Rev Left Radio - Against Dystopia: Imagining a Better World (w/ Little Red School House)

Episode Date: September 23, 2019

Little Red School House focuses on issues within our current education system and the ways that we can empower students, educators, and anyone who cares about education. Shouldn’t people be put before profits? Shouldn’t our children be educated to grow and learn instead of being treated like the mere means to the financial ends of those in power? If you agree with this so-called “radical” and “revolutionary” perspective, you’ve come to the right place! Join educators Gord Milstone and John Battalion as they call out systemic problems and discuss how we can break down barriers in the educational system. Find LRSH on Twitter @LRedSchoolHouse Support LRSH Here: www.patreon.com/LittleRedSchoolHouse Outro music by Blueprint - "Perspective" Check out his music here: https://printmatic.bandcamp.com/ ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/ SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical Intro music by Captain Planet. Find and support his music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and Comrade Bred O'Shea, and today we have another collaborative episode for you. This time I teamed up with the comrades over at Little Red Schoolhouse. They're doing this interesting series on broadening political imagination and imagining a socialist world or what the world could be post-capitalism. So it's really cool. I'm really happy to collab with Little Red Schoolhouse. They do amazing work. They're both teachers and they focus on education. So if you haven't checked them out, definitely do.

Before we go to the episode, I want to give a shout out to my other comrade who just started a new YouTube channel. The YouTube channel is called A World to Win. And also on Twitter, it is at a world to win one. So go check that out. It's a new up-and-coming project from a longtime supporter and comrade of mine doing really good work. It's part of this broad left-wing infiltration. and movement onto YouTube and deconstructing of the right wing and reactionary elements on YouTube and just have a new platform for us to reach more and more people, especially younger

people. So yeah, check out a world to win and enjoy this episode, this collaborative episode, with us and Little Red Schoolhouse. You are listening to Little Red Schoolhouse, a member of the Revolutionary Left Radio Podcast Federation. My name is Gord Millstone with John Battalion, and we are two educators who feel no child should be failed for profit. Specifically, we believe that education under capitalism is the primary factors stifling student success, and corporate interest and involvement in education puts profit margins above teaching real-life skills, true academic achievement, and aliens everyone from within the education system. On this podcast, we push for an insurrectionary approach to changing education through independent and organized movements that are geared first to creating dual power through teacher, student, and community solidarity, and action, followed by the formulation of worker-run teacher co-ops.

If you're an educator, student, organizer, or just want to know more about what we do, we welcome you to the show. You can find us at L. Red Schoolhouse on Twitter. Today we start a special series on Little Red Schoolhouse that will appear now and again, where we try to open our imaginations to a potential. socialist, anarchist, or non-capitalist future. We will have guests on to imagine with us elements of their ideal future. So sit back, relax, unbridle your mind from the concept of capitalist realism. What we imagine can become targets to strive toward. Now, let's imagine with Brett O'Shea. You wake up, the morning sunlight softly flooding around the edges of your drapes, illuminating the bedroom and falling gently upon the body of your partner, who is still sleeping. You get

up to let the dog out and wave to your neighbor who is doing the same. You're going to make it to the movie night tonight? Your neighbor inquires. Our friends on 27th Street are hosting this time. They blocked off their entire cul-de-sac and I made sure to run over the neighborhood projector yesterday. Of course, you reply. The kids love movie night. I'll see you there. Since the revolution, community means a lot more than it used to. At some point, it stopped being an empty platitude uttered by rich politicians on the campaign trail and slowly became a tangible reality in your daily life. You remember the days before the revolution, when you didn't even know your neighbor's names. Now you work closely with all of them to organize local councils and gardening

projects, coordinate with other neighborhoods, and put together communal events. Some of your best friends, you realize only lived a few blocks or houses away from you for years, but you never even knew it until you all began setting up community organizations and local grassroots collectives during the revolution. Now that life has been decommodified and people no longer live to serve the market, you have a lot more free time. You started a philosophy club with some of your neighbors, and your wife spearheaded a project to stormproof your entire neighborhood and coordinate local disaster relief projects across the entire county. Seeing her be able to pursue her interests and find meaning in her life has meant the world to you. Her depression and anxiety used to be

crippling in the old days, but now she has really come into her own. A happy tear slides down your cheek as you reflect on how proud you are of her. The work week has been cut in half, and you remember with sadness the days of old when you were forced to work three different jobs just to make ends meet. You never really thought of housing as a human right before. It never occurred to you that your family could be guaranteed a comfortable home without having to pay half of your income and rent to a landlord. You call your dog back into the house.

He clumsily navigates the flower beds and raised gardens you have littered throughout your yard. lawns of monocultural grass are a thing of the past now every lawn in your neighborhood has been turned into a biodiverse community garden you water your plants then you head back inside gather your stuff and walk down the block to the high-speed rail station as you enter the train headed into the city center you notice that the walls of the train have art on them you sit down under a beautiful print of van go's starry night

remembering that before the revolution this train wouldn't even have existed and if it did that painting would have been replaced with an advertisement for a car company or deodorant or something else equally is meaningless. You hated the constant bombardment of advertising in the old days. Not so much for yourself, but for your kids. You remember how they used to sit in front of the TV screen, staring blindly at colorful advertisements for sugary cereal and shitty plastic toy products that would break after a

couple of days. The cartoons they watched, you realize were only there to keep their attention between commercials. As you hurtle down the rails, you think about how the very concept of rush-hour traffic has all but vanished from your mind. All those cars packing the interstates at 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. every day, all that smog and CO2 being pumped relentlessly into the atmosphere. You wonder how many hours of your life were wasted sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic as billboards towered over you in every direction, trying to convince you that you weren't a complete person unless and until you bought their product. The train gradually begins to slow down and eventually stops.

