Guerrilla History - Bring Anti-Imperialism to Young Comrades + Learn from the Global South w/ The Cadre Journal

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

A great conversation with three young comrades from The Cadre Journal!  A fairly wide ranging conversation focused on why it's critical to push anti-imperialism for the youth, and why it's important that we learn from the Global South, its revolutionaries and theorists.   The Cadre Journal is a student-run podcast and journal on Marxism, Anti-Imperialism, and Communism.  You can follow them on twitter @thecadrejournal.   Here's Joseph's article A Prologue to the Swazi Revolution - One Year in the Making. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory  We also have a new (free!) newsletter you can sign up for!

You don't remember Den Van Booh? 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. the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the

lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki, joined by my co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. It's really good to be with you, Henry, and I'm looking forward to our conversation today. Absolutely. Always nice seeing you and I also am looking forward to the conversation. We're also joined by our co-host, Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett.

How are you doing? Doing great. Excited about the conversation today. Absolutely. We've got a bunch of topics that are going to be very fun to discuss, and we've got some great comrades joining us. We actually have three comrades joining us from the cadre journal. So instead of me introducing them,

I will just turn it over to them to introduce themselves to the listeners. Hi, everybody. I'm Joseph Mullen and I'm a junior at Cornell University. Hi, my name's Samuel Ravis. I'm also a student at Cornell University. How's it going? My name is Merrick. I'm a student at Florida International University here in Miami, Florida. Great. Now, before we even get into any of the topics that we started to, that we were planning on discussing, I mentioned that you were from the cadre journal. I'm wondering if one of you can just briefly tell the audience, what the Cadre Journal is, that way we are able to promote it for everybody, because I highly recommend everybody check out the Cadre Journal. So I guess, Joseph, go ahead and tell us all

about it. So the Cadre Journal is a media platform, writing organization, reading group, all around student organization, and we're specifically focused on anti-imperialism and educating young people, students across the world, and especially in the Global North who don't know about anti-imperialism on these subjects. We take our name from Chigavara, who wrote an essay, The Cadres is the backbone of the revolution, where he wrote that a cadre is an individual who has achieved sufficient political development

and is engaged in a systematic manner in revolutionary practice. And specifically, when you wrote that essay, he was talking about students and young people in Cuba who are learning the revolutionary practice. That's why we're trying to target it at young people who, as we've engaged throughout on our different college campus, and in general, don't often know about anti-imperialism and need to see the voices of those revolutionary struggling in the global South and be more educated on those subjects.

So since you mentioned that college students typically don't have much conception of anti-imperialism, I think we'll start with that topic for the conversation here. So when we were talking before we hit record, we were talking about how anti-imperialism seems like it should be something that should be at the forefront of left politics, but it often seems that among the youth, particularly in the global north and particularly in the United States, anti-imperialism is something that's really overlooked. So I'm just going to turn it over to you now for your opening thoughts on this topic. As somebody who's even younger than me, I know I joke that this is the first time we've had people younger than me on the show, but you know, you're the people who are experiencing it in real time. What is youth politics like in the United States and what is the feeling of anti-imperialism within this context?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I mean, I think it kind of depends where you are in the world. I know for me, particularly in South Florida, we have a lot of immigrants and diasporic communities. But one of the main issues, I would say, when it comes to young people being part of like the anti-imperialist movement is really the way that we're taught in school about the role of, of America and kind of how America really centers itself as this like portrayer of the of the world of freedom and you know for cadre journal what what really changed it for us was you know learning past that and learning the history of communities that we've been a part of for a long time but never was told the full story I know for me in particular I'm Chinese

Jamaican and learning about China and the role of China and anti-imperialism was a big part of what changed that. And for most people, they just don't have the want or the access to that information. Yeah. And I think another component of this is, and maybe we can get into this later, but I feel like there's a tendency to view, you know, what we call foreign policy, quote unquote foreign policy, as a separate sphere from domestic policy. And so, you know, in this country, we do have real struggles. I mean, you know, there are people who don't have enough to eat and, you know, really struggle materially. And so I feel like oftentimes, because of this like separated conception of, you know, the foreign, quote unquote, and

the domestic, I feel like oftentimes people think that if we focus on anti-imperialism, we're not going to be focusing on the struggles at home. And something that we believe at cadre and we think is important to theorize is the connection between those two. And like I said, we can get into that later, possibly. Just to add another note, I would say that for the three of us as students, we've all met in learning environments, but also doing extracurricular activities, being involved in leftist organizations on campus or, you know, extracurricular clubs and activities. So America and I, for example, met in Moldo United Nations in high school. And even there, you see how imperialist propaganda is kind of pushed at a very early level. to young people when you're doing debate, when you're doing model United Nations, and you're

learning the American perspective on international law, on economic development, you're being taught to work with the IMF or whatever. And some of the, I think especially important is with respect to information and information as warfare, we would be given information from specifically bourgeois sources like The Economist. And I'm sure everyone knows Lenin's quote about the economist, but it would be that kind of thing where information became very much part of how you're developed politically. And then especially now we see a lot of college students who get their information exclusively from media, from Instagram, from Twitter, from TikTok. And some of that media is very easily able to push a reactionary and imperialist narrative. And America and I growing up in South Florida together, we were both kind of getting just politically active when the counter-revolutionary protests in Cuba

of last year we're beginning to happen. And a lot of our fellow, you know, students were kind of very blindly undogmatically pushing American intervention in Cuba, which got very scary. And it would be doing it online on Instagram. So you see how all of these kind of like need infographics, like here's what you need to know about Cuba or what, you know, like Cuba in seven minutes or whatever, like that very easy information often has very false information embedded in it. You see that as well with how a lot of young people are picking up on narratives about, you know, calling China imperialists.

So even if you learn about imperialism, it's always from the perspective of like another country that is an American enemy is imperialist. And I know that a lot of people I've seen online, they, you know, regurgitate like a Trevor Noah segment on the daily show about how China is imperialist in Africa or whatever like that and retweeted. And that becomes the way of spreading information. So information definitely becomes part of the way young people develop politically. And our goal is to try and show them an alternative to very explicitly capitalist information. Yeah, just hopping in really quick. I know Adnan, you're going to ask the next question. But I just wanted to toss a, there's two cents in there, specifically around imperialism and people's understanding and how it's taught in schools.

