Guerrilla History - 2021: Year In Review

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

This Intelligence Briefing is a patron early access episode where the guys get together to discuss and analyze the most significant events of 2021.  A lot has happened in the past year, and we had a lot of fun chatting about some things that have been on the forefront of our minds, as well as some things that we had forgotten happened.  Hope you enjoy! Guerrilla History- Intelligence Briefings will be roughly a twice monthly series of shorter, more informal discussions between the hosts about topics of their choice.  Patrons at the Comrade tier and above will have access to all Intelligence Briefings. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea. Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod.  Your contributions make the show possible to continue and succeed!  Please encourage your comrades to join us, which will help our show grow. To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter at @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter at @Red_Menace_Pod.  You can find and support these shows by visiting https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/. Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.

You remember Den Bamboo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history. to Gorilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. This is a guerrilla history intelligence briefing, for those of you who do not know, intelligence briefings are roughly twice a month, Patreon content, where half of the episodes go on Patreon Early Access, and the other half roughly are Patreon exclusives. I'm your host, Henry Huck and Mackey, joined by my co-hosts, as always, Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Great to be with you, Henry. Yeah, it's always nice to see you. How's the weather doing up in Canada on this December 29th? Cold, but, you know, I wish there

were more snow, actually. If you're going to have, you know, this kind of cold, might as well be able to enjoy some snow. So I'm waiting for a big, a big dump. I can imagine that. It was my this 33 here recently. But not too much snow either. And also joined us always by Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you doing and what's the weather like in Nebraska? I'm doing okay. The weather here, the snow did not reach us. You know, out west is getting pounded. But here it's just, you know, sort of miserably cold, but no snow like with Adnan. Also a little bit under the weather. So if my voice sounds a little congestion. That's what it is. We didn't know if it was COVID, so we ran around, but two

years into the pandemic for some reason, the United States still does not have readily accessible tests. I mean, just absolutely insane that Biden ran on the idea that he was going to be the competent leadership to handle the pandemic and we can't even have access to test. But I had some friends that had some stored and we tested the family and we don't have COVID. So it's something else. So a common cold or whatever. But with a one month old, we're constantly on edge with regard to COVID. So far, no bad news, yeah. Well, I'm really glad to hear that it's not COVID.

I'm sorry to hear that you're under the weather, but I will assure you that even at your worst, your voice is still much more pleasant than mine at my best. So the listeners won't be disappointed today. Don't worry. Okay, listeners, as you can hear, we're in a little bit of a more laid back mood. And that's because today we're doing a bit of a,

I say it's going to be a fun episode, but a lot of what we talk about is not really going to be fun, We're doing our 2021 year in review. And that's not to say we're going to be reviewing what we've talked about this year. We're going to be talking about the big things that happened in 2021 that either will have some impact historically. This is a history podcast. When we look back in the future to 2021, we say, wow, that event really had some historical impact on today. Or perhaps as Adnan was talking about before we hit record, these things had

these historical, they had historical impacts from the past playing into them that kind of came to a head in 2021. So we'll have a couple of different tracks here. Guys, when we decided that we were going to do a 2021 in review, was there anything that jumped to your head immediately? I guess we'll start with Brett. We don't have to go too deep right away, but was there anything that like immediately hit you, 2021? Yeah, I, what, you know, I want to dive into the details here for sure, but, you know, from a bird's eye view, we are going to look back in retrospect at this period of time, 2020, 2021, and we'll see probably 2022 as well as a critical time when changes that were probably already in the making were forced, right, to come to speed up, contradictions

that could otherwise kind of be tucked away and hidden out of view, burst into view for everybody to see. And we're living through it. And, you know, a classic, in the insight of Marxism and historical materialism, it's very hard to understand within the fog of the present moment, you know, what you're actually living through. I think Marxism gives us the best ability to analyze the present as it develops, but as with everything, retrospect brings clarity. And I think, I don't even think that the most insightful of us fully appreciate the ways that these last couple of years are going to shape the rest of our lives for better or worse. So in that sense. And a lot of what we're going to talk about, I think, is going to at least dovetail with

these last two years. Because, of course, we have the pandemic. We also have Trump and Biden. We also have, you know, historic uprisings. We also have a military or increasingly militant, fascist right on the rise in the U.S. and across the world. And so things are coming to a head. And that's kind of my bird's eye view. And I'll dig into the details as we go through this episode. Yeah, excellent. None. Was there anything that hit you in 2021 right off the top of your head, when we first proposed this, that you thought, you know, this is really kind of the story of 2021. Well, I guess I agree with Brett that while there are a lot of particular events that perhaps

some of which we will talk about, that my overall sense of 2021 is really the exacerbation of processes that were underway when it came to inequality, you know, U.S. imperialism, how that's operating in the world, the disastrous consequences really of almost two years under the pandemic and responses to the pandemic have really accelerated a lot of things that I think were already underway in terms of techno, you know,

kind of dominance of new forms of capitalism using social media and technology. These kinds of things, I think, think, you know, they dominate my thinking about it. And I really think of this 2020, 2021 as years, in particular this last year, of missed opportunities, really in some way. So I guess I'm going to start with a bit of the negative. We were in a jolly sort of beginning mood. But I do think that, you know, we can talk about some of the positive developments. And I think definitely we will. But my overall feeling is that there were a lot of opportunities, really, too, that the pandemic presented and other aspects of what we've gone through presented opportunities for left critique of capitalism, movements for social change, and action on the climate in a way that would secure a progressive, you know, equal future for the globe.

well as you know the survival of the human race these kinds of opportunities i think were there but we've seen that the left um has not been organized and effective enough to take advantage of some of these so instead what we've seen is the exacerbation of some of those trends of inequality um you know over the course of the year so that's that's something we should be self-critical about and also be thinking about going into 2020 where do we have to put our energies on the left in terms of organizing and activism and what are the opportunities that may be available in the future? Because I think we wasted some of them in 2021. Yeah, absolutely. I think that all of those are really good points. And when I'm thinking

about things that really hit me, of course, there was things like the pandemic generally. Of course, this is something that's going to be right on the top of everybody's mind. We had things like the election. We had things like the insurrection on January 6th, which I think we'll talk about in a little bit. But when I was really trying to think about things that haven't gotten the media attention that they deserve, there was really one thing that stood out like immediately for me. And we're also partially to blame for this because we had intended on covering it this year, but we never, because of scheduling, we never got to it. And we're going to try to do it in early 2022. And that's the farmers' protests, the farmers revolt in India as a response to the farm bills

that were being put in place. So if individuals are not aware of what the farmers' protests were, there was three farm bills that were going into place in India that were very, very anti-farmor and anti-worker generally, which prompted this absolutely massive protests, like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people protesting, including general strikes across India. Now, this started, the farm bills were proposed in late 2020, but just a couple weeks ago, just over two weeks ago now, the government completely backed down. They repealed the farm bills, and the workers won in India. So this is some really, I'm really a history.

event, having such a huge number of people and a general strike across the country and getting basically all of the demands that they wanted, really historic. But when we look at the media coverage, even when I was looking at lists of like things that were happening in 2021 to jog my memory, this wasn't on a lot of lists because it challenges that, you know, the neoliberal order and the neoliberal consensus that, you know, the people at the top are the ones that are dictating what's happening in society. in India, we saw that when the workers come together, when the workers strike, when the workers have actions together, they can actually win.

