Rev Left Radio - A People's History of the New Deal w/ The Intervention

Episode Date: August 24, 2023

Nick and Levi from The Intervention podcast are joined by Breht O'Shea of Rev Left Radio to discuss the history of the making of the New Deal "from below."  We talk about the movements and dynamics that forced concessions from the ruling class, the importance of understanding the New Deal in our current moment, and much, much more. Check out The Intervention HERE or on your preffered podcast app Follow them on insta HERE

Any other logistical things that we want to get out of the way or we get into it? On my end, I think I'm good, yeah. Levi? You prefer Brett or Mr. Brett? Brett's fine, yeah, Brett's fine. No formalities needed. Hello, and welcome to the intervention podcast. It's Nick here with Levi, but sadly, Steve is again, MIA.

Levi, I think he was deported back to Britain this time. I don't know. I think last time was the IDF got him during the Israel series and now he's just gone again. So we're sorry he's not here, but I think the conservative government has him on a slow boat to Rwanda as we speak. Or else sending him up to the peat bogs of Scotland to work hard labor for his socialist crimes. But, you know, he's really missing out tonight because I think once again we've really out kicked our coverage because we're really lucky to be joined tonight by Brett O'Shea of Rev Left Radio, Red Menon, guerrilla history and shoeless in South Dakota now. Brett, did I miss any? No, that's it. Yeah, I'm very happy to be here. Very cool. Happy we finally got around to doing this. Yeah, no, absolutely. And again, thanks for being here. And just in case there's anybody that listens to our podcast that doesn't listen to you or know who you are, just please give a little bit of an introduction and talk about what you do. Sure, yeah. Brett O'Shea, probably the flagship project I work on is Revolutionary Left Radio, which is kind of a catch-all interview show. on the broadly conceived socialist left. I try to include as many voices on the socialist left

as I can to some people's consternation, I guess. That's kind of the casting of the wide net. And then the nets narrow with guerrilla history, where we focus on proletarian history with more academic specialists. And then on Red Menace, me and my co-host Allison cover Marxist texts, Marxist theory. So we walk people through works by Lenin, Mao, Phenon, Marx, others. And then we help people digest that information. We reflect on it and we try to apply it to our own times. And then shoeless to South Dakota is just a fun project that me and my childhood buddy do on the side. It's much more comedy. No politics at all. So that's something kind of outside of my political work. But yeah, that's me, I guess. Thanks. And just on our side,

you know, for people that don't know us, I think we like so many, owe a lot of inspiration to you. Thank you. We started this really trying to focus in on history, British and U.S. imperialism, Levi joined our show kind of a year in, and we started a series on Zionism as it relates to those things. But, you know, as you know, the research projects do take their toll after a while. So, you know, we do get into some interviews, some maybe lighter discussion on current events and even some explicit theory. We've got a reading mark series as well. To your point about kind of trying to cast that net, I mean, even those of us on the show here, you know, while we're all on the left, we're not necessarily the same tendency.

and we hope that it brings a lot to the conversation here, you know, and I think that's really needed in our current political moment for sure. I really got into the shoe list in South Dakota because it is, like you said, a nice change of pace. We all need a break, I think, from like a madness of politics all the time. So it helps with that. I reached out just to say, hey, thanks for doing it or whatever. And I thought about it. And that's ultimately where I asked you to come on to this episode. And it really came from a place of, as I was listening to you guys, and we were doing some work, I just got the sense that we were kind of on the same page, and I think a lot of us on the left are, as we're kind of evaluating these questions that come up

right now about reform versus revolution, accelerationism, and just generally kind of building working class power in the imperial core with the resurgent, but still nascent and somewhat disorganized left. We're staring down the barrel of Trump v. Biden 2.0, with really no end to the dictatorship of capital in sight, despite promising rhetorical campaign. from Dr. Cornel West, which I think plays into this conversation as well. From a historical perspective, I think a lot of people's minds are being drawn back to this New Deal era. Because this is the quintessential example of an American history of gay national rejuvenation, not universal,

but meaningful concessions for the working class year that were won. So I think that's kind of the Otis and the impetus for us to start this series. We're here really to talk about through various episodes, it's historical importance, discuss its limitations to a left behind, its relationship to U.S. imperialism, and really what we can learn as communist and socialist organizers, and most importantly, and we'll really focus on this today, but that the people made the New Deal, not some benevolent, great man, and FDR. I know I just gave a mouthful there, but Brett, before we even get into it, wanted to get your thoughts quickly on the New Deal, and it's important is for us in this moment today.

First off, I listened to your first episode on The New Deal and just like to sort of double down on what you said about us being in very much the same spirit. I was very impressed by that episode and the historical accuracy as well as the natural discussions that came up out of it. Yeah, absolutely. And I've been a fan of the show actually before you even reached out to me. So it's very cool to be here. That's great to you, right? Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. So the New Deal, I think, holds a very special place for a couple of reasons. I think on both sides of the crisis and rejuvenation coin. It's very clear that, and you could look, you could even talk about American history more broadly, but that we seem to, you know, occur in these cycles. There's something cyclical about history in general, right? We always hear terms like, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. If you study history, you understand the present, much better, et cetera. If you have any sort of grasp on American history, especially the last century, you do see like, oh, this is nothing new, right? We've been in a gilded era before. We've had insane levels of inequality before. Many of the same crises, the inequality, the polarization, the political party realignments, an old order dying and rotting on

the vine but not giving up power. Nobody's thinking in new ways to try to get out of it. Everybody's continually trying to reassert neoliberalism to solve the crisis created by neoliberalism. You know, we see that the crisis that we're living through right now has something very much in common. It certainly rhymes with the crises occurring right before the New Deal. And now the New Deal could be seen as optimistic for the average American. I'm not talking about socialist and communists who would much prefer some sort of revolution. We can get into how the New Deal saved capitalism. But for the average person out there, good-hearted, you know, maybe liberal or progressive leaning, the New Deal offers a little bit of hope. Oh, we have been here before.

We've had Robert Barron's before. We've had these crises, this inequality, all of this stuff before, the Great Depression, then we had the Great Recession. Maybe we'll have a new, new deal. And we can see Democratic politicians playing into this trope talking about the Green New Deal, the New New Deal, it never seems to actually fucking happen. But a lot of people like to talk about it. And Democrats love pointing back to that as a victory for them. But I'm sure as we get through this conversation, we'll see that it was really internal bottom up pressure as well as external pressure from various movements around the world that really culminated to create the moment possible to give rise to the New Deal. And then of course there remains the question, okay, if we're living in a similar period of crisis, we've had periods of renewal before. Is this crisis fundamentally different? Or is renewal possible still? Maybe renewal after the New Deal was only possible because of an external communist threat as well as World War II and all these factors that we might not have today as strongly as we're present back then gave rise to the particularities of the New Deal. Do we have those same causal factors at play today that could even make the ruling classes tremble? enough to want to give that many concessions, as limited as they were and as racially biased as they were, which again, we'll get into. So yeah, I think the new deal is hopping up into people's heads because we're living through another period of crisis, a new gilded age, and there is hope,

a desperate hope, that maybe we'll also enter a new, new deal of some sort. Maybe this time more racially inclusive, more universalist. That certainly remains to be seen. And I think there are very different conditions today than there were back then that might make that much harder, if not impossible. Definitely. We're going to touch on a lot of that as we go through the narrative. And Levi, I do want to turn it over to you. And just real quickly, right, since you praise the history there, we have to give all credit to Levi, because he is our resident accredited historian here. In a good sense, he has rejected academia in size of little people. Hell yeah. That's off. No sour grapes there at all.

The credential historian certainly comes out. They certainly came out in that episode. They'll take that as a compliment. 100%. I think you really hit the nail on the head when you called it something that offers hope to people that aren't even necessarily on the left. Because we have a new deal as an entry point. It's a way to articulate how the system might actually change because it was able to adjust itself in the past. Through the Democratic Party, no less. In terms of propaganda, we really need ways to appeal to people's better angels because the fascists can always appeal to the division

and hate that lingers as the background noise of life in neoliberal America. So we really need to grasp for these moments in history that are universally recognized as good, and we can even recognize as having elements of good structure to them, even if we don't agree with them in whole. So to jump into it, while our first episode on the New Deal took a broad legislative view, this one will focus on the actions and motivations of regular working people in America, which created the impetus for the problem. opposition of those laws.

Pulling back a touch, and listeners feel free to skip ahead if you're not interested in historiography, the history of perspectives on history. But I feel like it's important to briefly outline how the narrative of the New Deal has been retold by liberal and left historians, both in popular culture and academia. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., after his work during the early 1950s for the Economic Cooperation Administration and the Mutual Security Administration, which administers. the Marshall Plan and provided military and economic assistance to European Cold War allies respectively, wrote his magisterial history of the New Deal, the age of Roosevelt.

In this tomb, published in three parts. In 1957, 58, and 60, Schlesinger used government documents and newspapers to argue that the New Deal defeated powerful big business interests to uplift the disadvantage through greater state intervention and stabilized the market economy. Noteworthy, Schlesinger's work ended before the legislative stall of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's second term, which in turn provided a rousing, triumphant narrative for contemporary Democratic presidential hopeballs Adley-Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, each of whom he worked with personally. During the 1960s, this glorious narrative crumbled in the popular, by which I mean by and large, well-to-do white imagination. without getting into the weeds, which is actually the substance of my own dissertation,

movements for political, economic, racial, gender, and sexual equality challenged historians to reconsider the nature and use of their work. Among those young, new left historians, Barton J. Bernstein edited and published toward a new past in 1968, which included the landmark essay, The New Deal, the conservative achievements of liberal reform. Though he used the same sources as Schlesinger, he came to a radically different conclusion. The liberal reforms of the New Deal did not transform the American system. They conserved and protected American corporate capitalism.

Occasionally by absorbing parts of threatening programs, there was no significant redistribution of power in American society, only limited recognition of other organized groups, seldom of unorganized people. Neither the Boulder programs advanced by new dealers, nor the final legislation, greatly extended the benefits of government beyond the middle classes

or drew upon the wealth of the few for the needs of the many. Designed to maintain the American system, liberal activity was directed toward an essentially conservative goal, end quote. It seems obvious, but when we look at our current moment, it seems important to stress, when we assess educational work, as we're trying to do right now as it relates to the New Deal,

as you said, Brett, it would make perfect sense that the working class would call for something akin to the New Deal, given our political environment. And I think it's up to us to demonstrate why it wasn't enough then, and it won't be enough now, despite the positives that may come with it. Because we have concrete evidence in the neoliberal project to demonstrate that the state in the hands of the capitalists can roll back these concessions, even meant to save it in the first place. And it can always do that if the mechanisms that make the state as it functions now run are uprooted. And it goes to this idea that, you know, while communists are always on the bleeding edge of reforms and organizational efforts to achieve these things, we're always pushing

for more. Of course, we're met with violence as a result of that. It just kind of comes with the territory. I think that's a crucial point. And another thing I wanted to add is talking about liberals and their hope for a new, new deal. You both touched on this in your previous episode on this history. But the great man of theory history, you mentioned, you know, is this liberal idea that it just takes like these great men to come along. So if we had an FDR-like person in the White House, suddenly this thing would be possible. And what I think that desperately leaves out and is also an impact of anti-communism in this country is the erasure of the people's history and the bottom-up movements that gave rise and allowed an FDR to even exist in the first place.