You exit the train, walk out of the station, and head to your job. Before the revolution, you are a barista and an Uber driver, and on the weekends you tended bar. Now you work in the field of environmental science, helping others from your area build and maintain the new global green energy grid. The government paid for your education and training, arguing that they wanted to invest in their people, and implementing full employment for those who could and wanted to work. You don't love every aspect of your job, no job is perfect, but you only have to work 20 hours a week. And now that your health care, housing, transportation, and children's education are offered as human rights by the society at large, you are no longer working yourself to the bone out of desperation, paycheck to paycheck,

but are instead contributing to a society that you believe in and sincerely feel a part of. As you walk towards your building, you notice the utter lack of both cops and homeless people. Before the revolution, these city streets were packed full of the mentally ill and the poor, huddling and tents on the sidewalks and sleeping in the gutters and under bridges, being constantly harassed by an out-of-control police force with no accountability to the people that they brutalized and oppressed. You now realize that you haven't seen a homeless person in years, and you find it hard to believe that at one time it was accepted as normal by pretty much everyone. Now those people have health care and homes, as well as robust community ties at the grassroots level and structural institutional protection at the highest levels to ensure that no one slips through the cracks, that no one goes without. You turn the corner and enter your building. The morning meeting has already started, and you join your fellow co-workers to plan out the day.

In the old days, you remember getting scolded by your boss for clocking in late and taking too long of a lunch break. You cringe when recalling how belittled you felt, apologizing to that after. on the regular and catering to his infinite narcissism just to ensure you didn't get fired and lose your ability to support your family. You put up with so much shit, but you had to. A small smile spreads across your face as you reflect on the fact that your kids will never know what it feels like to have to cower in front of a petty tyrant like that and cater to their every demand. They will never have to feel the humiliation of having to lower themselves to the level of subservience to another human being. You laugh at the idea of someone nowadays puffing out their chest and handing down orders to their coworkers. They would be laughed out of the building.

As you ascend the staircase to your floor, you pause to gaze out of the windows and are entranced by the beauty. Every building is topped with lush greenery and solar panels. With the huge investments into science and technology detached from profit motives brought about by the revolution, you know those solar panels no longer require extractive mining operations in the global south to a obtain the minerals. The expansion of investments in science and public health have allowed for the emergence of asteroid mining and strict international laws against extractive environmental degradation. The huge sums of wealth and resources funneled from the global north to the global south after the revolution has reduced global poverty to near non-existence, and the

science and technology created in any corner of the world is shared immediately with every other corner of the world, reducing borders to a thing of the past and allowing for the free movement of peoples across the entire globe. You turn away and continue to ascend the stairs. You know the world isn't perfect, and there is so much more to do. But when you reflect on how far we've come since the revolution, you feel a burning passion deep inside your chest to do everything you can to make sure we never go back to the barbarism of our species capitalist past.

You know deep down that you would do anything to make sure your kids will never, ever have to live like your parents had to. And you sense within yourself a blossoming feeling of pride, knowing that you and your comrades help make this possible, that you participated earnestly in the monumental struggle of your time, and that you all fought for this new world against all odds and won. And you realize that you'll never stop fighting for it. So we are here with the lovely Mr. Brett O'Shea from Rev Left Radio. Of course, being a member of the Federation, I'm sure this gentleman needs no introduction. But just in case you don't, Brett is an organizer out of Nebraska. He started Revolutionary Left Radio, I think, what is it, two years ago now?

Two and a half years ago now. And it has done a lot to open up discourse on the left. And we are here to continue our We Can Do Better series, where Brett is going to get to talk to us about a few visions or a few things. things that he can imagine or would like to see in a future socialist society. So first things first, welcome to the show, Brett. Thank you very much for coming on. How are you doing today?

Absolutely. I'm doing great. It's always a pleasure to talk to both of you. I'm excited about this little project you're doing this do-better project. It's really interesting. And so, yeah, I'm pumped to have this conversation. It was challenging, you know. Usually you don't get questions thinking about the future socialist society.

And so really trying to prioritize what I think is important. and thinking through what these means. It was very interesting, and it was challenging, and it was refreshing in that way. So I'm really happy with it. I'm excited to have this conversation. We're excited to have you, too. So I think, as you would say, let's just jump in. I try not to say that so much now.

It's in my head. It's all right. The one joy of podcasting is finding out what words you overuse. Exactly. Teachers find that, too, usually, because our students will put their hands up and say, like stop saying that word and you're just like oh sorry and then I just test them on it and then it feels like it's it's done right so what are these two elements so when I when I did did mine last last episode we talked a bit about a debt-free society and and a mass transit

system kind of idea but what what two elements Brett have you come with us today what would you like to see the most so I yeah my two elements and you know there's a million things that one could pick and so you know boiling it down was sort of a challenge in and of itself But I pick two things that I think highlight two areas that I'm thinking about a lot lately personally. And those two things would be the relations of production and overall consumption, right? The consumption patterns engendered in capitalism broadly, which are obviously bringing us to the brink of environmental collapse. So in the case of the relations of production, just so people know what I'm talking about, like the 101 Wikipedia definition is basically the sum total of social relationships that people, must enter into in order to survive, to produce, and to reproduce their means of life, right?

