Rev Left Radio - Anti-Capitalist Parenting: A Dialectical Perspective w/ Breht O'Shea (Upstream Podcast)

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

One of the most radical things you can do is live your life in direct opposition to the forces that control our society. Not just fighting for policies or organizing your community, although those are certainly important parts of it, but also living with values that oppose the values of our dominant society. And even more importantly, raising the next generation to embody those values—not in a coercive way, but through organic parenting and role modeling that make radicalism irresistible. This is how we raise revolutionaries: instilling community, love, egalitarianism, and a need for justice into children. And this is just what our guest in today's episode has devoted himself to doing. Breht O’Shea is an activist, organizer, political educator, and host of the podcast Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the podcasts Red Menace and Shoeless in South Dakota. He is a father of three based out of Omaha Nebraska. In this conversation, Part 3 of our Post Capitalist Parenting series, Breht shares with us insights about parenting that he's learned over the years as a father of three and what Marxism teaches us about parenting. We discuss the classic text by Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which is a dialectical materialist analysis of patriarchy and the family, tracing the emergence of the patriarchal family and it took through various iterations of class society but also exploring what families have looked like under actually-existing socialism and also what it might look like under communism. We also explore the anti-natalist position which attempts to argue that having children is immoral, why this perspective is deeply flawed, what Buddhism can teach us about parenting, and much, much more. Support Breht and Rev Left Radio, and join their community HERE Further Resources The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Freidrich Engels Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, by Kristen Ghodsee Related Episodes: Post Capitalist Parenting Pt. 1: Parenting Under Capitalism w/ Toi Smith Post Capitalist Parenting Pt. 2: Reimagining the Family w/ Kristen Ghodsee Revolutionary Leftism with Breht O'Shea Buddhism and Marxism with Breht O'Shea What is To Be Done? with Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism w/ Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante Red Menace: "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and The State" by Friedrich Engels (Pt. 1) Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism w/ Kristen Ghodsee Intermission music: "Cool 4 U" by Club Cafe Upstream is a labor of love—we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Post-capital-a-a-a-ha-a-a-a-a-ma-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a. Post-capitalist parenting means raising well-rounded human beings, not future workers, well-rounded human beings that have the ability to retreat into art, into books, into nature, that these things are prioritized over your grades, how much money you're going to make, what job you're going to have. There's no even guarantee that there's going to be jobs, right? What people want is to be able to live well-rounded, creative, expressive lives, not just make money forever and gear their whole life towards doing just that.

So how do we raise revolutionaries? We raise critical thinkers with big hearts. We raise people that don't just pair it what we believe, but that see us role model it, that have good relationships with us so that they trust it, and that are taught how do you think critically about their society. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. One of the most radical things that you can do is live your life in direct opposition to the forces that control our society. Not just fighting for policies or organizing your community, although those are certainly important parts of it,

but also living with values that oppose the values of our dominant society. And even more importantly, raising the next generation to embody those values. And not in a coercive way, but through organic, parenting and role modeling that make radicalism irresistible. This is how we raise revolutionaries by instilling community, love, egalitarianism, and a need for justice into both our children and those who we have a hand in raising. And this is just what our guest in today's episode has devoted himself to do it. Brett O'Shea is an activist, organizer, political educator, host of the podcast.

Podcasts Revolutionary Left Radio, and co-host of the podcast's Red Menace and Shulis in South Dakota. He is a father of three based out of Omaha, Nebraska. In this conversation, part three of our post-capitalist parenting series, Brett shares with us insights about parenting that he's learned over the years as a father of three, and what Marxism teaches us about parenting. We discuss the classic text by Engels, the origin of the family, private property, and the state, which is a dialectical materialist analysis of patriarchy and the family, tracing the emergence of the patriarchical family in class society. We also explore what families have looked like under actually existing socialism and what they might look like under communism.

We also explore the anti-natalist position, which attempts to argue that having children is immoral, why this perspective is deeply flawed, what Buddhism can teach us about parenting, and much, much more. And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener funded. We could not keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bi-weekly episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show,

and it will also give you access to our entire back catalog of Patreon. episodes along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Sign up and find out more at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. And if Patreon's not really your thing, you can also make a tax deductible recurring or one-time donation on our website, upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Through your support, you'll be helping us keep upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund,

so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now, here's Della, in conversation with Brett O'Shea. All right, welcome, Brett, back to the upstream podcast, so happy to have you back. We always start with an introduction, but in this case, can you introduce yourself in relation to the topic of parenting? What is your connection with this theme? Sure. Well, first of all, happy to be back on Upstream. Big fan of Upstream myself. I love what you all do over there. And I truly think that Rev Left and Upstream are, you know, twin flames, as you will, with regards to what the sort of stuff that we're trying to do and the sort of people

