not. Yeah. I don't get the hesitancy to criticize something that really did a lot of harm. Yeah, I'm worried about, you know, I'm worried about accidentally bending to someone else's frame, you know. But you are doing that.

When you defend the word, you are bending to. I'm not defending the word. I'm like, grappling with like the need to talk about the word at all, I guess. I mean, I only talk about it because people keep asking me about it. I think they refuse to get off the subject. Yeah, I have no desire. I'd like to just talk about the world. Yeah, okay great

Let's move on then. Let's let's keep talking about the world We've been using the word reform a lot in terms of reforming criminal justice or, you know, police or criminals or things like that. There's a lot of, on the left, there's a lot of discussion of if reform is possible at all or if we need, you know, new systems, if we need to abolish previous systems, specifically about like the Democratic Party. People talk a lot about whether the party is reformable.

I'm curious if you think it is or if we need an entirely new structure. It's possible that you could have such a dramatic transformation of this party that it would have a historical relationship to what it used to be, but be completely different. But I think it's very unlikely. You had in the 30s such a massive, massive explosion of labor unrest. There were socialist parties in the US. There was a small but still viable communist party. And they all entered the Democratic Party and they really did try to change it,

and they lost big time, like huge. Trump would say they lost bigly. So what would it take to actually turn this party into a social democratic party? It would take something bigger than what we saw in the 30s. On the other hand, here's the problem. It's very, very hard to have a third party take something bigger than what we saw in the 30s. On the other hand, here's the problem.

It's very, very hard to have a third party in an electoral system like the United States where you have what's called a winner-take-all system. Yeah. So it's almost impossible mathematically. Yeah, it hasn't happened in almost anywhere. Where it has happened, it's been in exceptional circumstances. It's possible that if the party collapsed, if it actually just collapsed, if it disintegrated,

you could revive it under that banner and do new things with it. But I don't see that as a possibility. We're in a strange moment right now. Both parties are in flux, but neither is in danger of collapsing. So in my view, I don't think it's reformable. But at the same time, I also don't think that you can run as a third party So what do you do? one

Response on the left was to say just well screw elections We just won't take part in the electoral process at all, right? We're just gonna organize and I I don't think that's a viable option That's what the student left tried to do with the far left tried to do in the 70s, 80s, and they ended up just in the wilderness. And the reason is, who's going to listen to you? If you're a third party and you're not in the electoral arena, how do you reach people? You slowly just become a social club because you have a few branches here and there.

Some weirdos come to your meetings, but you're not a mass organization. American culture is weird. The only time people pay attention to politics is when there's elections. Otherwise, they go back to their TV shows and whatever they're doing. The election is a TV show, so it's the best one. Increasingly. Yeah. I do believe that you have to have a foot in the electoral arena in some way.

What that recommends then is that you find a way of being in the electoral process in some way but not being sucked up by the Democratic party. How do you do that? I think the way you do that is you do have to have a third party, but it can't be an electoral organization. It has to be an organizing vehicle. Sounds like you're maybe describing something similar to the Working Families Party, which is a hybrid electoral organizing organization.

It's a hybrid electoral NGO. It doesn't really do much organizing. And I think it sort of, there was a moment when the Working Families Party seemed to have real traction, but the last, I'd say 15 years or so, it's really lost it. And I don't want to offend anyone, but I think the Working Families Party has been overtaken by the nonprofits and the culture of the nonprofits and the kind of the professional life. I mean, we've had the head of the party on the show who described himself as an organizer. I mean, okay.

God bless them. Every nonprofit calls itself an organizing vehicle. That's part of their- So what's the distinction between what those sort of nonprofits do and real organizing? Real organizing, a real party would be a deuce paying organization that had internal discipline that brought people in on ideological grounds that did what the CP was doing in the 30s and 40s, which said, go out into these neighborhoods, live there.