People must enter into these social relationships, worker boss, landlord, tenant, et cetera, because participation in them is not voluntary. You know, you're in a society and these are sort of relationships that are foisted upon you. And when we talk about capitalism and the mode of production, we often hear the forces of production, but the other side of that is the relations of production. And I think it's important to highlight the latter. We've seen in, you know, like the USSR, for example, what a hyper-examination. focus on the forces of production brings, right? It's like we're not really concerned about the

boss worker relationships so much as we are developing our productive forces. And what comes with that is a sort of determinism. It's sort of this idea, this old sort of stodgy Marxist, deterministic idea that just by accelerating the forces of production, just by developing the forces of production, you sort of inevitably move towards socialism. And I think what we've seen in previous attempts at this is that it doesn't inevitably lead in that direction and that, in fact, the relations of production are just as, if not in some cases, even more important than the forces themselves. And so I think that's a really important thing to think about. And it's also an important way to avoid bureaucracy in some of the,

you know, failures and excesses that have happened in the past. And then when it comes to consumption, you know, we can just look around us and see how capitalism demands constant consumption. It's based on a growth model. The sustainability with nature is obviously not at all a part of this equation. It's about how can we produce more and more? How can we consume more and more? And especially in the imperial core, we consume the products of the global production, you know, mostly comes to us. So we have our personalized cars. We have our nice little smartphones. You know, we have AC pumping in every single building throughout the summer. Very energy intensive. And in fact, in capitalism, people start to understand themselves through their consumption patterns,

right? It's like, as a hyper individual, the way you express yourself in a capitalist society is through consuming things, consuming fashion, consuming music, consuming um, you know, sort of paraphernalia that, that, that, that you can wear or show off to others to say, this is who I am, you know, expressing yourself. And, you know, I want to focus on any socialist transition, being a transition away from this individualistic consumer centered idea of, of consuming things as opposed to focusing on meaning, right? Um, so those would be the two elements. course we can elaborate on what they all mean, but those are two elements that I would toss up here, you know. And they sort of go hand in hand as well, I think. And that's, that's interesting

that here, you know, we've talked a little bit about actual specific conditions changing, but you talking about the relationship itself changing is one that is both fascinating and already takes things into consideration. So the next question, John, if you want to take it, we'll go from there. So when during this transition from capitalism, how many years down the line, would we see these elements operate with fidelity? Yeah, really good question. Before I get into that, I just want to mention really quick for that last question. I just wanted to mention the idea of reparations, right? Because I do believe that any socialist transition must include, insofar as it's possible, a bringing of justice to the past injustices that have occurred, right? genocide, slavery, imperial extraction from a global south. I didn't put that as one of my elements precisely because it's sort of hard to figure out what the details of a reparation

program would be. It's a lot of people talk about reparations, but it's very hard to think about it in terms of policy. So I didn't include those as one of the elements, but I just want to throw that out there. Like, I do not believe that we can build socialism in North America without, you know, putting a lot of our initial energy and time and money and funds into writing the historical wrongs that gave rise to, you know, what we're doing. Because if we don't do that, if we just continue on top of the mountain of corpses of genocide, slavery, and imperialism, then you're really carrying into your new socialist project the worst elements of the old world, if you will. And so that has to be at the forefront of our mind. I think part of the issue with just moving on is that the populace doesn't get to be educated and internalize those horrors and actually learn from them.

I think that that's a major issue with just moving on. Exactly right. Yeah, and I couldn't agree more, Brett, in the sense that the number one thing we need to make right is the relationship between the settler, colonial group of people living here and the indigenous communities who we still have the relationships that were created, the violence that existed. I think a lot of times we sterilize our past and don't really think of the violence as much. when they get put on the silver screen with John Wayne and stuff like that, we can kind of codify it in a way that it becomes less real. And one of the greatest challenges for any revolutionary in North America specifically and anywhere actually where there's indigenous injustice that has taken place in the past

is the fact that the first step to any successful revolution is that reconciliation with indigenous communities. and it is not easy because it immediately feels like you know you're kind of getting a gut punch but you have to take it you have to if you're going to move forward so exactly with with climate change specifically i say this all the time and it's really important like there is no solution to climate change that is also not synonymous with indigenous rights and indigenous self-determination right indigenous people are on the front lines of the extractive industries of you know building pipelines through sacred territories they are land defenders and water defenders And there is no way to, to, you know, solve the climate crisis that does not include, you know, indigenous self-determination.

But I just wanted to make that clear. A hundred percent fully agreement. Little Red Schoolhouse sides with the plate of indigenous peoples around the world. And when it comes to struggle, we'll be there. Absolutely. Well said, my friend. All right. Now, do you want me to jump into this answer?

John, let's get you to re-ask the question. Sure, sure. When during this transition from capitalism, how many years down the, the line, would we see the elements that we discussed, you know, prior to operate with fidelity? Yeah, a very, very difficult question, you know, always hard to say these things. When you're thinking about it, the transitionary period, it is a period. And we're talking about the relations of production, you're talking about a fundamental

change in not only the way that people see other people, but really how people start to see themselves. People internalize their relations of production, you know, if you are, if you're poor, it makes a difference with how you see yourself compared to if you're a Donald Trump, you know, if you're a rich trust fund kid versus if you're born in a ghetto, you know, to poor parents, all those things really are defining of who you are, what your opportunities are, etc. And then just the day-to-day grind of being a worker and having to answer to a boss, you know, I'm a renter, so I have a landlord that is, you know, constantly in the background

of my mind, making sure that I'm paying him and not, you know, going to get kicked out of my home and have to take my kids somewhere else. So this is a, this is a difficult question, and it's so ingrained in the way people think that this is a real challenge and we've seen this be a challenge in past attempts. I do think, like, people know that I'm a Marxist, that I'm more on the MLMLM side of things, but I really look to like a situation like, let's say Catalonia, right?

