Rev Left Radio - American Capitalism in Decay: An Analysis (Pokepreet X Rev Left)

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

(There was a small audio issue at the end of this episode, we fixed it and are re-releasing it) Breht goes on the Pokepreet Podcast as a guest to have a fun and fiery conversation about his ideological development, why the United States is so hostile to socialism even relative to other hyper-capitalist countries, the current grotesque state of global capitalism-imperialism, and much more! "In this thought-provoking conversation, we sit down with Breht O'Shea to dive deep into the current state of world imperialism, the decline of the American empire, and the evolving global power dynamics. Brett opens up about how his ideology has transformed over time, offering a candid and enlightening perspective on his journey.  This is one of the best conversations we've had on the podcast and I hope you enjoy!" If you like the episode, go leave him a good review on Apple or Spotify and show him some Rev Left Love!  Find Pokepreet: Podcast main webiste: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/pokepreetpod  Twitter: https://x.com/Thepokepreetpod   Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pokepreet_1/?locale=es&hl=en Substack:https://substack.com/@pokepreet ----------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left HERE

Hello, guys. I got on a very special guest today, Brett O'Shea, host of Rev. Left, host of Guerrilla History, host of Shulis in South Dakota. Do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, sure. I'm Brett O'Shea, like you were saying, the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, the former host of Gorilla History, co-host of the Red Menace podcast as well. And all of those three shows, past and present, kind of come together to formulate my overall output, publicly, which is based around political education for the Marxist left, but also anybody else I can reach. Yeah, and I think I should introduce myself too. I'm a Marxist content creator. I started out on TikTok, and I started this podcast because a lot of people are just asking me questions, wanted me to expand on a lot of things, and there's a time limit on TikTok like 10 minutes.

So I just thought, you know, this would be a wonderful way to just teach people about Marxism and Marxist's Leninist concepts. So jumping right into it, how did you first become involved into revolutionary politics and how did you evolve from anarchism to your specific, to Marxism? Yeah, sure. You know, I think it starts for maybe a lot of us in childhood experiences, born and raised as a member of the working class, living through the lower end, perhaps, of the working class here in South Omaha, you know, growing up with things just like, you know, your car getting repossessed, your electricity being turned out when you come home from school,

seeing your parents struggle even though they work every day. And although I couldn't articulate that into a political ideology at the time, it clearly left an impact on me. And as I grew older, my dad actually, who's passed now, but who, you know, when I would spend time with as a child, he was obsessed with right-wing talk radio in the car. And he often lived in places like Montana or in Kentucky and we often find ourselves in the car for several hours for various reasons driving across parts of the country listening to right wing talk radio and uh you know rush limbaugh sean hannity back in the late 90s early 2000s and even when i started working at the age of 15 i worked as a maintenance guy on a golf course to try to bring in some extra money um i i this is before the era of

iPhones and even iPods and i i just had like an old kind of a radio antenna set of headphones that I'd wear as I would like, you know, mow the greens and whatnot. And I would just have like talk AM radio in my ears all day. And I obviously was influenced by the talk radio part. But I was immediately and sort of instinctually without even a form of political education against the ideology and the arguments coming from these figures. And I hadn't even really engaged with or heard from left wing figures, let alone radical left wing figures, but just based on my experiences.

and my sort of budding intellectual curiosity, I just had instinctive sort of rejections of some of their core premises and ideas, and that obviously developed. As I developed intellectually, hip hop was huge for me coming across at first, underground indie, you know, sort of conscious hip hop,

and then even into, you know, albums like Soul Food by Goody Mob, and obviously let's Get Free by Dead Prez, these blew my worldview wide open. They had huge impacts on my intellectual development. And then I got, me and my girlfriend at the time got pregnant when we were 19 years old. And at that point, I was working at a gas station. I had dropped out of college.

I was just kind of living for the moment, you know, having fun with friends and just getting enough money to get by. But the prospect of having a child sort of like shook me to my core. And I was like, I need to figure out who the fuck I am. I need to figure out life. I need to figure out, you know, things that I can teach. this child coming into the world, right? I can't just vibe and hang out with my friends anymore. And I just started reading books, literally at random. Like I would just pick up books,

start reading them, anthropology, politics, philosophy, anything that was nonfiction. I just started reading. And all this is a long story. But over time, I just became fascinated with learning. I really fell in love with philosophy. I went back to school, got a degree from the state school here in Nebraska. in philosophy, and that's when I would come into contact with Marx proper, like, you know, philosophical texts and political philosophy class that mentioned Marx or would engage with Marx, and I went to the library and found books on Marx and started reading. And although my shift wasn't directly to Marxism, it kind of went from progressive liberal to DSA during Obama. I was a card-carrying

member of the DSA as like a 21 or 22-year-old under the Obama era. DSA existed back then? It did. It's an old organization. Yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't very popular then. Very few people knew about it, but it did exist. And I somehow found it. So, yeah, so all that sort of shifted in Obama was my big disillusion.

I was involved in Occupy, but I still had a little bit of that liberal hope that maybe Obama could turn things around. I was skeptical, but open-minded, especially the first term. Coming out of Bush in the Bush years, I was anti-war for damn sure. and I had real hope and then seeing how that term went, seeing the economic crisis of 2008 and how the banks were bailed out, see the rise of drone warfare, U.S. imperialism started becoming very clear to me, and so I realized that not only was liberalism and progressive a dead end, but DSA was not sufficient ideologically to really confront these systems of power and domination, and that shifted me over to revolutionary forms of of politics. And we can talk about the shift from Marxism and anarchism and whatnot if you want, but that's kind of my background intellectual development. Yeah, of course. And of course, you know, I should add like, I know great comrades in the DSA. Oh yeah. You know, things like that. Yeah. But I'm, I'm, what I'm fascinated by especially is, of course, you have like sort of like a

lived socialist experiment experience. Like you were a socialist before you even knew it. But when I listen to like um early brett right you know in the in the earliest episodes of rev left and then modern day brett there's it's almost like two different socialists you know like what what exactly was the switch from like anarchism to Marxism in your mind um what what made it click yeah it's a really good question yeah so you know getting in i think at the very earliest days of of Rev left I was kind of flirting with Marxism but wanted to retain an anarchism you know I had I theological things to shed from liberalism. I had more learning to do. I had gotten involved in organizing, and a lot of the organizers that I was operating around were many of them

anarchist. So that was kind of a milieu. And I think when you first get into organizing in a city or something, I think you do kind of, at least back and then, now I think things are different. But back then, anarchism was much more overrepresented than Marxism. So I kind of fell into that milieu, still had the revolutionary aspects, which I do and obviously continue to be influenced by. But I started shifting as Rev. Left started, I was Marxist. I was always a fan of Marx. But I was still kind of convinced that Marxism and the way it manifested, you know, I didn't know shit, but I would just sort of like indoctrinated with certain background ideas that I hadn't quite broken free from with regards to that. But I was calling myself a libertarian Marxist in the early

days of Rev. Left, right? Trying to bring on the political economic critique of Marx, but maintain the sort of anti-state anarchism that was kind of easier to digest at that time but is actually starting the show engaging with Marxists I remember one of my earliest shows

being like okay hey we've covered anarchism a lot we've covered libertarian Marxism I've had on a lot of anarchist guests you know there's a lot of conflict between anarchist and MLs let me have it on MLs you know and just be open-minded and hear it they have to say and they started you know

throughout that episode and others that I did with Marxist I started being like, hmm, okay, I went from considering like, okay, I'm against capitalism, I'm against imperialism, I know these things, and that's sort of revolutionary politics writ large, but then I started getting interesting, okay, what do we do about it? What actually works? What has worked historically? And once I got into those questions, Marxism quickly overcame my anarchism, because then I'm thinking, you know, looking back over history, I start studying history more seriously.

Never really been deeply into history before that. But I started getting into history, learning for myself and saying, whoa, this works, diving deeper into Marxism. And then there was this one book that I came across that isn't particularly amazing book for Marxists, especially if you're a veteran Marxist. It'll seem kind of like obvious and sort of elementary for a Marxist. But it was Why Marx was Right by Terry Eagleton. And I just came across the book. I picked it up. And what he does in that book is chapter by chapters, he takes myths and, you know,

and lies about Marx and Marxism and deconstructs them in a very accessible way. And that was the straw that broke the camel's back. That showed me like, oh, Marxism, what I've been told about Marxism is bullshit. I'm already interested now in history and strategy. Marxism makes way more sense than anarchism personally. I have anarchist friends of this day, as you said, great. Even communist Marxists working in the DSA because a lot of their individual chapters are very autonomous and there's different caucuses.

So I didn't mean to shit on DSA. I was talking DSA in the early. 2000s is a much different beast than the modern day DSA to be sure. But that book by Terry Eagleton really broke down the last remaining walls ideologically that I had been conditioned with as an American against Marxism. And then the show and then studying history, worrying about strategy, organizing more. Those all completely dissolved away any hopes that I would ever stay on the anarchist side. And honestly, in those early days, that first six to 12 months of Rev left when that shift happened, that was the biggest disruption in my my audience, right? Because a big

chunk of my audience had come in for the anarchism stuff. And there was a lot of bitterness and there's a lot of people that really like were like felt betrayed and there was a lot of mud slinging. And people turning against me pretty hard, calling me out online, you know, calling me a tankie, all these things. And that's just sort of growing pains I guess I had to go through in order to forge forward and create, I think, a new audience. And as Rev. Left has gone on, not because of Rev. Left, but just in the background, Marxism among the revolutionary left in the U.S. has really come back, I think, to predominance now. I don't think that anarchism, as it was in the late 90s and early 2000s, the dominant strain of revolutionary politics, I think Marxism, because of many reasons, including the deteriorating

conditions and the obviousness of imperialism and just people being able to educate themselves more with the rise of the internet and the information age. Marxism, I think, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Marxism is now kind of the more predominant, serious edge of left-wing organizing and political development amongst the U.S. left right now. So I think that's, yeah, that's my history, and I think that's an interesting shift for sure.

Yeah, I think a lot of what attracted you about Marx is what attracted me about Marx. And also, I could hear the comments about the DSA, which is why I mentioned it. But it's just like Marx was so good at taking these very complex events that were happening around him in Victorian Europe and able to break them down into their very cell, right? Like this very anarchic, a crazy market that was just developing this new system that was just coming out of its infancy, the industrial age capitalism of his time. and he was able to simplify it. He was able to

learn these repeatable trends and him and Ingalls were able to develop this framework that of course dialectical materialism predates them, but they were able to refine it in a way that would truly serve the liberation of the proletariat in a

scientific way. My journey to Marxism is a little bit less having to unlearn propaganda because I was born into a communist family. My parents actually met because both of their cousins were in a communist party in India that's associated with the noxels.

So I like to say sometimes that I'm literally the birth product of communism, you know, because if they hadn't, if they hadn't met, I wouldn't have been born. But one thing I did have to sort of unlearn was Gorbachev era revisionism because I think the collapse of the U.S.R really affected my family, and it put in a lot of liberalism into their head. So, like, I, and also my mother, she has like ADHD, so she never really read theory. So, like, it was like slowly actually interacting with theory, slowly getting over sort of these more social, democratic, Gorbachevian trends that had infiltrated into my life through, through the filter of my family that I actually came to Marxism, Marxism, Marxism.

specifically. Yeah, that's fascinating. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. But that is what's so wonderful about Marxism. I think it's just this. It's not exactly a religion at all. It's a framework to view the world.