Not as FDR existed in a vacuum, certain historical dynamics and current socio-political dynamics were culminating within him. So because we have this long history of anti-communism stemming after World War II in the Cold War, a lot of our history is erased. Ask the average American, you know, what happened during the New Deal. like FDR and the liberals, they instantiated a new slate of policy reforms that, you know, helped us and then he led us to victory in World War II, whatever. So much of that is erased. So much of the bottom up pressures going on, the socialists, the anarchists, the communist organizations, the external pressure from the Soviet Union. All of these other things are completely left out. And then anti-communism over the intervening decades, erases that history, leaving it up to folks like you and me to try to dig it up and represent it to people. But what that does is that it reentrenches the Great Man Theory of history because it eradicates the actual foundation of people's movements that gave rise to FDR and the New Deal in the first place and leaves only FDR. So then this liberal idea of the new New Deal is going to be

almost entirely wrapped up and this idea of just getting the right person in office. And I think that's a real threat to actually even allowing that to happen in the first place thinking that somebody's going to emerge out of the Democratic Party and is going to do all these things absent internal and probably also external pressure from radical left-wing movements and the real threat of rebellions turning into revolutions. To build off of something that both of you are talking to. So what's important is that the New Deal gives us something in history where we can say, look, this is good, but it could have been even better. Unlike many other moments in history where it's frankly trying to find the

positive in defeat, the second is the importance of history from below. It's the people who wanted more than what was offered to them. It's the so-called great men that actually limited the demands of the people, the broad population of the United States, or intentionally cut off large swaths of the United States in order to get specific legislation through under American democracy. We're getting back at it? The argument of subsequent historians can be oriented along the polls signaled by Bernstein and Schlesinger. Bernstein held sympathies with the average American, even though he hadn't yet cultivated. the sources to articulate a history capturing the voices of those subjects. Those sources are actually

very hard to find. People's history is always harder to do than Great Man history. It would take about another 20 years, the late 1980s, early 1990s, before this approach burst into the mainstream of New Deal Studies. To articulate this approach, I'll be considering the works of labor historians Elizabeth Cohen and Elizabeth Powell. The similarities between the two works illustrate their shared perspective. Their approach has gone by many names. History from below. People's history, history from the bottom up, and Borilla history, to name just a few. Cohen, in her making a new deal, industrial workers in Chicago, 1919, 1939, and foul in her community and suffering and struggle, women, men, and the labor movement in Minneapolis, 1915, 1945, examine the labor

movements in Chicago and Minneapolis, respectively. They both argue the New Deal came not from on high, but that energy and the demands from below motivated Congress and the executive to take action. Militant rank and file, a common person devastated by the collapse of the Great Depression, those hungry and out of work represented in the words of V.I. Lenin, the power lying in the streets. The New Deal thus represented a successful move by the federal government to pick it up, before a movement more threatening to the structures of American power could. While the topics, methods, and politics of each author vary, both academics and the larger

field, aim to articulate the agency of common people and the design, successes, and even the failures of the New Deal. There are a few important historical realities to keep in mind that each deserve their own deep dives beyond the scope of this episode, which play a huge role in the information both of these historians discuss. So to go over them quickly. The first is the Red Scare of 1917 through 1920. Arjun of Deep into History has done some stellar work on this history, and we recommend checking it out. In short, the federal and local governments used violence and the threat of violence to quash any shade of red from the ranks of unions and government. The exact extent of the government's success in killing the communist

influence is actually hard to quantify, but it's important to recognize just how long much damage the scare inflicted on workers' movements for solidarity. Even though many Reds continue to live and agitate, they did so while always looking over their shoulders. Another important reality is the ever-increasing restrictions on immigration kicked off by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. As a result of these laws and transnational economic forces, immigration to the United States peaked and then dropped precipitously in the mid-1910s.

In brief, this meant the immigrant communities this historians will be speaking of in the 1920s, and especially in the 1930s, are growing a population due to natural reproduction rather than immigration from abroad. This meant that a large portion of the working population grew up in America. The second and third generation immigrants thought of the old country as an other place rather than home. And this population lost some direct connection to political thoughts or traditions as they continued to evolve across the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Citations needed has just run a comprehensive investigation on the role played by America's global relations and imperialist expansion. It was a decent introduction to this history. But again, for the sake of this episode, it is enough to understand that these historical contingencies play a role in the history of the New Deal from below. Just some personal evidence that kind of ties both of those points together on my dad's dad's side. I'm Italian. And my grandfather has done some work just in kind of unercing the family lineage. And he was able to find, I think it was my great, great grandfather's immigration documents. And it was around this time. And one of the questions on the paperwork was, are you or have you

ever been an anarchist? And that was kind of a catch-all, you know what I mean, for any kind of like left-wing movement. But that just speaks to both these restrictions on immigration as it related to some of the working class ideology coming from Europe at the time and just also the red scare being linked up directly together there. The other thing I would just add that we have to keep in mind and this is an obvious point as it relates to the New Deal is just the Great Depression and people just being beaten down by essentially the greed of capital at the end of the 20s and into the early 30s when FCR ultimately came into office. Just for some examples, if we have a quick minute here. You know, another seminal people's history is obviously Howard Zinn's work. In his chapter

on self-help and hard times, he gets into this Great Depression period. So just to read a couple examples that he was able to compile here of discontent in the populace, because there was real, like, spontaneous, organized movement, both large and small throughout the country as a result of these conditions. He says, quote, the spirit of rebellion was growing. Moritz-Halgren in a 1933 book, Seeds of Revolt compiled newspaper reports of things happening around the country, and I'll just read a few here. Detroit, July 9th, 1931, an incipant riot by 500 unemployed men turned out of the city lodging house for lack of funds was called by police reserves in Cadillac Square tonight. Detroit, November 28, 1931, a mounted patrol man was

hit on the head with a stone and unhorsed and one demonstrator was arrested during a disturbance in Grand Circus Park this morning when 2,000 men and women met there in defiance of police orders. Chicago, April 1st, 1932, 500 schoolchildren, most with haggard bases and in tattered clothes paraded through Chicago's downtown section to the Board of Education offices to demand that the school system provide them with food. New York, January 21st, 1933, several hundred jobless surrounded a restaurant just off Union Square today demanding they be fed without a charge. People are organizing spontaneously just as a result of real material need. That, I think, is just important. And again, people should always keep this in mind when we're

talking about the New Deal, but there's some just concrete evidence of people rising up together and state repression as a result as well. And I'll jump in an ad that I also have right here, the people's history of the United States, Howard Zinn, a really interesting text, really helpful for people wanting to do a full scan of American history from the bottom up. Yeah, we all got our coffee as good little American socialist and communists is what we have to do. That chapter, self-help in hard times, a great chapter covering this period of time, the Great Depression, and the self-help is, of course, not solely or merely what we think of as self-help today as sort of like internalizing structural

problems and finding ways to co. But it means self-organization. So what happened during the Great Depression when there was a complete lack of government help, not unlike what we've experienced during the pandemic, for example, or, you know, people in Flint, Michigan have experience with regards to their water. We could go on and on with this stuff. One of the big lessons I took away from COVID is the government's not coming to help. It shit goes down. You are in your community and you're going to have to go out and you're going to have to knock on your neighbor's doors and you're going to have to figure something out. Nobody's coming to help. But what's fascinating about this chapter, self-help in hard times, is documenting these cases of people with no other option. The state is absent. The economy is in shambles. Nothing is working. And people don't just lay on the floor and die. They naturally come together. They naturally, actually, I would argue, in moments of crisis like this, when they're forced to come together, are naturally communal, naturally socialistic, without thinking in those terms necessarily. But again, it shows tenant organizing, it shows labor organizing, it shows mutual aid,

how people in different cities across the country came together to fight for one another evictions. They would have whole crews of people in cities where when a landlord evicted somebody, you'd have 50 guys come down the block and move all your shit back in your house exactly where you had it. And, you know, would go to basically war against these landlords and the police that came to back them up, etc. This spontaneous self-organization that happens, but of course, not the bulk of the effort, but crucial to it were these organized socialist communist organizations that would spearhead these movements or at least help organize them. Sometimes a tenant organization of 100 people would have 10 dedicated communists in it, but would just be helping the material needs of the other 90 people

in the organization, et cetera. So it's not like these outside forces coming in, although of course the Communist Party did send people to different parts of the country. But it's really like this organic people coming together. And insofar as there were communists or socialists that were organized, they had some knowledge of how to organize. They had knowledge of broader networks. And that really was crucial when people were trying to come together and make do by themselves. It's kind of a beautiful thing to read that chapter and see how people do that. Not to reading on anybody's parade, but this is exactly why I included the line. Power is in the streets. And so we'll get to where we can talk about it with

more specific information, but while people are fed up, much like they are today, they don't necessarily consider a Marxist analysis of the system or the communist perspective immediately. Just as today, people might turn to Q and on and the elders of Zion. They had Father McLaughlin and the elders of Zion, some things never change, giving them scapegoats. It's important to remember that there really was a fascist movement in the United States, that this was just as interested in picking up the power in the streets as the liberal government was. as the communist movement was. There really was a competition for people's hearts and minds that wanted to overthrow the quote quote communist Roosevelt, right? Yeah. It's so called. But I mean, really like as

we're having this discussion and I don't want to get too deep into the weeds on this, you know, because we have a lot of ground to cover still. Learning this stuff and then squaring it with Lenin's theory on organizing is where it really clicked is that, you know, I think we can relate this to just working class consciousness coming out in the form of trade unionism. like that's almost automatic for people to do this on their own. The next step is to kind of organize and push for political power to make sure that these gains can't be taken back. And I think that is the thrust of how I would look at the situation today. I think how we really need to be if we don't want to repeat them mistakes, you know. And I would also add, yeah, reactionaries at the time

were completely on board with calling FDR a communist. People referred to him as Stalin, Delano Roosevelt, in the same exact way, with less reason that. reactionaries today will call Biden a communist or Obama, a Marxist, right? I'm the Mao haircut. Come on. But that's what anti-communism can do is like you can just stick that label to anybody you don't like. At some point, it sort of becomes unmoored from a reality these people don't even understand. And it just becomes a set piece or a fill-in for things they don't like.

And they are, you know, broadly apply it everywhere. You do anything to help any working person anywhere in the world. Somebody's going to accuse you of being a socialist or communist. And at some point, it's like, yeah, yeah, so what? You know what I mean? Like, does this really sound that bad? Right. I wish these people were actual communists.

Right. Yeah. So there's a senator from Mississippi named Theodore Bilbo. That's right, Bilbo. You Lord of the Rings heads out there who argued that he was the most effective evangelical of New Deal liberalism. He called himself a Baptist, a dry type of belief meant that he believed in the dry movement against alcohol. and a proud Ku Klux Klan member. But he fumed from the Senate floor on the fair employment practices writing that it's a damnable communist poisonous piece of legislation.

Some Catholics are linked with some rabbis trying to bring about racial equality for N-Words. The N-words and the Jews of New York are working hand in hand. You know, with friends like that. So this guy self-represented as the evangelical of New Deal liberalism. So you didn't even have to be against the New Deal to call Roosevelt a communist. Yeah. This is going beyond rhyme at this point. Right, exactly.

And I would also say throughout American history, the way that anti-communism is employed to bolster anti-Semitism, to bolster anti-blackness, calling MLK a communist. Once anti-communism is released on a society, it can be used against anything. And of course, in American context, it's going to be used against black liberation movements and going back to European anti-Semitism. I mean, Hitler's mind conf in which he explicitly talks about Judeo-Bolshevism, right? This is an old trope. Still alive with us today, of course.

These things are deeply intertwined. Was Henry Ford himself that printed, I think, 300,000 copies of the Elders of Zion to distribute around the United States? It's the same story over and over again. Elders of Zion still online. You can get a PDF of it in about two minutes. When there's no critique of capital, conspiracy fills the void. So when you have absolutely no way to critique the political economy, it's very, very, very, very tempting to sort of indulge in all your worst impulses in the form of conspiracy theories.

We still see that today. Which is where we're trying to fill in. Education is an agitation against the worst angels of people. Absolutely. So I understand there is some irony to introducing an episode on the guerrilla history of the New Deal by focusing so much on academic historians. Both authors are political actors and are unlikely to agree with our politics. But I do believe their research is,

impeccable, even as their conclusions are colored by these perspectives. Just as the conclusions, we'll draw in this podcast, are colored by our perspectives. Although this is the scaffolding which I've chosen to outline this episode, as stated, I am not that interested in making this episode about these authors. Essential concerns will be on the material. If one or both these authors are listening, though, we'd be excited to have you on to discuss your work that you now produced over 30 years ago. So the structure going forward is I'm going to do my best to give a good faith summary of Cohen and Fowles research before we work to compare them and consider where our analysis of the period may lead us to different conclusions.

Speaking for myself now, I will be taking the research and analysis of these academics on good faith. even as we may disagree on points of substance both authors make, I hope we can come to grips with how we understand what use this information might be for us today as we stand in the midst of yet another worldwide crisis of capital. We as principled communist and socialists should never dismiss good fact-based research even by people that don't agree with our politics or anything like that. I mean, Lenin's work is riddled, Marx's work is riddled with the work of bourgeois historian and economists to make the points that they were making. Get out of this headspace where it's like if someone doesn't agree with you fully that you can't utilize good research to

bolster your own arguments. If you don't do that, you silo yourself into an echo chamber, a bubble, you stop being tethered to reality, you stop being able to produce good analysis, and you stop being able to take what's useful from others, and you kind of lose your grip on reality. It's essential. So for Red Menace, we just got finished on Engels is the origin of the family, private property, and the state. And in that text as well, Engels makes great use of an anthropologist Morgan throughout the entire text and then takes Marxist analysis and historical materialism and fleshes out this picture of the rise of patriarchy and the family unit as we know it and private property and the rise of the state, which Lenin would later take up in state and revolution and expand even further. But in almost every case of really critical Marxist theory, there are Marxists engaging with. and wrestling with other theorists outside of socialism and communism, taking what's useful, criticizing where they get it wrong, and trying to advance knowledge that way. And it's absolutely crucial that we continue that tradition.