There's like two forms of it. One is like an imperialism was like something that happened in a past epoch, right? Like, you know, like neo-colonial European imperialism and now we're past the age of imperialism, right? So that's one misunderstanding of it. And then the other misunderstanding is that sort of like colloquial understanding of imperialism means bigger country, doing something in or too smaller country. And so, yeah, breaking down both of those misunderstandings is part of the struggle for sure. And just to touch on what I think Samuel said about, you know, getting people into anti-imperialism as something not separate from the domestic arena is really crucial and can help bring anti-imperialist politics to the forefront for people when you say. everything that you want, especially if you're talking like a progressive liberal college student,

everything you want domestically, you know, health care, child care, affordable college. These things are constantly being subverted for not only just the budget of the empire, but even like recruiting, right? So like if a military recruiter is going to recruit a high school kid or a college kid, the two things they dangle in front of you is like, you'll have health care forever and you can have affordable college. And so, you know, tying all of that stuff in and saying, you know, this struggle against imperialism is also a struggle for the things we want here and a struggle for people and their autonomy abroad, I think, can help on that front. Just also to jump in before it done very quickly, only to plug an episode, since Brett mentioned the misconceptions of imperialism as well as the very overly colloquial understanding of imperialism as big country goes in and does something to small country. It's important that we always keep the economic mode of imperialism in mind.

And this is something that we had a very brief introduction to in a recent episode that we did with Richard Wolfe. It was on the economics of imperialism. So any listeners that are interested, again, it was a very introductory episode. But I recommend you go back into our feed, find that episode, the economics of imperialism with Professor Richard Wolfe. And we will bring him back to get even more deep into those topics as well as other things. but just to plug that. Samuel, I saw you raising your hand. Anything that you want to add before we let Adnan hop in with his question?

Yeah, I just wanted to respond to a point that Brett made. And I'm really glad that you emphasize, you know, the lack of things like health care in this country as a coercive tool to recruiting because I do think that's actually, or coercive tool for recruiting, because I think that's actually a more powerful point than the one that we typically hear, which is, oh, you know, all this money could be going into, that we're spending on the military could be going into education or whatever, because, I mean, we're the richest country in the world. And we have monetary sovereignty, unlike many other countries. So I don't really think that the first point is as much as an obstacle to providing for people in this country as it seems. And I think that's part of the reason why it's so important. to, you know, really flesh out a theory of how proletarians in the global south and in the global north can share a material interest that isn't as simplistic as, you know, we're sending

too much money to go kill them when it should be here helping us. Yeah, just to add in after Samuel as well, I wanted to note that even trying to sort of revitalize like an anti-imperist movement on college campuses, like I remember in my freshman and sophomore year, Samuel and I met And to think about, like, one, the education we get, and then two, a response to it and our activism around it. But we met in a class that was on philosophy, and we both, I think, enlisted to the class because it had Marx in the description and we wanted to read Marx. And then we get into the class and it's like Marx as a theorist, as an intellectual, but never as a revolutionary. So we never read about the revolutionary practice of proletarian revolt. It's always like Marx's

very abstract literature. And then in response to that, both of us kind of had a global perspective already because we had both learned about struggle in the rest of the world and were interested in it. And we were trying to organize around our school's participation in the military industrial complex, recruiting with these, you know, horrible war criminals like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, that were, you know, implicated in war crimes, especially focusing on Yemen, was kind of the beginning of it. And our school had no reaction to it, but was Even scary as a lot of students were not really educated. So we'd have to first introduce, like, well, what is Yemen?

Where is it? It's like we have to start the conversation from ground zero rather than actually jump into it. Because all of us should know exactly what's happening. We should all be plugged in. But you find that a lot of students don't even really know because the U.S. Empire is involved in so many places at once that they just lose track of what's happening in the rest of the world. Well, and I think as you're pointing out, they don't necessarily see that what's happening

abroad, you know, has some intimate connection to or with them. But it's really interesting to hear you three describing, you know, what motivated you and what you saw as a need or a lack that had to be addressed. I mean, I was sort of curious, and it flows a little bit from your point about the philosophy course that, you know, may engage Marxism, but only abstractly and not for its political role or value in contemporary struggle and revolutionary action. Because I was thinking, you know, in contemporary mainstream culture, and of course, even more exaggerated in right-wing discourse, campuses are supposedly absolute hotbeds of left-wing Marxist political, you know, action, you know, as there's almost a panic about like what's happening on our campuses. And, you know, the perspective that you present, you know, suggests that it's not really as radical. as one might imagine. And in fact, actually, perhaps it's because so much of what we're talking

about is the culture war dimension of how politics is understood. So identity issues and struggles. But what I'm hearing from you is that in your curriculum, it's still very Eurocentric or it's very abstract still. It's not being connected to a more integrated understanding of the world. And so I wanted to hear a little bit more from you about, you know, what are the challenges in the campus environment? I mean, if it's an information war, shouldn't the university environment where people are studying knowledge, taking classes, equip students, you know, for political thinking and political action, it sounds like you're finding it's not the case and you've got to go against the grain. So maybe you could talk a little bit more about that experience. What's grabbing

people. How do you make the connections? Like if everybody's interested in climate justice, which I think campuses are, students are very concerned about that. How do you move that issue into a broader anti-imperial frame, for example? I'd really love to answer this question because I have quite an interesting sport related to it. I go to, like, FIU is a public institution in South Florida, and one of my professors actually used to be a teacher, I guess, at the School of the Americas in Panama, which, as many people know, was kind of this breeding ground for right-wing nationalism. And I've also had professors who were even like Marisou Macri, who was the former president of Argentina, very reactionary right-wing person against Cuba. And so, you know, this idea that

colleges and universities are like, you know, left-wing pools is really just like counter entirely to my own experience, especially in Florida where I'm not sure if you know this, but like Ron DeSantis wanted to have everyone in schools say, you know, their political positions and, you know, he wanted to kind of like get rid of any kind of like non-conforming ideas. And so that is so hard because so many students look up to these professors and they want to, you know, follow in their footsteps and they learn so much from them. So that's one of the first challenges that we have

is this kind of whole culture of the people we look up to are the very ones who are committing these, you know, committing these imperialist actions and are part of this whole, you know, ecosystem of imperialism. And for students at FIU, a lot of them are, like, poor Latin Americans, like Latinos. We have a lot of, like, Colombians, Cubans. we have like one of the largest populations of like black caribians in a public institution

and it's hard to make those connections because so so many people are only interested in like the work that they can do like you know what is their job life going to look like at the end of their four years and so when you talk to them about you know like invasion in granada they're like okay yeah the u.s invaded granada or you know they they do something to cuba but you know I'm more worried about how am I going to feed my family and like it's hard for them even to see those connections because they do still have a lot of people where I live have family in other countries that are attacking that are being attacked by imperialism. So they have so many they're attacked, you know, by two two mechanisms of capitalism and imperialism, which of course are highly interconnected. But, you know, one of the biggest challenges I think is getting people to see that imperialism is not just. being mad at somebody, it's actually a solution. Antian imperialism is a solution to the

problems you're facing. I'm just going to throw in one extra thing. This will be within the same question. So feel free to incorporate this into what you're going to say, Joseph, I saw you raising your hand. But one of the things that you mentioned, these people are worried about putting food on their table. That's one experience. I think that that shields the fact from people that they are still the labor aristocracy if they're in the global north. And this is a big problem. Because if people don't understand that they're part of the labor aristocracy, no matter what their position is in the global north, they're not going to understand how imperialism works. And if they don't understand how imperialism works, they have a very, very overly simplified understanding of how the world works, how the world system works. And so it's really hard, this is something that, you know, maybe you can throw in with what you're going to be saying.