And it's so good at just, just like a scientist is able to break down like a molecule into its most basic atoms. I think Marxism does the same thing. And then builds this analysis from there that I don't think other socialist trends are able to do. Would you agree, Brett? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And I think, you know, you mentioned dialectical

materialism, and dialectics had obviously been around, I mean, millennia in different forms, going back to ancient Greece, going back to, you know, Taoism and Buddhism. Like, there's always been a strain of dialectics in human thought. And materialism, obviously emerging post-enlightenment had its own sort of, you know, dimensions and philosophy. And it's, you know, it's obviously, its rootedness in the development of science. And yeah, it was really the combining of those two that was the real beautiful innovation and then the articulation of what that actually looks like as applied to class struggle through the lens of historical materialism. So it really was this

world historical development that is very much analogous to breakthroughs in the scientific realm. And no matter what version of anti-capitalist politics one has, the one thing that everybody does share is the world historic criticism and critique of capitalist political economy that Marx advanced in Das Kapital. You know, whether you're an anarchist, whether even you're a social democrat, you know, reformist strands of politics, democratic socialism, and obviously all strains of Marxism, all of them take for granted the critique that Marx himself advanced, even if they, you know, took it in totally different directions or they betrayed certain other aspects, you know, disregarded historical and dialectical materialism or whatever it may be so that's always worth saying

as well and then the last thing i wanted to mention is you talked about treating it as a religion and it's not a religion i totally agree anything can be treated like a religion if like a religion we mean like doctrinaire ossified dogma right even science itself is treated by a lot of modern people as religion and that it's not engaged with as a living breathing developing form of analyzing the world. It's just the conclusion science comes to, I point to as an authority on reality and say, that's what I believe. And Marxism, like anything else, can be treated that way. But importantly, if you keep your mind on dialectical materialism as a way of thinking and understand Marxism as a living, breathing, analytic tool that we use to understand the world in motion, then I think

you protect yourself from allowing it to become a dead dogma, a mirror. doctrine or as you said a sort of religious stance as opposed to a way of analyzing grappling with the phenomena of the socio-economic and political world absolutely i mean marxism was born out of that split in german ideology uh with the idealist and marx and ingot's greatest critique was that their analysis is not rooted in a concrete analysis of the world you know they have these very idealistic phrases they don't look at history they don't look at the world around them And they just come to these words and phrases that are essentially empty and mean nothing. It's, it's, I think Mao Zedong said it best when he said, like, dogmatists are lazy bones.

You know, they just treat these facts like they emerge out of a vacuum and apply them lazily everywhere else instead of doing a concrete analysis of the world with it, with a means to change it. I think that's really what attracts me about Marxism. It's both so good at critiquing the world, but also so scientifically good at figuring out a plan on how to change it. I think that's something that so much socialist philosophy before Marx and Ingalls lacked completely. It was good at critiquing the world, perhaps, but it wasn't good at changing it. And of course, Lenin's the one who formulated how to do revolution in a scientific way, but it was truly a kernel of some. something amazing that has been grown and expanded onto by subsequent revolutionaries, philosophers, things like that.

Absolutely. Yeah. Incredibly well said. So number two, why is American society, in your opinion, so uniquely anti-worker liberation, like even compared to our capitalist counterparts, like Canada, France, Britain, what have you? I think it's a really, really fascinating question. And I have a lot of thoughts on it.

So if I talk too long, you can just break in and tell me to shut up. But I think there's something really interesting in trying to analyze. Why is America so uniquely, hyper, insanely capitalist, right? Like, we all know capitalism is the dominant mode of production around the world. It manifests differently in different societies. I don't think it's unfair to say that America represents the most voracious, raw kind of version of it still, untempered, like other forms of capitalism and other countries have been. Maybe you could argue that South Korea, which, you know, is very much completely sort of historically intertwined with America has a similarly voracious form of capitalism.

I'm not exactly sure about what institutions they have with regards to a welfare state, et cetera. But it is also important to note that the welfare states, as they've developed, in places like Canada and in places like Western Europe or whatever, are products of Marxism. They are, they come out of the struggle between labor and capital. They are often indirectly tied back to socialist and communist movements. They're not full on socialism. They're not what you or I would want to see. But even those ways of tempering capitalism are products of Marxism. And I always like to point out, when the fall of the Soviet, when the Soviet Union fell, it removed a break on capitalism in the West. So the U.S. enters the Reaganite era, the neoliberal era,

the Soviet Union is beginning to crumble. And once it does, the Reaganite's neoliberal ideology becomes the bipartisan consensus with Clinton. And this is, among many other things, the dismantling of the New Deal era, which had racial dynamics that were atrocious and plenty of things to critique about that era. But it was precisely the fall of the Soviet Union that took out of the frame, the threat, the competition, the other mode of being that, that allowed, I think, in a lot of ways for the complete dismantling of even the tepid New Deal. So all of that out of the way, the question still is, why is America so uniquely anti-worker, right? And I think it goes back to the revolution itself, probably before.

I mean, just before the colonists that come over here, especially the English colonists, are Protestants. There's a certain, you know, we can talk about Max Weber's, I believe, Protestant work ethic, the spirit of capitalism as one piece of this puzzle. I like to start at the revolution itself. The American Revolution was the most conservative bourgeois revolution, especially the big three, Haiti, France, and the U.S. Haiti is this radical, liberatory, anti-slavery, anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-imperialist revolution. France is this dramatically left-wing version of a bourgeois revolution. Let's chop off the heads of those with wealth and power. And that still permeates down into the way that the French get mobilized today.

and there's obviously been you know plenty of interventions by marxist and french history since then as well the u.s was only a revolution in a formal sense meaning the the revolutionary aspect of the american revolution was just in the formal political structures that ushered in it was a formal break from constitutional monarchism and into a full-fledged you know uh democratic republic And so in that sense, sometimes we can say it was historically progressive in that it was a formal break from all forms of monarchism and the attempt to create a totally new thing, which is a true republic. But that should always be tempered with the fact that this was an incredibly economically conservative reaction. This could be called, if it wasn't for that formal transition to a republic away from a constitutional monarchy, it could be called an aristocratic separatist. movement because it was much more it had it did not threaten whatsoever the the class makeup

of the society it came from it was a formal political shift um and in fact the all of the founding fathers are incredibly rich they come from a very specific class we have early attempts at at worker or lower class rebellion like chaise rebellion that was put down and this these decisive shifts that the u.s is not going to allow us that that we are not interested in economic egalitarian itarianism whatsoever, right? And so I think that the deeply conservative economic nature of the American Revolution, maybe, and I could be forgetting some revolutions in history, the most conservative economic revolution of all time, you know? So right up right from the gate, there's a certain dynamic, a certain rhythm that's at play. Okay, then we move forward. What do we

have? We have manifest destiny ideology, open land to allow for the release valve of class struggle right the homestead act go to the west there's land out there you can build a home right these tight cities in in europe that were hyper industrializing they're they don't have huge swaths of territory an entire continent to push their workers out to give them more land right they don't have that expansion expansionary possibility so class struggle is concentrated it has to happen right and the u.s was able to act because of its land that it took over through genocide and the manifest destiny ideology that came with it allowed to act as a release valve move west move west you know send anybody that's um shafing against the the situations back

east send them west right and then what happens out west you get a sort of what i would call wild west libertarianism you don't have formal structures of law and politics you certainly don't have millennia of aristocracy and divine rights of kingship that you have over in europe you have not only a break from all of that but you have literally like sort of just a practical break from the the republican structures of government back east and so you do have this ingrained manifest destiny wild west sort of libertarian ideology that forms the core of the american identity very early on on top of the already incredibly conservative quote unquote revolution that we had okay what's the next layer i've thought about this a lot then you have slavery okay you have slavery that's the big crisis the big thing that was never addressed during the revolution the framers specifically put it off kick the can down the road in order to try to keep the the contradictions from blowing this whole project apart at the beginning it was a it was always destined to be another war it was the civil war was baked into the cake

at the founding itself and you have slave society which not only jumpstarts the capitalist a in the U.S. Part and parcel with American capitalism is the genocide clearing territory, the enslavement of Africans jump-starting the economy. So these are inseparable from modern American capitalism. And then through the civil war, you have the end of formal slavery, but segregation, obviously, the racism continues to live on, the rise of the KKK, et cetera. So when you start talking about socialism in France, okay, you're thinking, well, these are

my fellow Frenchman. You have socialism in Denmark or even the ideas of it. Well, these are, you know, my in group in some sense. I can, I can see sharing with them more. But now post-Civil war, in all the ideology, all the racism built into the cake, you're saying, okay, socialism also means sharing with them. No way, right? So you have the deep racism at the core of American in life. Another slamming fist against the idea of socialism because real socialism would not only mean their full

liberation. It would mean sharing in the resources with them. And we can talk like drained pool politics, right? Even the idea that poor whites would oppose public institutions like a public pool because they had to share it

with black people. So what happened in a lot of places throughout the country is after pools were desegregated, Right? It was now illegal to say that black people couldn't go certain places. They would just shut down public pools and they'd open up private membership only clubs. You had to pay money and you had to be accepted in to even use public pools. So then we can just expand that to health care to any other thing where you would have poor whites and who are self-identified in this racist terms that are baked into the core of American identity. And they would rather live lives of more immiseration than they would. share a pie that they don't even have a large part of with their black neighbor, right? That was unthinkable. So all of these things are in there. Then you have the gilded age, the rise of industrial monopolies, the taking over of government by corrupt forces of the bourgeoisie, the ideology is mounting. And then we enter the Cold War and its ideology. So now not only do we

have all these background conditions in the U.S. that militate against the very premises of socialism, and let alone communism. Now we have Cold War where to be America, to be an American, is definitionally to be in opposition to socialism, i.e. through the Soviet Union. It's the two blocks, right? Everything they are, we are not. Everything we are, they are not. So now you're literally and explicitly defining America and American identity as militantly

opposed to whatever those Ruski's represent, right? And then you have the cultural shift of the 60s. And for its breaking out of conformity and for the rise of certain movements, you could even talk about black liberation, feminist movements, right? There's plenty of good developments that came out of the 60s, but it was still profoundly individualist. It was always participating in this individualism. So, yeah, sure, it could be a left-wing individualism, but it's reifying individualism as such. And as those boomers grew up, they became the yuppies of the 80s. So that individualism of the hippie countercultural movement, let's move that into the economic realm.

Greed is good. Reagan era, you know, get what you can, sort of mentality. So that just concretizes it. Clinton comes along, makes it the bipartisan consensus that, you know, neoliberalism is the path that both parties just take for granted. The New Deal has been dismantled in all of its forms. Unions have been dismantled. And then here we are today in the ruins of that 250-year legacy. And we are trying.

Now, there's always been movements. There's been communist movements. There's been the Black Panther Party. There's been John Brown. There's been radical abolitionists from the very, there's been indigenous resistance this entire damn time before America, during America. And up to this very day, indigenous people are on the front lines combating extractive capitalism and are fighting for self-determination and autonomy from this settler colonial

dictatorship, this apparatus. So there is that tradition that's always been there, but it's always been repressed by the dominant modes of ideology and rule and exploitation. And so we now find ourselves in the rubble of that history, right, trying to continue to pick up and and bolster the torch of liberation from the, from the underbelly of this society that's always been there. But we've been cut off from that history on purpose. The main mechanism that working people get power, which is through unions and the political power that unions represent

have been first de-radicalized through the Red Scare movement and then just de-unionized through the Reagan neoliberal era. And so we are now re-emerging from that rubble in a period of crisis, ecological, economic, spiritual crisis that we find ourselves in as American capitalism is in some sense slamming against the brick wall it's always been headed toward and and now we have a particularly difficult task you know but such is our is our lot and we have to fight nonetheless but I think that and we could go into the nuances of every single thing I just said there but I think that general trend helps

explain a lot about why American society is so particularly hostile to these ideas. No, absolutely. And as like somebody with a history degree, I think your analysis was wonderful. And I agree with every single aspect of it. I study Latin American history. And I was always wondering, like, why are Latin Americans so much more and Central Americans, you know, Mexicans? Why are these workers so much more radical than American workers? Both are to some extent, settler colonialist countries. And I think it's really, you know, it's the microcosm of a similar society like Israel.