Is if you lose your ability to talk to human beings, you lose the whole game. As we've said a few times now, people are dissatisfied. If you yell at them and call them racists or imperialists, they're not going to listen to what you have to say. If you say that there's shills for accepting a negotiated union contract that's not 140% socialism, they're not going to want to hear what you have to say. You have to meet people where they're at so you can help bring them further along. We need to understand where humanity is at and help them with their better angels.

And to us, that means a left version of socialism. The three of us might actually have different ideas of what that ends up looking like. But we agree we need to work on getting people halfway. so they can understand and decide for themselves what they want this world to look like under the structures that make this into a more egalitarian world. Interpersonal ability to just be sociable, to talk to regular people is so crucial. Go to bars, go to family functions, don't try to be right, don't steamroll over everybody else. One crucial thing that you can do rhetorically when talking to anybody is first, before you start

jamming your thoughts down their throat, ask them what they believe, what they think, take an interest in their ideas. Right away, they're not going to be defensive. People love talking about themselves and their thoughts. So right away, they're going to feel heard. And then you look as they're talking. Even if somebody disagrees you, they're a Trump supporting far Republican guy. You listen for a thing or two that you can then extract from what they said and build off of. Oh, you said a bunch of stuff. I'm not going to point out all the things that I disagree with. But that one thing you said about the working man getting stepped on, I can take that. And I can have a conversation with you about that. So nobody's coming in as like an elitist talking down to people or condescending. You come in,

you open up your ears first before you open up your mouth. You find those kernels within the other person's thoughts that you can work with and then you start advancing the conversation that way, but always being willing to bounce the ball back over and to listen. If you try to, you know, bulldoze people with your opinions, they're going to hate you, they're going to find you condescending, they're going to go on the defensive, they're going to shut down the part of their brain that allows them to learn new things or is even open to new things. I think that's really crucial. And I think the more time you spend on stuff like Twitter, I think the further away from that you

get, the more time you spend in the real world with real family, real friends, real people in your community, the closer to that you get. Wait, what's Twitter? Isn't it now? I'll never stop calling a Twitter. I hate it. The frustrations in this system are real, and they are universal.

So everyone, maybe not somebody like Bezos anyway, is going to say something real that you can grab onto. Like, That's just the fact of living in the system that's on the verge of collapse as we all are dealing with it. As it was published a year before Fowles, let's start with the work of Elizabeth Cohen. Cohen's history focused on industrial workers, specifically steelworkers, tractor assemblers, and meatpackers, from four distinct Chicago ethnic enclaves, being Italians, Poles, Irish, and Slavs,

plus new black workers from the Great Migration. Her work begins in post-World War I during the production slowdowns of the post-war economic boom, through the booming 20s, into the Depression, and up through the start of World War II. Our analysis weighed heavy the actions of workers as consumers, both as investors and banks and fraternal organizations, in addition to the consumption of cultural products like radio, theater, and art. A work outlined how these Chicago workers in the late 1910s and 20s consumed cultural artifacts created by their ethnic community, belonged to ethnic banks, spent their time in ethnic fraternal organizations, including churches, and turned to these organizations when they needed assistance in times of need. To undermine the union movement of this era,

employers took advantage of these siloed communities to stoke suspicions of ethnic difference, hitting the Italians against the Poles, the Irish against the Slavs, and near everyone against black workers. In addition, employers also instituted corporate programs of welfare capitalism to satisfy the more radical demands within each ethnic enclave. These programs of welfare capitalism included medical benefits, pensions, and even paid vacations on rare occasion. Relating to how she structured this work, for anybody that might be perhaps critical of like limiting a framing just to Chicago, I invite you to look at the legacies of this kind of division in like whatever municipality you may live close to right

now. I mean, there's still like what's known as Polish zones or Italian areas. Brett, we're in Pittsburgh. We have Polish Hill here, right? But the small town, it was a coal mining town that I was born in. In another part of Pennsylvania, there was an Irish church, there was an Italian church, there was the Slavic church. And I mean, I am a product though that I'm Irish, Italian, Polish, and Slovak. You know what I mean? So, like, this is like a real thing that was all over the country. I just want to like kind of bolster. While she's limiting the analysis to Chicago, this is a phenomenon that was pretty universal. I mean, with different characteristics in different places, obviously, but especially as I think about like the northeast and the Midwest, you know.

Here in Omaha, we have little Italy. We have little bohemia. South Omaha, where I grew up, used to be the place where migrants from eastern and central Europe came. And then in the 90s shifted over to migrants from Latin America. So yeah, absolutely. This micro history, this case study history, makes research possible. I mean, the reason that Elizabeth Cohen uses something like Chicago is because the city of Chicago kept incredibly great records of their own city, especially the University of Chicago. So it just gave her a research base to understand the material conditions of the people she was interested in studying. I mean, in spite of the thought that history is some ethereal concept, it has a very,

real material basis in what is left behind. And the fact that Chicago is a city, the centralized means that the evidence is much easier to find in research and, you know, extrapolate. And just to bolster the whole kind of framing of this even further, when she's referencing like this kind of incoming black working population, you have to remember that this is on the heels of, you know, obviously the ending of slavery, reconstruction, sharecropping and everything like that. black community fleeing northward and putting pressure on the industrial apparatuses that were up there. And obviously, that was a very easy way for the capital's class to sow division and prevent true working class unity. There's a good movie made by a local filmmaker here in Pittsburgh called Struggles and Steel that talks about that exact phenomenon here.

So again, that's too much history for what we're getting into today, but there's a lot to dive into in terms of the dynamics that we're at play. Yeah. And to second the fact that this is too much history, there is a valid critique to be made that focusing on Chicago is going to be very different than focusing on Jackson, Mississippi in this period. So we always have to temper what we're seeing here with the reality that Cohen is not claiming to represent the entire United States. She's claiming to represent Chicago. We can extrapolate out of that. We should never claim it to be all-encompassing, as the author herself never claims that. So in the 1920s, when business boomed, welfare capitalism expanded, and ethnic centers of community supported their own. They're developed what Cohen coined a popular conception of, quote, moral capitalism within the working class, wherein workers began to believe capitalism could and should be fair. The Depression undermined the stability of both corporate capitalist welfare and community ethnic organizations. But because of the already well-established expectations of moral capitalism, workers believe their corporate bosses brought on this crisis by their own excessive greed.

The workers, in no small irony, came to this conclusion by considering the rhetoric of fairness and familiar support coming from their own union-busting bosses made all the more glaring by their corporation's sudden failure to hold up their end of the bargain. to put a point on Cohen's argument. The workers' conception of moral capitalism meant workers stopped short of considering capitalism itself as being an unfair system and rather blamed individual bad capitalists. So I know we were talking about how to handle conversations

with friends and family. Something that I'm working on still in terms of how to handle it, but it's still ascending me over the fucking wall. And I'm just reminding me of this here is when people say it's corporatism, you know, and I'm trying to figure out how to manage that situation, but that's what this reminds me of, right, like this. Well, you know, it should be fair. It is fair in theory and everything like that. It's just we need to get the right people in these positions because it's a journey to figure out how to handle and talk to people in these

situations. It doesn't, you know, you don't get that skill automatically and you're going to mess up sometimes. That is something that really just kind of tries me a little bit baddie. I share that. Crony capitalism is another huge one. The latest innovation, reactionaries is calling a woke capitalism. It's not capitalism. It's like the woke CEO's within capitalism that are the problem. I also don't like the term and maybe we have some disagreement on this, but a lot of people use this term socialism for the rich. And on one level, I get it, public funding, going into private profits, etc. But I always am sort of like on the edge of my seat when I hear that term. I'm not exactly sure the overall thrust of what that does

to people in their minds. It's like, oh, does that mean we want capitalism for the rich, socialism for this kind of like muddying the water a little bit, but it's certainly preferable to crony capitalism or woke capitalism or, yeah, corporatism, et cetera. But again, we still hear this exact same thing today. Like, libertarians will say this all the time. It's not the system of capitalism. It's this terrible way that is instantiated. It never seems to be instantiated correctly for them. And for us, it sometimes happens when they say, you know, here's a terrible thing that happened in socialism. And then some like tepid social democrat will say, that's not real socialism. And then they all, you know, that becomes a meme in and of itself. And what I like

about certain elements of the communist left is that we're willing to take on board all the bad parts too, not to say that they were great, but to say, yeah, that's our history. All of our histories are full of good, bad, and ugly. We're trying to parse out the good from the bad and from the ugly. We'll accept that. But can you please accept the entire history of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism? They're not as willing to do that. So I think that's the winning argument in that context. Yep. I think I share your suspicion of this language of socialism for the rich. And I'm going to go out on the limb here. This is way beyond my knowledge. But apparently Amlo, president of Mexico, likes to use that language of socialism of the rich

in order to claim that then he's practicing austerity by cutting the tax benefits to the rich by continually calling it socialism and then austerity to cut away socialism. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, exactly. That's strategic. Yeah. Has some strategic value to it.

But again, it seems like it could go way out of hand really quickly if you take it to its logical conclusion. Right. I think it's also different in different contexts. Just because of the history of anti-communism, anti-socialism in the U.S., I think you're on dangerous ground whenever you're equating socialism with something bad here and you want to see socialism advanced. Yeah, great point. Absolutely. We're only organizing where we're at. We're not going anywhere else. I don't feel my capabilities are anywhere beyond this region. Yeah. So workers, and turn demanded the state fill the role of welfare capitalism and turn to the new union movement, this being the nascent Congress of Industrial Organizations, the CIO, and their call to

unionize everybody compared to the old craft-based union organization, the American Federation of Labor, the AFL. To take on the additional support role of their financially collapsed ethnic-based organizations, businesses, and churches. By the mid-1930s, the disintegration of many niche cultural ethnic institutions, second and third generation Chicagoans, born of immigrants, consumed mass-produced culture of natural radios,

chain stores, clothing, and a new centralized motion picture industry which in turn fostered a mass-class culture on top of or in place of heterogeneous ethnic cultures. The figure of Roosevelt came to be part of this culture as a consistent being president for so long, uniting and larger-than-life charismatic figure.

Through this lens, FDR and the New Dealers, consistent messaging became a cultural project itself, as it was crafted uniformly and consumed in mass by working-class Americans. In big cities like Chicago, to be working class meant being a Democrat. In addition, the CIO fostered its own culture of unity, which heightened newfound feelings of working-class solidarity. The culture of unity embraced a specific union culture, wherein the union delivered for individuals and kept up bay the greed of the capitalist. Even if you were a Pole, Italian, Slav, or an Irishman,

you were first and foremost a union man. Or at least that's how National Union Literature presented itself. In conclusion, she wrote, by 1939, quote, ethnicity had become more a sensibility than a support system and quote workers of diverse ethnic cities and races succeeded in asserting themselves collectively as Democrats and Unionists by the 1930s because they had more in common from which to forge these alliances it's very an interesting little shift that occurs when people are proletarianized and put into big urban centers for the division of labor and the advancement of the productive forces is that there is like a sort of

loosening of, you know, as you put it, heterogeneous ethnic cultures and ethnic identities in favor of a broad class identity, which is of course progressive in its own right, this sort of understanding yourself not to be, I'm white, you're black, I'm Irish, you're a slav or whatever, but to say we're all working people, this is the very foundation of the possibility of proletarian organization, rebellion, and ultimately even a revolution. the way that capitalism sort of homogenizes can be a negative thing on one end, turning us all into consumers. On the other hand, it does do things like proletarianize, which gives rise in the best case scenarios to a sort of class consciousness on behalf of the working masses.

Such a contradiction in my mind sometimes as well, because it is great to break down those hostile, you know, ethnic tensions. But I do think capitalism has like a really negative effect on like some really good traditions in a lot of senses as well. Like breaking apart communities, people are forced to move away from these places to find a job. Like, I had to move away from my hometown if I wanted to find, like, a decent job because there was a few options in terms of where I wanted to work. You know what I mean? I think it is important for people to hold on to some traditions.

Again, I'm trying not say this in a very reactionary way, but I think that can foster real senses of community and bringing people together, like coming from the Italian side, the Sunday dinner with family. That gets more and more impossible as capitalism essentially breaks up communities and families. Marx talks about this in the Communist Manifesto, right? Capitalism is pitilessly torn asunder, the motley feudal ties that bound man to man and to his natural superiors or whatever and replace all of that with the naked self-interest, a cash payment, right? Everything solid melts into air.