On the ramp up to and during the Spanish Civil War, the Catalonian anarchists had these big established trade unions in their territory. And those trade unions in the context of the Civil War immediately was the sort of the bridge by which that entire little society could be reformed, you know? The relations of production really were

undergoing a change. Workers and, you know, took over the factories, they ran shit themselves. The interactions between workers and people like coming to a restaurant to get served was very different and everything was changing, of course. We know what happened in the Spanish Civil War. The forces of reaction

eventually crushed Catalonia and took over Spain, you know, world historical tragedy. But there was something beautiful happening there, you know, and that's where we all know that big no-Parsaran banner hung up over the city as the, you know, to the fascist entering. Like, we're going to fight back. So they reorganize their little localized economy and they got militias and people on the front lines to fight the fascist threat. And that's beautiful. That shows us like, it's possible. The relations of production were changing. In the Soviet Union, we had this experimentation with

the Soviets, right? The Soviets became ways to sort of mediate between the, the leadership and the party and the masses, the rank and file workers. However, that turned out, the point is there was an experimental process. So I believe that same experimental process is going to have to happen. And, you know, there's no hard and fast answers. I do know that if we're living in, we're talking about North America, Canada, and the U.S., you're talking about a lot of ideology operating here. People are so, their sense of self is so wrapped up in the capitalist relations of production that it's, it's going to have to, you know, include intense education, and it might take a couple generations to do it.

So if we're talking about that transitionary period, I'm thinking in terms of a generation two, maybe three, to fully transition in the relations of production away from the capitalist mode of production. But then with consumption, I think it could start almost immediately, and it actually is going to have to, right? Like climate change is putting huge pressure on the consumption and growth model of capitalism. And a socialist transition, I think, could immediately start. to decrease the most superfluous forms of consumption, you know? Go to like a dollar store and just

like the little plastic shit that is made for literally no reason. You know, people make products that nobody needs and then use marketing to stoke demand where it otherwise wouldn't have existed in the first place. A lot of that could be brought back. And actually tying it up to your idea of public transportation, look at cars. Cars are very American, very individualistic entities, right? They originated in America, like, I should have my own little car that I can transport all around, and we build these huge cities, and we build them around the idea of cars. And so this idea that every single person has to have their own car, like, that has to go away, and that could be in relation to public transport, right? If we did have a robust public

transportation system, the need for cars would decrease. And so the consumption move might happen a little quicker than the relations of production just because of centuries of ideology and people's self-concepts being so wrapped up in the capitalist relations of production. But I think consumption could, and in fact, will have to start much faster than that. If you were to look at consumption, you're talking about relations to work, you mentioned the idea that people, how people see themselves, it's really shaped by our relationship to production. And I would agree with that. But how would you see, instead of just looking at the self, if we were to move forward, how would our interactions change?

And in that, would that change daily life itself? Absolutely. Just imagine, just imagine for yourself, whoever's listening. Like, imagine not having a boss. Wherever you work, imagine that you went into your workplace and you didn't have to look to see where the boss was and when they were coming in and have to dictate your entire life around where the boss is in your workplace and what sort of pressures you're under.

But you go into a cooperative effort with the other. other people that make that business run, whatever it is, whether that's at a school or a factory or anything else, walking into your workplace and seeing not a hierarchy of managers and bosses and capitalists and workers, but instead seeing an entire room full of equals and that you're going in there and you're creating something, you're doing something for the day, but you're doing it amongst equals. Imagine not having a landlord. Imagine the idea that housing is a human right. And so people are are given homes and made sure that they have shelter and comfortable accommodations for their families outside of the context of a landlord or a bank making money and profiting off of

your ability to house your family. You know, imagine not having bourgeois politicians, representatives, like these rich assholes that don't know you or your family or your plight at all representing you. And in fact, their decisions shape your daily life, but you have no way to influence them if you don't have money, right? Imagine cops not playing the class and racial role that it currently does in the United States and Canada, and so you wouldn't have to worry as a low-income person of color about being pulled over and possibly fucking killed just because of the color of your skin and your class position in society based on where you live, right?

Poor neighborhoods, get more policing, et cetera. So you really can't overstate how dramatic the changes would be with regards to your daily life and your interactions with other human beings, all of those hierarchies that are necessary under capitalism and are fostered and intensified under capitalism would begin to shrink and ultimately vanish. And I think that would, I mean, that would help with so many different problems in our society,

including psychological ones, a huge thing that people don't talk about a lot, is how shitty you feel because our society tells you that your worth is dependent on your status in the economy. If you don't have wealth and you, you don't have what is conventionally seen as a meaningful or worthwhile job. That really goes to affect how you view yourself. I've felt it myself.

You know, I've felt that, that, like, I feel like I'm more than this. You know, why do I have to go into this shitty retail job and move furniture around and get yelled at by a fucking guy who got the business handed to him from his rich parents? Why do I have to do that?

And it makes, it makes you feel bad inside. So that whole structure being unburdened off your shoulder. and being finally able to interact with people as equals truly, you know, you really can't overstate how crazy that would be for people and how different that would be for people in the best way. It's surprisingly easy how many people overlook the huge impact

our self-worth being tied to capital is. And all the people who tend to say that they, I mean, you've seen the memes of like you don't hate Mondays, you hate capitalism. Yeah. And it's really, it's really true. So I'll just leave it with that so that way you can continue.