It's really hard to think about how you're going to communicate with these people that are more worried about putting food on their table, as you said, than interventions that are taking place abroad. You also have to incorporate the idea that they are the labor aristocracy, and a lot of these people are suffering very, very severely. And this is, you know, when people hear that they're a member of the labor aristocracy, people have this like recoiling effect because they look at their living conditions and they're like, you're calling me a member of. an aristocracy, you should see my, you know, see my house, see, see the apartment that I'm living in. But that is, of course, not what it means. And we have to communicate that with them in order for this idea to be pushed forward. Just something to perhaps add in there. Yeah, a lot of, a lot of really important things from Merrick said and from what you said as well, you know, kind of like, as you mentioned at the outset, talking about dependency theory

and world systems theory, even these concepts are not really easy to find in like a class. You can't really just pick up a class on the study of imperialism itself, which is why we had to independently create a group to read Emmanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, you know, André Gunder Frank, all of the other, you know, people who have written on that subject. And it was also making me think about how like when we do, when we talk about like careers in the future, even a lot of students who are engaged in somewhat progressive politics at a campus like Cornell, especially, which is a very bourgeois institution, students are. are still, if they are progressive, very concerned about getting a career in politics or in law

in the future. So they don't always care about putting their politics in a revolutionary perspective and saying, you know, thinking about self-sacrifice, thinking about what it actually means to go out and engage in struggle. And it's funny because we talk a lot between the three of us and in our group about some examples from history. So we mentioned at the outset of Che and I think we've all talked about Che and the motorcycle diaries of him as an example being a medical student, his father was an engineer coming from the upper crust of the bourgeois in Argentina, but then actually going and traveling and seeing the peasantry in Latin America and how it opened his mind. He had studied Marxism in the past, but he didn't actually

believe in it until he saw it with his own eyes of the dynamics within Latin America of neo-colonialism, the Latifundista, and the peasantry. So I think it's one thing to have classes and talk about it in seminars. And we have a lot of classes. with some professors, but they always, like I took a class on the history of communism and the class felt very much this academic seminar where we're talking about communism as an exercise in theory rather than in praxis. So even when students are a little bit exposed to it, it's always like, how can I make my academic career on writing books and articles about this rather than putting it into struggle? Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes I use the phrase, it's not to really hear nor

there but to use the phrase capitalism imperialism is one term can sometimes help you know tie those two things together and i'm quite fond of that term but i also just wanted to say i share your experiences at university obviously i'm from nebraska so i went to college up here but yeah like the most political outwardly um you know professors were like almost all right wing i mean a lot of people just didn't mention it they just try to stay away from it but like i've had professors like you know, like a Spanish professor who was a Cuban immigrant, you know, denigrate Che, this is a Spanish class, but he somehow managed to bring up Che and say he's his evil mass murderer, etc. I had one philosophy professor say to another philosophy professor. They're kind of chatting

and he said, I'm to the right of Attila the Hun. So just like, you know, weird shit like that, just like flies in the face of this idea that academia is Marxist or communist. But it's neither here nor there. I kind of want to transition to a discussion of media. especially the forms of media that students will engage with because this is a realm of rapidly transitioning and evolving technology and what even me, I'm in my, you know, early to mid 30s, what I had access to and the sort of resources that I would use to find information, I've totally changed even in just, you know, from one generation to the next. So I'm just wondering about what you found to be ways of reaching students in particular,

and what media forms that you found are actually more efficient and which ones are, you know, maybe less efficient. Yeah, so I think, I think we found that the podcast is a very efficient way to communicate with people because of what Joseph was saying at the beginning about how, you know, he would listen to the podcast at work, you know, students, a lot of us don't have a lot of time outside of, you know, all the classes we're taking. and if we do, we're usually, I don't know, a lot of us work. And so it's a great way to really get to people when they're, they can't, like,

fully be engaged, like reading a book, you know, they're working or, you know, doing some busy work for school. So, yeah, I think we found the podcast is a very useful method. Something I will add, though, is that a lot of students nowadays are very very, plugged into social media. So like Joseph was saying, like this infographic reaction that we have, we just go search an infographic once something happens. And like, this is what you, what you need to know. And yeah, it's a very like dispersed way of understanding the world. And so I think the podcast, it is a more longer form. And so I think we found that is helpful to instead of communicating

short bursts, like try to draw people in, like sit down and understand it. And I wanted to bring in the fact that even though social media is like this new platform and whether it's, you know, good or bad or, you know, of course there are elements, you know, everything has a contradiction within it. And of course there's elements of media, which are reactionary and others that are revolutionary. But I think at the end of the day, I think what we've all found is that the most like productive form of like media is, really like talking with people, having discussions. Joseph and I recently went to like anti-embarko protests and we've got to meet like organizers and, you know, different groups which are in South Florida

organizing against the embargo and, you know, meeting those people not only informed us, but we helped to inform them and we got to spread our message. And so I think even though, you know, media and stuff has changed, you know, we're no longer writing polemics in a newspaper, you know, in like the days of Lenin, but now we're, you know, discussing on a podcast. We still have that human element of going out and meeting people. And I know, like, I've had some great discussions with people, like after class, like, I'll hear someone say something that I really like. There are students who are, you know, will say, you know, I don't think you have a good idea of what Cuba is actually like, you know, they'll tell the professor like he's wrong. And I love that.

And after class, I'll go talk to him and I'm like, hey, you know, I'm part of this thing called Caldry Journal. Like, you should take a listen. Like, let's talk more. And I've had multiple experiences, not enough, I would say, but, you know, that human connection is still so important that I think that's something we don't really take advantage of. You know, that's just related also. Sorry to hop in before you were going to say something, Joseph, but I think that this is also related to the extent to which we're willing to talk about very difficult subjects. And this is something that we see with podcasts that we don't see with other forms of media. I mean, we have episodes that go up to three hours long.

on a single topic. So within this medium, we're able to get pretty deep within a topic. I mean, about as deep as you can get without actually having somebody sit down and read a theoretical book. So this is one way to get these very heavy topics in a more accessible format. But on the other hand, a lot of people, and I don't want to say it particularly young people because it's not true. It's for everybody, every age, every background.