Now, the other reason that it came to mind immediately is because, like I said, we've been hoping to talk about it for a couple months now, but scheduling just has prevented it. So that's, that's on us. And we're going to try to get to that in early 2020 with a couple of guests. I've talked about it on David Feldman's show. I've had Ashok Kumar, who's a professor at Burke, University talk about it on there. But we'll cover it on guerrilla history in early 2022, for sure, because it is an absolutely massive event that I think deserves a lot more

coverage. Guys, if you have anything that you want to say on that, or if you want to start jumping into the events that you want to start analyzing, feel free to just jump right in. Yeah, I'd also add to that. The worker sort of, I mean, not to the same size and degree, but the worker uprising here in the United States also got a similar, level of like ignoring from the from the mainstream media and it's very obvious why right these mainstream media outlets are are huge corporations and they have a vested interest in sort of maintaining the status quo which is neoliberalism which is keeping workers desperate riddled with debt you know not even showing them that other workers around the country are engaging in these

sorts of actions they would rather cover silly stuff about trump and rushagate than they would about this historic uprising, at least in the last several decades, of workers. And still, it's tiny, right? It's not going to radically change the American economy overnight. But it's a sign of something that could continue to develop. It has insane support, like these union strikes with Kellogg's, John Deere. It had support right left, maybe not center, right? But on the right and the right and the left, there's like, you know, bipartisan support for these, for these workers and their their union fight. So that's going to continue to develop. And, you know, speaking about history and probably Adonon could speak much more expertly to this idea. But historically, big pandemics have

been followed by, you know, sort of how would you, how would you put it? Some slack in the labor market, right? It gives labor a little bit of an edge. I mean, the brute fact of losing almost a million Americans. And that number will probably go up over time when the dust settles and we can take, you know, stock retrospectively, don't be surprised if that number crosses a million. We're at 800,000 right now. That's obviously going to have a fucking impact on the labor market, but other things as well. And I don't want to go into all of it because we just rehash what we've talked about COVID and its impacts on the economy.

We've talked about that a bunch. But I'm really interested in that. That hooks up with what's happening in India. If for nothing else, you have like a Trump Biden right wing presidency over there. You have Modi, obviously on the side of capital over labor. and labor is pushing back. So that's a beautiful thing. And the other thing I wanted to mention really quick, and maybe we can dive deeper into this, is just the role that Asia, and I never tire of saying this, is going to play in the 21st century. You know, it's going to be led by China just because of

the economic, military, regional power that is China, global, a counter-hegemon to U.S. and Western imperialism. But Asia as a whole, which includes India, obviously, is on the rise. And it's going to be really interesting to see how a developing and maybe even a developed India or a developed China are going to take shape and form over the next several decades. Obviously, how that relates to climate change is an issue. But I think we should keep our eyes on that. And we should also remember, too, that class struggle is happening within China, right? There's actually a wave of labor actions and strikes and full on explicit class struggle within China itself. So how is the CCP going to handle that sort of internal contradiction that

class struggle that's developing and deepening as a rising, you know, Chinese working class and even some semblance of a middle class is emerging. As it's happened around the world, they're going to start demanding a little bit more in terms of reducing inequality, etc. So how that will play out is also going to not only impact China, but it's going to impact India, that's going to impact the entire region and thus will impact the world. So those are things to keep eyes on as well going forward. And they sort of dovetail nicely with what you said, Henry. Yeah, I would pick up on that.

I mean, definitely part of my hopeful list of events during this last year were definitely workers' struggles. So I think, Henry, it's great that you pointed out that globally speaking, you know, this is, you know, has dominated, you know, in India, the fact that there's been a full, over a year now at this point. There have been constant protests that have, that started in December of 2020, but have continued, you know, to this day. And also in the U.S. and elsewhere, I think that's absolutely correct that the pandemic, both historically, we've already had an episode where we talked a little bit about the black death and some of the consequences in the 14th century, the failure of attempts to regulate that, that helped bring down the feudal

system and begin part of the processes for the transition from feudalism to new forms of political economy and ultimately capitalism. So that definitely does have a big consequence. I feel like there were more opportunities. So it's starting, and maybe we'll see it. Maybe I've just been impatient because I've expected from historical precedents that there would be the rise of worker movements right away. It's starting now in the U.S., Canada, places like this, and that could be very, very significant. The Kellogg's workers strike, John Deere, Amazon workers. And I think that's one thing that definitely has shifted in consciousness is the recognition of how much we have depended on very exploited labor working in terrible conditions during the pandemic

and that many of the greatest vectors for spread of COVID during the pandemic have been in workplaces that are unregulated, that are unhealthy, where despite this kind of rhetoric that we all have to pull together and make sacrifices together to ensure our collective safety that nonetheless this entire system has been depending on profit-driven, you know, just in time, you know, processing and in supply chains and so on, that are very vulnerable, but nonetheless depend on, you know, exploited workers. And I think there's been a lot of sympathy and consciousness about that that I hope and expect will be driving, you know, workers' movements that might be more successful because, as Brett pointed out,

there is sympathy on the right and the left. That, however, seems to me the big challenge and the big missed opportunities of the left in 2021 is really framing the narrative, you know, about post-pandemic and about what the pandemic has been causing and how it could be different in terms of equalizing, you know, possibilities for liberation. It seems that the energy, the discursive critique that has been more powerful has been the right against the vaccine mandates, against, you know, corporate elites exploiting and, you know, benefiting, you know, the left has been making some of these critiques, but it's also been a little bit divided in terms of how it presents its critique and

its alternatives about what could have been and should be possible. So that's something to watch out for going forward is, you know, left and right populism. You know, I think the left is going to have a big challenge ahead in how it frames these narratives, how it organizes politically in order to capture this critical energy of, you know, that is dissatisfied with the system. I mean, there's just wholesale dissatisfaction with the system. Everyone is recognizing that it's unfair, that it's exploitative, what are those solutions? How do we analyze that? I think that's really, you know, the key question for us on the left.

Yeah, just really quickly bouncing off what you said on it. I just wanted to iterate, you know, the reason why, one of the reasons our narratives are not really, getting through as much as the right and the center is precisely because big money backs both far right, center right, and center left political mainstream media. So you can turn on Fox News and get all of what you said about the right wing narrative. You can turn on MSNBC and CNN and get the center of center left narrative. But obviously if you're socialist, communist and anarchist, you're not going to have access to any of that corporate money, any of that funding. And so what we're doing here is what the best that we can do as a dissident fringe political group in the

in belly of the beast, which I think speaks to the importance of left media. Now, we are seeing left media grow, advance, spread out, expand into new platforms, new territories. I mean, it comes with a lot of bullshit. There's plenty of people calling themselves socialists that are muddying the water and, you know, I think really genuinely like misleading young people, like, you know, going on Twitch and watching voucher or some stupid, I don't even know how to say his name. You know, that that's a problem, but that's going to, that problem is going to come with the

of the left more broadly because there is no organization. There is no centralizing center of gravity. So it's going to be a bunch of disparate sort of DIY voices at the beginning. We'll see how that evolves and changes over time. But we've got to accept the good with the bad. And I think we also can't downplay the importance of left media precisely because for people to begin to organize and act on left ideas, they need to be introduced to them. And they're not going to be introduced to them in the conventional ways that people are introduced to politics. And that that's our disadvantage, but it's also something that I think the left in general take seriously and is working to confront. So yeah, we'll see how that goes. And just to add on to the importance of that,

sorry, I'll be, I'll be very brief. We have to remember that articulating a true left message is very important because otherwise a lot of people, including people that are nominally on the left, even if they're trying to advance, like, workers' rights, you know, they're supporting these strikes, they're willing to take, they're basically willing to pursue red-brown alliances by taking, as we mentioned, there's some worker solidarity on the far right and there's worker solidarity on the far left with striking workers. Well, they think maybe we should just harness that and kind of put these groups together and maybe we'll have a bigger group and there we go. That's done. Well, you know, different things like this have been tried in the past. And even

not looking at just trying to harness popular sentiment. I mean, this is a very random example, but it's something that popped into my head is, you know, when Marx was writing about the Paris commune after the fall of the Paris commune, what was the one big lesson that he drew from it? You can't take, you can't just take the ready made state machinery and then expect socialism to come out of that. You have to actually physically change what is going on. And in the same way, you can't just harness this disparate sentiment on the far left and the far right and hope that you can cohesively make these groups together. And then poof, you're going to have something akin to socialism come out of that because, you know, they both hate their bosses.