You live there. You commit class suicide. And you don't come back without bringing more people in. You don't apply for grants the way the NGOs do. You don't live off the grants. And you don't suck at the teat of elite institutions and foundations. You live and die with your members and the willingness of the members to support you. And you don't take up issues on what's hot at the moment, what's getting traction at

the moment. You don't worry if your base is racist or sexist. That's your base. You go and organize them and you win them over. You don't do focus groups. You don't them over. You don't do focus groups. You don't do polls. You don't do push polls. You go in there and you live and you fight with them

and you live and you die with them. That's a party. That hasn't existed in the US since the 1930s. It hasn't even existed in Europe for decades and decades since the Labor Party's professionalized. That's what it's gonna take. That, without that, you're not gonna get a revival. You're not gonna even get a Bernie Sanders like revival without that. How do we go about

building such a thing when, you know, if it's ideologically based, if that's the main thing that's bringing people in, we unfortunately do not have a mass number of people who hold that ideology to such an extent that they're willing to sacrifice part of their lives. You bring in your organizers on ideological grounds, but not your mass base. That's the difference. So what a CP or a socialist or a communist party used to do, and I'm saying used to do because that's,

you look to what worked in the past and you see if you can do it again to answer the question of what ought to be do now. What they used to do was, yeah, they brought in some middle-class people who were kind of, you know, fanatics in the sense that they were willing to undertake enormous sacrifice at the service of their beliefs. And you sent them into these communities and you said, go organize them. But you brought the people in based on their class and their interests and not their ideological outlook

There's a party and there's a union the party tries to bring in people on ideological grounds, but the right people if it's just a Party exclusively of middle-class people who happen to have the right views the bigger it gets the more corrupt. It's gonna get But if you try to bring in people who are working class in whose interests that ideology is, now you don't have a clash between your ideology and your interests. As a middle class person, me, Vivek Chhabar, my ideology is in tension with my material

interests. Similarly, with anybody middle class person who's on the left. Over the long run, as you bring in more and more such people, the numbers win out, which means that for five or six years somebody might be willing to stick to their values and their beliefs and give up their material goodies, but over time they're not going to keep to that. So what you wanna do is bring in people whose interests it is to be aligned with the ideology,

and that's workers. So as a party, if you base yourself in those communities, in those workplaces and you bring those people in, chances are as you grow, you'll have the right people in the party and they'll stick with the party. That's what workers for 70 years all over the advanced world, it's amazing through thick and thin, through recession and depression, through good times and bad times, workers

kept voting for their parties. Not the middle class, the middle class defected. But workers kept voting. All over the West for social democratic parties. So that means that interests have a salience. That's why you have to base yourself in that class. Is part of the reason that our organizations don't is that the middle class people running them, they feel that tension. And hey, if the workers take over, then I don't have power over the organization anymore.

It's not so cut and dry because there's no workers in those organizations. What they do is that middle class people come to these organizations for a few years and they leave. And I'm not criticizing it. They come for the right reasons. But the fact is those organizations are basically just bi-weekly meetings, an occasional protest, a picnic here and there, maybe a potluck. Okay, fine, but after four or five years, I'm going to get bored with that.

Life goes on. I have kids. I have a job to do because my life is separate from the life of the organization. But if you build the organization where the people live, that organization is part of their life. Now they're going to stick with it. So it's not that the middle class people feel threatened by workers coming in. It's that the organization doesn't have any connection with the workers and the middle

class people get bored and they leave and you keep cycling in new people. It's an extended social club. Right now the DSA has a lot of very good people in it. They do great door knocking and canvassing, and some of them are pretty active. But if you did a poll, you would find most people stick in the organization about two to three years, maybe four years, then they leave. Why? Because it's an affectation.

They do it out of a moral calling. But look, man, life takes over. And that's just the way the world is. So if you want the organization to last, if you want it to grow, evolve ideologically, build strategy, learn from experiences, you can't have people who leave after two years. You have to have people who stay in it and who see the organization's wellbeing as part of their wellbeing. If you have a socialist organization filled with middle-class people who essentially come in on the weekends, that organization has no connection to their lives.