It's this double-edged sort of dialectical movement that is both positive and negative, both progressive and in a way sort of a miserably. a rating at the same time. There is something lost in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but also we understand, and this is what prevents reaction, there's no going back. We don't move backwards in time to recapture a lost golden feudal era. The only way out is through, and so we have to accept the good with the bad, the dialectical movement, and see what kernels we can then take forward and move in a progressive direction. I share those sentiments as well. Something is lost, and especially in a neoliberal era in the United States, when even class consciousness, even class culture is sort of lost in a sense. It's replaced by a mass consumer culture, but it's not

giving rise to class consciousness in the way that we were discussing. So when you even lose that, or you don't have any solidarity, even if you're hyper aware of being a worker, but there's no organizations or solidarity, then you feel like there's no culture. Completely alienated. Yeah, you feel, yes, alienation. You feel almost an urge to want to go back and recapture some sense of identity. You know, you start looking at Ancestry.com and I'm Irish and I'm German. Let's go back trying to find some semblance of a culture in the desert of alienation of modern capitalism. But the real identity we can cling on to and organize around is the fact that we're all in the working class. And that can actually bring us together. And there's a whole beautiful culture there.

There's a beautiful tradition there. There's amazing people and heroes, you know, myths in a sense, mythic figures that we can take great pride in. Part of political education, I think, is reuniting us with this beautiful tradition of working people standing up a cross all identity lines coming together and fighting in solidarity for the interest of all, that can be our culture. I think all of us here are trying to promote that very idea. Accentuate the positives. Yeah. Building off of what both of you have said, and it's something I mentioned earlier, but to bring in the material history, the lack of immigration to the United States at this point

prevented traditions from the old country or being connected to a larger, Polish, Irish, Italian, Slavic, radical tradition. So there's something. contradiction here because as socialism is an international movement, we actually need these connections. Sometimes capitalism actually severs connections and creates siloed communities. It's not just about reaching back. That's not something that can work. It's about reaching across and understanding how as cultures, we actually can come to different conclusions under the same situation that may be more beneficial through that conversation. And as internationalists, that's sort of a non-starter. We have to be able to reach across and speak to people

beyond our own communities. Well, sir. It's now looking at Elizabeth Fowles' work. Fowles' monograph focused on Minneapolis in the 1910s through World War II, considering the events of this time and place through the primary lens of gender. She argued the Great Depression provided a real opportunity

for organized labor to reconsider the rule of women in the movement, but, using evidence from CIA archives, with conclusions that extrapolated beyond to the AFL, It appeared the increasingly bureaucratized labor movement agreed on the woman's place as auxiliary to a male-centric working class in order to secure the gains of the movement's coalition with the New Deal Democrats. She bolsters her argument by considering the place of women within the labor movement during World War I compared to their place within the labor movement of the New Deal,

positing that an alternative model to the male-centric working class actually existed. During the nascent labor movement of pre-World War I, the whole community, male and female, organized together around the strike. The community made demands, which the unions, or those hoping to form unions, reflected to management. In comparison to the 1930s,

women regularly attended meetings, stood on the line and understood themselves as part of the working class in articulating their demands. Even when these demands focused on home life, women and men crafted the demands in a unified voice as working-class concerns, rather than women's concerns. During the New Deal, a union bureaucracy took advantage of the Labor Relations Board to organize themselves on a top-down service-oriented model.

This meant that women held few, if any, positions of influence within union bureaucracy. With few exceptions, women who took to the picket line participated in public agitation or made demands of the state did so under the gendered language of the housewife, the daughter, or the dependent of a member of the male working class. This in spite of the fact that the workforce needed to hire greater numbers of women to meet the demands of wartime production during mass conscription. So that's a very interesting little nugget there about how with few exceptions women who took to the picket line made demands of the state, they did so under the gendered language of the housewife, the daughter, etc. I think there's also a mirroring effect

in the feminist movement of the last couple decades where there was often this line coming from men who wish to be sympathetic to the feminist cause. Of course, I support feminism. I have a daughter. I have a wife. It's otherizing in a sense. It's like my relation to these other people makes me care about their interest, but framing it as working people, I think really bridges that gap. It's not just because you're a father or you have a wife or you love your mom that you're feminist, but you understand the role of working class struggle and women's liberation and how they're fused together. Same with black liberation, same with oppression of all people, colonial oppression, etc. They can all come together in solidarity under working class

without erasing the particularities of the experiences of a Native American or a black person or a woman, right? So you understand and respect different experiences of different people with different identities, but at the same time, class is the mechanism by which you unify people across those identities and fight for a common good. So I think that's very interesting that that sort of language was even apparent back then in the 30s. To double down on what you were saying, it's about the common identity of the working class that allows those sort of differences to be accepted. Your X, your Y, your Z, you're whatever you want to identify as, but we're all working class. We can accept these differences in the same way that I can accept that your name is

Brett and your name is Nick. Of course, that's not my name, but we're all of the working class. And the logical end point is if you are a racist, even if you're working class, you're ostensibly for working class gains, you're dividing the working class. You hate gay people. You don't like trans people. You don't like women, right? Right then and there, you either need to be educated out of those chauvinist behaviors through solidarity and an understanding of these things, or you need to be some distance between us and our organization because that's one thing we can't compromise on. You don't get to dehumanized fellow workers. We're all in this together. You don't get to place yourself above that. But of course, that's the divide and conquer that. the ruling class has played beautifully and still plays to this day quite well. Go on Fox News. They're doing divide and conquer all day. So yeah, just food for thought. Even draw a more negative connotation to this. I mean, this is the leadership of unions when they want to secure their own power as head. I mean, Hoffa was very quick to talk about the black gab workers. I mean, he knew what he was doing when he was using those dog whistles. Well, I wouldn't even call that a dog whistle, but he's creating division within the working class, because his interest is as a powerful leader of the union,

not as a member of the working class himself. As the labor aristocracy. Right. Exactly. And I think that's very close to what Fow is actually arguing for in her book, even if she doesn't mention it explicitly. While women during the 1930s continued to be involved, by sheer number alone, they may have even become more involved, the focus of their efforts turned to supporting specific demands articulated by male-dominated unions.

These demands included increased pay, better work schedules, and employment security for male red winners. When women spoke out on their own, their demands revolved around kitchen table issues of unemployment assistance for their spouse, home relief and security, and a robust welfare state so they could better care for their children. I'm reminded of a quote, one of, I know our favorite text Levi, and I'm assuming Brett you like it as well, but from the 18th premier, the tradition of all generations ways like a nightmare upon the brains of the living. This is where plug for your episode with Allison and Red Menace on origins of the family to really understand where that kind of framing has come from. You have to understand like the family structure as it grew up and formed within capitalism to understand why these demands are being framed. this way at this moment and it is because there is this kind of traditional element while this is still obviously a very progressive step you're not just going to snap to some kind of like radical

proletarian feminism on a broad scale right away in this moment so it's an incremental process through this i can't say it better than marks but i just wanted to bring that up absolutely yeah we'll be revisiting that text in a minute here so the most interesting and to me the most convincing are the evidence foul marshals are political cartoons and narratives found in national and local union newspapers. These sources imagine women within the national labor movement as consumers needing protections or doing their part by, quote, buying union goods. They're explicitly homemakers, needing support keeping up with the chores, so they need their husbands to be home earlier. They're caretakers of children. They need the state to provide them schools. They need the

union to provide them education. They're damsels in distress, being taken advantage of by corporate greed and left out in the cold without their male red winners making enough money. And they're the dependence, always, of hard-working men. On the other hand, the same literature represented the worker as the image of masculinity. They're always muscle-bound, playing sports, and they're always focused on reporting and often romanticizing violent street fighting. Even the image of Roosevelt

grew into that of the wise father figure taking care of the sick and downtrodden which were almost always represented as women and children. All of these came to dominate union periodicals. A few pockets of resistance to this developing common sense existed, but either never found

great purchase or structures prevented its wide dissemination. The image of the militant mother and strong auxiliary woman occasionally popped up. Though this image still posited the woman as consumer, it did so by representing her as the backbone of the working man rather than his dependent. Now, I'm not saying this was the great image, but it's definitely in contradiction to the

previous image. All the same, the stronger representations pale in comparison to the dependent. Thao argued the government's shift from granting relief through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration providing direct jobs through the works projects administration for WPA represented a major impetus for this change, or the lack of a sort of counter from taking hold. In 1939, WPA workers in Minnesota went on strike to protest national budget cuts. Women organized to demand the government reinstate the laid-off workers and increase their budget for relief work. Although militant, a community-driven, much like the

strikes of the 1910s, the ongoing Popular Front mellowed communist militancy and the culture had solidified around a male-centric breadwinner workforce and the top-town bureaucratization crafted by the New Deal limited this strike to its existence as an anomaly rather than a sign of structural change. The fact that the government became the employer meant that the populace by and large trusted the good faith of the boss, the fatherly Roosevelt himself. The local decentralized approach of the late 1910s allowed for more radical, even socialist, demands true to the needs of the whole local community, even as they often faced violence from the state. Union bureaucracy at the 1930s, on the other hand, won their most modest demands crafted

toward a consumerist ideal of a working class dependent on the success of capitalism. Fow argued the first Red Scare 1917 through 20 marked a significant reason community militancy subsided while arguing the popular front of the mid-1930s led the remaining Reds

to sacrifice the resistance to the New Deal. Labor unity with the state represented a short-term detriment in the larger fight against fascism at the expense of racial and gender equality. These limited gains,

though uneven across race, became stabilized under the bureaucratic growth structure. In her conclusion, these limited gains, built as they were on gender inequality, without a structure to prioritize rank-and-file community input, guaranteed the eventual collapse of the New Deal labor movement. We can pause right there. I would like to read a little part from Howard Zin's, that same chapter, self-help and hard times from a people's history of the United States.

He's talking about how these reactions that were inherent to the New Deal also acted, as you were sort of alluding to here, to suppressing the more militant edges of the labor struggle. So he says, quote, thus, two sophisticated ways of controlling direct labor action developed in the mid-30s. First, the National Labor Relations Board would give unions legal status, listen to them, settling certain of their grievances. Thus, it could moderate labor rebellion by channeling energy into elections. just as the constitutional system channeled possibly troublesome energy into voting. The NLRB would set limits and economic conflict as voting did in political conflict. And second, the workers' organization itself, the union, even a militant and aggressive union like the CIO, would channel the workers' insurrectionary energy into contracts, negotiations, union meetings,

and try to minimize strikes in order to build large, influential, even respectable organizations. The history of those years seemed to support the argument of Richard Cloward and Francis Piven in their book Poor People's Movements that Labor won most during its spontaneous uprisings before the unions were recognized or well organized. Quote, factory workers had their greatest influence and were able to exact their most substantial concessions from government during the Great Depression in the years before they were organized into unions. Their power during the Depression was not rooted in organization, but in disruption, end quote. I found that incredibly interesting because on one hand, there are these concessions being made. There's the strengthening and even legitimization of unions.

On the other hand, there's a deradicalization of unions and a bringing them into the fold in the same way that the radical energies of something like Black Lives Matter, historic protest here in the United States, were more or less successfully co-opted and funneled back into the maintenance of the Democratic Party. So this is like a really like a dual-sided catch-22 situation that the New Deal is not holy good nor wholly bad. It came with all of these nuances, these contradictions that had to happen. And I was speaking of angles as on the origin of the family private property in the state. He talks about this very clearly about the state arising in modernity under capitalism, right? As we transition

out of feudalism and towards capitalism, the state arises to mediate class struggle, which is inevitable, but not in a neutral way. And I think that's the liberal sort of naivete that the state is there as a neutral arbiter between the owning class and the working class or different factions, different classes or whatever. No, the ruling class itself has a vested interest in stabilizing the system that allows them to be the ruling class. Sometimes that does come with concessions. Sometimes that does mean mediating between concerns of labor and concerns of the owning class, but ultimately and always to the favor of the system itself, to the perpetuation of the system itself, which is the dictatorship of the owning class. So in this way, we can see that the state does mediate

class struggle, but not neutrally. And I think the New Deal approves that quite well. Just to touch on what I think that this might mean for this moment, especially at a time where we're seeing increased union radicalization, union organization, et cetera, et cetera, I think this is something that we have to be very careful with, because as you said, Brett, the Democratic Party is very good at co-opting movements and kind of deradicalizing and channeling all that energy into electoralism. At the same time, I think most people are still very much engaged in electoralism outside of our left wing circles and everything like that. And I think you've made this point as well. And I share the sentiment. That's why I think even if the

end goal isn't to win the presidency, I think the best thing that would be at least reasonably achievable at this moment would be to attach these growing unions, burgeoning unions, resurgent unions, to call that to a true independent working class party. It might be imperfect, but we really have to decouple this union drive from the Democrats because they don't care. Again, we have the evidence of Biden squashing the railroad strike, et cetera, et cetera. The list goes on and on. You know, our most pro-Labor president ever, the most pro-union president, leading the most pro-union administration in American history. Well, it's nothing to do with actually changing the fundamentals, right? Exactly. I think we need to be realistic about what something like that could achieve. I mean, if we're going to sustain any kind of momentum towards achieving the radical change that this country and this world, so desperately needs, we need to decouple labor militancy from the Democrats.