That doesn't work like that. You have to actually foster left-wing theory. You have to foster left-wing sentiment. Put these ideas forth before people. hopefully you convert them ideologically that's the key you can't just take this disparate anger and hope that something positive and lasting comes out of that sorry for that digression but it was something that's absolutely on point henry i mean i think that's the real challenge that we're facing when we talk about you know left media and all these opportunities that brett was pointing out

are expanding and he pointed out that some of the challenges are is that you know it's very disparate one because they're not really anchored until maybe now and this is why it's very important that we talk about and engage with and support and create you know these worker struggles in our communities and you know nationally and wherever we see them this is something that has to be supported because that is historically speaking the base for genuine you know change structural change is coming from you know these movements that change the workplace that change you know production that change distribution in the economy because the workers are organized so whatever else we're doing in terms of developing ideology political education and so on if it's not connected with

if it doesn't engage with and promote you know that worker uh challenge to corporate capitalism to you know the capital capitalist class obviously it's not going to um you know be that fruitful or useful. One of the problems I've seen in these growing pains is that in the new economy of social media, the YouTube clicks and Twitch and so on, is that we're getting a personality-driven celebrity politics, both in terms of the political elected leaders who act as celebrity figures, you know, who are not necessarily rooted in actual workers organizing, but they exist in the sphere of Twitter and social media as performers of a certain kind of leftist politics while not necessarily challenging the party structures that they're engaging in at that level and then likewise

in the media that covers them comments upon them what we're getting is factional politically you know fruitless I think you know factional polemical discord because this is very you know entertaining. It is, it captures attention. It's less political education than kind of left political entertainment. And this is, I think, a problem for the future. It is part of these growing pains. We need to see, I think, less of the sectarian and personality-driven schisms and fights online and more of building a kind of wide left movement that, okay, at different points, you know, people will have differences of opinion, on issues, on strategy, but there has to be a space for talking about them. I do think that in this political education, historical analysis

is absolutely crucial. As you point out, Henry, there have been previous occasions that we can learn from and analyze our contemporary situation with the benefit of insights on those. And so that's, I think, you know, one way forward that if the progressive left alternative media is to be effective, one has to root itself in these worker struggles, and then secondly, it has to create the conditions for genuine political education rather than just polemical interchange where people are performing their idea of what a true left is. And in fact, I don't even like that kind of framing or terminology. Real left, leftist, etc. This is where we get into sectarian division because we want to be correct and we want to be the true rather than we want

to be effective and we want to liberate ourselves. So I think there's a big challenge and it's very interesting to see what's happened this last year is that starting very from the very beginning of the year, you know, where there were opportunities for organizing on the left to push through universal programs and so on. What ended up happening is that we've had a year essentially a factional personality-driven fights that I don't think have really pushed the agenda forward that much. Yeah, I just wanted to mention the, you know, I think both of you kind of alluded to, but Henry put on the table this idea of the red-brown a lot. and there's people on the left repeating this mistake.

And I think this harkens back to a core lesson that Mao and Maoist dialectics teaches us, right? It's not that two combines into one. You don't take the left and the right and put them together and create a new entity. It's that one divides into two. You have the left and we have to line struggle and become principled in that. And in those divisions, in those line struggles, you're going to have actually divisions within that singular entity that we call the left, which is obviously very unhelpful for obvious reasons. So I think that's just interesting to keep in mind and totally undermines this idea that there's anything to really gain by, especially the far right.

And when I say like there's like right wing support for unions, I'm not even really sure about like neo-Nazis and fascists. I mean, you know, they're all race over class weirdos. I'm saying like center-right conservatives, right? Millions and millions and millions of more of these guys than there are of the fucking fascist and want to be Hitler's. And those people, you know, tend to support unions and they're on the picket line right next to any progressive lefty or Bernie Sanders. or supporter fighting for their for each other's families now regardless of of their other political ideas on the center right which we'd all disagree with unionism is always going to be a win for the left and and i've seen this personally not that unions especially today are radicalizing people to

socialism but labor politics blunts the edge and makes it much harder to to maintain a right wing politic um all my buddies from high school are in unions and they're all you know, bearded white guys that fish and hunt and they live in a deep red state. And in any other world, those guys could very easily become Trump supporters. They're all not. They're all like Bernie supporters. I even have one of my, he's a steam fitter. He calls himself a democratic socialist because of Bernie Sanders. Now, obviously for the communists, not far left enough, we have plenty of critiques. But labor unions in particular prevent and actually act to like stop further right wing development by centering class, a trade union in, by definition, centers class over things like

race. And so, you know, that, that in and of itself is going to help the left broadly conceived, just pro-labor unionism, et cetera, and at least open people up to left-wing ideas and critiques and close down some pathways for moving further right. So, you know, on the picket line with like some fucking Trump supporter, whatever, I think that the fact that they're on the picket line and the union wins is a win for the for the left broadly conceived and we should keep that in mind i don't know just a thought yeah and i just imagine what would happen if unions actually were radical in the united states now i know you know we have the iw but i'm talking about like mainstream large unions uh this is something that in some other parts of the world do exist

radical unions in fact i'm still trying and i i will persist until i succeed in trying to get the the leader of the largest single union, individual union, not like coalition of unions. In the entire African continent, the guy is an avowed Marxist-Leninist, and it's a very, very left-wing union. It's metalworkers union of South Africa, in case anybody's interested. I do have people that are in contact with the leader of that union, and I'm working on it because they had some very interesting developments a few years ago that would be interesting for the show. But nonetheless, just imagine what would happen if, you know, The biggest single union in the United States was led by a Marxist Leninist and was trying to push for, you know, a socialist or communist future within the country.

I mean, the mind boggles at what would actually happen when we can see, as Brett was pointing out, sentiment changing just because of these very bland unions that we have in the United States today. But I want to transition out of worker's struggle, at least for the moment, because there's a lot of stuff that happened in 2021. and we've already been talking for almost half an hour. So I guess, Brett, let me pitch it back over to you to go into the next kind of topic or theme of discussion that you want to talk about in our 2021 in review. Yeah. So here's my main thesis argument that I'm going to push in this episode surrounding this topic. And I think, you know, this kind of a bold claim, and we'll see if I'm right or wrong,

I think that what we're witnessing now is the final death nails. in neoliberalism. I do not think it can continue. Right, left, and center, neoliberalism is a failed project. So many of the terrible things about our society are traced back precisely and immediately and directly to neoliberal economic policy from the rise of the fascist right to historic levels of inequality and everything in between. Neoliberalism is a failed project. And it's also interesting because where do neoliberalism start? Well, it started in the laboratory of of Pinochet's Chile. And with Henry Kissinger in the U.S. overseeing, you know, the Chicago boys overseeing the development of what would become neoliberalism and be imported back into

the U.S. and into the UK under Thatcher and Reagan. What just happened? Well, Chile is rejecting neoliberalism, right? They just voted in a social Democrat, whatever, not perfect. But somebody that opposes a neoliberalism and beat like what, like a Nazi's grandkid or some shit. So we are seeing that in Latin America broadly, we're seeing a shift back to the left with Evo Morales. You even have like Omlo in Mexico, who my wife's Mexican dad is a big fan of, right? Social Democrat, but still interesting move to the left, anti-corruption left. In Brazil, we're looking at Lula, possibly displacing Bolsonaro, taking back over control of the

single biggest country in Latin America, which would be huge. obviously you have Venezuela and a couple other places, Cuba, keeping up the fight. So that's a beautiful thing. And that is also another sign that neoliberalism is more or less dying and is going to, is dead, I think, is dead. The response, I mean, neoliberalism was in part of response to the falling rate of profit in the 70s. And those conditions no longer hold. But the conditions aren't better, right? The falling rate of profit is still a problem.

And if huge populations on the right and the left are rejecting neoliberalism, what does the ruling class do to prop up profits? Well, that's going to intensify class struggle at the very least. And I think if they have their way, they're going to lead us into some sort of monopoly techno feudalism. You can already see the beginnings of that, right? Huge monopolies and a permanent underclass. That's the only place that neoliberal ideology can possibly continue to lead toward. But, you know, I think in the U.S., you're seeing both parties wrestling with the end of it. And I think like a Biden administration or if they try to put Kamala up in 2024, what they're going to lose.