They have no reason to see it grow in the right way, build in the right way, learn the right lessons. You have to connect the membership's material interests to the organization's future. Yeah. We've been talking for a little while, but I wanna really quickly talk about the right, at least a little bit. A lot of what we're circling around is that these organizations have trouble growing in America because they're fundamentally anti-capitalist,

and the capitalist class tries to crush them and has been successful many times in the past. Yet we've had the massive success of this right-wing populist movement the capitalist class tries to crush them and has been successful many times in the past, yet we've had the massive success of this right-wing populist movement that at least aesthetically is sometimes anti-capitalist. At least in the last couple of months, there have been moments where-

It's anti-elite. Yes, it's anti-elite, yeah. So how do you view the rise of Trumpism, and does it present any opportunities to the left? Trumpism itself does not, I think, present an opportunity in that I think it's a really thoroughly reactionary backward movement, and whatever connection it has to people's anger, it's funneling it

and channeling it in horrible ways. So Trumpism doesn't present an opportunity, but I do think there's a kind of a cultural churning going on underneath Trumpism, which is trying to capitalize on. There's a lot of unhappiness, not just with the inequality and the material conditions of people's lives, but there's a disgust with both political parties. And there's a disgust with the way in which the media has become this parasitic growth on top of the culture. And so nobody trusts it, all that.

I don't know, if there was a left-wing party in this country, it would grow explosively right now. I think the people, right now what's happened is that the whole neoliberal political and economic edifice has zero legitimacy inside the population. And that could be a huge opportunity. The problem is that there's no way for people to take their anger. Yeah. So it's either coming out in these kind of destructive, self-destructive ways inside working class neighborhoods

and communities, it's coming out destructively in the kinds of political patrons who they seek out for themselves. It's not just that there's no political organizations, there's no political vocabulary in this country anymore. People don't even know how to talk about what they're feeling in political terms. It's all in this kind of childish, infantile American vocabulary, right?

So it's a huge opportunity. I do think that, I think Trump, that's a huge opportunity. I do think that, I think Trump, that's a different discussion. I don't think Trump, the Trump political project has much of a future, but that doesn't mean that the left has any future either. Why don't you think the Trump political project has a future?

Well, we have to distinguish Trump's political project from the right wing generally. Trump is a particular wrinkle inside American right wing generally. Trump is a particular wrinkle inside American right wing forces. So what he is particularly about is a vision, both of a kind of a rebuilding of the American manufacturing sector, of an explosive growth of the powers of the presidency, and of a kind of narrowing

of the civil liberties in this country. So I think some of that is going to happen, continue to happen. The narrowing of civil liberties is going to continue to happen. And some degree of protectionism of the economy is something even the Democrats are going to support. But there's a particular problem of the authoritarian agenda that he has, which is he's not just... The Democrats don't have much of a problem in the restriction of democratic rights for ordinary people. They've been part and parcel of that for 25 years now.

Not as much as the Republicans, but the biggest growth of the prison population happened under Democratic presidents. What Trump is doing though, he's also going after the elite institutions, the courts, the elite universities, research institutions, even the Democratic mayors. they're not going to abide by that. So I think after the Trump presidency, anointing Vance as the next bearer of the torch and all that, not going to be able to do it because Trump has this ability to do two things, to keep a section of the business class with him and this rabid fan base in the electorate. Vance is not going to have the same resonance with the fan base. Probably American business likes him more than Trump, but the electoral base is not

going to come to Vance the way they did to Trump. So my guess is that 2026 will probably be a rebuke to Trump. Probably the Democrats will come back with a majority in Congress, and 2028 will probably be a rebuke to Trump. Probably the Democrats will come back with a majority in Congress. And 2028 will probably get a Democratic president. The only wild card in all this is the Democrats are in such disarray, they're so clueless, they're so without an agenda or a vision that they could screw it up. They could lose 2028. But even if they do lose it, I don't think Trumpism is going to be what will

carry the torch for the Republicans. But do you anticipate, you know, the Democrats reconstituting themselves the same way they did in 2020 with a, you know, sort of staying the course? Or do you think that they need to transform everything they will? Oh, no. If by 2020 staying the course, you mean remain... I mean, Joe Biden is a, you know, was a return to, hey, back to normal, everybody. Oh,, if by 2020 staying the course, you mean remain. I mean, Joe Biden was a return to, hey, back to normal everybody. Oh, it'll be worse than Biden.