I think Israel is very similar to America right now. It's that there's these outside group of settlers who are basically a colonial outpost that are in constant war with the indigenous population with absolutely no intermarriage with a very strict caste, with a very strict, not that, you know, Latin American countries didn't have cast either, but America would see like racial segregation to the point where, you know, no intermarriage whatsoever. And I think the watershed moment, uh, that highlights

this for me is Bacon's rebellion where, uh, yes, poor whites and poor blacks, uh, and some slaves would get together in order to demand the taking of indigenous land. So it still was racist fighting against each other as racist. But during this period in early American history, our racial laws were not as codified yet. And free blacks and poor whites would intermarry with each other, right? You know, it wasn't anything radical. When the ruling classes of Virginia saw poor whites and free blacks and slaves coming together, it was fucking scary to them. It was terrifying. And so what did you get immediately afterwards. You saw a very concerted effort by the

American ruling class to divide the races, right? Put up as many rules and laws against the intermarriage between blacks and whites to make blacks second class citizens, so on and so forth. I think that really

is the crux of it. America is a colonial outpost that achieved what the Nazis could in, right? Lieber Srum, through its manifest destiny um and this has led to an horribly individualistic culture because it's always been the threat of war i mean poor whites i mean the white populations within the south were vastly outnumbered by the slaves right were vastly outnumbered by um um the people that they were ruling over and so

they had to out of fear bring that down the book on them out of fear had to uh uh separate themselves from each other. And this little divide and conquer game that America has played has been successful time and time again and has infiltrated the working movement, the labor movement several times. You mentioned the Gilded Age. During the Gilded Age, there was incredible white chauvinism within the labor movements, right? Even many of our great figures that we look up to. or organizations like the

AFLC fuck how do you say it AFL CIA yep CIA yeah I'm so used to saying that you know um they were specifically made for skilled white workers

and black workers were not allowed into organizations like that you know a gomper's the leader of the AFL CIO specifically worked with the U.S. government and white chauvinism um And America was so good at using races to strike break, right?

America's Reserve Army of Labor. And I'll just explain that super quick. You know, Marx observed that under capitalism, there's always a section of the population that's unemployed or underemployed so that they can be used to break strikes and, you know, just get negotiating power for the bourgeois. Our reserve army of labor is racialized within America specifically. You know, it's black, it's Hispanic. um it before that it was eastern european and slavic migrants and so it's just this i i want to i

wouldn't say wonderful i would say deviously intelligent game of divide and conquer that you can't really do in like you said um more unitarian uh societies like france um though it is slowly getting there within europe as uh migrants have been moving there um as a another reserve army of labor. But it's that America is just a horribly racialized society that never got out of its being a white man with a gun in a vast sea and a vast forest full of natives, right? Full of indigenous people. That mentality has never left America.

And that has led to the most egregious individualism to the point where, you know, you'll do polling of other countries, right? And British people, French people, you know, these are people are not, I mean, no offense to British viewers or listeners or French viewers or listeners, but these people are not the most communistic, the not the most socialistic, you know, their superculture is mostly capitalistic, though, you know, welfare. But even they are more than aware, the vast majority of them, of their class status, right? You know, you'll ask a British person, what class are you? I'm working class. I'm middle class. You know, I'm rich, you know, and we can have conversations about how the middle class is not real, especially within a Marxist framework. But if you ask Americans, poll after poll, you just find everybody saying, I'm middle class, I'm middle class, I'm middle class, and then you go to yearly earnings of Americans, and there's no way, you know, this is an actual representation of American society in general. I also think that, like, Americans are under a spell, an ideological spell because of our racialized society,

but also because of the way that we are in the colonial, we're in an insular empire, right? We're in the inside of the empire. All other countries face the brunt of our empire, even if there are allies, as we're seeing in Ukraine. even if they're allies and we're not even at war like Morocco or Egypt are puppets of us and they face you know that second class status and the division of the world and the investment of capital and like export exportation of resource you know just a classic imperialism but being within the imperial core in America puts you under an ideological spell that's so hard to break because it's a different kind of capitalism than being on the receiving end of America

America's empire, right? It just makes you not, it almost keeps you from being a true materialist because you are not actually able to analyze capitalism as it materially functions around the entire globe. It puts you into the utmost idealism. And that's what the majority of movements within America are ideological movements.

You know, the Democrats, their idealism is, you know fascism is happening right now because Trump says mean words we just need to all hold hands together and sing kumbaya and just to keep on electing the Democrats for 100

fucking years or something I don't know 100 200 years and then you know all our problems will be magically fixed Republicans you know we just got to get rid of migrants and you know we got to

get rid of LGBT Q rights and somehow that will translate to like this magical utopia for white workers because if we get rid of, you know, Mexicans or, uh, uh, Muslims or, you know, something of that sort, somehow capitalists will look at the remaining white workers and just really love them, you know, like it's, it's, it's, it's an absurd, uh, proposition. But the way that American, uh, capitalism functions, I think it does put you into that spell, uh, with, the superstructure that you have to break out of, especially I think the suburbs, which is where the majority of Americans have gone after the 50s, the 60s in the post-war reconstruction. The suburbs are just a different version of capitalism that is so different from, for example, the DRC, right? In the DRC, you see a capitalism of the utmost barbarity, right? slaves, children, dying, digging the most precious metals being used as exploitable

digging machines, right? These aren't even human beings. They've turned into a fixed capital for the capitalist, right? You know, the big iPhone companies or smartphone companies. But then, you know, in the suburbs, you get to go to Pilates classes. is. You can walk your dog down the street. I mean, you got a gated community. A lot of them have security guards. It's a protection against our empire within our empire. And it's almost, you know, of course, the suburbs are tied to white flight, right? Like, it is inherently tied to white flight.

It is a fortress built inside already a fortress. That colonial, I'm against everybody mentality. fucking stop. That white man with a musket in a sea full of natives in a scary forest, that mentality never fucking stopped. And it continues to this day through the suburbs, through Trumpism. And I think the ultimate conclusion of American ideology and Americanism and everything stands for is the Trump phenomenon. In addition to the Kamala phenomenon. And both of these are highly individualistic, right? Forget about the genocide and gods.

You've got to think about harm control or damage control, a completely idealistic take that has no material root whatsoever. But it's a product of the way that which America and especially American liberalism treats identities, racial, sexual identities as not based in the material world, in a vacuum that just sort of come out of nowhere, right? So instead of actually addressing racism, what they'll do is they'll put a black face on the police baton, right? Green, who was our UN representative, was black.

And that was an amazing thing for the Biden-Harris administration, that we had a black UN representative. And what did she do? She multiple times voted to end the ceasefire, not do the ceasefires within Gaza she shot down the ceasefires multiple times led to the deaths of tens of thousands of children and drew out a horrific conflict

but it was okay because she was black right identity is not actually treated in a material way where it's a lived experience it's treated as something in a vacuum and just by putting blackness on top of the empire it's okay so that's that one form of idealism the other

form of idealism is Trumpism which basically just posits that if I cause as much suffering as possible for gay people, for trans people, for black people through this very thinly veiled DEI initiative bullshit that they're doing where they're trying to get rid of DEI, it's just a very badly coded way of saying black workers as far as I can tell. Mexicans, if I can break apart these families, somehow this will materially improve my life. somehow the capitalist will start caring about me. And what it essentially does is that age-old American thing,

which is built into the DNA where it's like, yeah, my material conditions are getting worse as a poor white, cis man. But it's okay because a black person or a gay person is suffering more than, right? Like, it's, it's put that. And once you break through that spell, and I have seen them break through the spell, right? we saw that a microcosm of them breaking through the spell with the Luigi Mangione situation

where for the first time conservatives liberals everybody was celebrating an act of class war but an act of class war from the bottom up I mean for the first time you know in a long time I mean oh America has had you know adventurous assassination plots before this is nothing new but it was the first time in a long time since like you let's say like the gilded age or what have you um and you know the the terrorist anarchist

of the 1910s and but it was the first time that we had um um um an active class war bottom up and what that did i think the the base of society right the economic mode of production class relations broke through into the superstructure for just a tiny little bit and you could see how fucking scared the news media was how fucking scared Congress people were I have a friend comrade workwear

and he owns a clothing store and he was releasing a clothing and a card game based on it was called a CEO hit list card game right? And it had like all the biggest CEOs and it had like a little bit funny play you know like CEOs with targets

on them and when he released that the NYPD commissioner in her same statement about Luigi Mangione brought up the card game. She held it up. She said, people are now making this card game. And it's horrible. You know, this is the worst thing ever. And his business has effectively been shut down.

Banks have abandoned his business. It was a small business. It was him relying on himself. Banks have shut him down. His website's been shut down. All of his accounts have been blocked. I mean, they basically purged. this very small guy

who sold like maybe like less than like 500 shirts a year right like not the biggest creator I don't know his analytics but he wasn't the biggest like fashion brand he was just one guy working out of his New York apartment making shit they purged him out of internet reality they purged him out of everybody's memory

because he made a card game with a CEO and a target on his head and if you want to support him he is currently trying to fight the new york um uh he's trying to fight the new york state for what they did um and i can include um i'll include uh his his campaign in the in the description but what i'm trying to say is for a second um class consciousness broke through that divide between black and white and misspanic and whatever broke through no longer were americans you know white and undocumented right i no longer

where americans you know uh white and de i hires we were all united against uh the billionaires and that was so scary to them that they completely first of all tried to push a narrative that luigi mangioni is the scariest thing ever and with that didn't work just suppressed all news about luigi mangioni um and i i think you know me and you brad as as as marxist um and marxist marxist marxist we know that adventurism is not the best strategy um i i think i you wouldn't disagree with me there absolutely yeah but i think louisie did spark a break in the spell in America's mind control just temporarily, and that's what's needed to be done. Americans need to break through that spell. Absolutely. Yeah, there's so much

there that I want to touch on and totally agree with you. What's to start with Luigi? That was the first time in my life, to your point, that I had seen that just explicit falling away of all false division and it just being pure bottom versus the top. So rich people like Ben Shapiro, you know, Sean Hannity, Joy Ann Reed, whatever the figures on the left are, you know, everybody with a lot of money came out and they said, hey, whoa, this is too far. And then everybody on the bottom, conservative, left, right, whatever you identify as. And you could just see this. I would purposely go to the comment sections of Fox News to the comment sections of Ben Shapiro's page when he's talking about it. Anytime I saw a right winger, and I keep my eye on

right wing channels all the time, anytime I would see a right winger talking about it, I'd see how they talked about it, and I'd see their comments. And it was just the first time of my life where it's just so obviously, as you said, the base broke through and the super structural fog cleared for a moment. Now, you're right. They try to put the cap on it. They immediately stopped talking about it. It fell out of the news. Part of that is just the news cycle goes on, but part of it is certainly like, oh, we can't convince the rabble that this is bad. And every time we talk about it, just more and more of them are like getting amped up and saying that they agree with it 100%. But here's the problem. The trial is happening. So the mainstream media is definitely

going to try to downplay it, but at the same time talking about it, it gets a lot of clicks and attention. So there's going to be this contradiction between profit and like the general interests of the ruling class that profits from this stuff. But the trial is going to be really interesting because as far as i'm concerned as far as i'm aware he's pleading not guilty so that means a prolonged trial in the public sphere that is going to really challenge their ability to simply move on had he died you know had he just pled guilty and they're not being a trial then they could have tried their best to continue to ignore it the trial is going to bring that um to some some tension and some contradiction so we'll see what happens there um and yeah they they all reacted very differently

and one of the big reactions is you start seeing Elon running around with his kid everywhere. You know, like, you've never seen Elon as an engaged fucking parent. The only thing I hear about him talking about is like his trans kid who he hates and feels like the woke mob got to. You never see him

as, and he's not in any sense, a present father and the lives of his kids, but after Luigi, you can't see you can't see Elon without his kids. And I thought that that was just really revealing of the psychodynamics of of the sociopath, Elon, for sure, and his narcissism and self-concern.

But the bigger point that you're making, I mean, you make a great point about the living in the belly of the beast and being separated from the actual violence of the rest of the world and the violence of the U.S. Empire, creating an insular, hyper-idealist U.S. population on the liberal, quote-unquote left, I call it the liberal center and the reactionary right. DEI is the newest form of woke. Before that, it was CRT. they've been trying for a long time to basically say the N-word without saying the N-word. And Trump has been able to make that succeed and satiate the longstanding ideological thing with white workers and poor white people.