that we're trying to reach. So, you know, I tip my, my cap to you and Robbie and everything that you guys do with upstream. As for me, I'm Brett, the co-host of Rev. Left Radio, co-host of Red Menace with Allison Escalante, former co-host of guerrilla history, et cetera, political educator, organizer based out of Omaha, Nebraska. But the point of this conversation, of course, is to talk about parenting, which I'm really thrilled to be asked to come on and talk about that. You know, I think on the left it is discuss sometimes, but not as much as maybe it could be or should be. And when it does, it can get needlessly contentious for certain reasons, which I'm sure we'll, you know, explore or bump into throughout this conversation. But yeah, I am a, I'm 36 right now. I'm a father of three. Married,

father of three. I had my first child at the age of 19. She was born right as I turned 20. And ever since then, every six years through no planning or foresight on my part, I've had a child. So I have three kids each six years apart. So basically from the age of 19 to the age of 36, I have been raising small children as well as older ones, right? My oldest, my daughter now is a sophomore in high school, about to have her sweet 16. So I have like kind of the full gamut of raising children at different age groups. I have two boys and a girl. So that's a huge part of it.

And we'll get into that later, certain aspects of the relationship because I had my daughter with you know, my, a girlfriend that I previously had, and we were very close. We were together for many, many years. The relationship ultimately didn't work out that I met my wife and had our two boys. And there's some interesting things we can explore there later on. But I always say that when you have kids, what you realize, especially when you have multiple kids, is twofold. One is that, you know, two kids are not harder than one kid. It's an exponential curve. If you have two kids, it's four times as hard as one kid. If you have three kids, it feels like it's 16 times as hard. And that's kind of hyperbolic, but only kind of. I feel like, you know,

it's not a, it's not a linear shift upward. And every kid is so different. So the second part of that is that every child that I've had, I've come to the conclusion that 80 to 90 percent of their personality, their basic temperament, their basic orientation to the world is kind of baked in. And as a parent, you get to work with that remaining 10 or 20 percent, which is beautiful, right? because you see like as a flower blooms differently than the flowers around it, children come into the world with their own orientation, with their own way of being, with their own form of expression naturally. And you get to sort of see that beautiful uniqueness, cultivate it and try to make the best of it. But yeah, all three of my children are incredibly different temperamentally,

basic personality-wise. And so it's fascinating to see that as well. But I also have to say that I am throwing in the towel as a parent. I'm looking into getting a vasectomy soon. My wife kind of wants to get off hormonal birth control for various reasons. And so we're done creating more children. So I think I'm good at three. But yeah, I've spent the last 15 plus years of my life raising children. So I hope I have something useful to say about it. Thank you for that introduction and bringing in your kids and your wife as well. And you spoke about that it is hard, right? In that exponential hard. that comes, one of the reasons why it's hard is due to our political economy, our economic

system of capitalism. And so can you share, you know, from your years of parenting, how has our economic system impacted you as a parent? And how does it impact the process of parenting in general? It makes it brutally difficult. You know, there's class hierarchy here, right? If you are wealthy. If you have lots of resources, you basically can hire what the old style communal family, extended family and a healthy community used to provide, right? Like rich people will hire nannies and cooks and whatever. They'll hire out their ability to extend their family and get the help that in previous eras, especially before class society under what we might call primitive communism, it was just kind of unthinkable. It was natural. It was built in to the structure

of communities that everybody would pitch in and help. And that took different forms depending on cultures and certain histories. But that has been really stripped away, not only under class society, particularly under hyper individualist competitive capitalism, where the family is reduced, reduced, reduced, it becomes an economic unit that is just fighting to stay afloat. And as cost of living rises, as uncertainty about the future rises, as you have to go into debt just to get by as that rises, the burden on the shoulders of working parents becomes astronomical. Child care, right? Just one aspect of working family means that in most working families, both parents are going to have

to go out into the workforce to make enough money to get by. And especially when you have children, your cost of living goes up naturally because you have to, you know, you have another human being that you're taking care of. So that necessitates trying to get into, get your child into daycare. Now, for the first, I think for most daycares, you can't really get them in until they're potty trained. So you're talking the first two, three years of a child's life that, you know, you might not even have access to that, even if you could afford it. And then the astronomical price of child care when you can, when they're old enough to get in, is just backbreaking. So the stress of trying to survive under capitalism for working people gets magnified.