As the old rapper Jellystone said, you can't buy me happiness, but I'm happiest when I can buy what I want anytime that I want. So you're very right. If our relationships change, that would mean that consumption changes. So take it away, Brett. Yeah.

One thing before I move on in consumption, I just want to tell this little anecdote because I think it really speaks to what both of you just said. I get a lot of tattoos and I talk to tattoo artists all the time. and I was have this one conversation with tattoo artist who I was saying like is it awkward when you have to like deal with different people you know some people are way more quiet some people want to talk your ear off where they're getting tattooed etc and we got into this conversation about it my tattoo artist said for the longest time how he would start a conversation with a client was by asking what do you do you know like that's a normal everyday sort of introductory small talk question to ask somebody and he said he realized that a lot of times people would sort of recoil in the face of that question and he found out over time that the reason people would recoil is because this exact anxiety around status. This exact idea is like, oh, you know, I work a shitty job. When somebody asks me, what do you do?

Immediately you feel the pressure of being like, oh, I know that what I'm about to say, what I do for a living is not going to be seen by this other person as good. It's going to be like, oh, I'm lowly in some way. And so he's like, you know, as an empathetic person, he stopped saying, what do you do? And he's like, you know, what do you do in your free time? Like, what do you do for fun? Who are you? He started switching the questions around, and then you see people come alive.

This person might work a shitty job at a gas station, right, trying to get by, but actually what they do is they're a family man very dedicated to whatever. You can fill in the blank with whatever things that human beings are motivated by and what they really love and are about. And I thought that was really instructive, and it's never left to me as like, yeah, you know, you're not what you do. You are who you are and what you stand for and what you believe in and what you're interested in. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that speaks to that anxiety for sure. I've made some of my closest friends through the passions and talking about the passions that we both have, whether they be similar or different. It's, it's, that really speaks to who we are and who we can be.

And in that horrible argument that capitalism is the natural state of humanity, really this disproves that intensely. I mean, I've got a short story as well that I think is indicative. to this as well. I have a friend whose husband is in the financial industry. And he's a huge liberal. And one of the conversations was where he was just going off on how amazed he is at the creative things that I've created, you know, like an iPhone game and other stuff. And And then he, we got into the conversation, same conversation about where we, you know, envision the world and where we wanted to be. And his argument was that same argument that is so tired of that how can you motivate people without, you know, capital.

And I said, how can you even ask that after you've seen and have complimented me for all the things I've done and created without a motivation of capital just because I enjoy it? And he's married to an artist as well. So it just, it boggles my mind. That's that ideology, you know. It's so structures the way people think. They can't really think outside of it often. Even when they're contradicting that in the form of complimenting you for doing stuff outside of the profit motive.

Exactly. Exactly. Speaking of consumption. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of consumption. So, yeah, so we can just imagine what would your daily life and interactions be like if the entire society was not constantly geared towards selling you shit? Every day that you exist in a capitalist.

society you are bombarded with advertisements marketing schemes you know and they're deeply psychological like marketing firms they hire psychologists to understand the human mind so they can manipulate you better you can't drive to work without being seeing billboards you can't look at your own look down at your desk and you can just count how many product logos you see it's just it's it's all encompassing it's ubiquitous imagine all of that going away because if we have an economy no longer focused on growth and this hyper commodified consumption constantly, then you would no longer need this constant bombardment of advertisements and stuff like that. And as a parent, seeing the bombardment of my children by marketers is brutal.

I grew up in the 90s. I mean, we watched Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, and there would be five minutes of content and then five minutes of advertisements. And they would try to sell you all these brightly colored kids shit, and they want you to run to your parents and say, I want that, mommy, I want that, daddy. and they're already priming your children to be good little consumers. Did you listen to our podcast episode about Jim Sterling and the video game industry? No, I think I missed that one.

No. So he delves into this very deeply and shares a Nordic mobile game CEO's speech about this. And this guy broke down what you're talking about into three steps. It's the, Gord, do you remember what those steps are in order? It's hook. Hook habit hobby, yes. Yeah. And what he says is that what we do is that we give, we offer something for free.

And so that's like the marketing. And then we hope to hook them, you know, get them constantly coming back. So that way, what happens is as children or even as adults, you internalize this consumption and you think it's your hobby and hearing that and internalizing it blew gourd and our minds to the point where we had to reevaluate some of the things that we we were enjoying and thought were our hobbies and they were owned by capitalist companies like for me i'll admit again that i enjoy playing magic the gathering and i i had to reassess that because that we feel that there's no way that a hobby could ever be something that's owned by a capitalist corporation because of the hook habit hobby.

Exactly. Fascinating. I have to listen to that. But the reason why I bring this episode, that episode up is because as a parent, one of the things that was also brought up by Jim Sterling, who's an amazing YouTube content creator, he's really stepped up his game and he really is tackling the video game industry from a not like anti-capitalist point of view. He brought up a key part of that very popular game Fortnite, and Gordon and I have seen it in our schools, but they, and this Nordic CEO even brought it up, that what they're trying to do is normalize spending money as being the only okay way to play the game. And so what we've seen is that students are bullying other students if they are using the default skin, which means that they're not spending money. Wow. That's so sad. I mean, kids, you know, they don't have the capability yet to understand and navigate the stuff, but they're bombarded with it before they even have a chance to critically engage with it. exactly yeah it's horrifying um so yeah so like just imagine how your interactions in daily life would change when that entire sort of super structural apparatus is lifted off your shoulders you know that would be amazing and then without that need for growth and that need for constant consumption

there would be less of a need for just a energy intensive economy where people are constantly either working or consuming right if if we don't have to serve this economy endlessly this economy of growth forever, then all of a sudden you have a lot more free time. You would be able to structure your entire daily life around something. We would still have work, right? A socialist transition would absolutely still require people to come together to work and build up our society. But it would be a lot less intensive because the goal would no longer be to serve the ruling class in the form of constant flow of profits. It would be, you know, maybe something like how can we create the highest quality of life for human beings and what role does work play

in that broader strategy to increase the quality of life for human beings. And that would take a lot of creative, experimental thinking and doing, but it would be very possible. And I think people would actually, when they get to this new stage of human evolution, if you will, looking back on our period of consumption, it would look so grotesque. It already looks grotesque to me. But with historical hindsight, you really get to see the grotesque nature of things that were once considered normal.