But, you know, even on the Democratic Party, like these ideas no longer have sway. And you're still trying to fit the square block of neoliberal 80s ideology that's swimming around in Biden's dying brain into the square hole of 2020s. And that's just no longer tenable. So how that project ultimately gets pushed off the table completely, I'm not quite sure. The ruling class is going to put up a fight given the lack of other options it really has, right? This idea that social Democrats and liberals have that we're going to come, that we're going to go back to some sort of New Deal post-World War II Keynesianism is insane. We have to, as Marxists, understand that historical period that allowed for the development of the New Deal is dead.

It's gone. And what really concerns me, and this, I'll wrap it up here and toss it back because I want to hear your thoughts on this. What really concerns me is that environmentalism is being promoted, like the Green New Deal, is just Green Keynesianism. It's this return to a previous way of doing things, even though conditions have shifted because there's no imaginative capacity to figure out how to move forward in a new way. So even with the death of neoliberalism, there's not necessarily going to be a guaranteed rise of like a new left wing vision for America. I think the I think right winger, centrist, and liberal social democrats, progressives suffer from a complete lack of political imagination and how that will play out. I don't exactly know. But my main premise here is that we are seeing the death of 40 years of neoliberalism.

And it's kind of a, it's a good thing. You know, well, what comes next? Who the fuck knows? But it's good that this fucking beast is finally being put into its grave. I completely agree. I think that's very, very good. cogent analysis spread about the end of neoliberalism, widely discredited across the political spectrum. I think the point about these left victories in Latin America, they are a recognition

that the Washington consensus has not been working. And, you know, we saw a left wave in the late 2000s, and that was when the U.S. was fully wrapped up in the war in Iraq and occupation, continuing occupation in Afghanistan and all of its kind of efforts in the global war on terrorism were focused in a particular direction. And it opened up possibilities for left populist victories in the traditional home for U.S. Empire, which was in Central and Latin America and Caribbean. So while the empire was being, you know, kind of absorbed and the, you know, kind of attention, that first critique of kind of the neoliberal order was starting to make itself felt and was, of course, with the global collapse in 2008, it received, you know, kind of a boost

ideologically and tearing down, you know, all of the, you know, fantasies that, you know, the global financial order could actually work. But there was a right word counterreaction clamped down. They got rid of Lula, you know, they managed to create this. sort of corruption discourse and only target, you know, Lula, you know, under it. And we saw that there was a attempt at a rollback. And of course, with the U.S. pulling out of the, you know, Afghanistan, which is, of course, another major event that we could talk about here as significant, not because it itself in that moment was so significant, but because it, you know, took so long for the unfolding

of what was evidently the weakness of the U.S. attempts to occupy and control the Middle East did tremendous damage in the region. Let's be honest about that. We could talk a lot about that, but nonetheless it was not able to really genuinely achieve its goals and create the sorts of regimes that it could work out this new system of the rules-based international order, which is what we're hearing about a lot here in 2020, 2021 with all of these pions for the threats to liberal democracy that need to be, you know, countered. Well, it's not been working very well. And obviously, the end of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is a product of struggle, you know, against U.S. empire on the ground, the overreach, imperial overreach. And maybe in some sense, that has,

also created more of these openings, along with the pandemic, for these opportunities in Latin America, where the neoliberal order is really kind of dead now. The question is, as you said, what replaces it? And we already see, you know, with ultra-nationalist, you know, very interestingly, internationalist, ultra-nationalist movements, you know, movements that are taking, you know, a page from one another for far-right extremist, ultra-nationalist movements against immigrants and for these kind of nativist sorts of policies, fascistic, neo-fascistic orientations that we see in India under Modi or we see in Hungary and Eastern Europe, and even with the rise of left right-wing populism in places like France, in Germany, with the neo-Nazi kind of type parties

re-emerging back into, you know, the mainstream. So that is definitely happening. And I think, you know, Paul Mason had a very interesting examination of Wilhelm Reich's ideas. So what's the psychology, you know, of fascism? And he was sort of turning to Eric Fromm's ideas, very interesting lecture that he gave. And he sort of argued that what we're witnessing is the dissolution. of neoliberal personality. That's what's kind of happening.

That's no longer credible. And so there are the emergence of this neo-fascistic kind of orientation, sort of sociobiology. I think that is one thing that we're seeing. I think the other orientation that we're seeing is wokeism. I think this will be interesting. There's a couple of interesting articles recently, one by a kind of sort of center-right figure in Bloomberg news where he, this guy, what's his name? I'm looking up the, oh, Tyler Cohen, and it's a fairly recent article from earlier this fall where he basically talks about how,

you know, wokeism is going to go global. And what I would argue, he sees this as a potentially positive. He doesn't like it, but he sees it as potentially positive. It's going to replace the neoconservatism, you know, which was a uniquely American ideology of how it should dominate and spread the American model around the world, and that this is an analogous kind of ideological movement, and that while it's not great, it's much better than these far right alternatives and, of course, any of these left ones, which you can't really understand and characterize, what I would say is that this wokeism seems like it is sort of the ideology potentially here of the global, progressive, professional managerial class.

under this latest iteration of that techno-futalist capitalism that you were alluding to, this is sort of how it could be conceivably managed, just through an ideology of trying to spread a certain form of wokeism, that there is counter-reaction against. You see in France, for example, they're upset with, like, the importing of post-colonialism, You know, the education minister himself said that we're going to have inquests in people who are teaching post-colonialism and race because this is all a North American importation ideologically that's undermining the fabric of France, right? So there are going to be reactions, but this is sort of a potentially globalizing ideology to reinforce and at least to keep integrated the managerial class for this sort of techno feudalism. that capitalism seems to be metamorphos foresizing into.

So anyway, that's just some, I had been thinking of talking about that, but it just perfectly fit with what you mentioned, Brett. Yeah, so let me just say something quickly in regards to wokeism, not in terms of analysis myself, but I want to point the listeners in a direction that they can look to if they want. An analysis by some people that I respect greatly, I have two of my comrades, many listeners may know them, Dr. Charisse Burden Stelly and Dr. Layla Brown, who are two black pan-Africanist, communist scholars, absolutely brilliant.

I've interviewed both of them before in different venues, chat to them periodically. Absolutely fantastic. And they have their own show called Last Dope Intellectual. If you want a black pan-Africanist communist perspective on things, you should definitely check out the show. It's very, very interesting, very informative and very fun. But about two or three episodes ago, I would say they had a somewhat in-depth discussion of wokeism on the show. And it was a quite interesting discussion. So without, you know, saying what they said on the show, I can just direct you to the show and tell you to listen to

it. And, yeah, share the love from guerrilla history with, uh, those two comrades of, of ours. Brett, I know you have something that you want to say on this. So I'll let you hop in here before I hit my next point. Yeah, thank you. One tiny thing about what Adnan just said before we move on. You know, obviously, like, I don't know what they say on the show. Wokeism fucking sucks.

Like this is the term. I hate it so much. Like, you know, and it's kind of a tragedy because woke started as like an inter-black, you know, slaying term for a certain person that had a socially and politically developed consciousness. and then you hear like old white boomers like you know i think jo rogan's gen x or whatever but you know all these weirdos talking about wokeism and like just the the worst fucking people using the term i think for the left i think we should try to not use that term you know for for various reasons and instead replace it with what i think is a more precise term which is

identity reductionism because that's the real liberal play here and we can already see it we've seen it develop over the last several years it is what you're saying odd not it's just a matter of like quibbling over an abstract term. But, you know, I'm just riffing off of the term that they've been circulating in their internal dialogues here. Yes, absolutely. Without a doubt. But we can see that with, yeah, we can see with corporations.