People want their information in a very snappy way. This is why TikTok is so popular these days. days. People can get quote unquote information in 20 seconds. Well, in 20 seconds, might you get a factor to? Sure, of course. There's many good TikTok creators, people that are putting out good information all the time. My friend, James is a very good TikToker. James Ray for everybody that is, you know, following him. But anyway, 20 seconds is a good way to get a fact or a stat out. But for us to really understand the mechanisms, for us to really understand the world's systems that are at play, we have to have these more in-depth conversations, which is something that podcasts allow for, but they don't get the sort of reach that these other forms of media get. So, you know, it's a given take. Are you going for how many people are going to hear your perspective on a topic or how many people are going to get a deep understanding of the topic from your perspective?

because if you go just for reach, you're not going to be able to get very deep. If you want to go for depth, you're not going to reach as many people. Joseph? Yeah, all really good points. And I kind of wanted to weigh in as well with like why we chose. I mean, as the name implies, it is a journal. So we would also love to do writing because we, you know, as much as like it's good to simplify information and have it audio accessible.

It's also great to like I love writing and I love to just get things out on a page. because you can really articulate things that you wouldn't be able to in sort of be the brevity that you may have with the podcast. But at the same time, we found that like as opposed to reading a whole dense text, I can remember like I was literally having a summer job after one semester at college. And I think I listened to the revolutionary left radio segment with capital, a learning capital while I was at work. So I'm like listening to the value form theory in my brain as I'm, you know,

doing it in real life. And it really made the connection for me to actually do it that way. I think similarly, you know, we've tried to introduce, like, in our reading group to read, like, our Gehry Emanuel's Un Equal Exchange. But it's such a dense, long and complicated book that it is much easier sometimes to just do a two-hour segment with someone who is an expert on it and then just have him relay it to people who may not have the time to read it. And just like with what Merrick said about, the best, like the ideal is to get people to just talk in person with someone else. But if you can't do that for lack of being able to travel or lack of being able to go meet people, it's sometimes really good for us to talk to people

from communist parties or revolutionary organizations in the global South, have them come on and explain something we really enjoy doing as well as talking to young communists in particular. So in their cadres, like in the Young Communist League of Kenya, for example, and have them, like some of the best questions for me have been asking them, you know, what book did you read that really got you into communism and you get amazing answers and some really good book recommendations as well. So that's another great way to kind of connect people. They wouldn't be able to have that conversation otherwise. To add to that, I think, you know, what Henry was saying about the dichotomy between depth and like breadth of spreading your knowledge and your

learning process. I think, you know, when you do go for spread and in shorter form videos, I do think it invites a more like scattered understanding and it doesn't lend itself very well to understanding systems. However, you know, like you do, you do say it is an easier way to reach people. But I do think that as young people, we do have a lot of unlearning to do with how we relate to information. And this might be a little anecdotal. But even now that, you know, I consider myself a communist, I would say I have a revolutionary consciousness.

Oftentimes I find myself, you know, instead of going out and, you know, seeing out, I can actually put some of this stuff into practice. It's almost like I just want that like hit of like revolutionary fervor. And I'll just go and like, I don't know, look at some memes that, you know, have like Lenin and them or something and that's like yeah it's fun and it'll make me feel good for a little bit but I mean we're not going to change the world with that and I wanted to add onto kind of like I think a lot of as much as young people are on social media and like it is a large part of our culture I think that a lot of people are also very angry with it and have a very

mixed relationship with it and people talk about like taking a break from social media and people want to look for ways that they can, like, escape that world, which feels so destructive. And it's kind of like that escapeism, you know, like, going online is a form of escapism from, like, the dauntingness of capitalism. And I think one of the things that, like, that I was really, like, inspired by was, like, Shigabar's Motorcycle Diaries, where, like, Joseph talked about a little bit before, he went out and, you know, he had an adventure. And, you know, not, like, adventurism in the way that we hear on the left, but, like, going out and doing something. feeling something. I think a lot of young people actually want that. And one of the things we want to do with Audrey is like find ways that we can get young people to be excited about that idea that they can go and do something and feel productive. Because I think social media is really

about escape more than connecting. Yeah. Wow. Interesting remarks. I mean, I also am wondering just broadly, it occurs to me that your generation as college students, university students, also has had to deal with the consequences and atomizing effects, you might say, of the pandemic, you know, the in-person opportunities to really get together or work together. You know, it doesn't, you know, obviously it was possible because we had Black Lives Matter, you know, the largest protests in the history, you know, modern history of the country. But at the same time, there were also a lot of forces that, disrupted the normal way in which we might get together and work together. During this period,

I think people were focused a lot more on things like mutual aid and ways that they could help each other survive through it. So that might have also had a consequence for why you would value at this stage when hopefully we're really coming out of it of those interpersonal relations and moving from social media to life in person and activism. I don't know if anybody has any thoughts on that, but I also did want to ask you in particular, because I think one of the key issues that have been important, almost the last institutional space in which you can contest these issues, has been the university, and that is the topic of Palestine. and, you know, resistance and solidarity for Palestinian human rights and for that struggle.

And so I'm wondering if you've been involved in it, how you see that being shaped, you know, and more how you think the question of Palestine as an example of anti-settler colonial imperial resistance, you know, fits into the broader kind of sense of U.S. Empire and the global system. What connections do you make between that particular issue and the larger work that you're interested in? So I would just say that I got involved in SJP, and I think a lot of students are galvanized by SGP as an organization and as a movement, because I think over time a lot of people outside of just necessarily Palestinians on campuses are making their own connections to the struggle. So we have a professor at our university who's written quite a bit about how a growing amount of African Americans are making connections to their own liberation with the liberation of Palestine. And it's just one way that BLM from Ferguson to Gaza has helped kind of make that connection more clear.