You know, Marx and Engels and Lenin, they all knew this as well. They weren't against electoralism a priori. They understood that sometimes there's a role to enter the electoral realm and fight, but not on behalf of one of the ruling class parties. You do it with your own party. To take it. your own number to gauge the interest in your own politics to advance your own narratives, not to tail one of the capitalist parties. And I think that sometimes is what's echoed by social Democrats or people that like to think of themselves as understanding Marx, but are fundamentally more on the social democratic position, is they'll try to shoehorn you into the Democratic Party and using some of the lines sort of decontextualized from Lenin or Marx or Engels to say, this is why you should support the Democrats in particular. So we look at Cornell West. We look at the Green Party. Green Party is not historically nor presently some paragon of working class

anti-imperialist politics. My co-host Allison said it's actually opportunist and not even in the negative pejorative sense, but just in the sense that it's constantly shifting. The Green Party just kind of like fills a role that the two major parties aren't filling any given election cycle. And it kind of depends who the candidates are and what issues they want to push. The Green Party itself is not like a party that, you know, that's organized well and has certain principles that you know, forces its candidates to run on or anything like that. So I'm not saying that the Green Party is going to be the working class party, but Cornell West getting the nomination of the Green Party,

advancing explicit working class politics, anti-imperialist politics, and narratives. That's a step in the right direction. But also we can't tie our fortunes simply to even a fully working class electoral party. We also have to be engaging in all these other spheres, which include the union struggles inside of unions. We need a reintroduction of socialists. and communists. I know there are still some out there fighting. I hear from them often and salute to you that are out there doing that, but more can't hurt. Tenant organizing, on the ground organizing

of all different sorts. All of these things need to be happening and then they need to be married together. So the arising of even just an explicitly working class party would even electoral be a wonderful step of progress for the working class. And I also wanted to note that while we on the left talk about the Democrats co-opting movements that are on the left, it certainly is more prevalent. But the right in the Republican Party also does their fair share of co-opting, right? There's lots of angry white union guys who are watching Fox News as we speak right now. You know, maybe their upper echelon of the unions are telling them, hey, vote Democrat, they're better for your pocketbook than the Republicans. But they're being co-opted by this culture war bullshit, weaponization of evangelical forms of Christianity, you know, all this other nonsense against elites, but not Republican or reactionary elites, right?

You're against Democratic elites, liberal elites. the George Soros, the Bidens, the coastal elites, right? So they're finding a way to shift the anti-elitist energy, which can be revolutionary, shifting it back into reactionary politics and a very thin sliver of what they consider the bad elites versus the good ones, like Tucker Carlson and DeSantis or whoever else. Both parties totally and always have engaged in various forms of co-option. Because we're talking about third party candidates right now, I think despite giving RFK Jr. a little bit of credit early on for some maybe like unprincipled, anti-imperialist critiques. In 2019, France, Germany, and Russia all agreed to the Minsk Accords.

That year, Zelensky ran for president. He was a comedian. He had no political experience. Why did he win? Because he ran on one issue signing the Minsk Accords. As soon as he got in there, Victoria Newland and the White House, told him he couldn't do it. That Putin sent 40,000 troops in. It's not enough to conquer the country. Clearly, he wanted us to come to the negotiating table. Lowensky came to the negotiating table. Signed a new agreement that was the Minsk Accords, too, in 2022,

and that would have allowed Dumbos to stay, and Lugans, to stay to remain as part of Ukraine. We said Putin signed it. Zelensky initialed in and in good faith began withdrawing troops from the Ukraine what happened we sent Boris Johnson over there to torpedo it because we don't want peace with

what you want more with Russia more and more as the you know his stance on Zionism Israel is a model democracy in the Mideast it's the only democracy in the Mideast you know becomes more and more fully exposed

and I hear more of his language around like the environment and how we solve the climate crisis. What polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for the rest of this. And they do that by escaping the discipline in the free market. You show me a polluter. I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political cloud to escape the discipline at the free market

and force the public to pay his production cause. That's what all pollution is. I mean, he really just seems to be kind of sheepdogging a lot of this anti-elite sentiment into a right-wing politic more and more. Absolutely. Yeah. RFK really drops the ball. I listen to his Rogan interview. And it's two hours of just like insane bullshit conspiracy theory. Wi-Fi radiation is all kinds of bad things, including causing gasser. And then there's like a segment where he's like making really good points about the American Empire and the working class. And that's completely washed out. why all the coverage afterwards, which just focuses on, you know, his weirdo woo-woo bullshit about vaccines and whatever a little shit he has. So even when he does say good shit, it's so surrounded

by negative stupid shit that it just makes him a candidate that we could just dismiss offhand, I think. Absolutely. As a candidate, he needs to be dismissed. But I think this is actually a good example of somebody that we in our day-to-day lives would actually want to talk to. We would want to cling on to the good things that they're saying if they're your uncle at a picnic. Totally. Not if they're running for presidents and they're from one of the greatest political dynasties the country has ever produced. They're not worth our time. Absolutely. To drill down on really two things that I heard come up in your conversation here is that the union, while we refer to it as such, is not a singular concept. We don't just want a union.

We want an egalitarian or in the language of foe. We want a community-based union that is antagonistic to both capital and the state when their demands butt up against either one. The other is the concept of electoralism. So we understand that it's bad to frame working class agency as limited to electoralism, but it's also dangerous to claim that working class is just going to be swayed by some democratic elites to fall in line. So we need to be careful about how we're understanding working class agency, because the working class has to be capable of pushing back on this themselves, because barring some incredibly radical change, the Greens are not going to be the Green Vanguard Party.

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like the growth and spread of militant unions is the best thing we're seeing. The union is a place where people of power, like Christian Smalls and Sean O'Brien, even if we don't agree with them on everything, are trying to build a community, a working class culture, wherein they can educate themselves and push back against the Democratic. Democratic Party, push back against the state and really represent themselves as an electorate that actually knows what they want and are willing to push the Democratic Party beyond or even push beyond the Democratic Party and create that third party or create that institution that's

actually going to push the state to do something more. Yeah, definitely. To move into critical reflections on the New Deal from below, I have my own analysis of Cohen and Rose work from my days as a historian and an actor. academic research that's long and boring, I'm going to cut it out. But neither Cohen nor Fowell pretended to have captured the history of the New Deal, but rather both present a version of how a specific segment of the working class in their respective cities at their respective times, according to their prospective lenses, used what agency they could to push

for a new deal. But primary interest here, as stated above, is to have a conversation about the benefits and detriments of the approaches these historians, rather it's to consider the real political lessons we might draw from this analysis. Central to Cohen's argument, our major contribution to the field, is the argument that the motivations of working-class Chicago can be best understood within the concept of moral capitalism, a phrase of her creation. The cognitive dissonance of the Great Depression

pushed ethnic and black workers to blame capitalists for the collapse of the modicum of economic and cultural stability fostered during the 1920s, but moral capitalism prevented them from going so far as to desire the overthrow of capitalism for the embrace of socialism. In essence, she argued that each ethnic enclave developed a niche culture based on consumption, which then transitioned to a mass culture based on consumption, which in turn stifled all radicalism. In this reading, both the radical traditions of the organic, ethnic-based, socialist, anarchist, communist movements of the pre-199 Chicago and the ideological influence of socialist and communist organizers within the

CIO pale in comparison to the conservative draw of moral capitalism, which she argues came from below. But it feels very top-down to me. What both authors contend with as historians from below is, to adopt a well-worn quotation from Karl Marx, which Nick mentioned earlier, that the working class made the new deal. But they did not make it as they pleased. They did not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances already existing, given and transmitted from the past. Both Cohen and Fowell understand their actors felt disillusioned with capitalism after the Great Depression, but both have to contend with the very real popular sentiments which sprung up around the New Deal, around the rebirth of capitalism.

If I were inclined to, I'd argue that Cohen's moral capitalism actually celebrates the hegemonic power of the bourgeoisie of the proletariat. That seems unfair, or at least unproductive. Thou, on the other hand, is outright critical of the creation of a bourgeois bureaucratic structure in a mass proletariat culture centered on gender inequality. She points to this level of of culture and the centralizations and limitations of worker demands as fatal cracks poured into the foundation of the House of Labor, which manifested in its later collapse. Importantly, though, both agree that there is a moral cultural shift that won the day in support of capitalism. Both authors come to remarkably similar understanding of the Agency of

Working People during the New Deal, even as their conclusions on politics are pretty different. What the New Deal represented is what a large number of working class wanted, according to both. A suppression of the abuses of capitalism, instead of a suppression of capitalism itself. At least, that's the argument. Do we buy this? Is the draw of sharing in the wealth of exploitation within moral capitalism more appealing than revolution? I can buy it to some extent. extent. And that's like a favorite line of ours, right? It's like, I can see some sides of this

with some exceptions, with some key exception. And I think maybe foul touched on it, maybe a little bit more, at least as we summarized here, than Cohen. But I think that just this idea that, you know, the massive people just wanted moral capitalism kind of ignores the violent reaction of the state on some sides to graspings at something else. Not everyone was bought into this. I mean, we know that socialist and communist movements existed. And we saw the reactions in terms of like multiple red scares, right? I mean, we had the post-World War I red scare. We had the post-World War II red scare and we're living through a fucking other one right now.

And this is all state-sponsored violence, surveillance, and media manipulation to try to smash the more radical elements of these kind of movements. Well, I can buy that some elements of society certainly bought into it. I mean, we can see it today, again, as we were talking about people kind of understanding that they want, you know, the absence of crony capitalism. But again, I think that we need to emphasize the state's reaction. I do want to caveat this as well. When we contextualize these movements in the international situation, you know, there was a push led by the USSR to formulate a popular front to fight Nazism. And I can understand why the USSR wanted to do that. that was an existential threat to essentially the epicenter of communism.

And the whole people that was facing down the barrel of genocide. We can understand where they're coming from. And there were some elements that kind of decided to work with the Democrats, and I can understand where that came from. But I don't buy that, like, the working class was entirely on board with just moral capitalism, I guess. I hate to be that guy. But if we agree, as the. these authors do that the working class created the new deal, then why didn't these communists

and socialists who are articulating a valid alternative push the working class to demand more? Yeah, it's hard to say. One thing that jumps to mind when you're asking the question, like, do we buy this basic idea that they want in moral capitalism and not a suppression of capitalism itself is I think there's also like, there's this historical unfolding of the new idea of socialism, right? And that takes jumps when there are successful revolutions around the world. We're talking in 2023, in the internet age, where, you know, we understand a lot more of this history. Think about the 1930s. A lot of this stuff was still unresolved. You always had the ideological conditioning of the Western press being against the Bolshevik revolution.

But these are still very new sorts of ideas and terminologies and the average working class person just trying to get by, not hyper-educated, not as educated as the modern American working class is by any stretch of the imagination. And it takes time for certain ideas to grab hold and to develop within a population. So while there's always radicals on the far cutting edge of any movement, and in this case it is the communists and the socialist and even the anarchists to a large extent, the radicals, anti-capitalist, it takes a long time for these ideas to sort of seep in. And when people are in crisis, people are not necessarily always ready to jump and experiment widely with new things. Capitalism for these people is what they've known. As bad as it's treated them,

you can't necessarily blame people for just wanting this system that they're used to. They basically understand how it works to operate in their interest much more fairly. You know, the average person is given these ideas that America is synonymous with democracy and freedom, and a lot of people on some level, consciously or not, do buy into that idea. To ask all working-class people in the 1930s in the midst of a great depression and the rise of World War II to try to keep pushing and go for socialist revolution. It's a lot to ask. A very big population spread out over wide areas. I mean, today we have the internet, right? Omaha to Pittsburgh, we're talking instantaneously. This is a brand new thing. For a long time, for all of human history,

it took much, much longer for even in one sentence to get across the river, you know, to the next town over, let alone to transmit simultaneously. We have the internet now. Like, you know, my education on Marxism and socialism, I was aided greatly by being able to Google what is Marxism, you know, what is socialism? If I had to learn every single thing from like going into dusty libraries and pulling out books and I might not have been the person to fully understand all that stuff. So what I'm basically saying is it takes time for these ideas to immerse themselves amongst people. It takes multiple successful revolutions to bring in more and more people seeing alternatives working out. We have to fight a capitalist press that is going to shine a very dark light on something like

the Soviet Union at that time, right? Highlighting all the negative stories, downplaying all the good ones. So an American audience is just like taking in this propaganda and this ideology. So for all those reasons and more, it's not fair to say that the workers chose moral capitalism out of all these options that they had equal access to. They were just, trying to survive, trying to get through. And just as today, most people are not socialist and communists. The working class is flailing. People have kind of some signs like innate radical ideas that will sometimes surprise you and jump out. But the average American working person who's under the boot of capital right now is not reading Marx or thinking about a socialist

revolution. They just want to fucking afford food and a nice job and have a fucking future. I don't blame them. So these are complications that we're still dealing with today. Just to go on two points here. So first, are you against the concept of libraries or just when they're dusty? I prefer my library is dusty. So to argue against myself, because that was sort of a theoretical question. There is a siloing effect in these ethnic communities and state violence against the Reds did prevent anti-capitalist thoughts from breaking through. During this crisis, the anti-capitalists did their best. But it's also important to remember, so did the fascists. Yes. and although they made advances themselves, they, thankfully, lost.