You know, at least I'm not them. You know, they're the real enemies. It's the poor immigrants with no money and power. And the DEI people getting jobs that I should. It's not the capitalist. It's not the ruling class. It is these people that are the problem. That is the lifeblood of American ideology that keeps this fucking system going and prevents class unity in any sense.

And the liberals, they have inverted the way that we all know reactionaries use race to divide the working class and always have, right? Liberals have inverted that in the modern and postmodern era by reifying, as you were saying, identity politics and importantly alienating it from class. which is the mechanism by which people of genuinely different identities and experiences can come together in solidarity. So the liberal movement was to say it's grotesque the way the Republicans and the right use race. They're all racist. They're all bigots. They're all homophobes.

That's all true. What we're going to do is we're going to elevate identity but make goddamn sure that not only do we separate it from class and certainly internationalism, right? like the Muslim identity is great unless you're Palestinian so it's very insular in that way and then it's alienated from class which is the only mechanism of material shared interest where people can come together despite different identities and then it's actually weaponized against class and anti-imperialist politics so we saw it really reach its it's pinnacle in the Hillary campaign where it was Bernie Bros and Obama Boys right like um and Obama Boys was a little different he in his first run a lot of people are young He was talking about class a lot. He was talking about, I'm going to wear my tennis shoes. I'll join you on the picket line, right? He presented himself in that first campaign as like, I'm anti-war and I'm pro-working class.

All bullshit. But with Bernie, he was coming with a more explicit economic populist message. And it was the liberal center that weaponized immediately identity against that movement, claiming that that class-focused movement was inherently misogynistic and didn't care enough about identity. And so we've seen that happen and the dead end that that is for sure. But that's the lifelong, I mean, that's the American history long strategy. And any time there's been multiracial coalitions brought together by class interests,

the U.S. state has freaked to the fuck out and clamped down. You were talking about the Gilded Age and the racism of the unions. And it was the IWW that in its early days opened up its membership to black to black workers right and it was immediately in late 1919s early 1920s where you had basically a pre-cointel program go dismantle the organization put them on trial for sedition or whatever you know these false pretenses they use and destroy the IWW when Martin Luther King Jr. was talking about the poor people's campaign right he was going from a civil rights activist to let's now let's criticized Vietnam and let's bring in a multiracial working class element in March on Washington,

that was a step too far. Malcolm X was actually fine for the establishment as long as he was saying really inflammatory things about, you know, white devils and the nation of Islam. He actually, while he was galvanizing and militarizing in some sense, the black community, he was still safe from the ruling classes perspective because it was so scary to white people that that was something that actually they could use to their benefit to some extent with regards to maintaining and, you know, maintenance around white identity and white fear. But when Malcolm X comes back from his sort of religious and spiritual expeditions around the world,

comes back from his trip to Mecca and talks about seeing people of all different colors, you know, shared around their shared Islamic faith and started moving in that direction, and, you know, he now became a threat. Fred Hampton, a threat operating and talking exactly these things. Like black liberation leader, a messianic figure, as the FBI called him, and was doing stuff like the Rainbow Coalition, saying we're not going to fight racism with racism, we're going to fight it with solidarity.

He had to be eliminated. And the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 before was fully co-opted by the Democrats and opportunists and careerists, right? it scared the ruling class i remember because it was a multiracial young movement it wasn't explicitly around class but it had the prerequisites of multiracial unity that could very easily and left-wing multiracial unity that could very easily be leveraged in to a class movement as well as a mechanism by which they could all come together and there was moments during 2020 where burning down police priestings in minneapolis with 60% support among the general population

rattling the gates outside the White House until they had to shut all the lights off in the White House and Trump had to go hide in his underground bunker because there was real concern for about an hour or two that those fences were coming down and we were going to do a real January 6th multiracial movement coming into the White House

so there was real, it was really touch and go and the whole project since then has been this attempt to fight against that with reactionary backlash now taking the form of anti-Dei but having all these manifestations since then, which is about reasserting that white racial identity, scapegoating racial minorities, Muslims, immigrants, black people,

jacking up the racism, getting behind the Trump movement, talking about white identitarianism. That has been the focus of the reactionary rights since 2020 precisely because it touched the oven of multiracial unity. And whenever a movement or a group or a single person touches the oven of getting too damn close to multiracial class unity, the whole system goes into overdrive. The right through reactionary white reification of identity is separate from them and the liberal movement in reifying identity but using it as a wedge against class. So actually you don't have anything to share with a white person or a cis white man.

he is your enemy by virtue of his inborn characteristics of being a white cis man he could never understand you have nothing in common with him he should shut down and he should sit down and shut up and that's a way that they actually take that age old practice and invert it for the same exact ends and so as Marxists as people who are interested very much in a multiracial internationalist socialist revolution we have to see how that manifests in both arms of the ruling class and combat at the entire time Absolutely. I mean, I think during the ongoing, it's still an ongoing genocide in Gaza, but during the genocide in Gaza, that was employed in liberal politics, just what you said. You have nothing in common with a white myth. Things like, are Palestinians anti-black? Like conversations like these would have come up. And it's not based in any material reality, right? It's a complete abstraction. of these real world issues, but it's just how, it's a form of American left idealism, I think.

I also think really what the Western working class has lost with the collapse of the USSR, specifically, even if it was a revisionist state after the death of Stalin, and especially in the Gorbachev era, what the world lost was class struggle being at the forefront, right? Tony Blair, the labor leader, he would say that we now live in a post-class society, right? Like, the class struggle is gone. We're at the end of history. And slowly but surely, the world has been gaining back, right? The working movements have been gaining back our class consciousness.

And we were seeing that in BLM, right? they would write articles supporting Cuba, right? They would write articles supporting Cuba against sanctions. They were very close to it and of course they got enveloped. I think

it's the difficulty of spontaneity, right? You know, Lenin analyzed this beautifully that without a vanguard party leading the working class and that doesn't mean we're

separated from the masses. That doesn't mean we hate the masses. That doesn't mean we're dictatorial over the masses. But a working class without it Vanguard Party, without it leading the working class, the working class always gets into the spontaneous movements that fizzle out, that become reformist, that

become incorporated into the state machinery. And that's exactly what happened with BLM. That's exactly what happened with Occupy. That's exactly what happened with so many movements. Pivoting this conversation just slightly a little really quick before you move on i'm sorry i just want to make one point

based on what you said despite yeah the limits of spontaneity and the fact that a movement like blm was ultimately it in some sense it fizzled out was co-opted by the democratic party the careerist opportunist all that stuff what it did do as well as what palestine is doing right now is it is inexorably raising consciousness so after black lives matter you saw and during black lives matter, a flood of re-interest in figures like Fred Hampton, a flood of re-interest in the Black Panther Party. Sometimes it

took more liberal forms, sometimes it took more radical forms. But these instances and then with the now ongoing genocide in Palestine, the connections that go back to black liberation movements, every major black revolutionary figure in the U.S. has talked about and identified with the Palestinian

struggle. These moments, although they do come and eventually they go, and it can sometimes feel like, damn, we were defeated again, they are every single time rising the tide of consciousness, especially among young people who are encountering these ideas and this history for the first time through these movements. And so there is a building on top of each other that is occurring, going all the way back to Occupy and beyond. There's momentum. And although these movements and standing rock right, although these movements come and go, they build on one another. They educate

the next generation and they create more organization and so in and of themselves they do contribute that and that is why the movement on the left has been gaining steam it's a very uphill battle but every iteration of struggle raises the consciousness convinces more people and at the same time in the background capitalism itself is decaying is failing to meet the needs of more and more people, throwing more and more people into precarity. And so those two things are feeding off of each other. And that really does give me optimism and hope that we are entering a period of intense unmasking and intense struggle. And our job is not to get blackpilled and domerish because, you know, things are looking so scary right now, but realizing that because the system

is getting desperate, because it is in a moment of crisis, and it is overreacting and over extending itself out of desperation, out of weakness, and that means opportunities for us dialectically. Yeah, of course. No, no. I mean, that nuance is so important. And I mean, communist leaders themselves recognize all of this. I mean, a Stalin in the foundations of Leninism, he mentioned that the closer and closer you get to a revolutionary outburst, the more of these tiny little movements you get, right? Like these tiny little big movements, these big ruptures that slowly trained the working class for that final triumphant win, that final triumphant push over that climax

of revolution. And it's important not to do that push to before the climax, you know, where you're going way too far ahead of the mass as revolutionary potential or too far behind where you're tailing them. But I think we are witnessing those like smaller bursts that are getting more and more frequent. And Gaza has really just exemplify that to an extreme. It's been a worldwide movement that has come in like a whirlwind

and the Palestinian people in liberating themselves, I think, have to some extent, started a really big ball of liberation for so many other events, right? It's led to so much anti-capitalism. It's led to so much

anti-Westernism, anti-imprilism into the mainstream globally, you know, in the most poorest countries um you know in the most poorest african countries you know um my um uh friends in the in the c pk uh the communist party of kenya will hold up Palestinian flags and talk about how much they love Palestine um uh Booker Amole a great comrade um great he will do that and then all the way from um you know America or Canada they'll they'll hold up the Palestinian flag i mean it's it's it's

broken down so many, it started the ball on black liberation, worker liberation, colonial liberation. I mean, it's, I have to thank the, the Palestinian people who always stay in my heart because of that. Well, one, moving the conversation a little, one observation that one of my friends pointed out, actually, Henry Martel, a very well-read guy who writes articles, is that Western fascism, as it currently is operating, this new sort of fascism that we're getting, is very different from the old kinds of fascism and even fascisms in Asia, like with the Modi and the BJP, which is where old kind of fascisms were sort of like in how communism is an inversion of the inversion, right? It's an inversion of the capitalist productive forces to a primitive communist, a social,

relation um fascism was an inversion historically and even within like the bjp of socialism it was a version of socialist structures it was forget about the class struggle but we're going to keep a lot of the institutions of socialist parties socialist aesthetics and socialist uh working class movements and we'll even brand or some of the socialist you know the Italians and the the the Germans um so like you know for example musilini would have these relaxing houses for work workers, right? And after a long, hard shift at your job, you could go there and you could relax and chill with other people as long as you were anti-communist, right? That was the one caveat, right? You've got to be anti-conmists. And similar things, the BJP in India will meet people's

economic needs a little bit, a little bit. It'll go to a village. It'll invest a little bit in order to get support for maintaining bourgeois rule. But within Western societies, as we're seeing fascism rise. It's very individualistic. I don't see that social welfare, that social welfare base whatsoever. In fact, it seems to be alienating itself from its own base in the form of Trump as he gets rid of benefits, social welfare benefits for veterans, for his own base, SNAP programs, social welfare. There's no Republican cadres like fascist cadres going from city to city asking you what you need. Please support the bourgeois and forget about the class struggle. It's very separated. Why do you think that this new kind of fascism that we're seeing in the West is so individualistic?