Yeah. I think it'll be worse, because Biden made some concessions to the Bernies, the Berniecrats. Yeah, sure. Inside the party. And unless there's a really dynamic candidate coming out of the Democratic party left, which I just don't see right now,

somebody who can appeal across racial lines and across gender lines. I don't see anybody who can do that in the Democratic Party. And the party itself, the party's made it clear in 2016 and 2020 that it would rather lose to the Republicans than win with the Bernie Sanders crowd. And they're not going to let this happen again without a real fight. So my guess is what you'll get is another Pete Buttigieg or something like that with some Gavin Newsom with some rhetorical nods to populism. Yeah. But it's gonna be identitarian social justice-y neoliberalism and they could

lose they could very well lose because of that Do you have any program for the left? You know, it's to not entirely miss this opportunity Look, I think in terms of the program Sanders has the right program But the Sanders candidacy also delivered a really important lesson Sanders banked his entire campaign on a bet that he made, which was that most of the American working class has given up on the system. Only about 55% of the electorate votes, and it's mostly the richer 55% that votes. Most American workers are so cynical that they don't even come out.

And he thought, he knew that the electorate as currently constituted is lined up against him because it's mostly wealthier people who vote and they're not going to come to a Sanders type agenda with the same enthusiasm that workers would. But the workers don't vote. So what he bet on was if I just, if I'm given real media time, they see the message, they see what I'm about, they'll come out. And what happened was they didn't. Except in cities where he physically sent in buses

and brought them out, they didn't come out. Yeah, I mean, there's the narrative on the Bernie side that the election was stolen from Bernie or the establishment rallied against him. And they did, of course. And Biden's consolidation was certainly that. But that was also, by another measure, just sort of normal politics.

And you can also look at it and say, hey, Bernie didn't win. I mean, you know. That's right. He didn't. And look, there's no crying in politics. So if they lined up against you and they torpedoed your candidacy, okay, that's reality.

Yeah. Just like when earlier he said when American state is so powerful and the ruling class is so powerful, they can smash us, what do we do? I said, well, just do it. That's the world. So Bernie can't complain about that. But back to your question, the program is not a mystery. The problem is this, people don't trust left-wing politics.

They think it's pie in the sky. They think it's not gonna happen. They think, I'd love to see it. Like right now, Mehmet, Zoran Mamdani is running a great working class campaign, but it's a fact that he's more popular with the college-educated crowd than he is with workers. Now why?

It's because they don't take it seriously. So how do you get them to take it seriously? You have to go back to what I said earlier. You cannot parachute into these neighborhoods every four years, knock on a door and say, hey, here's our candidate. Will you come out and vote? Yeah. They're just not going to do it.

You have to be in those neighborhoods. You have to... The people doing the canvassing have to be familiar faces, people trust, who they go to church with, who they go to neighborhood events with. They have to be in their workplaces. Because in between those four years, it's the corporate media and it's the politicians. And they have full access to the headspace of these workers who you're trying to reach with your program. Parties have stopped doing that,

not just here but even in Europe. Parties have become PR machines. Yes. With consultants, with focus groups. And if you're a left-wing party and you're relying on a focus group, just give up. You don't deserve to be a party. Yeah, you should know because you should be

constituted of your members. Yes, exactly. And you'll know every day what they want because they are you and you are them. I wanna know what people, working class people in Queens think. I call you up, you're the person who's the party representative and I say, hey Adam, what's going on

in that neighborhood, what do people want? I don't do a focus group. Yeah. So this whole, I think Bernie knows this in his heart, but he's never been a party building guy, so he doesn't have a solution to it. Until the DSA becomes a party or a party comes out of the DSA and you get this thing,

you get real people living in the neighborhoods, working in places with the people who they seek to represent, the left doesn't have a chance, not a chance. So what is the embryo of such an organization look like? On the one hand, unions do that, but we've already talked about the challenges that unions face and the conservativism and reforming the labor movement as its own project.