And I think hyperconsumption will absolutely be one of the. those things, whether we transition to socialism or humans somehow manage to get through a bottleneck dystopia and come out the other side, whatever. As long as there are humans in the future, they'll look back at this time and sort of be repulsed by it, I think. I think that that's very important that you bring up that, you know, humanity will be able to look back on this, because what I'm seeing now with friends and family who are a lot older at the, like, retirement age, is that what's happening, and let me know if you are seeing this too, Brett and Gord, with your loved ones, but that those people who really bought into the propaganda of

our capitalist work life model, and they're reaching the retirement age or being forced into retirement, they have so conflated their self-worth with their work that it's not until they reach this point where they can't, where they're not valued anymore because they've reached that age, that they're actually, they're like crashing down and coming to terms with the actual disgustingness and the reality of their situation. And I feel like, the reason why I bring this up is that I feel like if we can get people to see this and make that change for many people before they either enter the workforce or are in the midst of working, everybody will feel that relief way before they have to. Absolutely. And I, you know, I was just talking to my

grandfather yesterday and he's retired. And he was, we were talking about how he spends his time, you know, and he totally, he's one of those people that bought in. He was early in IBM, you know, so he has this nice pension. He's actually, he lived during, he was a baby boomer born in 45, so he really rode the good times of the American economy and, you know, it's still been from that, but he is sort of trying to understand because I think this is what it is. It's just occurring to me as I'm speaking, but I think what it is is when you're so externally focused on status, on consumption, on, you know, wealth and accumulation, what you miss out on a lot of times, and you see this a lot with baby boomers, is a complete lack of an internal

life. There isn't time in your existence between work and retirement and buying things like my grandfather because he has a nice pension. Well, you know, he basically expresses himself through consumption. New TVs. I'm fixing my counters. I'm getting a new, you know, garage put on my house. Nothing else to do but buy more shit now that you're at the end of your working life. But a lot of people, we hear this concept of a midlife crisis and stuff. And I think what this really speaks to is a complete void of an internal life because they've never had the time or the understanding of society because we're so produce, produce, produce, work, work, work. They've never had to

to take a breath and look inward for a second, you know? Some people can do that in the confines of capitalism. I think I have a rich internal life insofar as I possibly can have one. But that's a generational thing. I think millennials are more geared towards having a more internal, robust internal life than like the baby boomers who were so just drenched in the ideology of capital. At the boom, at the biggest boom cycle of American capitalism, the 60s, the 50s, et cetera. And I shared with Gord and our listeners, don't know if I've told you, Brett, but I experienced this like three or four years ago where I was on a lunch break and I told myself, okay, during this 45-minute lunch break,

I need to try to teach myself some French because my wife was born in Paris and speaks French and family speaks French. And at the same time, while I'm doing that, like while I'm on duolingo and doing that, I'm going to also draw something for myself. And I want to teach myself. And I want to teach myself how to program. If I'm incapable of doing all of this, then I'm a failure. And it was only at that point that I realized, oh, my God, nobody can do this. And oh, my God, even worse, I've been doing this my whole life. And that's what spurred me to go into therapy and got me to where I am today, where I'm actually able to, you know, enjoy my life and separate myself worth from my work. And I just, it just boggles my mind how many people are doing that to themselves and and can't see beyond

that we have a codependent relationship with capital at this point and it's very unhealthy yeah no i'm actually going to you know admit something like right now which i struggle with internally which is that exact idea my anxiety around myself worth because before i did rev left i mean i don't i only have a degree in philosophy i don't have any other job opportunities i'm from a working class family. I don't have any, like, generational wealth I can depend on or any networking I can get into a good position. So before I did Rev Left, I was, you know, dishwasher, a barista working in retail. And I have this deep-ass anxiety. Like, Rev Left has enabled me to basically have a little bit of comfort, right? Like, I make enough money from people that support Rev Left to struggle, like,

to eke out like a 25K a year income, which, you know, with two kids and my wife works as well. We make it work. It's not great, but I feel fulfilled in a way, right? I feel when somebody asked me that question, what do you do? I actually feel like, hey, for the first time of my life, I can be happily and say that I do something that I find meaningful. But I am terrified on some deep level of this falling apart of like people just not no longer giving a fuck what I have to say and then me having to reenter the job market. And I don't have any options. If I have to reenter the job market, I'm just going to go back to like the low level jobs that I could only ever do. Janitorial work, like, you know, physical manual labor maybe. Like, I used to pull

weeds at a golf course. Like, that is the only other option I have. And so even when I gain, like, a little bit of freedom and I find some fulfilling work, it's not about the income. It's about, I'm actually finding that's fulfilling. Then what happens is the anxiety creeps in. And the anxiety is a constant background noise. Like, okay, yeah, but this is going to end any day, Brett. What are you going to do after that? What are you going to do after that? And it terrifies me. And it's sad to admit that because I realize what that means is that I still on some level buy into this idea that my worth is wrapped up in what I do and what I can tell people I do. And it's not money, but it is status in a different way. It's like, what do you do for a job? And I don't have any