Is it because the bourgeois don't have anything to give up anymore? I think that's a huge part of it. Yeah, the bourgeois don't have anything to give up. The post-war period in the U.S., for example, right? Sometimes there's like democratic socialists and social Democrats in the U.S. that say we need to bring back the new, even Bernie talks in these languages, you know. We need to bring back the new deal what they don't understand the material basis for the new deal is gone that was a unique moment in capitalist history where the pie was growing and it could be shared in very certain economic context the rise of the u.s as the military and economic superpower in the world you know europe is in ruins you have the the globalization process then occurring where where um you know

western investment can continue to fly more more voraciously into different corners of the world open up markets that's coming to an end that whole process um and the the the material basis is now obliterated for something like returning to the new deal the contradictions are so deep that capitalism can actually only be transcended now there is no real way to continue to reform it and then you have the ideology in the background so american fascism for example is deeply imbued with all the ideology that we just talked about earlier um the corporate neoliberal hyper individualistic, capitalist forms of thinking and being. And when you have a figure like Trump who is completely conditioned and, you know,

the Republican Party in general of these older people who are completely conditioned by these periods that they lived in and the ideologies of their time, they are not thinking in those terms. And on top of that, you add the neoliberal period has actually dismantled democratic mechanisms, right? it has been about privatizing social function it has been about protecting capital from democratic pushback it's been about co-opting both in the u.s especially and around the western world in the uk is very similar co-opting both parties through the influence of big money such that you don't have to rely on not only democratic mechanisms as much but on mass movements as much you talked

about Germany and Italian fascism, right? Both of which relied, as you're talking, the inversion of socialism, which socialism completely relies on mass movements, both of them relied on that structure of mobilizing the masses to some extent and having that mass support. And if we still had anything like a reasonably democratic society, even under capitalist conditions, maybe they would have to appeal in that direction. But neoliberalism has whittled all of that away. There is no organized labor, right? There was organized labor in those earlier iterations of fascism that needed to be contended with as a political force. We saw the SA under the Nazis and of course Mussolini, as you were just talking about, and the Italian communist movement, but the Italian

working class movement, unionization movement, all of those things don't apply in places like the U.S. and even the UK, right? So the whole need to move in that direction, the practicality of engaging with those forces just simply isn't there. And then you add on a course on top the the fact that honestly they can't do it and the fact that there's this ideological sort of program running in the background, especially in the US and UK that is hyper individualist. And also just very stupid. I mean, because there's a point at which you think, if I am a capitalist, if I am incredibly wealthy and powerful in American society and I see this whole fucking society coming apart at the seams, isn't it actually smart to try as much as we can

to satiate at least some strata of the working class, win them over through economic reforms, calm down some of the internal contradictions and class tensions in our society so that we can perpetuate the system that I am so clearly benefiting from. And yeah, if that means instead of me being worth $400 billion, I'm worth $200,000, billion dollars i'm still a hundred billionaire and i still have insane access to power and wealth and any fucking thing that i want ever so but but that is too strategic that is too long-term planning for the capitalist mode of production and the economic elite who think quarter by quarter who think about maximizing profits today um and so it's this funny irony i like to point out that if you want

to perpetuate american capitalism and basically keep the structure of American capitalism, imperialism in place, you could best do, over the medium and long term, you could best do that through a social democratic Bernie-like movement, right? Which doesn't challenge imperialism. It doesn't actually challenge class society. It just says, let's share the pie a little bit. And you can even give it a conservative inflection that's anti-immigrant. And if we're going to share the pie, we just got to share it amongst ourselves, kick the immigrants out, right?

You could still do all of this movement within that movement to kind of perpetuate the system long term. But it's American capitalism in particular, literally incapable of that. It literally can't think in those terms. Certainly a leader like Trump does not think in those terms whatsoever. And so all this left to do, stomp the death drive accelerationist gas pedal. And rip open the fucking carcass of American life, slash taxes on the rich even more, hand over government power literally to the oligarchy,

dismantle Medicaid, dismantle any fucking fragments and tattered pieces of the social safety net that may still remain and hit the goddamn gas pedal. And maybe in the minds of techno-libertarian freaks on ketamine in Silicon Valley, they think if they do this quick enough, if they do this quick enough, that maybe they can totally dismantle democracy,

They can usher in techno-futalism and with their techno-utopian ideas that AI just in five years is going to be able to eliminate every job and concretize their power and use the Israeli model to use hypertech to box in and cage, an exploited and dominated population. And then we can retreat to our bunkers and we can have private police and we can retreat to our gated communities with private police. maybe we can do that in quick enough time before the rabble catches on and does anything about it. And so I don't know if that's a conscious thought or an unconscious death drive in the American ruling class elite, but we've long passed the turnpike for going in a more sustainable long-term direction through social democracy and concession giving. Now we're hitting the pedal on our death drive and seeing what the fuck happened. So, yeah, there's a certain insanity about it. And we are living at this insane period in American history and world history, where the capitalism is just hitting its limits.

It's infiltrated markets around the world. It's enjoyed, you know, 100 years of imperial hegemonic Western domination. It's reaching its ecological limits. It's becoming more and more irrational. It's ideological superstructures failing to convince more and more people as the material base falls out from underneath. regular working people are what in America used to be called the quote unquote mystical obscurantism middle class that doesn't exist anymore people cling to the verbiage of it and the self-identity of it it doesn't really exist there's an upper professional class and there's a big

bourgeoisie and there's a huge underclass and that underclass has strata but there is no middle class to be spoken of so yeah i think it's accelerationism i think it's hubris i actually don't think it'll work. I think, you know, the empire is in retreat, and so it's lashing out. Domestic capitalism is failing, and so it's lashing out. It doesn't have the long-term capability to plan and strategize and do anything in a way that will keep it going in the long term. And so it's going to go down in flames. You know, it's going to try to do fascism, techno-fortified fascism. And it's going to hope that it can pull that off in time before we catch on and organize enough to do anything about it. And so that's our challenge. Will we rise to it or not? It really is socialism or

barbarism. Right. I'm not going to be completely honest. I think Trump is a fucking secret Chinese spy. I mean, the way he's taking down the American Empire, I mean, if I was a communist and president and I wanted to destroy America from within, I think I would do what Trump is doing right now to some extent like I I mean okay look here's what I'll say okay um I think to some extent and this is a non-Marxist thing to say but I think to some extent America's rulers started believing in their own bullshit right like there used to be a separation where they understood what they were telling the public and what they were talking to each other in smoke-filled rooms was completely different right um and somewhere along that line of

fail sons in power they just ended up with Nepo babies holding the reins of government who have no idea how to drive this fucking ship and it is all the contradictions of

imperialism state monopoly capitalism right you know as as Lenin said you state monopoly capitalism is sort of more bond capitalism it's the final because these large monopolies they eat away at a society completely, right? Even the historically somewhat progressive roles of

capitalism get eaten away in this new stage. And instead of promoting innovation, they temper innovation, right, through their monopolization, copyrights, taking down of other, even companies, you know, so within capitalist logic, it doesn't even work anymore. They eat away at society through taking all these resources, right? Our tax dollars start going towards their need for clots to be invested into the military sector, you know, for the capital cap on reproducing itself. So our health care gets taken away and put into this military sector.

Our schools get put away and put into the military sector. And even though we have entered into an era where we produce more than enough for humanity to never go hungry again, right? We produce at the most basic level, more kilocalories, more than enough kilocalories to feed the majority of humanity. We have more than enough homes to house all the homeless people in America. The productive forces, there's no issue with it, but the relations of production start budding heads. And it's amazing how capitalism has had a tendency to survive. It's been amazingly elastic at going through big crises, right?

Marx and Ingalls predicted big crises in Europe and this sort of a world revolution starting in the most Western developed nations and, you know, history and the era of imperialism has sort of changed that. But capitalism has shown an amazing elasticity where every time historically communists have thought, this is it, right? You know, oh, the World War I, this is it. This is World Revolution as Lenin and so many communists at the time thought before World War I ended. The Great Depression, this is it. This is the end for capitalism as the common turn and the USSR, many inner circles in the USSR thought. World War II, this is it.

The 60s, this is it, right? America's empire is on collapse. The Vietnamese are putting up an amazing fucking fight. They're losing in Latin America. You know, it's not looking good for the American empire. Capitalism has shown an amazing ability to rebound in this elasticity. however it's only been able to take the hits for so long right like it's only been able to um and every single time has had these hits it's gotten a little bit weaker and weaker and weaker i mean we are

living right now uh in the post uh 2008 financial crash world in a very more bund more bund capitalism like if the capitalism of lenin's time was a more bond capitalism we are in a zombie right we are in something that should have died a long fucking time ago um and it's it's as as it keeps on trucking along the people at the helm of the empire don't know what the fuck they're doing anymore right it's almost like watching the the roman empire go from a statesman who knew what they were doing like a caesar or alexander the great to romulus right like these bumbling uh guys who have no idea what the fuck is going on these fail sons put in there by meritocracy

and I think Trump Doge Elon Musk is the perfect exemplar of this they literally fired accidentally people in charge of America's nuclear missiles they've stopped funding for the

treacherous Palestinian authority or the U.S.A.D and NED U.S. aid. NED right. These are institutions of American imperialism and now conservatives are looking at me in my comment section telling me

your leftist must be funded by US aid right? I want to like literally reach through my phone and slap these people like you do you are helping me out accidentally to some extent like you're somehow you're destroying that American empire like but through the language of

strengthening it I mean it's it's eating itself it's eating itself it's a it's just nowhere left this elasticity is less elastic it's getting you know like a rubber band you stretch it a hundred times and slowly but slowly those microchairs end up on it and again and again you know great depression world war two a vietnam war whatever and it's so close to snapping i don't i can't predict when it's gonna snap i'm not gonna i mean like many communists before i'm hopeful that it will snap soon but i

don't really see it but it is getting close and i think the one fucking the people uh stretching out that elastic band as far as they can is Trump and Elon Musk right now. They are just ripping it, trying to see how far they can stretch this elastic band and not snap it. Brett, if you have any thoughts. Yeah, I mean, so well said, very funny, deeply insightful. Yeah, that's what I mean by accelerationism. They're stretching it further, thinking that they're doing something to fix the band-aid or to fix the rubber band, and it's going to snap. When it'll snap, how it'll snap, I don't know. And although it's inevitable, and although it has to happen, um it could be incredibly dark times like i don't i think it's going to get worse before it gets

better um and and the ways that it snaps is going to be something like complete economic collapse that makes the great depression look you know nice by comparison it's going to be world war goddamn three it's going to be environmental catastrophes piling up like who knows exactly how it's going to happen i mean at some at some point you know you think that the rest of the world if they sober up they have to come together and put down the rabid dog because America still has the biggest economy or the, you know, one of the, China now is in competition, but still has the biggest and strongest military. So what does a dying society with the biggest and most powerful and technologically advanced

military and human history, how does that dog die? And that's still a huge question to be answered. Now, your point about forces versus relations of production is spot on goes back to marks and angles talking about this contradiction that you're right. we the stupidities of the system is that we can live within ecological limits we can have enough resources to feed and house everybody we can do this but the relations of production won't allow for it and it's that contradiction that mounts over time in the beating heart of capitalism like a like a artery to the heart being you know filled up with plaque it will eventually

stop working it will seize up and explode um and so that's the that's the issue It is capitalism's biggest strength has always been its adaptability. And when I'm talking about the death drive accelerationism of the current administration, they do think that with technological development and rapid economic growth, or at least one last round of it, prompted by incredible tax cuts and deregulation, that that's going to be able to usher in the next round of adaptability. If we can get growth up enough, right? And maybe with AI and these promises of this technology really taking full form that we could have unprecedented growth, right?

That we could plow through this moment of crisis and reach a new round of adaptability for, you know, these people are, what, Trump's almost fucking 80. Elon Musk is 50 or something. Like they just need this system for their own self-interest to last a couple more decades. and that's kind of always been at the core of capitalism's adaptability, the economic and ruling class aren't looking to keep this thing going for hundreds of years. They just need to keep it going for their own portfolios and their retirement and their investment plans. And so that's the short-sightedness of it. And that's also what the accelerationism is trying to accomplish one more round.