But I think I would also focus a lot on the repression that the pro-Palestine student movement faces. And as we're talking about with careerism, if students have this perspective that I'm just focused. on getting a job. One of the main tools that I've seen that has helped really destroy student activism for Palestine has been Canary Mission. And for those, I don't know if anyone is not familiar with it, it's like an online tool, basically a blacklist for students who are involved in pro-Palestan activism, put your name, all your social media where you go to school. And I've heard a lot of stories from students who were involved in SJP in the past, got on Canary Mission, and really just stopped after that and it's been an incredible tool to intimidate a lot of students a lot of us

at Cornell were just put on including myself and it's definitely something to reckon with although I think it is a very much a learning opportunity for people to see are you really committed to this struggle for very revolutionary desires and as a political struggle that is connected to imperialism and settler colonialism or is it more of a kind of NGOized you know it can sometimes become this like online trend to just be like pro-Palestine, but not understand what is at stake with that. And I think we have been lucky at Cornell because we've been able to do protest in 2021 when the war on Gaza was occurring in, I believe that was in May. And we had a huge turnout on campus. We saw a lot of people who were galvanized by BLM, who then got involved in pro-Palestine

activism. We were able to bring Muhammad al-Kurd on campus. And that was another event that a lot of students attended, and there was a lot of reflection from that event. But even then, students were writing to the university and saying, you know, Zionist students were writing to the university and saying, you need to shut this down. You're bringing a terrorist sympathizer on campus. You're letting these terrorists come on campus. So you see the kind of intimidation tactics that are used. And those do scare a lot of students, but it becomes an opportunity for us to learn and reflect about how sincere and how committed we are to this, especially from, I think, as you're referencing Adnan, a kind of political perspective that Palestine is just one other, but, you know, it's

almost exceptional its own way in respect to settler colonialism, but it's also part of a broader global struggle against imperialism and trying to make those connections to say we're in support of Palestine because we're Marxists, because we're anti-imperialist, that's the way that we can get more students who care deeply about that issue to connect it to a broader global struggle. Yeah, and I would add that the connection you mentioned in between BLM and activism for Palestine, I see it as very inspiring because I think it's one of the first places we're starting to get a more complex understanding of what proletarians, specifically those from communities of color, can have in common with those in the global south because we see

how these two repressive apparatuses feed into each other. And I think observations like that are more powerful than, you know, the anti-imperialism where it's like, you know, American, this war is bad because American soldiers are dying or because American money is going there instead of being used for American health care. So I think, yeah, the fact that a connection was made between BLM and Palestine activism, I think, is a beautiful thing. And I would love to see more stuff like that. I would actually go so far as to say that the Black Lives Matter movement and its attendant sort of relationship with the Palestinian struggle has brought this issue into the American consciousness broadly in a way that's never happened before. And I think we're seeing

that the Zionist lobby in all of its forms, whether that's an APEC for the government or these university organizations, very strong in the past. I think it really is losing power. And I think it's a generational thing where, you know, being on a watch list by Zionist will increasingly be like on a list of people who want universal health care. You know, it would be like, more common sense and less stigmatized but i think we're in that process so we're not quite there yet and just to add a very brief reaction to that i will say that as canary mission has existed for a longer time i know that even when i just got onto it like a lot of people you know reached out and were like don't worry about it it's really not that bad you know i've been on it for like four years

now it's not a big deal but as as it has existed over time the reaction from when it just started and people were really freaked out. I know I've spoken with Stephen Salada and his experience, I think, terrified a lot of people about what happened to him in his career and how they really went after him. But I think we are seeing a long-term process of more people learning that actually,

I've heard some people say they met comrades on Canary Mission, almost like it's this kind of weird networking forum where you're like, who's cool and pro-Palestine? They're probably on Canary Mission. All right, yeah, I can switch the conversation. conversation moving to the to the global south now. And I think I actually want to kind of start with, I think it's called a prologue to the Swazi revolution one year in the making. It's up on the monthly review. And I thought it was a very great breakdown of a situation that I think even very informed

people in the West, you know, communists and anti-imperilists in the West might not know much about. I don't expect you to go through the entire article and we could probably link to it in the show notes for people who do want to do that. But I was hoping you can kind of just touch on what that article was attempting to do and the overall movement it was attempting to to cover yeah so i can i can begin by saying that i got involved in activism for the communist party of swaziland and around the issue of the swazi revolution through through an organization so not just as an individual through the friends of swazi freedom which has come up kind of centered around this issue but doing it through an explicitly marxist and anti-imperialist perspective and they've done some really great work they helped us

organize a book drive as well, where I was able to deliver 30 books to the CPS and kind of create this international solidarity that is desperately needed. For anyone who's not aware about the subject, essentially Swaziland is the last absolute monarchy in Africa. And it's also one that was heavily supported by the apartheid regime in South Africa and by neo-colonialism, very much backed by Taiwan and the United States and Israel. So very like on the list of the top neo-colonial sources of domination in Africa and the Global South. But as that repression has persisted for so long, there has been a growing movement with very inspiring revolutionaries in the CPS, who have really, in my opinion, made a lot

of theoretical breakthroughs with respect to thinking about anti-neocolonial struggle, which I think is very much the phase of revolution that a lot of parts of the global south are in at this point. And so I had sort of interacted with them online. We'd interviewed them a few times. And I went to South Africa over the summer to do research on South African Marxist politics. But Swaziland, of course, is right next door. So I was able to interact with them.

A lot of them are in exile in South Africa, actually, because they suffer very severe oppression. The police come after them and the intelligence services as well. I got to attend the protest that they conducted at the embassy of Iswatini in Johannesburg, or sorry, in Pretoria, and going in person and seeing that protest, seeing all, you know, not just the kind of motivation of Swazi freedom fighters for it, but also seeing a lot of South Africans who have a strong solidarity for the Swazi cause was really incredible. And I think a lot of people are realizing that this is related to the fact that in the, in the broader region, neocolonialism, especially after apartheid in South Africa, has

dominated the country. imperialism has not been deterred at all. I think maybe just to also talk about what else I was doing in South Africa just briefly, but I went and was researching a lot about the Maricana Massacre, which was a massacre of 34 mining workers in the platinum mines in South Africa, and that the 10th anniversary was actually a few days ago on the 16th of August. And it tells you a lot about the state of South Africa today after apartheid that a British-owned platinum mining company can instruct the government to go send police in and kill 34 miners because they've decided to go on strike.

And I think a lot of people are waking up to the fact that as much as apartheid was defeated politically, imperialism controlling South Africa and Southern Africa as a whole has not been disturbed whatsoever. So there's new theoretical advances being made to decide how that struggle can be continued. And especially to understand that in the region, as imperialism consolidates itself, it means that if South Africa isn't free, Swaziland is in free, other countries within the region like Mozambique and Angola continue to suffer from imperialism. So it was a great experience to meet people engaged in those struggles. And also, as we've been discussing throughout, to see people who have to think about revolutionary theory, not as an academic discipline, but as real practice, they have to put it into struggle

to ensure the future of their country can be rewritten. I just want to jump in and kind of add kind of the, I think the urgency of what the CPS and like what's the United Front, the United Democratic Front in Swaziland like really represents for people who are interested in anti-imperialism, they have a lot of really great information about the relationship between Swaziland and Taiwan and kind of the role. that one of the first things that the CPS wants to do is establish deeper ties with China. But even that's something that I find personally very interesting.