options other than communist propagandist. So I don't know. It scares me. I think a lot of people have that low level anxiety regardless of where you are on that ladder. That is the ultimate fear. And I mean, I think John and I both are very, very much aware of the idea that that teachers who come out as politically left tend to lose their jobs. They get deemed undesirables. They get into trouble. And that's something that definitely we have on our minds as well. So we not only empathize, but sympathize with you on that. But speaking of the ever-looming shadow of the capitalist hegemonic system in and of itself, let's say,

we do end up in that liminal transitional socialist space. And in this case, you know, Brett and I both coming from an MLMLM background, I would say we would both agree that defense is one of the most important parts of a successful revolution that ends up with fidelity creating an alternative to capitalism. So if, you know, in that transitional phase, capital accumulation is still necessary, as we have seen it, have to kind of still play a role in places like Cuba and in the former Soviet Union or in the DPRK or anything along those lines. Or, I mean, even in Zapatista and Rojavan communities, I mean, they're not completely divorced from the need of capital movement. What steps do you think would be needed to prevent revisionism, opportunism, or just the steady and slow creep of capital?

What would you say would be the greatest shield against your changing relationship to protect. and our change of consumption. Yeah, it's a great question, and one that's incredibly challenging. I do want to say you mentioned the need for defense. And I've always said, like, in a post-successful revolutionary context, you know, what I would do, what I would put myself into is into defense. I would join whatever organization exists to defend the newly founded society from the forces of explicit attack, you know, because I believe that I totally believe as a Marxist,

Like your political project is literally only as good as it is defended. And if you can't defend it, then, you know, what do you even, it's not even worth doing because it's going to be crushed and brutally. We saw the Paris Commune, the first ever proletarian revolution because it was the first ever. So, of course, you're not blaming them for not doing it right. They did the first time ever a proletarian revolution. But what happened was because they weren't able to defend it, you know, these nation states came together, crushed it. I mean, and you're talking babies, mothers, fathers, indiscriminately slaughtered. And that is the worst case scenario for any revolutionary movement.

So, yeah, defense is essential. But to your question about capital accumulation, it's interesting because when we think of socialist movements, especially as Marxists, you can think of Mao's China. You can think of the Soviet Union. You can think of Cuba. What all these have in common were they're very different from Canada and America and that they were hyper underdeveloped. In China, you had more peasants than you had proletarians. In the Soviet Union, you had civil war in between. two world wars and you're trying to come out of centuries of right-wing czarist reaction

and repression underdeveloped economy. And so in those instances, especially in the Soviet Union and China, they had to industrialize. They had to develop their country during the transition. And this is so difficult. I think people don't really understand how amazingly difficult it is to industrialize a country during a socialist transition. Industrialization, whether it's capitalist socialist or anything else is always a absolutely brutal process. And then you're constantly being attacked from, you know, imperialist and capitalist forces from around the world as well. It's a huge feat that it's amazing that they had any gains and accomplishments at all. But I do think that in North America, we're different, right? We're not 1917 Russia. We're not

1950s, China. We have a post-industrial society. And so we've never really seen what it would mean to build socialism in a context of post-industrialism, really robust socialism. So it would be very different in ways that I can't even begin to predict. But the need to industrialize and the need for capital accumulation wouldn't necessarily be as imminent and intense in North American 2020 context as it was in, you know, 20th century, Russian, Chinese, or Cuban context. So I think that's important to remember. And then as far as as needing to prevent revisionism, opportunism, et cetera, that's something that has really never fully been overcome. Anarchist, Marxist, whatever, none of our projects have led to communism, right?

So that means they've all, to some extent, failed or hit a limitation. And in the case of the USSR, you know, you had the rise of this big bureaucracy. You had a very much top-down sort of system with no dialectic bottom-up compliment to it, especially towards the latter years. And it did fall to revisionism. And then that revisionism gave way to collapse and the re-entry of capitalism, brutally, you know, mind you. So how do we prevent it? Try to learn as much as we can from comrades in the past, but know that we're really entering uncharted territory, trying to build socialism in a post-industrial society, in an imperial core society. There's just so many different variables that it's really no precedent in history. So I, you know, as a Marxist,

I would say a revolutionary party that is healthy, that has good internal debate, that has good discipline, that is that is knowledgeable about what revisionism and opportunism is, what it looks like, how it arises, and how to combat it, learning from examples of the past is pretty much the only way we can move forward, but there are no quick and fast answers when it comes to that because the context is so dramatically different, you know? While you were talking, I was just thinking from a sportscaster's perspective, we revolutionaries have a really good offensive game, but the forces of reaction play the trap really, really well, and they have a stronger defensive posture. And yeah, that is, that is so

important. And I always think about when I start daydreaming about what I would like to see, I always think about what sort of backsliding could end up happening, what sort of, what sort of forces of reaction could end up putting an end to or just sort of, yeah, freezing in amber, you know, the progress of a group, you know, say of, you know, the Zapatistas or the the extent of what Chinese communism, socialism can do right now, and if it's become a reactionary force or not is now the debate rather than what is it doing as a socialist society, that is a really bad sign that the forces of reaction are slowly starting to gain more and more of a foothold. And now that Hong Kong has happened, it's just going to make that whole debate even

worse. And it's depressing to see. And should, even in the context of North American leftism right now, we already see, you know, formations of revisionism and opportunism. We see the right wing of the DSA trying to, you know, shuffle in these reactionary attitudes towards oppressed and marginalized people under the context of building socialism. The DSA as a whole has a big what I would call an imperialism problem, which is this idea we talked about early on, which is you're going to build socialism on stolen ground with a legacy of genocide maintained by imperialism and you're not going to address that? That seems like that's not socialism to me, You know? So, yeah, it's, those, those elements are already present. And, and, you know, as Mao talks about, that shit will only actually intensify during a socialist transition. Those things don't decrease during a socialist transition. They intensify. And that's what we have to keep in mind going forward.