This was not a fascist state action. The New Deal, although it had some fascist aspects to it, was a liberal capitalist ideal. And I'd like to think that has to do with help from the anti-capitalist. Like Nick mentioned, we had the fellow traveler movement. We had people that were actually working with the Democratic Party that didn't necessarily agree with the movement of Democratic Party. they just understood that the rise in the threat of fascism really was popular. It's hard to over-emphasize that people questioning capitalism are just as likely, if not more likely, to lean to the right, if they're not given the opportunity to lean to the left. And the reality is Father McLaughlin had his own show where he was espousing pro-Naziist rhetoric.

There was no alternative on the radio espousing pro-communist rhetoric. That's just a reality. Which still today is true, right? Like fascists literally have institutional roots within the Republican Party, you know, the Supreme Court, the entire right-wing institutionalized movement, whereas communists and like real socialists are completely excluded from the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is a bulwark keeping them out. And so that, as you say, given that you can get on, you know, a show and listen to Tucker Carlson or listen to all these right-wing figures. The internet is sort of eveninging the field, but back in the day, there was no way to compete with that ability to get your message out to a lot of people. One thing that does jump out, though, of course, is that when the U.S. state is insecure and its history, it does always turn to a red scare of one sort or another. Now we're seeing DeSantis talking about getting all this complicated history out of Florida public schools and just teaching this kindergarten-ass version of American history where anything that is impolite or rough is

completely thrown to the side. And importantly, he is teaching how evil anti-communism is. This is not a move that a powerful, secure state necessarily takes. It is coming from a place of insecurity, but it also does work. And so, yeah, I think that's a really good point. And the fact that the U.S. in a period of crisis is continuing to turn into another red scare of a sort, it's a real lesson for us to learn. How many fascist states did the United States support after World War II just so that they would weaken the one communist state that was actually thriving? All of them. You could almost make an entire podcast about it. Which was the premise of what I started working on, right?

Yeah, I might hit that subscribe button, please. Just like Spain as an example, they literally were heavily supported by the Nazi and fascist regime, and then heavily supported and at least defended by the American NATO alliance. They weren't official members, but when you're surrounded by NATO countries, you don't need to be a member. And the American bourgeoisie, like the CEO of Texaco and stuff, would sneak oil over to Franco and his armies in Spain when there was an bargo and, you know, difficult trade relations, big bourgeois figures in the U.S. were actively funding and supporting with their money and their products, fascist, Francoist, Spain's. Yeah, deep connections. To be fair, the Jewish elitists in New York City were doing the same for the Soviets,

right? Yeah, of course, of course. Levi, to go back to your theoretical question real quick, I'm putting this in very simple terms, right? But I think at some level, it's just a simple matter of negotiation. And it's something that exposes the Democrats, I think, in a lot of ways. for what they are right now as well, because, you know, we see them go to the table with half of what we'd want to see to begin with, right? And they're variably met, you know, further away from the middle than they would ever anticipate. So I think if the working class came to the table with just the demand for moral capitalism, we would have seen less than that, because that's how this always works. You go to the table asking for way more what you really want, and then maybe

you settle on somewhere in the New Deal, given all the complications and contradictions that we invariably have to deal with on an economic, societal basis. But again, that's just basic negotiation in terms of how these things play out. Just sort of take your real politics idea here and push it a little bit further. So what does this mean in terms of our own contemporary political moment? Because it's really, as we stated before, not hard to imagine moral capitalism among the platform of a left Democrat. It may as well have been Elizabeth Warren's platform. So how might we push against this or push beyond this, like you're saying? Yeah, it's a tough question, but of course the old age, old answers are still always there,

political education, using the new technologies that are at our hands as we're doing this very moment to try to bring people up and get this sort of these narratives, these ideas out there to as many people as possible. Organizing is always going to be a mechanism by which you convince people, right? If you're in a tenant's organization, you're not going to convince every tenant to become a Marxist or a communist or a socialist, but by working side by side with them and having the communists be the ones that show up to help them get their deposit back or fight off a slum lord or whatever, you're going to do a lot more convincing than ever. And I tell young people all the time, young people that listen to Rev left, you know, what should I do?

Should I go to college for this degree or get that degree? And I'm like, if you have some specific path that goes through college, fine. But if you're floundering and not knowing what to do, join a trade union. You know, it's going to be better for you and your family. And also, within those unions, you can reintroduce or help introduce, you know, more radical lines. One of the attacks on unions, or these, I think of it as like these two major wave of attacks on unions, although it's kind of a simplistic device. With the early Red Scare, the demolishing of the IWW, there is a de-radicalization of unions. That's what we're talking about here, where the radical elements of unions were kicked out, were purged, were destroyed,

and these sort of labor aristocracy unions that were in bed with the basic strife. of things were allowed to stay and indeed flourish. And then with Reagan and the neoliberal era, unions altogether were sort of dismantled and destroyed. And so these two waves of first stripping these unions of radicals and then eventually stripping the country of unions at all and thus stripping working people of a place at the table. Right? It used to be like big labor, the government and corporations. Now for the whole neoliberal era, it's just been corporations and the state talking to each other working class people because unions have more or less been gutted have no spot at the table. So yeah, this two wave of tack of de-radicalization and then de-unionization are sort of

hallmarks of the last century of U.S. class war and the final second wave, the destruction of unions generally, is sort of in line perfectly with the rise of the neoliberal era. And what we're seeing now is, you know, the working people standing back on their feet and importantly, creating unions where otherwise there wasn't even before. So like a Starbucks union in the service industry, that's a real innovation. In the host industrial service economy, there was this period of time and still is to a large extent of how do you operate unions and class struggle within these very fluid service economies with high turnover rates, right? It's different than organizing a factory where you're creating rubber or something. It makes it much more harder, much more diffuse. The high

turnover rate makes it harder for people to stick around and struggle. So the fact that we're seeing labor struggles and unions emerge in the service economy and at places like Amazon where they previously didn't exist is certainly a good sign. And I think we're going to definitely see more of it, but we definitely need and will continue to need radicals to enter those unions and fight, which I do think there are. You talked about Chris Smalls earlier. What's interesting about Chris Smalls is as far as I understand it, I could be a little bit wrong here. I'm not 100% perfect, but he was a regular working class dude who actually got radicalized through his labor experiences, right? He wasn't coming into Amazon as a Marxist trying to organize people or anything

like that. It's through seeing the depravity of the Amazon bosses and the corporate structure smashing any attempt by workers to have any dignity at all that radicalized them. And now he's wearing Che Guevara shirts and travel into Cuba. It's a beautiful fucking thing. And we need more of it. So I tell young people like, please get into unions. Get into unions. And the last point I want to make on this is earlier we were talking about culture and the lack of culture and how working class identity can give us a sort of culture in the desert of alienation and capitalist society. My friends from high school who are in trade unions, steam fitters unions, electrician unions, insulator unions, they connect with that tradition right away. They have a

culture. They're proud of it. People that are not explicitly political, you know, that were not political growing up with them at all by being introduced to the union, which they just did because they thought it was the best chance of getting a good job. They've become radicalized to the left. They understand labor politics much more. They have these little pins where they'll share with me about, you know, the first union in St. Joseph, Missouri was formed. And it's a beautiful thing. Even in the union context, you get immediately sort of this tradition that you viscerally feel a part of and that whose values still permeate those institutions. I can't recommend joining unions enough. But to pull something out of what you've said there, and to touch on sort of a cultural

political point used to divide the working class going on right now, college is something of a bogeyman. We hear college-educated anchors on Fox News constantly beat down. Really, we're talking about post-secondary education, which back in the day might have been called college is something that most people can agree is a good thing. Learning a trade, going to a union, becoming a truck driver. Those all actually require post-secondary education. I mean, I don't know about the high school you guys went to. I didn't learn to tile. I didn't learn to plum. I didn't learn to do any of those things that post-secondary education requires that you learn to be successful at any of these trades. So college is just one post-secondary option. Yeah, it's not great for everybody. A post-secondary

education isn't a bad thing. And I think most people, when you break it down that way, actually agree with you. It's good to learn a trade. It's good to learn how to do electric work in a new build house. Those are very valuable tasks and skills that we're all going to need. And it's also beautiful to learn philosophy and to learn history. And that's why I think a demand for free college is important because it's the tuition that makes that shit difficult and makes me warn people about going because I got a philosophy degree. Now I'm $65,000 in debt and that sucks. But like I think every working class person should have an opportunity to indulge their interests, raise their intellectual levels, experience and explore different varieties of human knowledge. thought, and so in a socialist society

are on the way to it, having free, universally accessible, higher education, not even geared toward being a productive, like going and getting a career and making a money, but just because we're human beings in the cosmos trying to understand ourselves, that makes it worth it. And, you know, investing in public colleges and universal education would be a great step

forward. Because you say the word productive, right? I think that we think of that word so negatively sometimes, right? But I think we need to kind of like think about what other uses and applications of that word can be, right? Because I am of the belief personally that people like to be productive, not in the sense of like I'm going to make money for my boss, but I personally, I like to do projects around my house. I like to build shit. You know what I mean? Learn how to do stuff. I like to read. It's just to your point. We're putting a price tag. We're commodifying the full human fucking experience in capitalism right now. Everything has a price tag and it actually prevents us from being humans and pursuing different things that we want

to do with our lives. I can't think of a better reason to fight for a better society than to allow just people to fulfill what they even want to do as individuals. I know we sometimes shy away from like the individual, but I still think that like we're not living as individuals right now because of the system that we live in. You know, even if you're doing okay by capitalist standard, You know, you're still chained to a desk from nine to five, even if you're making decent money. Is that living? Very well, sir. So a colleague of mine went to one of those for-profit technical institutes to learn how to drive a big rig with the promise of a career.

He went through the schooling, did the work for a while, but he absolutely hated it. So now he has $10,000 in student debt, and he didn't get a degree in philosophy. He didn't get a degree in history, but he's still under onerous debt. Now, we don't need to talk about what the difference is between $60,000, $90,000 debt, $10,000 debt. If it prevents you from living life, from making your bills, it's an onerous debt. And there's nothing impractical about what he went to school for. There's nothing unproductive about what he went to school for. It just so happened that he was taken advantage of by an institution of for-profit post-secondary education that shouldn't exist.

If we lived in an alternative world where that education is state-driven or is provided by the community or some other institution, and it was free, he could go to that job, he could hate it, he could quit, he could go back to school, he could learn another trade. He could try again. Oh, with $10,000 in student debt that he can't pay, he's not going to have that opportunity to go back to school. Instead, he's going to flounder with a degree that's to him about as useful as my history degree. And what do the elites tell us? In this age of technological progress, you're going to have to learn and relearn new skills all the time. Like you're going to have to be a coder and then new things are going to happen. You're going to catch up. But then every step of the way, they're going to burden you with an insane amount of dead, making that utterly impossible. Right now I'm trying to get a master's in education so I can become a high school teacher, right? There's a teacher shortage in this country. God knows society needs more teachers. It's not even a well-paid job. I'm not doing it for the money. A rational society would say, hey, we need more teachers. Let's incentivize people. Let's invest in our people to pull out amongst them the best possible teachers we can and pay for their schooling so that they can go on and contribute. And yeah, that $10,000 that we spend of taxpayer money to fund that teacher will turn into 30 years of them giving back in the form of teaching our next generation, right? We're going to make sure that they're highly educated, they're highly qualified. That's what a rational society would do. But a capitalist society is fundamentally centered and organized around capital accumulation for the ruling class.

It is not and has never been organized around increasing the well-being of the average citizen. And I think that's a down-to-earth way that I tell people what socialism is, fundamentally shifting the main priority of society away from the profitability of a few and towards the uplift of everyone. And that radically changes your values, your priorities, what you do with your money. Some people will no longer be able to get rich, super rich. There's going to be no more billionaires and there's going to be no trillionaires. but every human being is going to have a life with, you know, a little bit of work,

contribute to society, but also leisure. And also, we're going to make sure that you can learn. I mean, when you look at the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet Union, a Chinese communist, Cuban revolution, and socialist movements throughout the world. In every instance, literacy is almost always a number one program, right? Let's get people up in reading and learning so that they can pick up books and they can learn by themselves. I heard in Cuba, there was, I don't know if it's still going on, but in public broadcasting. It's not TLC, my 600-pound life or Dr. Pimple Popper or whatever. It's like, here's French lessons, right?