But you're right. Those micro-tares are adding up. And the post-war moment of U.S. hegemonic unipolarity, which it did rely on him. heavily to siphon resources and wealth back to the imperial core to satiate, you know, certain strata of the working and upper classes of, of the imperial core societies, when that unipolarity breaks down, when the third world continues to rise, right? And new forces come onto the scene, that's also an existential threat to its power and adaptability. And all of these

things are happening at once. And so, yeah, we're kind of, we're kind of here to see what happens and we got to be as organized as we can to take advantage of the opportunities that are going to be opened up and to be able to take care of ourselves when the crises inevitably erupt. And the very last point I want to make, and I'll hand it back over to you, is you made a point about monopolies. And that's a point that I always want to stress competitive free markets, this ideology that, you know, free markets are the way like deregulate and let markets compete and they will create the best products and the best prices. The irony of that is that competitive free markets always lead to monopolies. Somebody wins those competitive games and they amass more and

more of the market share. And what happens when they're big and strong enough? They buy out competition. They corner the market. They infiltrate and corrupt politics and they eliminate their own competition. Leading to monopolies that are top heavy that suck up all the oxygen out of the economy, siphon all the wealth to themselves, and create stagnation and crisis in the economic system itself. This is the logic of capitalism playing itself out. And you're right. The fact that we have these nepotistic children of rich men who got handed life on a silver platter running this machine is just more indication that that's what's happening. No, absolutely. I mean, the hard example was all right, but I think the rubber band was better. But,

I mean, I think right now America is completely humiliated, right? You know, on a global scale. I mean, for God's sake, we sent Israel unlimited fucking weapons, right? We sent them everything. We gave them all the sport you could. The entire brunt of the Western world against this five-mile corridor or just a couple miles corridor. I don't know the exact size of Gaza, but it's very small. against a couple

handful of guerrilla fighters and the Aklissan brigades the entire brunt of the Western world against them and they won they humiliated the American Empire the Vietnamese people humiliated the American Empire the Afghani people

right these peasant farmers against the world's strongest military humiliated the American Empire and Russia most recently and of course you know, I'm not a fan of Russia. I see it as much of a counter imperialist bloc. But it has also humiliated America.

Whereas America, when the Ukraine-Rustal war started, we were saying things like, oh, it'll be over in a couple months. It'll be over in a year. But America has come out of it with its tail in between its legs. But what it speaks to right now, and what I think America's ruler's philosophy is, is really just, you know, China's on the. rise. China is the new

world rising hegemon. We have lost a lot of our trade partners. We have lost a lot of our trade partners in Latin America in Africa, in the Middle East even. Saudi Arabia most recently has been middling, right? It hasn't completely given

up America. But that's our most reliable ally and the fact that's middling says something. That really does say something. The rise of China on one pole of the world And also America's continual humiliating defeat has led to the American ruling class thinking, first of all, the way to gain back American dominance is to just develop a weapon, right? Like, we just have to get this ultra super good weapon that will help dominate these people without actually understanding why wars win or lose, right?

You know, guerrilla warfare relies on the popular support of the people and to, you know, get the. occupying force to break itself in terms of occupying the country, you know, waste as many resources, things like that. And so as American capitalists right now are looking towards these startups like Palantir, which like try to get like all this data to help weapons, they're trying to get these AI drones. They're trying to get back American dominance of the globe without understanding why America has lost dominance of the globe. And that is because socialist, communist, and even national liberatory movements are the organic. will of the vast majority of humanity.

What the world situation has been imposed onto the world before has been artificially imposed top down by America, right? Post-war World War II. I mean, before that it was the Europeans. But it's been posed top-down artificially. It is an artificial move, a world order that has no mass base of support. The mass base of support is with the Maoist in India, the Maoists in the Philippines. the Al Qasan brigades, you know, all these national liberation movements.

And so America is right now thinking, we just got to get a palantier, right? You know, we just got to get these AI drones. They've been obsessed, these ruling classes with AI drones. We just got to get some supercomputer bullshit that will get us back domination of the globe without understanding why America lost domination of the globe in the first place. And that's because the people of the globe did not want you fucking there. And your own people wanted food in their mouths. Like people at home needed food in their mouths, and all the finance monopoly capitalists could care about was their bank account, was reinvesting their capital into the military industrial sector as much as they could.

So it's caused American dominance to break. In addition to that, the rise of China has just led to America losing all of its trading partners. And China itself is complicated. It claims to be communist. It has a highly regulated capital. Whether or not it is social imperialist or not, I've never been able to figure out. Because the way that China acts is not like traditional empires, especially like say America where like I will dominate a place.

It'll build hospitals and railroads and, you know, much more beneficial. mutual trade though it still is for the extraction of capital so i i always have a give or take on china i cannot figure out um where china is headed specifically but the fact that america has lost all of its trading partners has led it to sort of forego the illusion of sovereignty for its closest trading allies right you saw right now um as of this recording trump bitch slapping zalensky right in front of us before you know America would act like you know these are sovereign nations right but now we are just extorting for as much open imperialism as possible for as much open extortion as possible almost like a mafia boss um telling you that if you don't get the payment to much

to tomorrow you're going to get your kneecaps broken we have essentially uh in order to hold on to our allies because we know that china is the new kid on the blog China is able to do innovation, capitalism, Chinese socialism with Chinese characteristics much better than America can. They've got a six-generation fighter jet. America spent a trillion dollars and couldn't even get that jet to go through. It's not even functional. I mean, America has so many parasites now because of this overbloded bureaucracy,

because of this finance monopoly capitalist sector that should have been siphoning off profits itself that it can't even function as an empire more it's being forced to bitch slap all of its allies into just forcing them to be loyal and not go towards china yeah absolutely and that's that's what that's another way that it's shooting itself in the foot as you were kind of alluding to not only as its ideological illusions falling right the ukraine russia situation happening at the same time are overlapping with the israeli palestine conflict blew open the illusion of american ideological messaging right and one in one instance we're for self-determination we're for sovereignty we're for respecting people's rights and borders we're for international law and in the other one we are funding

and protecting politically an absolute genocide so the palestinians struggle raises everybody's consciousness these two things happening at once forcing america to say the exact opposite thing in both circumstances right um that just implodes that aspect we already talked about Trump and Elon dismantling its soft power mechanisms, the NED, USAID, etc., weakening its ability to engage in clandestine, subterfuge in various countries around the world. Its reputation has collapsed around the world, as you were saying, from the bottom up, as well as across the international spectrum with regards to its allieship, because one of the worst and most dangerous things to be in the world right now is as a U.S.

friend, right? Look at Canada the way that Trump is treating even Canada, which is just like might as well be an appendage of America. It's so closely related and that relationship is taken so for granted and now there's tension there. Europe is feeling completely isolated and even attacked by J.D. Vance going over there, wagging his finger and condemning them. They're not taking NATO seriously, weakening that whole project as well. Europe is now talking about forming its own military, leaving NATO behind, taking care of itself. We can't rely on the U.S. And then even its pawn on the chessboard, Zelensky, is being humiliated in the White House on public television, yelled at by Trump and J.D. Vance at the same time, and being discarded

as so many other U.S. proxies, to be clear, have been discarded in the past. But this one is with no ideological illusions, no ideological fog surrounding it. So this is a way that just everything about, and they're not doing it because, as you were saying earlier, because they're like they want to destroy U.S. Empire. They think they're strengthening it and they are destroying it. So Xi doesn't have to take over Taiwan or make a quick move before the demographic situation gets out of control. He can just sit back, continue creating trade partners, continue using Chinese soft power and diplomacy, continue arguing at the UN that sovereignty is really important. We need to respect people's borders. China hasn't dropped a bomb on any other country.

China hasn't invaded any other fucking country. China has now a moral superiority. It's on a genuine moral high horse and is now taking the role of the responsible rising superpower in the world that can work with and talk with anybody. And as the same time that the U.S. is self-immolating. And I thought it was kind of funny as a complete aside. Bernie Sanders came out and wanted to chastise the Trump

administration over the Zelensky thing and he was talking about how how sad it is that America is not supporting Ukrainian democracy. And I just wanted to point out not only as Bernie Sanders and imperialist stooge and fully embedded within the Democratic Party and imperial apparatus of the U.S., there's no such thing as a Ukrainian democracy. Zelensky has a couple years ago, 2022, banned all left-wing parties. All progressive, socialist, and communist parties are not allowed to vibe for democratic power in Ukraine. Ukraine already was just like Russia and the U.S. and oligarchy masquerading as a democracy.

There was never any democracy there in the first place. And now Zelensky has suspended elections and is in power indefinitely going forward. We'll see how long that lasts now. But just the fact that Bernie Sanders comes out with this liberal, imperialist bullshit, that what the Democrats have been doing is caring about democracy, much less caring about the Ukrainian people who are used as cannon fodder in their proxy war against Russia that they helped exacerbate and create. Russia had come to the table many years ago saying, here's our red lines.

If you just don't cross these red lines, we're not going to go to war. They did the 2014 May-on coup. They were expanding NATO, very dismissive and arrogant towards Russia. Then Russia does what it said it was going to do the whole damn time. And then Bernie Sanders and others points to Russia and say, Russia started this war, just like they point to Palestine and say, all of this started on October 7th. It doesn't work anymore. Their ideological apparatus has failed.

Their alliances are crumbling. Their imperial hegemonic unipolarity is coming to an absolute end. China's on the rise as a more responsible, trustworthy, and stable partner for more and more people around the world. And the U.S. is dying a violent death. The U.S. is not going out with a whimper. It's going out with a bang. We're just waiting to see what that bang is going to be. Absolutely.

And I think what China offers is less, it allows. allows for you to have an actual national bourgeois as compared to like a completely comparador bourgeois where American global hegemony always relied on these compradors, you know, William Ruto, Batista, Samoza, just these absolute comparators that would gut these countries, whereas China is willing to work with all ideological various governments. And so if your government like Burkina Faso, which overthrew French colonialism and neo-colonialism. If your government gets a national liberation movement, the first person that you step in

will be China, will be Russia, and they'll give your revolution aid because they do not care about really the ideology internally within your country, as long as you know, you're good trading partners. I think that's why America is losing so badly. imperialism has given all these countries within the global south all these tools to essentially liberate themselves I mean production has moved to all of these countries in the global south

the world has become more literate than ever and that's not out of the goodness of capitalism it's out of the goodness to create good workers and as essentially the world has been given tools to at least divorce itself from Western imperialism by Western imperialism and go towards not a necessarily socialist

revolutionary character, but a nationalist less confidore a form of government. I also think there's a crisis right now happening where, you know, when a Democrat or, you know,

a former Republican like, you know, a traditional Republican like Bush, was talking to a foreign leader, it was the exact same relation that Trump and Vance had with Zelensky, right? They were basically in more diplomatic language saying, you know, fuck you, you're basically our puppet, don't

even talk back to us, but it was diplomatic, right? You know, oh, we'll have this wonderful trade agreement and, you know, we're great friends as nations and I love your sovereignty. And that for a lot of the workers within the global south

that are liberals, right? You know, that are labor aristocrats, you know, a better off in the majority of their working classes, they were able to fall for that, right? They were able to become Americanized, you know, believe in the American ideology. You know, there's always been a section of the global south. I think within American circles, we look at the global South as completely unified, right? You know, it's all just workers. What we don't realize is within the global South, there's liberals that are labor aristocrats and love America and are subsumed

within American, a global hagemonic ideology. There's, there's, of course, like, very, very exploited workers. There's the, the, the bourgeois of these countries and petty bourgeois, what have you. But these liberals that are, were comfortable and believed in Americanism,

you know, the, the, even our European allies, like the, the, fuck, who owns Greenland? It's, it's the Danes, right? Danes, yeah. Yeah, yeah. They, they were able to sort of fall for this sense that, oh, yeah,

we have our sovereignty. Oh, yeah. America's a great partner. Oh, yeah. This is a great system. And we're able to make our own trade deals. And these are our own trade deals and in our best interest also and not just America's interest. But as America rips off that mask and really shows that these governments have always been what they've always been, which is puppets, in order to maintain their grip on them and keep them from going towards China, I think even the liberal labor aristocrats have become a little bit radicalized. a little bit radicalized against America. I mean, what Trump is doing. And I think within the internal logic of capitalism, capitalism needs a Trump right now. But also, what it's not realizing is that it is destroying itself. I think that is just the ultimate. That is all I can really say about the system. I, maybe he is a Chinese agent and he's secretly a communist and he, you know,

he pulls out his, his quotations by chairman Mao after, you know, defunding US aid. And he says, ma'all, well, I'm doing it for you, ma'am, something like that. But, you know, that's how I feel. Yeah, our better world situation. Yeah, no, it's dialectics at play. And I just wanted to mention, you mentioned Burkina Faso, there's the alliance of the Sahel states now, another blow against imperialist neocolonialism in Africa. So that's another signal of the global South standing up, kicking out compradors, kicking over neo-colonial relations, forming economic and, you know, military. unions and alliances and doing it in the spirit of Thomas Sankar. It's a beautiful thing to

see. Absolutely. Absolutely. Moving on, you've talked to people all across the ideological spectrum. Trots, anarchists, egoists, what have you. If there's an ideology, it's probably been on Rev. Left or your other shows. Are there any tendencies that you notice that it's shared as common amongst all these different ideologies that you found with than all leftists and socialists? That's an interesting question. What I find amongst, you know, and that was much more, I mean,