I think the big thing that we need to take away from it all is that we need to understand when people show who they are and actually innately understand that there are people out there who don't want the change. and we'll fight it tooth and nail. And there's no hoping or praying or putting our head in the sand that we can do to make it better. We have to, it's hard work in the beginning, but by doing the hard work and actually coming to terms with it, that's when we can enact change. And I think that the biggest thing is that Brett, you said something that I found very important, especially from listening to a lot of the Rev Left episodes on these top. The main issue that I've noticed is that it's very rare that a socialist country or state or whatever has been enacted truly, truly from a bottom up. And I feel like if we can do that, if we can truly give back the power from a bottom up structure, I feel like that will educate and empower people at the same time in such a fashion that those at the the top right now, those capitalists at the top right now, will not realize the power shift

in time. Does that make any sense? Yeah, no, I think it does. And in fact, I think the revolutionary process itself is an education. If you look at a situation like, let's just say Venezuela, whatever your politics are in the Venezuelan situation, the fact is Igo Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution, that process of anti-imperialist struggle of nationalizing the oil industry of being attacked by the U.S. was an education for the Venezuelan people. And so even if the Venezuelan people are large segments of the Venezuelan working class don't particularly like Maduro, they've been educated through the process of anti-imperial struggle to know that the U.S. will play on that rift and that they consolidate their forces behind the Bolivarian revolution in the context

of being intact by imperialism because they've been educated through that process. You know, Americans, Canadians, leftists, we've not had a revolution to learn through of any sort. And And so that will be a huge educational process in and of itself. Absolutely. Well, I guess that's a good note to wrap up on. So first of all, Brett, thank you so much for coming on the show. And once again, we're really excited that you saw value in engaging in this series, not for its utopian catharsis, but to give us a sense to imagine something, to give us something a little bit further. And, you know, you were on seriously wrong recently.

And, of course, they do a lot of imagining through their skits. their comedy. And I do have to give them a bit of a shout out because for my inspiration for all of this, I definitely not just took from other podcasts that kind of sort of look at a possible dystopian future, but also looking at the utopian future. It was quite helpful. So thank you so much for coming on and seeing this as a valuable project. Yeah, no, I said this before we started recording, but I think what this project really speaks to is the sort of antidote to to capitalist realism, this idea of having our political imaginations completely controlled and dominated and confined by the dominant ideology of capitalism. So thinking through these difficult

questions about a future possible state of affairs is really good work in pushing against that sort of ingrained capitalist realism. So I love what you comrades are doing. And it's always an honor to speak with both of you. The honor is ours to have you on the show. So we'll get you to plug your particulars and we'll sign off with the solidarity. So where can people find you, Brett? All right. I host two podcasts, Revolutionary Left Radio,

and then I co-host Red Menace with my comrade, Allison Escalante. You can find both of those shows, our Twitter pages, our YouTube, our Patrions for both shows at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com.

John, is there anything else you want to finish off with before we go? Yeah, just anybody who's listening to this who creates a Lefty podcast as well, we want this to grow and at some point become its own thing.

and if you're interested in recording your own, we can do better episode with us. Please reach out to us. Well, wonderful. With that, everyone, solidarity. Solidarity. Huh. Ten girls stabbed on a college campus. Twenty school kids gun down and Sandy Hook.

A black teenager is murdered over skin color. It would feel like the chaos is everywhere you look. 30 Afghans killed at a family wedding. 60 Iraqi kill trying to vote A woman gets gang raped out in India Five kids' lives get ended by drone I don't care if you live in a high rise You're no different from a man in a hut

Every single life is sacred in God's eyes You ain't worth more because you got more stuff I don't care what the color of your skin is I don't care about your fortune of fame I just want for us to have more perspective and understanding everybody's pain is the same perspective. Birds eye view. It's beautiful up here.

Understanding and empathy for all others. Appreciation as a half, what a have-nots. Recognizing people's worth is decided by the content of the character and not what they got. I get upset because it seems so hard for us. lie to ourselves we sound so crazy we tell ourselves that they don't work as hard as us they could be like us

if they just were lazy I think it's just an excuse that allows us to treat them as less human because once we begin to take it as the truth it justifies all the evil things that we do to them some people work hard and barely scrape by others work hard and end up rich

it doesn't mean you shouldn't celebrate success but understand the systematic hurdles that exist, perspectives, birds are here, beautiful up here, might shed a tear. A man with no shoes stands on a corner, sat about his circumstance and began on the street, then realized that it wasn't that bad when he was joined by another man that had no feet. A woman makes a post on Facebook about how she and her brother got beef. Unaware was read by a friend of hers whose own brother passed away just last week. Boston gets hit by a dirty bomb.

A hundred people injured, three people died. Rare for us, but for many, that's the norm. The daily threat of an attack is part of their lives. I ain't saying what we feel ain't real, but understand just what it means to be privileged. That's when you ignore the circumstances of those less fortunate than you, that you don't have to live in perspective. Birds are viewing. It's beautiful appear. My shit of tea.