We can see with the industrial, military, industrial compost. We can see with Israel using feminism and veganism to advance a fascistic apartheid politic. And so, you know, that allows a regressive right wing, brutally blind. bloody system to dress itself up in the garb of like inclusion. And, you know, liberals are eating this up. Young people coming up are eating this up. And what happens is two things. One, that identity is, is, and we've seen it already, weaponized immediately against an anti-imperialist and class politic. You can't vote for Corby. He's an anti-Semite. They even try to pin

Bernie Sanders as an anti-Semite when other things weren't quite sticking, right? Sexist. What are you? You're a racist because you think we should get out of this country or whatever. they're going to keep doing it's very cynical so that that's one thing that they've been doing they're going to try i don't think it's going to be successful i think people are getting sick of it um people even on the left that understand there's a place for this stuff like inclusion and and pointing out different identities have different experiences and different forms of oppression but we know you have to marry it to a class an anti imperialist politic or it's fucking meaningless and and one of the other unintended consequences um is that it it intensifies the identity

politics of the right um particularly in a political system like our own where the politics doesn't work to change your material conditions. No matter who you vote for, your material conditions are more or less going to stay the same. And so politics becomes culture war and identity and ephemera. And so with the assertion of this liberal identity reduction comes necessarily, this white identity fascistic response to that. And so for the left left, the communist socialist left, we should be emphasized anti-imperialist and class politics, the right doesn't have a response to that stuff. You know, not in any substantive way.

They do have a response to identity reductionism. We're identity reductionist too. We're white Christian nationalist. Fuck you. They don't have a response to a really sincere, well-articulated class and anti-imperialist politics. We have to keep pushing that without becoming reactionary against identities, right? Like we don't want to fall into this trap.

You see some quote-unquote leftist fall into. into where then they start becoming we're anti-wo-cleftist. Like, it's so fucking nauseating. You know, all around, it's nauseating to hear this stuff. So I just don't think that that's going to particularly work long term, which gives us an opening because the white identity politics of the right also is rudderless, also offers no way forward, also is completely visionless and is all about feelings and vibes and aesthetic and how does Trump make me feel as a white reactionary and all this nonsense?

sense. So I think this whole thing is kind of, it's collapsing as well. And it might take longer than neoliberalism proper to collapse, but it is collapsing. And I want, I think the real left should get away from that as quickly as we can. You know, it sounds like you listened to that episode of the last dope intellectual Brett. I know you said you didn't, but like very much echoed the point of that segment. So if you, if you, again, the listeners are interested in that, do check out that and give our love to Dr. CBS and Dr. Layla Brown. Adnan, do you have anything very quick here. It looked like you wanted to say. Only that I agree that I'm not positing that this so-called wokeism, which is how I should have framed it, because it is indeed, as you point out,

Brett, a longstanding trajectory of identity, well, the use of by even corporate capitalists of identity reductionism, you know, in these like latest neoliberal forms of global capital. They'd already sort of been developing that United Colors of Beneton and, you know, all of this. But as a kind of turn, like a real doubling down by the sort of PMC of this techno feudalism, like they are going to really hang on to this and try and promote this. And this may be one of the kind of ways in which the corporate right wing tries to shore itself up through this, partly because even though it is completely unpopular as being discredited, because their demonization of the people, you know, and trying to kind of frame all of the those who are

resisting against it, even if it's coming from the right, they're still kind of using this sort of language to talk about them as Hillary Clinton did as the, you know, what was it? She said again. It was the basket of deplorables. Yes, exactly. Now, I agree with you. I don't think that's going to work. But I think the. problem for the left is that it does confuse a lot of people because we do believe in social justice we do believe in being inclusive of those identities and difference it's just that what we need to do is to foreground the universal basis of justice for everybody and not get wrapped up completely in some of the distracting paradigms that will be used to divide us from communicating with people

who may be, you know, susceptible and engaged in potentially in class analysis if we could make that case for them. So I agree completely with that. And it does, in a dialectical way, this is what helps organize the counter-elite dimension of right-wing populism today. They love that stuff. That's all we want to talk about. You know, there's a recent report about that just came out, a polling about trans, you know, trans issues, you know, NGOs that are kind of trying to figure out the politics of how to, you know, have a more inclusive society around trans issues have been doing polling. And they found that, you know, people on the right know all about this like swimmer at UPenn, a trans woman who is competing, you know, in women's

sports they know all about this because that's all they want to talk about um you know but are they feminists no of course they're not feminist so but they will adopt this idea you know whereas people who are more inclusive and who don't have a problem with people's gender sexual identities and you know have a more open attitude we don't know about this you know that this is a big thing on the right and it's because we're not really paying attention and it doesn't mean the same thing for us, but the right wing loves to focus and organize around these supposed fantasies of wholeness and of identity as well. So that's the problem that we have to, we have to solve and foreground that class analysis. And just really quick, Henry, I really apologize, just to make this very clear,

why does corporate capitalism like this move? Well, because it divides people. You know, the only challenge to global capitalism and imperialism is a hyper-organized, multi-racial coalition of different people with different identities coming together through the bonding glue of class struggle. And if the ruling class can convince you on the right and the left, that you're actually this micro identity. And you can't really, you know, if you're like a black trans woman, you can't really align with that, you know, Nebraska Fisher Hunter white guy because you guys just don't have anything in common whatsoever. So you can see how this serves to hyper divide the working class and thus consolidate ruling class power at the top. And it works on the right

and the left. And they all, they have their different inverted versions of it, but it does the same basic thing. And it prevents us from, from uniting. Now, there are real differences. We have to work through them. There are differences of identity that could cause us to not be able to form coalitions. And we need to work through that. But as long as we can, we can keep it away from class and on these like hyper, micro divisions between people and these very subtle intersections of a bunch of different identities, of course, it serves the already consolidated in some sense global ruling class. So that's why I would just put that cherry on top. But I apologize, Henry, for going too long. No, no, it's okay. I mean, it's a really interesting discussion. And I would love to continue

it. But we do have a lot more things on the docket and not a ton of time to get through them. So I'm just going to try to transition us here. So Brett, a little bit ago, you mentioned how eco-politics, green politics in the global north is today. And this is something that we've talked about on the show. Several times, this is something that our next full episode will be on. It'll be out in just a couple weeks, listeners. So we've already recorded it. Just be looking in your podcast app in a couple weeks for it for the next issue about this.

But we've been talking about eco-politics in the global north. And we've been talking about the Western left. And these things, they coincide with each other, which is to say, and this goes back to your neoliberal discussion, the discussion on neoliberalism, what is coming up in it? One of the things that even people nominatively on the left are pushing for is this kind of green Keynesianism, which, frankly, we can also call eco-imperialism. When you don't take a global analysis, an internationalist analysis, where you don't center the third world, the global south, in your analysis of how to handle the environment, you have solutions that are going to entrench the global north, global south divide. And we see examples of this all the time. But it goes to the point that you are making, Brett, in terms of, you know, we have falling rates of profits. We recently talked with Manny Ness about needing release valves for capital gluts, investing in green technology, getting cheap raw materials from global south countries like lithium, producing high cost manufactured goods like solar panels in the United States and green batteries.

This is something that might increasingly happen. And I'm using this as a transition point to talk about the next topic that I would like to bring up, which is the climate. So this is not something that's happened in 2021, right? This is a process that's been going on for decades and decades and decades and decades and decades. But what we can see is that we've had some developments even on the climate front this year. We had COP26, the biggest conference that we've had on the climate in the last five years. And what came out of it? Not much.