I've certainly had on, you know, people of every different tendency. And that was kind of a kind of a thing I was doing early on with Rev Left is it was in that exploratory phase where I was like, let's just have on a representative of every major tendency on the left and let's hear them out, learn about them. We can disagree or whatever,

but it's important that we actually hear from their mouths instead of somebody who already disagrees with them what they actually believe. And, you know, I've obviously kind of moved on from that. But still, I keep an open, open arms to people who want to come on in good faith discussions and have discussions, although now it's much more with a explicitly Marxist bent. But, yeah, I mean, I guess the things that I find amongst people is, you know, even if they're not as politically developed as maybe some others, there's always this sincere repulsion against inequality. there's this attempt in the spiritual desert of capitalism alienation to find meaning and even identity through political identification and to find purpose in joining with others to try to

create a better world which is a beautiful impulse in human beings there's there's a split in every single tendency between the dogmatists and egoists of every single one like it's very common for, you know, an anarchist or something to say Marxists are all dogmatic or vice versa. But every single tendency has their dogmatist and their egoist and their antisocial narcissist because politics attracts, you know, those sorts of people like flies across the political spectrum. And then they all also have their genuine, humble, willing to put in the work, continue to learn aspects as well. And so obviously those are the elements that I want to highlight and play up because I think that's important. And Marxism is, and revolution

is an open-ended, in some sense, experimental project that we have to engage in with humility. And if we are led by our egos or we are reducing this thing to dogma, it just completely obliterates any potential that they may have and connects us or disconnects us from other people, etc. And yeah, there's just a genuine concern about the future and a widening consciousness outside of the confines of ideological conditioning that people are grappling with and they grapple with it in different ways. I don't know if that's getting at the question. The question itself is kind of ambiguous to me, but let me know if you want to get drilled down into details on some of that or if I'm misinterpreting your question altogether. No, not at all. That's exactly

what I was looking for. One thing I've noticed is there's two kinds of, you know, within various leftist ideologies, and it's either a complete rejection. There's extremes, right? There's a complete rejection of dogma and pragmatism over dogma, to a point where you even lose, like, the original revolutionary character of the theory. There's, like, very extreme version of that. You could say, like, the Maga-Commonist movement or La Russism or what have you. but and then there's also the

exact opposite where you turn it into this unable to actually affect the real world you know no concrete analysis of the real world and it becomes instead like a catchphrase right you know um this is state capitalism you know there's no such thing as socialism it's just state capitalism um you know you you can't do socialism ever right you know

unless it's perfect, so let's not even try, you know, it becomes defeatist in both ends. And I think the perfect encapsulation is a perfect blending of theory and practice, right? Theory and practice. And a theory always informed by our material reality around us, what do you exactly, what is your criteria for somebody you would consider a comrade, right? like across the ideological perspective spectrum because for me it's always been one you're anti-capitalist right your anti-American imperialism you're willing to at least defend you know social states against um western imperialism and regime change um and that you're just open-minded

and genuine right that's always been my criteria oh what would yours be for a comrade Yeah, just really quickly, I just want to address the point about theory and practice is that you, we all understand like too much theory and not enough practice. That's obviously a dead end. It's also, you know, when you try to organize, you run in very quickly to organizations and people who have no theory, but they're organizing and maybe even doing good work. But the fact that they don't have theory, they don't have understanding radically limits what they're able to do. So that gap goes in both directions and that's why they need to be unified. But yeah, to your point about what is the basis for unity. I think there's different bases for different organizations. So if we're talking a Vanguard party, you know, we're talking an advanced organization of that sort. I think that a unity of all true Marxists need to happen. So a real Marxist is somebody who understands that, you know, understands the basic critique of capitalism, understands that imperialism is capitalism on the global scene. imperialism is what capitalism does in its most generalized global dimensions and therefore it needs to be fought with the same rigor

and with the same amount of energy that you would fight capitalism because it is the same thing and so that is crucial and a lot of times you'll see people on the revolutionary left who aren't interested in confronting imperialism they think that you can whatever spontaneously have uprisings against capitalism at home or you can use the democratic mechanisms of ostensibly democratic bourgeois society to advance socialism without thinking about counter-revolution

and not thinking in terms of internationalist connections and that leads to a whole bunch of really shitty analysis when it comes to things like Palestine, when it comes to things like Syria, when it comes to things like North Korea, right? You can get incredibly chauvinistic, idealistic, reactionary, even out of ostensibly revolutionary anti-capitalists when it comes to that precisely because of that

that lack of understanding. So if you're talking to Vanguard party, I don't think, and I don't like MLs and MLMs thinking they can never work together, you know? I think that's absurd. I think the differences there are important. I think it's important that we are clear about them

and that we struggle about them. But thinking in the terms of like just an organization here in the U.S. if we ever got to a Vanguard party level, there's no reason why Mark's true. good faith Marxists that go through political education in the process of organizing and entering the party cannot use the mechanisms of democratic centralism and comradly struggle to work out our problems, identify primary contradictions, you know, find non-antagonistic contradictions versus antagonistic ones, and work through that in good faith. But that does require some of the

emotional and personal tools you laid out of, you know, just being not a freak, not a weirdo, being able to work with other people, not having an insane ego, not always wanting to be right, not thinking you're coming here to teach everybody else, but you're actually coming in with an open mind, willing to learn, willing to struggle, willing to self-criticize, and willing to work for something bigger than yourself. But when we're talking about mass movements, we're talking about broader organizations, obviously the standard decreases a little bit, right? There's a role for united fronts against things like fascism. There's a role that bigger mass organizations play and funneling and educating people through experience

into more principled or advanced formations. And so for that, you know, a broad understanding of capitalism, of the need for class solidarity, that class struggle is essential, that we share more with workers in other parts of the world than we do with the bourgeoisie of our own, that the two mechanisms of the ruling class the two party systems are both hostile to our position and they will use different they'll play the good cop bad cop routine on us but don't for a second think that we're going to get anything by appealing to or engaging with the democratic party as such much less liquidating ourselves inside of it those are some of the even lower level standards that i would hold for when it comes to

organizing because if if even that standard i understand the need for mass movements and mass organizations, but if you can't even make sense of those basic concepts, then your movement is just literally going nowhere whatsoever. And it's incredibly susceptible for just immediate co-optation by the Democratic Party, which is just a knife in the throat of any organization and any movement whatsoever. So those are kind of the two broad standards I would set for two different types of formations. I think that's an excellent Leninist answer. I mean, any organization does need a very highly disciplined working class, membership that is able to leave the workers and especially if we allow in all these different various tendencies that are, because, you know, one of the

biggest issues of leftism, Marxism, is that bourgeois ideas inevitably infiltrate leftist movements and spaces all the time. And they disguise themselves as truly liberatory or revolutionary, you know, radical liberal. or um um social democracy or you know uh even other marxist tendencies that call themselves marxist i mean this is what leninism was born out of that split in the the second international right with the the the the second international becoming very heavily infiltrated by bourgeois um ideas i i think one of the oddest phenomenons that um it you know it's always so hard to tell about the left and i've always been trying to figure it out is why is the left

so divided, right? And why is the right so easily united, right? The right will argue with itself, you know, white supremacists will argue about who's truly white and who's the real master race in Europe or something or who is the true Ariens. The conservatives and the neocons and the libertarians will argue and the Democrats and Republicans will argue liberalism, of course, being inherently right-wing. But I think that issue is um leftism until it is actually able to do revolution remains to some extent and and ideal right like even if it is um um a scientific analysis that sign until that scientific analysis is practiced you really don't know who has the best framework for actually getting

the revolution done who has the most excellent analyses of capitalism itself until it is practiced, you know, Marxism, MLM, Hojaism, what have you, you know, all these tendencies. And so when you are not in power, when your, when your goal, main goal, for right-wing ideologies, that is, is to preserve the current superstructure and base of society, and tweak it a little, right? You know, tweak it a little. Neocons will tweak it. Fascists will put it into emergency mode. Liberals will put it into a relaxed sort of empire driving. It's a very easy job to just defend the system. But to overthrow capitalism is a very tough job.

And this inevitably leads to all this infighting because you have to have de-perfect analysis, the most scientific analysis for both the issues of capitalism and how to overthrow it. And this is where all of these different tendencies come in, right? Marxism, Marxism, Marxism, Herzlenaism, Maoism, what have you. But to some extent, you were laying down this. point that, you know, MLs, MLMs don't need to necessarily fight. I think you're exactly right. As important as the differences are, you know, between Marxism and Marxism and Maoism,

you know, mass line and non-revisionism and what have you. What the fuck are, can we do about China, right? Like these debates about like the fate of China is up to the Chinese people, you know, what our party's position on China is in the long term does not really, substantially much on the ground within America and of course it is a worthwhile debate but things like that are so often divide the left

and it's because the left's job is monumentous and sometimes these are small genuine arguments about the structure of a party and how to overthrow capitalism but sometimes they are to some extent useless to some extent they are petty Why? I'll let you speak. I'm sorry. I'm talking over myself.

No, that's fine. Yeah. I think your points are all incredibly important. And that point about, you know, right reactionary formations reacting against social movements, reacting against developments and progressive movements, reacting against socialist movements, defending something that already exists despite disagreements on what the critique of the thing that already exists, except. There's a broad agreement that we do not want this progressive movement. So it's not really about building something new. Conservatives and reactionaries are not fundamentally interested in building something new. They want to harken back to something or defend something that's already existed through tradition. And that just allows for a sort of easier time, whereas you're right, the left is trying to build something totally new.

And that is in the future. That's indeterminate. that is unconstrained that's wide open and therefore a thousand different ways of thinking about and going about doing that open up there's also an element and you can see this with the trump movement how the right you know and it's not to say this never exist on the left but to a much less extent the right really enjoys falling back behind the leader they like a strong man they like a guy that they can put all there project all their hopes on to and really get behind him and kind of subordinate themselves to it right for the right always calling everybody

cucks and making fun of everybody for being weak and you know i'm a real man i stand up for this machismo performance they put on they're so willing to subordinate themselves to a great leader to take care of things for them and to actually be a a proxy for their own you know masculinist aspirations and i think that is just like a a weird thing that's certainly alien to me an alien to a lot of people on the left. We're interested in democratic communal movements, mass movements, coming together as people, working together to build something brand new. And so that's an element of it as well. But yeah, I think you really, I think you put your finger on the, on the gist of it, on the most substantial, substantial aspect of it, which I'm

just kind of reiterating in a slightly different way. Yeah. And also, I think just going to that right point um the the rights when they fall behind a leader it's safety right like change is scary inherently like especially people who are subsumed with thousands of years of tradition i mean private property has existed since uh agricultural societies um woman and patriarchy can find its origins in the in the de evolution of a humanity out of primitive communism to you know a class society um so when you have all these traditions behind you something new and radical that changes that that says you know let's get rid of class society let's get rid of patriarchy let's get rid of a homophobia that is inherently a scary thing to ask whereas safety is familiar and for many right right wing

people of their their entire ideology is an ideology of a fear of fear um and not to reduce these very complex movements to very simple emotions. But it really is fear versus hope. I mean, that's what socialism in its best attributes proposes that humanity can do better than this. And we believe in a future for humanity rather than this barbarism that they're giving us. Absolutely. And yeah, that's a very human characteristic. We all have to some extent that that contradiction between fear, comfort, stability, and experimentation, doing something new, growing. So that kind of is a human thing and yeah fear i think you you nailed it is the if we're reducing movements to like base emotions fear is a huge huge part of it i would also add

disgust when you get to the more reactionary elements as being a pronounced emotion that drives thing right this need to purge out um you know impure elements uh you know this goes back to nazi impurity and the the bloodline and all of this obsession about blood and soil so fear and disgust and then defending of long-standing traditions that already exist there. And you mentioned safety, which is a sort of salve to fear. That manifests is law and order, right? Stability. You know, anything that threatens stability, anything that is pushing for dramatic change,

the reaction is violence of the state, the police, in the form of law and order. And they're always banging on about that, which is, I think, a reveal of their underlying fear that really does drive them. So yeah, I think that is, obviously it's in some sense a reduction in a simplicity, but I also think it's a genuinely robust and substantive aspect of all reaction at the end of the day. I think one thing that we often forget about is that all dictators, all right-wing movements, all fascists have had to have some popular support. Right. It's not the majority of the society, right? It's a subsection of society. But, you know, fascism, base was within those that were consumed with the most traditional aspects of society, right?