But I think that I really urge people to go and learn more about what's going on there because I think that this is one of those places that like a real change is at the precipice and that, you know, people in Swazoo Man really need help because nobody really understands what's going on in Swaziland. And I think that even the juxtaposition of Swaziland is so interesting. because it's right below, it's right above South Africa, which has the SACP as one of its, you know, ruling parties. And then also right below Mozambique, which has the Free Limo Party, which was once Marxist, right above it. And now has kind of, you know, reverted to a more social democratic stance.

But I think that, you know, this interesting area of monarchy and, you know, this Democratic front really says a lot. And I know for me personally, it's really informed how. I view like what's going on in Latin America, which is kind of my area of interest and kind of like the way that, you know, different parties interact with each other to go towards same goals. You know, the fall of the of the monarchy is the principal goal of the Democratic front. But of course, the Communist Party of ZwaZan has its own unique analysis of the situation as well as well as in. So it's kind of pushed me to go more into the different parties which are going on Latin America, specifically the festival be. Pese Dobe, which is in Brazil, and they have a very interesting analysis, and they have an interesting relationship with the MST, the Movimento Santerra, which is like a movement of people who are like landless workers, and it just wanted me to go out into the situation and learn more about what's going on in the world. Yeah, I just wanted to add a note onto what Merrick was saying and talk a little bit about specifically the South African Communist Party as well.

It's another experience I had while I was in South Africa was going to the South African Communist Party's fifth national Congress. It was, I mean, there was a lot of very interesting things going on. And from my perspective, studying South Africa, seeing the SACP as well at this moment is very much a party that it's in an alliance with the African National Congress as the leading party in the nation. And unfortunately, that party has very much played into neocolonialism. So the Communist Party there, I would say the leadership primarily is functioning in that role as well and supporting neo-colonialism. But you actually talk with the grassroots, the rank and file of the SACP, and many of them are criticizing the leadership and saying we should be supporting the Communist Party of Swaziland full. We should give them more money. We should give them more resources.

And many people would tell stories in the International Commission that they held about how they had gone to border blockades, where they would go. around the border of Swaziland, which is landlocked, and try to prevent critical resources from going in that would support the monarchy and instead allow support to be given to the CPS. So there's so much solidarity between the rank and file South African Communist Party membership, but the leadership often doesn't support them in that struggle for many reasons. Their complicity with deal colonialism and as well with the massacre at Marconi reference, they were very much defending the actions of the government. And one other interesting experience that I had that I want to touch on is meeting representatives from many different communist parties.

So I got to meet the ambassadors from Vietnam, from North Korea, from the People's Republic of China, from Cuba, from Venezuela, and from Palestine as well. So getting to meet these representatives. And one thought that I kept having was as an American, it's kind of weird to be sitting next to the Vietnamese ambassador at the SECP conference. and a lot of South Africans would walk by and make a joke and be like an American and a Vietnamese person sitting next to each other. That's so bizarre. I would never imagine that. But it was something that kind of kept coming up because it was like we can have solidarity in spite of the history of imperialism of my nation. I feel politically educated enough to understand the struggle being undertaken by the Vietnamese people today. So that kind of really global

perspective of meeting so many different people. And that was the same experience with a lot of countries with Cuba and Venezuela as well as the same thing of talking to the Cuban ambassador and saying like even as an American, I support Cuba and I'm, you know, against the blockade completely. And that earns a lot of trust and solidarity that I think that kind of trust is essential to making a connection with someone being their comrade and kind of getting to learn more about their struggle. If they just view you as an American who has walked in here and wants to just talk to people and be like a loud American as as many foreigners think Americans are, which we kind of are, you know, they never will trust you fully. But that was a great experience

for me and it really played a very foundational role in my kind of political education. Yeah, before we get to the final topic, because I know we've been going for about an hour now, since we're talking about the global South, learning from the global South is something that I think is incredibly important. So I have maybe a little bit of a fun question before we get to the end. So the Cadre Journal, one of my favorite things that you guys do at the Cadre Journal is that you really go out of your way to center voices from the global south. I mean, if you just go through your podcast feed, you'll find voices from Cote d'Ivoire, Morocco, Pakistan, Lebanon, Kenya, Swazilin, like, you know, all over the global south.

We have all kinds of voices. So I'm just wondering if each of you could give us perhaps the most important thing that you've learned from your interactions with theory from the global south or with individuals from the global south, we're operating in that context, because this is a problem that we have, a major problem, really, in the global north, is that even people on the left, left wing, even people that center anti-imperialism, we have a tendency to only focus on theorists, revolutionaries, scholars, et cetera, from the global north.

You know, everybody loves, I shouldn't say everybody, everybody that's listening to this podcast loves Marks, everybody that listens to this podcast loves Lenin, you know, et cetera, et cetera. These people are all from the global north. Most of our guests are from the global north, although we're trying to change that now. But people need to go out of their way. There is so much knowledge that is available in the global south. And one of the big problems is that that knowledge is not easily accessible or widely distributed within the global north.

It's not that the work is less relevant or less important. It's that it's harder to find. You're less exposed to it. And so, again, you know, thank you for your work for, you know, really going out of your way to highlight some of the work that's taking place in the global south. And so each of you, before we get to the final topic, I'd like, you know, what's the most important thing that you've learned from going through this work from the global south or interfacing with comrades from the global south? Yeah, I'd say the most important thing that I learned was in an interview I did with a professor at the University of Havana. and I feel like before that conversation maybe I had a more naive and romanticized view of Cuba, a very positive view, and I still have a positive view, but I think through speaking to her, I saw it more as an active ongoing struggle rather than like this state of affairs I was accomplished after the revolution. And I think I really, obviously I'll never understand. But I think I got a clear picture of the brutality of how it is to live under the blockade.