I mean, it was just about nothing came out of COP26. Listeners, I will direct you to, this is like my main job here, is telling listeners where to look for things. Look back a few episodes ago, Adnan hosted an excellent interview with Vijay Prashad and Chris Saltmarsh talking about COP 26 and the failure of COP 26 and taking a global perspective of the failure of COP 26. Also, Brett has interviewed Max Isle on a People's Green New Deal on Rev Left. Max, I've interviewed as well. He's a comrade of mine, somebody who everybody needs to follow. Everybody needs to listen to what he says, read what he writes. You don't have to take everything on board, but I find his analysis to be one of the most incisive

and one of the ones that foregrounds the global south the most. But we see that we have these failures coming right down the pike with. regards to the climate. We have deals that need to be done that are not being done. We have thresholds that need to be the absolute maximum that are already being exceeded. We see things like, and this is something, you know, if it was happening in a place that people in the U.S. actually cared about, not talking about listeners of this show, obviously, but the average American, it would be in the news all the time. Madagascar has been in a drought for four years. There's villages and actually some cities in Madagascar where they haven't had a single

proper rainfall in four years at this point, over 20% of the population is in dire need of emergency food and water supplies because there is absolutely nothing that can grow in Madagascar right now. But we don't even hear about it because the climate disasters are everywhere. You know, there's no real pictures that you can show people to make them care about this in the United States. You know, how many kids can you see that are malnourished putting the band around their arm to see how malnourished they are, will it take for Americans to have it really sink into their heads? It's not as sexy as seeing the, you know, grease on fire and the people on the boat taking a picture of it. I mean, that was a little bit more of a striking

image. But even then, we have these striking images of absolute climate disaster. And we have things closer to home. We have tornadoes. We have hurricanes. We have floods. We have floods. We have fires in the West. We have heat domes. We've got all. kinds of disasters hitting the United States, hitting Canada, hitting the global North more generally. We had floods in Germany. We had floods here in Russia and Crimea. We have all of these disasters. And yet, when the leaders get together at their best opportunity to try to put something on the table in five years at a point where things are more dire than they've ever been, we get nada out of that meeting. We get absolutely nothing. And this is something that

in 2021 really came to a head, at least in my mind, because this has been a process that's been going on for decades, as I said. This is something that we've been needing to fight for decades. As I've said, this is something that we've taken menial steps towards ameliorating for decades. But the time to act, I mean, the time to act is long past. But this is really one of the last big opportunities that we've had to try to put some substantial stops on things, and we failed. We failed miserably. So I know we were in a very happy mood at the beginning of the conversation, but here's Henry's typical rant per episode right now.

So guys, I know that we've been talking about the climate a lot on the show. Listeners can go back through our past episodes. They can look at the next episode that'll come out as well. We've talked about the climate quite a bit. But I think it's worth just at least touching on before we get into our final topics that we want to talk about in our 2021 in review. Sure. I can start this off. Just to say, like, yeah, we've talked about this so much. I think it's important to talk about we have to filter all of our political thinking through the distorted prism of climate change because that's going to shape everything. And I think it is, it is at the point now where we're, I mean, just face the facts. We're not going to prevent anything. We're not mitigating anything. I mean, maybe we can mitigate, you know, a four degree warming planet and keep it closer to 2.7 or 3 degrees. But like the idea that we're going to. you get anywhere close to 1.5 is off the table.

We had to act a decade ago to even approach that. The two degree mark now is the realistic, like, best case scenario to stay under. And honestly, totally honest, we're going to blow past that. Like, there's just no way that we're going to get the global cooperation and the time needed to do the things needed, blah, blah, blah. And so, I mean, we're going to hobble through it. We're going to do like the bare minimum until things get bad enough and we have to deal with it. But, you know, there's still hope in that. in the sense that that pressure is going to possibly, at least regionally or in certain

parts of the world, make societies, particularly in the global South, dramatically run away from a capitalist way of organizing your society through the baptism by fire that is climate change, that it's already happening, is going to continue to happen, we're not going to get 1.5, we're probably not going to get 2, that is going to cause insane amount of suffering and death and hardship for everybody. And even if you're very at the tip top of the north, like I live in northern Russia or I live in Canada, I'm fine. No, because you exist dialectically and interpenetratedly with the entire totality of human civilization. And if huge swaths of people are migrating across continents, if major countries are going to war over water

resources, I don't give a fuck where you live, you are going to be severely impacted. Adnan mentioned earlier, these just in time supply chains breaking down under COVID, what do you think they're going to do under climate change? I mean, these supply chains are going to be right. We are now in America, we're going to be the first generation that's going to deal with routine food shortages, right? Water shortages, things that our parents would never imagine Americans would have to go through. Americans are going to go through. Nobody is safe. You have to realize that. But that insane crisis, which makes COVID look like a day in the park by comparison is going to do on a much larger scale what COVID did expose all

the contradictions nowhere to hide everything is going to be heightened and sharpened beyond relief and it's going to be absolutely fucking miserable for everybody but in that misery in that baptism by fire there's going to be transformation that transformation is going to look different all over the planet I think you're going to see the rise of like eco-fascism you're already seeing it and in places like white supremacist settler colonial imperial core societies like the U.S. That's probably one of the primary political manifestations that we're going to see. But in the global south, I think there's a huge chance that you see something much different. I think you do see something like, you know, move in the direction of socialism, especially like,

look at Asia. You have like, you know, you have North Korea, but you have China, you have Vietnam, you have countries with histories of revolutionary ideology, of mass mobilization, right? Like in the Mao period, you had the mass mobilization of all. hundreds of millions of Chinese workers, peasants, and students to do things like the great proletarian culture revolution, the great leap forward, et cetera. Whatever you think about those projects, the fact is they represent revolutionary mass mobilization to tackle a very important goal.

In that case, it was industrializing the society or fighting the capitalist rotors within the party or whatever it may be. But you can imagine that also happening in China again, but in the sense of let's mass mobilize to lead the world and dealing with climate change. And it's precisely in this equatorial belt in the global south where the impacts of climate change are already hitting. The forces and the pressures are already being pushed on these societies. So I think you're going to see a bunch of different manifestations. And there's darkness in that and there's hope in that.

But I think the idea that we're going to stay below or even around 1.5, you need to toss it out the window and get real. Because one of the biggest political advantages for the next several decades is what political formations can face up to reality in the most clear and sober-minded way. that's our advantage. I think Marxist analysis and communist analysis gives us the ability to analyze things in the present as they develop in a way that liberal ideology mystifies and doesn't allow and right-wing ideology is it's definitionally turning away from reality. It's turning towards conspiratorialism, toward apocalypticism, you know, toward anything but looking reality in the eyes. So as dark as looking at reality in the eyes is, I think it's going to remain necessary and it's going to be part of what the left has to do if we're going to be able to put together any sort of response on a global level. But it's not, it's not pretty. And I think with 2021, last thing in review, 2020 and 2021 is the beginning of no more denialism, right? It's like so obvious. Before 2014, 2007, you could think of it in the abstract. It's down the road. It's not impacting me. These last couple years have showed you every summer for the rest of our lives is going to be chaos. And I thought,

naively, well, maybe the winters in the northern hemisphere would be like little recesses from climate change. But we were even seeing now, we just had historic tornadoes in Kentucky in the middle of December that killed hundreds of people or, you know, hurt or killed a lot of people. That is, that means that even in winter, you're not going to be a safe from, from the chaos. And so there is no refuge. Everything's going to get worse, climate speaking for the rest of lives and we have to navigate the chaos unfortunately well i don't have much to add to that that's i agree fully that's one of the reasons why i think this was a year of an opportunity lost and really in terms of climate action um we're just still so um disorganized and i think really

while consciousness is changing in terms of people's recognition during this year and last year and subsequently has really sharpened. And there is a relationship, I think, between the pandemic and climate change in precisely that sense of political consciousness, that the contradictions are more obvious, you know, the urgency of the problem, you know, is more evident to people. But in terms of action and positive developments, it's clear. I think what's really possible to say is that just as neoliberalism is increasingly being discredited. I think likewise there is increasing accord that to solve the climate crisis, you can't just use corporate capitalist mechanisms, you know, of, you know, green washing the capitalist global economy is not going to work. We know that

it's not going to work, but I think more and more people are seeing that consumer-based solutions that are not followed by transformations of how we produce and distribute, you know, global goods, you know, agriculture, all of these things, I think it's becoming more and more evident that there are just Band-Aid solutions that are being proposed by, you know, politicians and, you know, corporate leaders and so on. So I think that's one positive dimension is that there's more of an appetite for perhaps radical change. It's just seeing through how that would look. And one of the real cul-sacks here is this Green New Deal. As you mentioned, Max Isles work on this and the discussion that he had with Brett

and on other podcasts, people should go check those out, as you mentioned, Henry. But I think what is really evident this year is that this is not going to be. going to happen without global south organizing, you know, and solidarity with that, with those organizers, I mean, from the global north. So if people are concerned or interested with, you know, what we can do, maybe it's less trying to get the Green New Deal through in kind of the U.S. Congress and talking about that if you're in like the U.S. Imperial Corps, but actually, working for solidarity with the demands that have been made by the global south that include reparations for the disastrous harms of the carbon debt that we have incurred with our form of

unequal you know inequitable and environmentally devastating form of development that the global north has gone through right under capitalism is that it has made an externality of the environment and you know the world is now suffering so we have a debt let's focus on that because that's something that we can actually advocate for in our political sphere so it's kind of the corollary it's kind of opposing the carbon imperialism you know that uh just as we're saying you have to you know the the left to be relevant really has to oppose um you know u.s empire well likewise we have to oppose the maintaining of a kind of carbon apartheid where the benefits of this form of industrialization is only kept exclusively and not even equally in the global north but is kept in the global north by

you know the capitalist elite we need to break that down and widen our analysis so that going forward we're talking about genuine solutions because as brett said you know we're going to punch through 1.5 1.2 degrees and in fact actually I I think we need to stop sort of talking about the technical side. Well, we have to keep talking about the technical side, but we have to talk about the social side now, that it's going to take real solidarity and major transformation if we're actually to solve the crisis.