Men, the churches, those who were afraid of the new, right? And so even in the most dictatorial fascist regimes, they have always relied on at least a small part of the masses that are afraid of change that stand to lose something a little bit within the current system if there is change. And for example, let's take men. Men under socialism and communism tend to gain so much, right? You know, liberation from strict gender roles, the alienation of the workplace, just this, you know, a sense of being boxed into the social role. But also on the opposite side, within capitalist society, you get to be the king of your household. You know, you get to dominate over your wife and kids. It's a fucked up way of you being your own little mini CEO within the house. And that's your job under capitalism.

It's to raise a good worker through how your kids view you and your relation with your wife and your own kids. And these little concessions that have been given to these traditional aspects of society make them afraid of that change because they don't want to lose that tiniest bit of power that these very large superstructures have given them. Yes. And there's an irony there, too, when you're defending capitalism in class society, because class society goes way back. Capitalism, less so. But capitalism actually overtly militates against tradition. It is a mechanism of rapid, you know, there's this revolutionary technical aspect of capitalism where it's constantly overturning things in this sort of blitzkrieg force ahead that is capitalism that actually destroys the sort of provincial traditionalism that a lot of reactionaries and conservatives want to maintain.

So that creates a little bit of a cognitive dissonance, but because capitalism is the thing that they were born into, and that comes before them, they defend it. And so I always thought that that's always an interesting sort of tension that is alive and well within reactionaries in the capitalist epoch. But if you really want to understand reactionary psychology, I always find it very helpful to go back and study the reactionaries of the 18th and 19th and 17th,

century, they were defending monarchism and feudalism and the divine rights of kings against the revolutionary forces of republicanism and liberalism, right? So at that point in human history, that was the progressive force. And so conservatives, people that were fear-based, they wanted to run to the protection of, instead of a strong man leader, they wanted to run to the protection of the king. They wanted to maintain the king, the Leviathan, the sovereign. And so it's really and to read their letters, to hear their, you know, to read their sort of screeds and rants against modernity and development. It's just a fascinating peek into the reactionary mind that is put into different epochs and must react given that constraint, but really has

this fundamental just looking back over its shoulder, trying to stop progress, trying to stop change, romanticizing, always romanticizing the past. And as Marxists, we know that the only way out is through. The only way out is forward. There is no going pack. That past never existed. Even if it did, it's totally dead. But I always find reading old reactionaries trying to defend monarchical

and feudal structures from the revolutionary forces of capitalism and liberalism to be really, really insightful when it comes to the basic psychology of reaction. Revolution will not happen until we have total Joe Rogan listener genocide.

but really I think you did hit the nail on the head that reaction is always behind you know it's like mouse said it's the new being birthed out of the old and the old tries to just maintain but it's a dance and it's a dance that always moves forward in some way or another and the old is always the old is always the the current new is always the future's old you know to to make it make sense yeah um We're getting late. Let's start wrapping this up just as a final sort of goodbye. And to end on a positive note, within America and around the globe, what are some movements, current, things that give you hope, that keep you going? What drives you to have optimism? Even aside from individual instantiations of movements and orgs, we mentioned Palestine, the Alliance of the Sahel states, we've mentioned the rising class and social consciousness of especially younger people, growing working class consciousness occurring indigenous groups on the front lines of extractive capitalism and colonialism around the world, the waning U.S. hegemonic unipolarity moment, already ending, really. you know all these all these contradictions coming to a head it's scary but that is how change happens that when you are alive at a time of great change it is scary it is overwhelming it feels impossible and and you go back through history and you look at other people living through transformative times and they have very similar sentiments and the thing that always gives me optimism is a basic understanding of dialectics that the more you ramp up repression, the more you ramp up

its resistance. We talked earlier about imperialism going around the world and through imperializing other nations and subjugating them and using hard and soft power, they educate the working classes of those societies. Go talk to an average Venezuelan about imperialism and talk to an average American about imperialism. Americans fancy themselves more developed or in a richer country, we live in a democracy, unlike Venezuelans, and they are just childish in their understanding of the world. And that's a dialectical response to being imperialized. Not only do you learn about it, you understand how the real world works, you don't have the luxury of retreating into fantasy and idealism, you also are taught how to resist it. And so dialectics gives me hope

that there is always and everywhere a human refusal to be dominated and exploited. forever. Fascism and fascist movements, they never last. Why? They can't. Because they attempt to turn the dial of repression up to 10, which at the same time turns the dial of resistance up to 12. That's dialectics. Anywhere there's a boot on somebody's throat, there's a person grabbing that ankle and trying to stab into it with a knife. And so, you know, change is scary. It's going to have many moments where it looks incredibly dark. No doubt. As members of the Imperial Corps, We are entering hard times. Things are going to get really bad.

That's the importance of organization. That's the importance of networks of family, friends, and comrades that have each other's back. When shit really hits the fan, it's not money and guns and ammo that's going to keep your ass safe. It's having a community of people that love you and who you love that is going to be the actual social safety net in those times of chaos. And those are the people that are going to ground you, that are going to give you courage, that are going to keep you moving forward. So things are happening at the global scale. Things are happening at the national scale. Consciousness is being raised.

Old illusions are falling apart. Masks are being ripped off of faces. And it's an exhilarating time. So instead of giving into despair, instead of giving into a doomerism, instead of throwing your hands up and saying, oh, God, we're all fucked, you have to realize this exhilaration is not the exhilaration of the end. This is the exhilaration of change. And we've wanted change.

The worst fate is actually to be stuck. in what we're living in now forever, that nothing ever changes, that nothing ever happens, that nothing ever gets overturned. That's actually the real hell. There's a comfort and a stability in that because we know that. We've lived in that for the last 40 years. But there's actual liberation in that coming to an end. And as it does, doorways that were closed our entire lives are going to be ripped open.

Opportunities are going to present themselves again and again. and community, connection, and organization are going to be our best weapons in the undoubtedly hard times to come. And at the other end of this tumultuous time, at the other end of this transitionary period, whatever comes out the other end, it's going to be new, it's going to be different, and in some ways I truly believe it's going to be better. There are more people on this planet who have a material interest in a future for themselves and their families and the human species than the amount of people on this planet who have an interest in maintaining the brutal, disgusting, stupid, irrational fucking system that exists right now because very few people actually benefit from it at the end of the day. And new ways of organizing human society around maximizing flourishing for human beings instead of maximizing profit for a few elite, that has to come. That is coming.

And it might not be over the hill of this next crisis. it might be two hills it might be the next who knows we don't we don't dictate understand or control the future but we understand the past we understand the present we have the tools to navigate whatever comes in community and organization gives us the resilience and the and the love and the connection to protect us during this tumultuous time so i'm actually incredibly optimistic i'm incredibly optimistic if nothing was changing then i would take the black pill if nothing ever changed i would be a dumer but all there is is is inexorable cascading change and that's scary it's also exhilarating it's also um creating amazing

opportunities for us so so now more than ever don't there's no there's no a political life anymore there's no turning and retreating into your personal life and saying politics is all messy i don't want anything to do it politics is knocking on your front fucking door and how ready you are to answer it how prepared you are how many friends family and comrades you have standing behind you when that door flies open, that's what's going to be determinative of how you are going to make it through the next couple of years to decades. So, yeah, I'm obviously.

I mean, I think to some extent, there's been a little bit of escapism within like late stage neoliberal capitalism, such as like the rise of AI buddies and virtual reality. A lot of people have not wanted to confront what's happening right now. But I think, like you said,

we have so much to be hopeful for. um revolutions have happened under the worst conditions possible i mean a hundred times worse than even what we're facing for our american and western european audiences i mean could you have imagined um in the midst of the vietnamese war uh the vietnam war telling like a vietnamese peasant that yeah we're going to win um it would have seemed impossible to do that that that the vietnamese would have ever won and yet they surmounted that challenge um in the october revolution it would have been impossible to have ever imagined, I mean, it's that quote. It's that quote, you know, socialism seems impossible, but so did the end of the age of absolute kings, right? You know, it's always impossible

to imagine the new happening until the new happens. And there's also this recognition that a lot of liberation fighters in the 60s had, you know, Stokely Carmichael, Hugh P. Newton, of revolutionary suicide. And that is not dying for a cause greater than you. This recognition that, yes, revolution may not happen in my lifetime, but I have two choices. And one is being subsumed in this sort of like overly internet language, black-pilled, doomer-ish sort of nothing's going to change

and I'm just going to die in capitalism, or recognizing that the work that you do is a drop in the bucket towards that eventual liberation of mankind and humanity from class society, from capitalism, from racism, sexism, patriarchy, what have you. The Russian Revolution itself was built up on the foundations of past movements, past liberal revolutionaries. The Chinese Revolution, the very same. Every single revolution has stood on the shoulders of great giants and masses that struggled before them for that eventual climactic triumph. And nobody can say when that triumph happens

as we get closer to the triumph as we get closer to the climax shit is going to get bad it's going to look bad but like the Palestinian people who right now in the midst of fucking rubble in a landscape

littered with the bones of their relatives who have not even been able to get a proper burial who are still able to through their faith hang up decorations for Ramadan still drink coffee

and chat with their friends still have hope for the future still send their kids to school I mean these kids may have lost their uncles their mothers their fathers they still refuse to give up amidst the worst destruction and holocaust of the 21st century

those kids I saw the videos of those kids going to the school and it brought a tear to my eye just how happy they seemed Just too excited, they seemed, you know, talking to by Palestinian friends online. I think I have learned more about being a communist from Palestinians than I have some communists even. And I think our task and our fight that we have within American and Western society is not as hard as people who have done it successfully before. Absolutely. Absolutely. Palestinians, not only do they live their life, have their relationships, they continue to fight back.

And Palestine has not only taught us how to be better communists, better liberationists, better anti-imperialist, and anti-colonialists. They taught us to be better humans, fully human. And so the Palestinian people are at the forefront of this global fight and the inflection point of the best of humanity. And those trying to strangle and murder and kill Palestine represent the worst of us. and represent the forces that all of humanity has to come together to finally put down

and transcend. And I truly believe humanity can and will do it. And we have an obligation to each other and to the future to do whatever the fuck we can. And if Palestine

can still rise up, fight back, live their lives, if you're sitting in the Imperial Corps, you have no fucking excuse. Absolutely. Absolutely. Brad O'Shea,

thank you so much for coming on. This has been a wonderful conversation. I hope we can continue working together in the future. I like the way you think. I think we think very similar ways, but also a little bit different. I like picking your brain, basically. It's fun. Where can, if anybody doesn't know where they can find you, where can they best find you?

Sure, yeah, I just want to say, first of all, the feeling is mutual. This has been really fun. You're incredibly insightful and incredibly funny. I would love to continue working with you and to just use my. platform to get more people to become aware of yours. I think you have a really incredibly principled voice and those are those are incredibly important at this time. As for me, you can find everything I do politically at RevLeftRadio.com. Okay, Brett. It's been a treat. It's been a hoot. You have a good one. You too, my friend.