But also to have, what you're talking about is a mass membership organization. You need to give people an organization that they have skin in the game about, right? We talk a lot about the NRA on the right and how that's an effective mass membership organization because it literally provides services that people want. So if we were to either radically restructure

the Democratic Party or create a new party or a new organization, you know, send people out into the communities, have them live there. I'm trying to figure out what's the catch point for the public to actually make them invested. Sure, I'm living in the community, I'm working in the community, I'm getting to know the people,

but how do I make them give a shit about the project? What is the connection to their lives? You have to show, it has to be, I'm gonna use the word an abundance agenda. Ah, yes! You have to do things, not charity, not giveaways.

You have to do things for them. Not charity, not giveaways. You have to fight alongside them and show that you can win things. Small things. Yes. Start small. Real gains, real victories, build trust, and then to the trust, build confidence. The thing of it is, every time the labor movement has grown, this is the good news, it's never been an inch at a time. It's been in leaps and bounds, doubling in three years,

tripling in four years. Because it grows not through this slow molecular march through the trenches where you're building one neighborhood at a time. You'd never win if you did that. What happens is you gain a foothold, you gain some visibility, and then to some mysterious process, Adam, and it's a complete mystery, to some mysterious process, things come together where an organization that has a kind of baseline credibility explodes in its membership. That's how I've studied this pretty hard because the last 20 years I've been thinking we're all going to die. There's no point.

Nothing is going to happen in this country. Nothing ever. So I went back and said, okay, things weren't this bad in the 1880s, but they were bad. Things weren't this bad in the 1920s, but they were bad. So how do we come out of it? And what you see is you exploded your way out of it. You didn't grow your way out of it. Organizations exploded.

But every time they exploded, one thing, there was one constant. You were in the neighborhoods. You demanded incredible sacrifices from your members. They weren't vacationing. They weren't doing it as what I call political tourism. You demanded things of them. And in particular moments, in England in the late 1880s, in the United States in the 1930s,

in Sweden in the 1920s, your membership went from 2,000 to 200,000 within the course of two years. But we don't know how and why. We know it was during periods of real crisis. Yeah. But everywhere it happened, it happened like this. You were in the neighborhoods, you were in the factories, you had credibility with them, you were in several cities, and they came to you because they saw you doing real things.

So that's good news because it means someone like an organization like the DSA that has 80,000 people, if only 15 or 20,000 of them are really dedicated, really serious, that's three times the size of the USCP, the Communist Party, when it grew and had real impacts. So cautious reasons for hope. As long as we don't get caught up in these ridiculous culture wars and we know what we stand for, we're not afraid to make, to take difficult stances within our middle-class setting, which is where all the left is now. Yeah. You're not afraid to call out identitarianism because you know what it is. As long as you can do those things, at some point the real people will say

these aren't just professor douchebags who are talking down to us. Yeah. And if we had those sort of organizations now, they would be exploding. And so the fact that they aren't speaks to the sort of desert that the American left is right now. Yeah. And a big part of that is the fact that I think the middle class left, people like myself, are caught up in useless defensive struggles around things like Wokery and Identitarianism and all that. We're constantly having to justify yourself to people who have no interest in your winning. So we need to... until

the left, what's called the left, breaks out of its class environment and embeds itself, we don't know what culture debates will have when we're talking to working-class people because we don't do it right now will have when we're talking to working class people because we don't do it right now. And I find that a lot of the stuff that you and I are worrying about, about alienating people and this and that, it's just a non-issue.

We don't know until we break out. That's a really great message to end on. I really thank you for being here, Vivek. It's been fantastic. It was my pleasure. Yeah, thank you. You're great. Well, thank you once again to Vivek for coming on the show.

Once again, his podcast is called Confronting Capitalism and he also has a book out by that same title that you can pick up at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. Just a reminder, every book you buy there supports not just the show, but your local bookstore as well. Of course, if you wanna support the show directly,

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