Every day at 2 p.m., you tune in to the local public broadcasting, and we'll give you introduction to French literature or whatever. And that's, like, uplifting. And in those socialist experiments I was talking about earlier, once the boot of capital is off their neck, even for a little bit, working class people start organizing philosophy clubs. They start organizing their own means and their own interest around their whole hobbies when your entire life is not having to be dedicated with grinding to make sure that you can afford food and shelter at the end of the month, but you're actually given some goddamn breathing room and you don't have an impressive system to organize and confront. You can actually become more human. And I think that's what, you know, like a Che Guevar was talking about about a new man under socialism or a Frida Kahlo would talk about, I think it's only under communism that we can become fully human. I truly believe that. I truly believe that because under capitalism, some of us can become.

human, if you have the money, if you have the time. But for most of us, the lid of becoming a human being, even figuring out what your interest might be is prohibited, right? Let alone pursuing those interests. And that's a real human tragedy that affects everybody, you know? Yeah, hell yeah. Just to generalize what you're saying, Brett, I think that this speaks to what we have to do almost in this moment a little bit, whether we're organizing around reforms, you know, with the goal of going beyond that. But I think sometimes we get bogged down a little bit too much in critique. And we have to critique. That's very important.

But I also think we have to accentuate the positives. You know what I mean? I know like there's some kind of discourse in Marxist circles about, well, you know, we can't predict the future and everything like that, blah, blah, blah, blah, material conditions. But like if you're talking to some normal person, you want to get them on your side, you have to present a positive vision for the future. Yes.

you have to do that. I think we have to kind of speculate in our moment right now to overcome, as Parenthe says, the religion of anti-communism, we have to present a very positive vision of the future to help come back that almost material reality that we have to deal with on the ground here of like as soon as the word socialism is thrown out, the blinders go up, the walls go up, and there's no more conversation anymore. But it's like, no, this is what socialism could do for you. I mean, and again, like we can talk about what goes on in Cuba and everything with that. And trust me, I love doing it. I love talking about the victories of socialism. But like when we're starting out, let's just talk about what socialism can do for you. You want your kids to get a good education, right? Yeah. You want to work less.

We all want to work less. This is this whole idea that everybody wants to work 80, 90, 100 hours a week. That's a bunch of bullshit. Nobody wants to fucking do that. Absolutely. You want to have your three or four day weekends. You want to have a vacation. You also still want to contribute to society. but we need to change the context of that. I think that positive vision is very important when we're organizing. We can't just be like, I fall under this trap. I'm saying this is like a personal critique a little bit as well, but you can't just fall into the negativity all the time

because nobody wants to be around you when you do that. Totally correct. Well said. And I have, I think, a big question to ask that sort of ties into something that's being stated here about the benefits of socialism versus the supposed benefits of capitalism. So another major issue in both Cohen and Kyle's argument, and may show that they're writing in the late 1980s, which deserves some note is that their work by and large conflates the creation of shared whiteness in Chicago and Minnesota with the creation of mass consumer culture. Black Americans moved to Chicago from the rural south during the first great migration, which began around 1910.

Cohen argued these immigrants of Chicago participated in American mass consumer culture before their ethnic brethren because they viewed it as one of the few opportunities open to them to assimilate into so-called American life. This is difficult to accept for at least two reasons. First, this articulation both undercuts the institutions established by and four black Chicagoans, while, similar to our approach of the other ethnicities in her study, undermining the homegrown radical traditions found within southern black culture, Second, even accepting her arguments around black culture institutions, the businesses which offered

access to, quote, mass consumer culture were owned by white Chicagoans. These theaters, shops, restaurants, and hotels did so under de facto race-based segregation. Bows case study is a bit different since Minneapolis didn't experience the same large-scale black migration, but the white male breadwinner and female homemaker used. Union literature and structure she analyzes our national in nature. Looking at the cartoons she analyzed, which I've copied to this document again, it might even strengthen her argument to note that white womanhood is being protected in the New Deal union culture. That gets me to a bigger question.

As both authors argue, the New Deal provided programs that satisfied the workers' demand for a moral capitalism. More people went to school. More people got health care. More people got vacation. The real wages of people went up and up so long as they qualified as white. Capitalism does have ways of giving benefits to people so long as they don't challenge the structures of capitalism at the expense of divided population. So you can imagine in Germany, you actually can go back to school anytime, and it's always free. It's actually something that they are trying to push against because,

because Europe is going right wing, but it's incredibly easy to go back to school constantly in certain European countries. And we would never call them socialist in the international stance. So that's sort of the larger question to draw. How do we convince people to push beyond moral capitalism? One thing that jumps out based on this and our understanding of the New Deal and its racial imbalances is that whatever we're talking about, right? It's socialist, but we can talk about a new New Deal or any sort of program, any reform package that we want to see has to be, and we learn this directly from the New Deal's failures, a universalist program. You know, any attempt to exclude some people based on who they are or what they look like or

their skin color or their inicity who's a real American or a false American is always going to play into reaction, always going to allow these things to continue to divide people instead of bring people together, and will also increase the chances that they're able to be clawed back. I always think about drained pool politics, right? This is a term that comes out of, I think, sociology, but it's talking about the America desegregating and there's these public pools. And during segregation, of course, it's whites only. And desegregation came and then these public pools became open to everybody, including black people. And that's where we get these horrific pictures of white pool owners dumping bleach into a pool of like, you know, black children having fun together and stuff like that. And what happened in the wake of that is like white communities would just, just shut down the public pools. Open up private pools and charge a membership fee with certain guidelines for you to be able to get in. Now that is just one instance of this and it's just public pools, but that's broadened out to, I think, behind the rise of like Goldwater, libertarianism. We can't say the N-word anymore, but we can talk about state's rights. This whole attempt and the whole

ushering in of the neoliberal era, which is really just applied libertarianism, can kind of come out of this. And we saw it with slavery, right? It's like a state's rights issues. It's not about us wanting to enslave black people. It's about us wanting to control our own politics. And that just so happens to include the fact that we think these people are property. This tradition in American history needs to be confronted. And that's why, you know, movements like Black Lives Matter and white radicals showing up, joining in the streets, showing multiracial working class rage, showing that, yeah, I'm a white person. I'm not getting killed by police out here, but I'm coming out. I'm facing the cops on the front line with my black brothers and sisters. Because I believe in their human.

as well, right? Now that we've seen the failures of what happens when we allow people to divide and conquer, even in an ostensibly good program like the New Deal, it was ravaged by its racism. And so anything going forward needs to be universalist, needs to have multiracial solidarity, and needs to really think about the failures of these non-universalist programs. To build a point off of what you were saying and not accusing you of doing this, but it's easy to see these sort of pull politics and have liberals globontics. that and say, oh, that's terrible. We need to open up the pools. It's like, okay, opening up the polls is not really the issue we're saying here. And it can be even more vicious because

pool politics, it's actually quite visual. I went to a school district where we didn't have buses. Every kid had to walk to school. I mean, it's cute, it's quaint. It's something they put on their little newsletter. The reality is they started doing that in the 1960s and 70s. No coincidence. That's when school busing started. So because my community had no buses, we couldn't bus in or out any students into our good school district. But again, we can't get distracted by the individual issues of schools. We can't get distracted by the individual issues of polls. It's not about the New Deal should have given all of these benefits to black Americans. It's these benefits are deserved by every human being on the planet. The problem isn't the

minute issues that we can point to in the New Deal, it's all-encompassing. There's not enough podcasts in the world to point out every single little issue, at least none that the three of us can ever produce. It's community-oriented. Every community needs to understand what needs to change in order for them to participate fairly and freely in an egalitarian worldwide project. On the positive side of all this, not that you guys are speaking negatively, from like some personal experiences, organizing with PSL here, we're making connections with a lot of these new unions that are growing up in the service industry, like you mentioned. And it makes a lot of sense, right, because we live in an economy that is, I think, 60% service base or something

like that. So again, I've seen some really dumbass arguments online, which is just a reminder to stay offline too much about like how service workers aren't proletariat or whatever. It's just the dumbest shit imaginable, right? Like these people are workers under capitalism and they're organizing and this is where the fight is because this is where the massive workers are centered in this. And it's not exclusively where the fight is because the fight is everywhere, but this is where a big massive workers are right now, right? And it is a lot of young people. It's multi-gender. It's multi-ethnic. You know what I mean? We talk about, you mentioned Chris Smalls before, to your point about him. I mean, I was at a rally in D.C. where he spoke and he said to

Joe Biden out in front of the steps of the White House, don't invite me back to the White house until you take Cuba off the state sponsors of terrorism list, right? So it's great to see like those international bonds and international solidarity forming. I can tell you like talking to union organizers down here, issues that are being put on the table are things like addressing sexual harassment in the workplace, addressing racism, healthcare for trans people. So I mean, there is this consciousness of a union class-based struggle connecting to a lot of these social issues that I don't think could have been made maybe in the New Deal era. So I think we are seeing progress in that era. But like what we have to fight against, Levi, to your point about being co-opted by

liberalism is to kind of, again, build these connections with these workers to make sure that, you know, we're not losing sight of the class element of this because all these aspects are very, very important. But we don't want the Democratic Party to come in and co-op these movements on a purely identitarian basis because it's all connected. The social consciousness on some of these issues, again, in my own personal observations and conversations that I have, it has come a long way. Yeah, yeah. I totally agree with you.

And I think that's the big innovation in liberal co-option is the weaponization of inclusive identity-based political rhetoric, weaponizing it against class and anti-imperialist politics, like Bernie bros, she even did Obama bros or the Corbyn anti-Semite accusations, this weaponizing of intersectional identity politic language against the actual left is an innovation that we've seen over the last 10 or so years about the drain pool politics. I didn't fully get to fill this out and it's to your point, Levi, that was just a microcosm and drain pool politics means something much more, right? This is like health care, where you have people who are like, I'm not going to pay for that motherfucker's health care.

Some of their heads, they're racializing who that other is. What ends up happening is the racism of white people who engage in that behavior end up stripping society of communal goods that ends up hurting white people. So now poor white people also can't get health care. That's a loss that they're willing to take to make sure that a black person somewhere doesn't get a white person's tax money to deal with their cancer or whatever. So drain pool politics goes way outside of just pools or whatever. But the other thing that I wanted to mention is what happened after the New Deal consolidation and renewal period? Well, you had the 50s. and then you had the 60s.

And then that's with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panther Party, MLK, Malcolm X, right? So there's this way in which things build on one another, which, you know, the way in which something opens the door for something down the line to pop up, whereas if that previous thing hadn't happened, maybe this other thing wouldn't as well. And so I see the failures of the New Deal

also being the ground with which the Civil Rights Movement and Black Liberation movements throughout the 50, 60s, and 70s and 70s, arose because there was this failure of the New Deal era to actually address these issues. And so these issues pop back up at a higher level, almost, you could say. So I think that's incredibly interesting in the fact that the Civil Rights and the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation movements of the 60s arose 15 years or so after the New Deal and the end of World War II says a lot about what the New Deal did do and did not do. The Great Society of LBJ, right? You can see that

as a continuation, still imperfect, but an attempt to kind of expand the new deal to cover more people, which also every single time is met with white reaction against helping those people. And so we're still in this sort of dialectic. We're still in this loop. We got to show solidarity to get out of it, but I totally agree with you, Nick, that massive change of the 23 average working class person's racial views are enormously better than the average person in the 1930s. Thank God. And that comes from bottom up, act struggle that educates and inspires white people to grow the fuck up. Absolutely. Yeah. No. And like I don't want to get into the whole like automatic moral

arc of history bending toward justice. And can I think this is what we're saying is that this has always been pushed. The New Deal was pushed, was met with reaction, right? The great society didn't come about just because LBJ was some like kind, benevolent patriarchal figure. He was pushed. Yes. Kennedy was pushed by the movements that birthed Malb. Malcolm X. Martin Luther King, Jr. And that's the point that we have to make. We may not win everything we want every time, but we're only going to get something by doing something. Right. That's why we can't dismiss somebody that hasn't gotten there yet. We're all trying to get there. Just as a society, we're not there yet. We can't expect everybody who's going to

get there to be there already. It just doesn't logically make any sense. Yeah. And to bring a quotation into this whole argument. So W.E.B. Du Bois by the New Deal was essentially a communist at point or was getting there very quickly. And he was no friend of FDR. He pushed FDR. He pushed the New Deal as hard as he could. But even he had to recognize in 1936 that the New Deal, quote, gave the American Negro a kind of recognition in political life, which a Negro had never before received. Now, that's sort of a backhanded compliment to the New Deal, but it's a compliment, no less. He's looking at what is positive out of this movement, even though we're going to mostly keep this for next episode, but the racist elements of the New Deal were core to the passing of that legislation. They're

not incidental. Just as the sexism that's understood in Fowle's comment is essential. It's not incidental. Can I read something really quickly from the self-help and hard times chapter on black folks in the New Deal? Howard Zin says, quote, For black people, the New Deal was psychologically encouraging. Mrs. Roosevelt was sympathetic. Some blacks got posts in the administration, but most blacks were ignored by the New Deal programs.