And yeah, I think speaking to her really emphasized to me why it's so important to continue struggling against the Cuban blockade, or the blockade on Cuba. I would say just to frame this question, because I love this question, something, well, unfortunately, I will center a theorist very briefly, but not quite into the traditional sense. But we've done, I think, like, three or four episodes on Walter Rodney because I love Walter Rodney. And I think he's one theorist who perfectly answers this question when he discusses the guerrilla intellectual and groundings. And if people haven't discussed those concepts, those were really important for me when going to South Africa. Because do you see this,

especially with groundings, going to places where working class people, colonize people will be, rather than trying to go to the university, to the ivory tower, So I did a sort of like a mini conference, more like a week of discussion on Walter Rodney when I was in Cape Town and South Africa. And some of the comrades that I met there who were students, who were working class South Africans, kept saying, why are we having this discussion in like a gentrified suburb in Cape Town? Why aren't we having it in Cayalachia, which is a township outside of Cape Town? And I thought that point was very valid. You have to go to where the people are rather than asking them to come to you. And so for us, it has been so important to approach this as, you know, like guerrilla intellectuals,

which is, of course, being very theoretically developed. But as Rodney wrote, he respects intellectuals the most who will pick up the gun and go and engage in struggle. And I think it's important to be talking to people who have views of struggle that as I think very much, as Samuel said, are not these overly romantic conceptions or overly idealistic. And I think something that we've learned through doing this is we have a lot of, another problem I would add on to what you were saying, Henry, which is there tends to be a sort of fetishism of the global South among the Western left, anyone who is anti-imperialist, which may be very few, but sometimes it can become this kind of overly adventurousistic fetishism

of saying, you know, the Global South will liberate us and we will just have to let them do all the work. And I think sometimes that can contribute to a view of people in the Global South as pure subjects. They have no contradictions. They don't deal with problems. And it, and it towards a sort of, of course, a kind of orientalism that they're not three-dimensional human beings with their, you know, many contradictions as well. But by engaging with people in that way, you learn, of course, about their humanity and that they are people in struggle just like anybody else, but they happen to be at the crux of where imperialism is, where super exploitation is taking place. And that's what makes them truly revolutionary subjects who are poised

to fight imperialism, where it is taking the most value out. of. So I think that has been a great lesson for me is that I'm much, I'll take talking to like a random person in the global South who has very little, you know, knowledge about Marxism. They may not really say in sort of like academic terms, what would sound pleasant to like an intellectual ear, but I think they often give a very clear picture of what's happening and their frustrations. And in South Africa, like, I can read Kwame and Krumas neo-colonialism on one hand and get the theoretical picture or just talk to people who will say a part that ended 30 years ago and nothing has changed for me and my family. In fact, these atrocities continue.

So what is the change in my life? And that to me is kind of the expression of the urgency of revolution at this point. Yeah, I have two things I want to say. One is very quick. Some of our comrades from Swaziland, we did an interview with them and they had a really great analysis or application of Lenin's analysis for the situation in Swaziland. And we actually did like a little snippet that we put on the Instagram. And one of our comments, you know, very elegantly explained how theory is being put into practice and how, you know, these concrete analysis is actually being used for, you know, real development in the country. And I would say my second thing, which is more broad, and I haven't really gotten to,

interview anyone about this. But I think one of the great things, because Cadre is multilingual, you know, we speak French, Spanish, and I speak Portuguese as well. I interacted a lot with Brazilian communists and the Brazilian left and the Brazilian left. And one of the great things I've learned is really the way that the application is always more difficult

than it seems and the contradictions among people is more difficult than it seems. But in that contradiction, there are new pathways to discovery, like learning about liberation theology, learning about like Apollo Feri's pedagogy, and there's so many things that can make your view of anti-imperalism more complex and make it more actually useful for the exact conditions for each country. Yeah, sorry, just one last thing to add, but it just occurred to me is I did live in Colombia for a while. And I think something that experience taught me is I would often hear both from more working class people and from, you know, people in the bourgeoisie, it's, oh, corruption is a problem in Colombia. That's why we're so poor. And I'm, as Joseph has said to me previously, they say the same thing in South Africa. And I think living in a global South country and hearing the same things from the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. that to me seem off. And so I think, yeah, that experience of sort of hearing the same things from both sides

dissolved this idea that I really think is malicious, that it's all up to corruption. And that's the only thing that matters. I think that experience really dissolved that argument for me. And actually, I think the corruption argument is often use, it's not only like sort of a useless argument that doesn't explain much. It's also used as a cudgel against the left because in many of these countries, you know, as the investigations against Lula found, and I don't, I don't want to say if they're true or false or whatever, but we see the people who are persecuted for corruption are often leftists. And even if Lolo was corrupt, so were the people persecuting him. It's more

use as a political tool rather than, you know, they're actually trying to find the truth and, you know, improve the conditions of a country. I think you're right. I mean, you know, it isn't a systematic analysis. It doesn't lead to structural kind of analysis, which is, of course, where left politics always has to ground itself in the broader, you know, change. I mean, this is pursuing individuals for their own, you know, failings and so on. It doesn't get at the broader. you know, critique. So that's why it's always used, I think, you know, by the right. Brett, did you want to come in? Yeah, just not only doesn't get at it, but it actually actively mystifies. Yes, yes.

That's right. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, this has been really from my perspective, a really interesting and refreshing analysis to hear about your work and what you're thinking about. And one thing that I found fascinating, Joseph, when you were talking about, well, actually, also, Samuel, both of you mentioned having your romantic kind of views of revolutions and revolutionaries past be textured and nuanced a little bit by the active, ongoing complexity and sacrifices of struggle for justice. They don't just end. You know, there's a lot more to it. People have their contradictions. And, you know, that I think is probably why I detect in your approach and analysis a really, you know, a kind of revolutionary, sober optimism, you know, and it made

me think a little bit that so much of previous generations and even contemporary youth are suffering nihilism and despair, noticing the vast, incredible challenges that we we're facing, you know, whether it's climate change and the coming, you know, kind of apocalypse and it just seems that, you know, it's such a huge problem. That's how do you address it, you know? And similarly, U.S. Empire continuing, even though we might see in the global south, there are, you know, points of resistance that are emerging, you know, whether it's China or whether it's the bricks as a whole that are undermining the pure dominance of U.S. empire. But Nonetheless, it's a bumpy road to seeing some kind of, you know, liberation and a international socialist future that's sustainable.

So, you know, I think a lot of people also were, you know, crushed spiritually in some ways by, you know, the failures of electoralism. Like there was hope that got invested with like the Bernie movement and a lot of youth were galvanized. but there's been an ebb in that kind of optimism because of these failures. And I know from my own generation coming to political consciousness at the end of the Cold War and then in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and really the destruction of global left movements for a long period of time. So I'm wondering how do you think of this problem and this question. What keeps you motivated?

how do you engage your colleagues and your generation to, you know, have this sort of revolutionary optimism that's grounded in sober analysis of realities that recognizes the task at hand is momentous, but doesn't lose hope and succumb to that kind of paralyzing despair that we see, you know, encourages people to just, I think Samuel you had mentioned, you know, like you might go for some memes or some online stuff, listen to a video to kind of recharge that revolutionary spirit, but it's not, you know, really that's sustainable. It's just a momentary. And for a lot of people, that's what left activism has become is just sort of escape into the media sphere, mistaking, you know, Twitter and, and, and, and, you know, online media for genuine struggle. So I'm wondering, how do you, how do you guys deal with that? One of the ways that I deal with it is through learning about third world struggle, because I think that does reveal the sort of plasticity of the global capitalist system. By observing these points of struggle and third world revolutions, we see that it's not, capitalism isn't this fixed thing that will exist forever. Like there's points where it's currently being fought and in some cases overcome.