There's no way to solve it under the current conditions of capitalism. I think that has increasingly been proven and demonstrated over the course of recent years. We're going a bit long, and I know that we haven't even touched on Afghanistan. We haven't touched on January 6th at all. And I know that we did want to talk about that. So here's what I'm thinking that we should do.

I'll just run through a few of the other things that I had flagged up for potential discussion, just to remind people that they happened in 2021, because 2021 is been a really weird year. I mean, I feel like I say that every year, but 2021 has been a pretty bizarre year, even by recent standards. And then I'll turn it over to you guys and each of you can pick, you know, one more topic each that you would like to just give your thoughts on to the listeners and we'll wrap up out of that. But just to remind the listeners of some other things that happened in 2021 that we're not going to really have time to talk about today. We had the release of the Pandora Papers, which we have an episode about. We can follow that or find that out on our feed. We found out

about the Pegasus Project, led by Israeli intelligence. That's something that we haven't talked about on the show. The Guardian did some pretty good reporting on it, but I don't think it got nearly as much coverage as it should have. It was a pretty big thing. We had coups all over the place from Myanmar, which, again, listeners, we have an episode about Myanmar, go way back in our feed history to get that historical background of Myanmar

to understand the context of that. We had a coup in Guinea. We have an episode on that. You can find that episode. We had coups in Sudan. We had coups in Mali, coups all over the place. 2021 had quite a few not-so-peaceful transitions of power. We had a governor who was found to basically have sentenced people to death in nursing homes,

you know, by putting COVID patients in there. And that wasn't a scandal that took him down. But, you know, being handsy was. So that was something that happened in the U.S., just a little bit of a interesting note. We had some new revelations about residential schools. I mean, of course, we had known for years and years that the residential schools in the U.S. and Canada were absolutely horrific institutions for native populations, First Nations people in Canada,

native populations in the United States. We knew that. One of my professors had to, you know, hide out to escape from being stuck in a residential school taken away from her family. I mean, this is something that we had known for years. But in 2021, we had found some mass graves up in Canada with hundreds and hundreds of children's bodies that had been buried in these mass graves and basically forgotten about until this year. We knew that people had been dying, but finding mass graves, I know one that had been dug up had over 250 bodies. And another one had, I think, about 750 bodies, absolutely horrific.

And that didn't get, you know, nearly as much media attention as it should have. It did catch the headlines for a few days, particularly in Canadian media, but not nearly as much as you would have thought that it would have. We had things like vaccines. Yeah, we talked about COVID vaccines on the show. We have an episode about vaccine intellectual property rights. But there's another vaccine that really didn't get much media attention in 2021 and deserved to. the malaria vaccine. There is now an approved vaccine for malaria.

Did you know that? Malaria is a disease that kills over 600,000 people a year, almost all of them in Africa. 96% of the people who die yearly from malaria are in the African continent. We now have an effective vaccine against malaria. I mean, that's a game changer. Over 600,000 people a year dying.

That could change as long as we make the vaccine available for these people in these underprivileged areas. We had, yeah, 2021 was a very interesting year. I have even more things listed, but I guess that I'll wrap up there by just saying that. It was a very fun conversation that I had the opportunity to talk with with you guys, and I'll turn it over to each of you now to kind of give your final thoughts on one final topic. Sure.

Yeah, so just I'm not going to follow your rules, Henry. Unfortunately, I have three things to say, It's okay. They're not rules. It was an idea. We're all equal partners here. So feel free to, you know, counterman me on anything. All right. I'll be quick about it, too. Just bouncing on a couple points on the climate thing. One is the Green Keynesian idea, you know, we could talk way more about that. We could spend a long time about that. Just know, though, that green Keynesianism is still capitalism, right? And so if you have a conviction that capitalism, is at the core of the problem. Green Keynesianism doesn't solve that problem. It merely perpetuates it. So we should be critical. And of course, like Max Isle

and plenty of other left thinkers are doing that work and it's important. Reparations are not just feel good. We don't just give reparations because we did an oopsie in the past, but actually reparations are also importantly the only path to green development for the global south.

If we do not give some sort of aid from the global north to the global south, they will have to rely on the cheapest, dirtiest forms of energy, which is like coal and oil to develop their economies and their countries. So reparations is like not just we have to do it because of the historical wrong, which we do have to do, but also because it's the path forward to clean development. And the last thing on the climate point is like me and Allison are doing an episode on Red and Menace. I think we're going to record it in a couple days. By the time this comes out,

that should probably be out already. But we're doing it on the book, Climate Leviathan. And climate leviathan is a political theory of our planetary future and lays out four possible, you know, sort of outcomes politically of climate change. And I think that's really worth thinking through deeply. And so go check that out because I think it's really, really helpful to think through those implications. So that's climate. The other thing, January 6th and the right, the only point I wanted to make, obviously, you don't want to fetishize that singular event too much. You know, for me, I don't call it an insurrection. I call it a fascist riot because that's pretty much what it was.

I mean, they smeared shit on the walls. These are not like people with the plan for the most part. And so this liberal hysteria and freak out over it, I think, is often unwarranted. But its implications are interesting. One of those implications, you see the American right turning more towards fascism. There's the rise of what is now called the new right, which is explicitly embracing certain fascist elements of politics. And I think it's important to remember that the, I believe that for now, elections going forward, the right wing, at least a large chunk of them, tens of millions

of Americans, are never going to accept a Democratic victory at the presidential level ever again. It is now set the standard that when the Republicans lose, it had to do with some fuckery, some corruption, some ballot stuffing, some weird shit. That has been set, and that's going to do insane damage to the stability of an already destabilized country. Just keep an eye out for that. The last thing I want to say, and this is my final, my final comment and a way to wrap this whole 20, 21 point up, bin Laden, okay, when he did 9-11, and I remember reading this and I was going to community college, I was like, I wonder like, you know, bin Laden did it, like, what does he say why he did 9-11, right? And he talks about imperialism in Lebanon and all this other stuff,

but he also, the point of 9-11 was not that the attack itself would destroy America, right? He knew it, one, and you're just driving a plane into a couple of buildings. It would do damage, but the Real damage would come in America's inevitable overreaction to it. And I don't think bin Laden could ever have conceived how correct he was. Because 9-11 and the response to it was the end of the America that our parents and our grandparents knew. And that was the beginning of the American decline. The economic recession 2007, 2008, really sealed the deal. You know, America and the empire is in decay.