As tenant farmers, as farm laborers, as migrants, as domestic workers, they didn't qualify for unemployment insurance, minimum wages, social security, or farm subsidies. Roosevelt, careful not to offend southern white politicians, whose political support he needed, did not push a bill against

lynching. Blacks and whites were segregated in the armed forces, and black workers were discriminated against and getting jobs. There were the last hired and they were the first that were fired. Only when A. Philip Randolph, head of the Sleeping Car Porter's Union, threatened a massive march on Washington in 1941, would Roosevelt finally agree to sign an executive order establishing a fair employment practices committee? But the EFEPC had no enforcement powers and changed little. And he goes on to also count for all the ways in which the New Deal failed black folk. So I thought that was an important thing and sort of speaks to everything we've been saying up until now. One other thing that I believe Zinn could add to that list that always puzzles me, or doesn't

puzzle me, it's saddening, actually, is the Southern post-Confederate Dixie Grats were behind this movement to give the rights to soldiers to vote while they were participating in World War II. I mean, that seems incredibly innocuous. until some crafty Southern Democrat realized it wasn't just white people that were fighting World War II on our side. To sign that bill would have accidentally given the rights for black people in the military to vote. So it was immediately struck down. They were not going to intentionally empower or threaten their statement of white-dominated southern democratic politics. And they almost did it by accident.

And that sort of gives me hope that these people have an ideology, but they screw it up. They accidentally give too much. And it can work to their detriment. And that's the hope that I have in terms of where this union movement is going. Because it has the potential of being something much bigger while still falling within the lines of at least the rhetoric of the Democratic Party, even if not the action. And here's a very interesting point, I would argue. It's the failure of reconstruction. that set the groundwork for the New Deal to be racist in this way, right? If Reconstruction had actually

been along the radical abolitionist lines that it should have been empowered black people democratically, politically, politically, economically, and socially, then perhaps they would have had a power base in the South, not the whites, to push the New Deal into areas where it would be universal, where it would take care of everybody. But it was precisely the failure of reconstruction that then would provide the broader failures of the New Deal, showing one again dialectically how history is always interconnected. Everything comes up again. Everything's connected to something. Read another book. So, yeah, that thought just jumped out. I'm like, oh, yeah, Reconstruction, the New Deal, it's all connected. So the guy who wrote that, we know who that is?

I was going to say, plug for W.B. Du Bois, right? Which, um, on Rev left, we're doing a series on Du Bois. Yeah, that was great. He was writing that in the 1920s and 30s and published it in 1935. As the New Deal was unfolding. So is that a coincidence that he was politically rambling with that in history at the point where he was seeing the consequences of that white power structure in action and its inability to deliver actual egalitarian democracy to its own people? I would argue no. Great point, yeah. He was an incredibly astute public intellectual. He was an activist. He did not write history to put another book on the shelf.

Yeah. He was very engaged. Well said. I forgot the timing of that book, but you're absolutely correct. Yeah. While we're talking about people's histories, I mean, Black Reconstruction is a quintessential example of a people's bottom-up guerrilla history. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah, we had a well-renowned DeBois scholar, a Dr. Gerald Horne on Rev. Left, to talk about specifically DeBois's Black Reconstruction. So if you want to dive further down that rabbit hole, definitely go check that episode out. I second that. That is a great interview. Anything with Gerald Horne, and it's going to be great. Absolutely. The last thing I'd like to consider before I shut up, both Cohen and Fowell posit that their populations had by and large lost faith in the government to provide a helping hand during the 1920s. The less a part of Cohen's work, Fowell detailed how repressive actions by a government headed by the Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, helped tamp down large-scale strikes in 1990.

After this, in the large-scale red-scarred decimated independent community unions. workers thus lost faith in the radical power of the union and the federal government. Cohen and Fowl, as noted, wrote their works in the late 1980s under successive Republican administrations which crushed unions and waged a culture war pitting the working class against itself. Now, we know Joe Biden would never do such a thing, even though he enabled and voted for many of the actions that took place during a period as a senator, both authors give a significant weight to the Great Depression, shaking the nation, the world to its core. The charismatic figure of Roosevelt and his New Deal surrogates

and the concrete benefits of federal programs to lending the liberal capitalism a new lace on life. But can we even imagine that happening again? Is a new, new deal even possible? To resist romanticizing the New Deal, Fowle makes a convincing argument that direct federal work programs suffocated the egalitarian community programs because they explicitly dictated conservative economic structures. I know this is a big ask because it considers the rise of an imaginary popular reformer, but can we imagine how the left should respond to a new New Deal, to a new Roosevelt, or a new bourgeois reform party that actually injects itself with populist-leftist sentiment. because it's possible.

I mean, I'm skeptical of it ever, ever arising in this moment right now. I mean, that's what they would have said in 1928. They would have said three days before the crash. Nothing's going to change this Republican aristocracy from ruling forever. Herbert Hoover was incredibly popular the day before the crash. Just how does climate change complicate this situation, though, when we've got like, oh, yeah. I mean, essentially we've got an hourglass and,

in some ways. And I don't want to be too, I'm not, you know what, fuck it. I'm going to be alarmist about it because it's fucking serious. We have, you know, a sandglass kind of ticking down in front of us, you know what I mean? So to complicate and pose like another contradiction into even our thinking here, it's like, we have to meet people where we're at, but we also have a little bit of a time constraint here about like, you know, stopping all this shit. I mean, I don't have a good answer to be honest with you. I guess to your point, Levi, there is historical precedence for something like this kind of arising. I think for it to arise, we need to see the connections of the labor movement develop even further for the state to even feel

the pressure to present us with that kind of option. I still don't think they're threatened. They see it and they're feeling it a little bit more and more, but I think we're going to need to see a little bit more growth before they really feel threatened because it's like, you know, people talk about, oh, you know, they could do this, you know, they need to manufacture consent for like military spending. They don't need to manufacture consent for a fucking thing. They just do it because there's no resistance to it. Yeah. So. Yeah, I was going to say climate change is an interesting external pressure point for sure. We talked about earlier about how World War II also helped the economic boom that the New Deal got a lot of credit for. What would have happened

about the New Deal absent a World War II? That's a very fascinating alternative history question. The external pressure of the Soviet Union as well as, I would say, perhaps even better organized communist movements that could be debated i guess i think there was the communist party which is singular and big as compared to i think today we have a lot of little smaller organizations people are still doing good work i think there is a point about saving capitalism i think there are factions within the american ruling class on the liberal end of things who certainly see a real threat to you know there's like millionaires for higher taxes and stuff like that right these little liberal sort of groups of people who kind of feel bad about how much money they have and know the

areas are at the gate and maybe we should do something. So I think we are in a period where concessions would be popular. I think on both the Democratic and the Republican side, there are rhetorically movements towards the working class rhetoric, right? And growing up in the 90s and the 2000s, like class wasn't even a word you heard from politicians. Now it very much is and the Republicans in the right are playing into it. They're trying to in their faux populist way where they're talking about, we're the party of the real working class, you know, although everything they do policy-wise is absolutely antagonistic to the working class, but at least in posture they're pretending, whereas the fucking Republicans from the 90s

in the early 2000s would not even pretend to be for the working class, right? They would tell you to shut the hell up. We're here to give tax cuts to the rich. That's our block. Also is complicated by the fact that the big bourgeoisie has shifted to the Democratic Party as the party of stability. The Jeff Bezos and the Mark Zuckerberg of the world are Democrats, which one should tell any communist or socialist

who thinks that's the party they're going to use to bring about the revolution to really check yourself because you're in the same party as fucking Jeff Bezos but two, there's a political realignment seemingly happening but it's not that the Republicans are going to become the party of the working class they're going to become the party of the reactionary elite

and the Democrats are going to be the party of like the elite that wants stability so they can continue making money now if some politician arose probably outside of those two parties had some name recognition because you can't just come out of nowhere in American electoral politics and you started articulating

a real working class agenda that didn't play into culture war bullshit in fact a movement that explicitly shunned you know just for the sake of all the different factions I'm not saying this is ideal but I'm saying that they would we're not going to talk about the culture warship we're not interested in that our only goal in politics

is to help working people in America right there would be a lot of support behind such a party. Most Americans want other options. Poll after poll shows that Americans are unhappy with the Democrat and the Republican parties, are unhappy with Trump and Biden as their options. So there's clearly a desire on behalf of the people. There's a desire on at least some factions of the ruling class to save capitalism from itself, just like FDR did. So I think there are some foundational reason. And of course, climate change is an external pressure. Talk about jobs programs, right? Talk about making sure everybody has a job. What could we do that would be

societally beneficial. World War II, we put a bunch of people to work manufacturing for the war economy. And that boosted the economy that got people to work. What about a war on climate change, right? Where jobs programs pop up, where money is shifted for people to go. You know, military service conscription, but instead of going to the military, you have to go down to the countryside and plant some trees. There are options on the table here. I think the smarter factions of the ruling class know that something needs to be done. They're very aware of FDR, and they know that he saved the system overall. And so we could enter a period of real shakeup where something like this could emerge.

Our job, I think, is to learn the lessons from history, politically educate, and organize so we can do everything we can, that if and when that opportunity arises, we can push that shit as far to the fucking left as we can. It might not be socialism, it might not be full-on revolution, but just like communists in the past had a say and how the new deal unfolded, we today could have a real say in pushing that shit as far to the left as we can. But that doesn't come from posting on Twitter and arguing online. That comes from being organized using your organization to pressure the powers that be to do the damn thing that you want to do. So regardless of how things turn out, organization

is going to be absolutely essential. All we have is our numbers. And without organization, those numbers don't mean shit. You know, numbers organized are our only hope. In that context, perhaps we could see a real new deal, a good new deal, even if it's not what we would want, which is a real socialist revolution and a transformation of this entire society. A fucking man. Fyodor Bilbo, the senator I mentioned before, was a staunch Klansman and a staunch new dealer. The same program Du Bois remark represented one of the greatest breaks to the benefit of race relations in the 20th century was supported by a Klansman. So why? Why would a Klansman support the New Deal, even if reluctantly, voting for the services which benefited black Americans through the back door?

I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of counterfactual histories, but I really want to press just how cataclysmic the Great Depression was. In 2008, with what counts as a comparatively tiny crash, Obama launched to the presidency on the language of popular leftist rhetoric. Now, he was not even an FDR, and I'm not even claiming that the crash in 2008 was in world terms nearly as significant as the Great Depression. My claim is clearly this kind of cataclysmic change has happened in the past. It can happen again. People in 1928 didn't expect 1930 to look the way it did. People in 2023 may not understand where the world's at in 2025. That's an even greater argument to the fact that we,

need to be ready we need to know we need to be thinking about these things now if you're waiting for the announcement of the revolution it might already be too late those decades that happen in weeks don't happen on their own that's because people are prepared to meet that moment yes and lenin was the ultimate in being prepared yes and it was only because of his preparedness and his superior organization that the bolsheviks won out another lesson from history that we can take for ourselves today. I do believe a crisis is coming. I think a reckoning is absolutely coming. I think it's probably, if I had to guess, less of a great powers war, although that's always on the table, but maybe a combination of a climate

catastrophes mixed with an economic crash of the likes we haven't seen since the Depression. That alone could be the catalyst to a period where at least the opportunity for radical renewal, the doors open up. I think by 2030, we're going to be living in a very different world. and hopefully a very different country. Amen. Should we wrap it there, boys? Yeah, I think so. This is a good one.

Yeah, this was great. This was fun. Brett, thanks so much for coming on, man. Absolutely. Obviously, if you can make it, we'd love to have you on for the additional entries into this series. Hopefully we can keep in touch on that. I could get a lot to the conversation. But before we let you go, please just plug your stuff again, let everybody know where they can find you.

Sure. Well, first of all, thank you so much. Always willing to come back. I'd love to have you on Rev. Love sometime. Really appreciate what you guys do. I think it really is a genuine service to the American working class. And everybody who is not listening or not subscribe to the intervention podcast

absolutely should rectify that as soon as possible. As for me, you can find everything I do at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. That's my political shows and as well as a Patreon for those interested in supporting me and in exchange for supporting the Patreon. You get access to up to three bonus episodes every single month. And just a plug for Brett's Patreon. I mean, I've been a subscriber for a little bit now. You know, just to say that as great as the main feed content is, you're missing out if you are getting some more Brett, so support a working class hero. Appreciate that.

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Thanks again, Brett. Adios, Pisano is. We'll grow so broke We've never been Of the sleep Walls, so looseness Of our opinions are changed

We're called so bloke We've never been On the sleep Walls, so looseless Of our opinions of shame Thank you.