So I think, yeah, conceiving of capitalism as something that is, like, struggling to, like, keep things together as people fight against it, sort of keeps me going. And another thing is also, I sort of view, like, I guess modern existence as you sort of have two choices. And one is you can sort of just plug into the way capitalism wants you to behave and you can go and be a good worker or you can opt for a completely different way of being, which is being against the system and like defining yourself by through your struggle. And so I think it's also like an existential choice that you have to make. And that like existential leap for me was, I don't know, when I made that. it felt like pretty liberating and it like kept me going and like obviously there's still times when I like have doubts or no like I can't do it. It's not possible. But I feel like if you go through this leap with your comrades, not by yourself, but with your comrades, it can be very

empowering. I want to jump off with Samuel's response. I think he made a lot of great points about like having a group, you know, having fellow comrades. But I think that even more importantly for me, And if you also made a good point that, you know, it's not always good. Like, we don't always have that optimism. And I think what really helped me is the idea of, like, understanding where that kind of melancholy and that, you know, depressing force really comes from. I have a lot of critiques on this book, but I think it helped me to think about this idea more, Mark Fisher's capitalist realism and kind of the way that capitalism affects your brain

and affects the way you see yourself. I made a joke with Joseph and Samuel like we should write an imperialist realism and kind of the way that imperialism changes your brain and you know that the whole you know like like Brett were saying like that capital imperialist structure like they're together and so we have to analyze how both of those structures change your brain and even for diasporic or colonized people like your brain changes it even more and for me when I realized that the things that were really you know bringing me down and made me so, you know, like angry or sad were really these, you know, really large structures, these really, you know, complex systems.

And the more I realized that there was an alternative to them and that idea of there is an alternative is what really flipped the switch. And I just want to come back to the same point that having people around me, like having Joseph and Samuel and one of our, and another person I wanted to mention Amira, who's also part of Kazi Journal, she does a lot of, um, work and we've talked about the idea of melancholy. And so having that these groups of people to discuss how we're feeling and discuss the way that capitalism and imperialism interact with our mentality, that that has really

helped me to work through all these issues. Joseph, have a final word on this topic. Yeah. I would just say that I think there are two quotes that I come to mind when thinking about this as you're talking about the long-term revolutionary commitment. And the first would be that, as Mao said, revolution is not a dinner party. And I think we've all learned that over time, a lot of people in our generation that we observe, I think get this kind of idealism and this very sincere optimism, but it can

quickly turn into sort of adventurism. It manifests itself in a sort of performativity that can simply be going and doing stuff for the sake of doing stuff. And I had wanted to mention this with the previous question, but it comes to mind now. because one, my last thing that I did in South Africa that rule always stay with me is I went to Marikana, the site of the massacre and talked to some of the widows of the victims who were killed. And a lot of them, to me, expressed that they were very frustrated by many different leftists who had come into the area after the massacre, stayed for a day or two, done interviews, had discussions, and then they never saw them again because they went back to go do something else. So for them, it was really sort of a performance. It was kind of the specter of doing something revolutionary without seriously committing to it.

And then the other I would say is, I think we've over quoted Che at this point, unfortunately. But I would just say that, you know, when he says the revolution is an act of love, I think about that a lot too. And you have to genuinely love this to commit to it. Sincerely, you have to understand all of the contradictions that come with it. It has to be a long-term commitment. I really like what Samuel said about making that sort of Kierka-Guardian, leap of faith and just going full on with this project. And that's really the kind of faith. And that sounds overly romantic, I think, because it is. It's not, I think, sometimes we can be

a bit too bitter with ourselves and sometimes too cynical and say, sometimes people are too idealistic. They're too romantic. But a little bit of idealism and romanticism sometimes will give us the long-term optimism to view this as a struggle in the making. And then just as we've been saying throughout seeing the process that goes into revolution, that it doesn't happen overnight, and that oftentimes when you go to observe these projects, they are really in the middle of trying to think through their contradictions. And when, you know, I think an essay that we all have discussed and talked a lot about in the socialism, a new man in Cuba, and trying to think about a new individual that has

self-sacrifice, has a commitment to, of course, man, you know, we would prefer to use, like, the individual, rather, or to say this concept of humanity that we are all in revolution together and we have to have this self-sacrifice for one another, that goes very much against the grain of what we're taught as students that you have to get a job, you have to succeed for your own bourgeois conception of the family, and you have to just make sure your, you know, your kids get into a university in the future. But I think this kind of self-sacrifice is very fulfilling. But it's also the kind of thing I would just add as a final note that we are a collective for a reason where we're a cadre and a cadre isn't an individual. It's a unit. It's like a cell.

It's not just one individual who runs the whole thing and gets their name and becomes this kind of individualized hero or celebrity. And I think we're all really against that. We don't really like even putting our names on things sometimes is to say it's a it's a collective project. And an organization really matters because you have people who will hold you accountable, but you also have this kind of collective trust that you can make decisions. I think bringing back that concept that used to be very strong on the left of meeting organizations, needing people who will have discipline, hold you accountable. That's really what the cadre is about as a fundamental organizing concept, is that you have a collective group of people who are committed to political education and

we'll hold one another accountable, but at the end of it, are not interested in this sort of individual worship or getting into it just for glory, I think bringing that back is very important because that is the kind of longevity that we really need on the left in this age of Twitter celebrities and hot takes and stuff like that. We need this kind of discipline to guide us. I think that's a great note to end the conversation on. So our guests, again, were members of the cadre journal. Can you let us let the listeners know how they can find the cadre journal? Yes. So we have our Twitter, which is at the cadre journal, all one word. And then if people would like to reach out to us, we have our email. It's also the cadre journal at gmail.com or the underscore cadre underscore journal at protonmail.com. And then I think our Instagram is also the cadre journal, all one word. I just wanted to say this. I wanted to find a nice spot. And this is it. Just that, you know, I'm in my mid-30s now. My, you know, career as a left-wing organized.

an activist and, you know, thinker and intellectual started young and I was often found myself early on being like the youngest person in an organization and carrying that fire and flare. And now I find myself aging into an older generation of, you know, people on the left in the U.S. And to see, you know, folks like you, you know, younger people really with this level of analysis and depth and substance, it gives me a lot of hope and it gives me a lot of pride. So yeah, you guys are, you guys are absolutely awesome. this amazing work. The kids are all right, as they say. All right, listeners, until next time, solidarity.

Thank you.