It is collapsing. And now with Trump, with COVID, with Biden. Biden. I view these things as morbid symptoms of a decaying corpse of a society, not the cause of that decline. And so it's just really interesting to look back over the last 20 years, starting with 9-11 and see how the dominoes fell one by one by one. And all of it is pointing in the direction of, at the very least, a more desperate, weekend, destabilized U.S. internally and abroad, as far as reputational losses, getting allies together, being the police of the world, I think that era is coming to an end more slowly than neoliberalism. I think it'll be a more protracted

process. But I think I don't, I do not see America pulling itself out of this head dive into the ground. And it's going to get a lot uglier before it gets better. And so I would just say, keep an eye on that. And it just is funny to go back and look at what, what bin Laden wanted to accomplish his prediction of America way overreacting and doing severe damage to itself is exactly what the U.S. did. And, you know, bin Laden is not by any means an honorable or heroic character because I don't think killing innocent people is ever justified. But it is in a very interesting prediction. And he was more or less right, probably more right than he could ever have imagined while he was alive. And I think that that protracted process of decay is going to continue

and continue to shape our increasingly extreme and destabilized internal politics. Well, just to pick up, I did mention a little bit about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. as the epitome of the failed global war on terrorism so of course we could talk quite a lot more about that and i really appreciate brett your remarks on how that affected the u.s the overreach is exactly what helped precipitate the decline in u.s. empire which doesn't mean that it isn't any less dangerous in fact it's more dangerous because of the way it's going to behave in the absence of actually being able to dominate the post cold war future, which is what the sort of goal of it had been. But you could hear more about my thoughts

on the global war on terrorism and how I frame it within kind of the long history of the crusading society on, you know, from medieval periods. Forward how Islamophobia has served a kind of political purpose and its corollary anti-Semitism, you know, in the politics of the West, in its foreign relations, as well as its suppression of internal dissent on an upcoming episode of the Red Nation podcast with Nick Estes and Jennifer Marley. So look forward to that. It should be coming out sometime next month in 2022, January 2022. As far as kind of stories, I guess the residential school systems

you know real unaccounted legacy was a very big story in Canada where I am and of course should have been a much wider story because you have residences in every of the settler colonial states that were established you know by Europeans in either the new so-called new world in the Western Hemisphere or in the Pacific like Australia and New Zealand and of course South Africa all of these countries have very similar kinds of approaches to the indigenous peoples they encountered and how they instituted various kinds of programs of their exclusion, assimilation, and ultimately genocide. But what I would say about that is some people have objected to the term mass grave because they weren't, you know, one grave dug to deal with victims of a massacre, for example,

and they've tried to talk about it as unmarked graves. But I think that also underplays the true horror of the neglect and of the way in which they discarded these human lives of vulnerable children who had been taken and separated from their families already in order to erase their culture and to assimilate them. So I like to call them grave dumps. Well, I shouldn't say I like to. I'm forced, I think, by those circumstances.

to call them grave dumps, because that's really what it was, is places where they discarded these human bodies unceremoniously to ignore them and throw them out like they were garbage. And this is what was so disgusting about, the settler colonial institutions that were created to erase indigenous identities, culture, history, and to assimilate children into what would essentially be a kind of servant class,

for white settler elites. That's really what the goal was. So the last thing I would just say is that I think just to add one kind of set of stories to that. And I would just also add that, you know, Stephen Donziger,

if you want to hear more about the residential schools and all of that, I did an episode with Isaac on Night Rule podcast. You can check that out. It's a fun podcast when we talked. He's a Canadian, and we talked a little bit about

about that but in terms of indigenous solidarity politics this you know house arrest of the lawyer stephen donziger who had won a major judgment um against um texico and now it's i believe mobile um which is i forget the company the current company it was texico at the time but i think it's mobara oh it's chevron sorry yes of course chevron um you know the lengths to which you know this corporation that of course is a horrible fossil fuel polluter in this case the victims directly were you know indigenous people living in you know the Amazon and Ecuador this is what we're going to see and this is what shows that we are not going to solve these questions under capitalism because you know he great trained war a lawyer

manages to get a judgment what does it end up doing they're refusing to pay there's no way that it seems to force them and the corrupted you know what we shouldn't even call it corrupted the you know judiciary you know is basically protecting the interests of these global corporations and so you know you're not going to see under liberal democracies under capitalism the the solutions that are required to protect protect our you know precious indigenous peoples and the environment. So that's, I just wanted to highlight that that was quite a stunning, that that ripped, I guess, the, you know, veil of respectability of the sort of legal and justice system and protection of rights and judicial processes. All of that was

thrown aside in order to suppress one lawyer's amazing work on behalf of, you know, indigenous struggle. And so I think that was a very important and interesting story that exposes how weak this system is and how inconsistent it will be when you actually start making victories. We have to be prepared for that because we need many more victories and not just in the courts, but on the ground at the grassroots level. Yeah, and I'm glad that you took back the word corrupted when you were going to say corrupted judiciary because it's not corrupted. That was what the judiciary was intended for. That was what it was intended to do. It fulfilled its role. And in that way, it is not corrupted even though the judgment is an absolute

travesty. The charges against Stephen Donziger are an absolute travesty, but it's not corruption. It's intentional. On that note, then, listeners, we started on a very happy mood. We ended on a not-so-happy mood, but that was kind of what we were expecting. That's it for 2021. We're going to be releasing this on New Year's Eve, and we're looking forward to a big 2022 for guerrilla history. We had a really, I mean, absolutely fantastic year. We had fantastic guests, fantastic conversations. Every time I get together with two of you, I feel like I learned so much. You guys are just good friends. It's a lot of fun doing these with you. So thank you for doing a guerrilla history over the course of the year. It was, it was an absolute joy.

So, Brett, why don't I start with you? Can you tell the listeners how they can follow you on social media and follow all of the excellent work that you do on RevLeft radio as well as the Red Menace podcast? Sure, yeah. Well, first, I just want to reiterate absolute pleasure working with you. You both have become genuine friends of mine over the last year or so, and I look forward to continue to working with you. And you know what will be really cool is if, at the very least, like get us three plus

Allison on like some big live stream event this year or I mean ideally especially if COVID passes and I know this is going to be very hard given where Henry is but it would be really cool to meet up in real life at some point and maybe do like a little like I don't know a show or something I don't know but I would like to just see this show expand and the rev left universe continue to expand and it's a it's a beautiful thing and I'm deeply honored that you both put this show together and thought that I would be a wonderful or at least an adequate third host. So it's been a pleasure. As for me, you can find me at Revolutionary Leftredo.com. You can find all three of the shows, Patreon, social media, all of that. And I would recommend as

well, me and Adnan just did a two-hour episode on St. Francis of Assisi. And I think we did a really wonderful job. Like, I am truly, deeply proud of that episode. And if you haven't heard it yet, regardless of what your religious beliefs are, I think you can get a lot out of it. So definitely go check that out. It'd be a great way to start the new year for you. Yeah. And, uh, Brett, I just want to say the show absolutely would not be the same without you. And it might not even exist without you. So, you know, you say Adnan and I put this together, but that's not true listeners. Like I said, we're all equal partners.

This show would not be what it is without the dynamic that we have between the three of us. It's really lovely. And that episode, listeners, again, I'm usually the one to direct you to things. But Brett said it best. It's a fantastic episode between the two of you guys. well done and listeners should all check it out. Adnan, how can the listeners find you on social media and your other podcast? Well, yeah, 2021 was a wonderful year. I have to say 2020 when we started it, the best thing about 2020, one of the best things was starting the show. One of the

best things of 2021 was deepening our collaboration, our friendship, getting to know you both better and to explore these important ideas, these important stories of history and the analysis I've learned so much and enjoyed myself and enriched myself. I hope you listeners also have been benefiting and we look forward to developing and expanding further in 2022 and continuing this. You can follow me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N. And of course, check out The Mudgellis, another podcast I host. It's called The Mudgeless M-A-J-L-I-S relates to the Middle East Islamic World, Muslim diaspora, Islamophobia, these sorts of topics. So do check us out. It's on all the platforms. Excellent. Definitely recommend the Mudgellis podcast. I listen to all of the episodes

and, yeah, perspectives that I wouldn't find anywhere else. So thank you with none for putting that together along with your project that you have, what is it, global society's, what's the name of the project? Muslim society's global perspectives at Queens University. Global perspective at Queens University. Really important work that you do. So thank you for that. Listeners, you can find me on Twitter where I post garbage at Huck 1995, H-U-C-1-995. You can follow the show, which is much more entertaining than my personal Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's

G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod. And you can support the show monetarily if you're financially able to. And of course, we always understand if you're not able to by going to Patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, G-E-R-R-I-L-A

history, where you get bonus content, early access, things like that. And yeah, we're looking forward to a big 2020. So happy new year, everybody. Hope that 2021 went okay for you under the circumstances that we all had to live through. And as always, solidarity. Thank you.