And not only financially, right, but psychologically. because it's not only how am I going to afford daycare, do we have a big enough house for to have another kid? Are we in a good school district? You know, are we giving them extracurricular activity that can cultivate aspects of their being that isn't just addressed at school like sports and music, etc? You have to go into huge debt. So me and my family, we're in like thousands and thousands of dollars of debt for one simple reason. I decided that I wanted to get an education to try to better my life. And I don't have health insurance. Obviously, I'm self-employed. I don't have health insurance. And so I recently have some surgical or some

health issues that needed surgery. And so now I have thousands and thousands of more dollars in debt just just piling up. I get letters in the mail every day about another $500 for this and another $1,000 for this. And it's just, it's absolutely brutal. So that's the obvious financial stress. But psychologically, you're also thinking, what about my kids? What? What? future are they going to have as this system rots and decays and as as wealth gets shunted to the very top over and over and over again as we're now staring down the barrel of another economic collapse i had my first child right around that 2008 financial crisis so entering adulthood as a 1920 year old having my first child right at the exact same time that the 2008 financial crisis

has happened. And now we're still struggling, you know, still feels like I've never progressed financially. And now we're staring down the barrel of what's looking like another possible recession. And, and then just the bigger question of how long can this house of cards last? So not only am I looking at a short term recession, but this whole system seems like it's destined to slam into a brick wall at some point. Like, we've been flying off the cliff since 2008. We're just waiting for gravity to introduce us to the ground. And so that creates a fuck ton. of psychological concern about your kids, their future. How do I best equip them? So, you know, traditionally it's like, okay, we get them a job. Here's a good job that they can have. Okay, well,

first of all, in America, that's going to be hundreds of thousands of dollars, probably to go to a really good school or tens of thousands of dollars to go to a state school to get even the bachelor degree to be able to possibly move in that direction. And then you have the concern of like technological progress in the sense of like this techno oligarchy that's emerging. So like, what if they're right about AI. I don't know. I'm, you know, we could have a whole conversation about the realist, pessimist and optimistic visions of what AI could bring, but there's not a zero chance that AI could start to automate huge swath of the workforce. So, you know, what does that even mean to raise a child and put them on a career path, not knowing if that career path will even be

viable in five years, 10 years, by the time they reach maturity? So that's a brutal aspect of having children. It's like not only do you have to worry about society and all of the things that we all worry about if you're listening to a show like this, you also have to worry about what future your kids are going to inherit. And on one hand, that's horrifying. On another, it's deeply motivating. I can't separate my politics from my desperation to help create a world where my kids can actually flourish and not be crushed under the wheels of fascism, imperialism, capitalism, and for other children around the world not to be crushed under the wheels of that. Look, look at the children in Palestine think about being a parent in Palestine right now incomprehensible

incomprehensible and then the marxist element can come in with reproductive labor isn't compensated but capitalism depends on it so under the under the capitalist system it's not just that we're raising human beings you know we're raising future workers capitalism will eventually take them out of your home put them into a job exploit them mercilessly for surplus value while they're destroying the world and bombing kids in other countries. And that whole process that you're psychologically and financially stressed about raising a child, trying to do everything you can for that child to hand them over to capitalist at the end and not being compensated for all that reproductive labor that the capitalist depends on to have a fully formed worker that they can then exploit mercilessly

for the rest of their fucking lives, it's repulsive. It's unacceptable. But, you know, obviously we still live under that system and we haven't organized the movement. enough to topple it yet. I think that's coming, but we haven't done that yet. So this is the, this is the situation that we're born into and we have to operate on. And then the very last thing I'll say is, it's twofold. One, you mentioned working. Right away, having to work so hard, not even to thrive, but just to survive, that means that a lot of parents can't spend time with their kids. So these crucial years where your child is developing into a human being, you have to take eight hours of every day stripped away from you by this society to work for a job

that doesn't even allow you to give them a good life reliably. And it takes away that life, that precious lifetime you have to spend with your children and have that deep, deep relationship. I'm actually, I got lucky there because the nature of my work as self-employed means I'm in the trenches every day. You know, like with my wife, like we are partners. We have figured out a way to stay home with her with her job is seasonal my job is self-employed so even though we're under an immense amount of psychological and financial stress 24 goddamn 7 there is this little silver lining that we don't have to take our kids to daycare we couldn't afford it anyway but we don't have to take them to somebody else that we can stay in the home and be with them as as hard as that is

psychologically how demanding that is physically of your labor and your time but that's what having a child is. It's selfless service to another human being. They didn't ask to be born. They didn't ask to come into this world. You brought them into this world. So it's not a burden. It's a beautiful responsibility. But I'm very lucky just with regards to the amount of time I get to spend with my kids and how that pays off in our relationship. And that wasn't true for my parents. That wasn't true for my dad. My dad who has passed now, he, you know, 12-hour days. Most of my child, my life as a child, I didn't get a hang out with my dad. And to lose him at 55 and not even be able to have, you know, that 20 plus 30 years that I should have with

a dad if he lived, a normal lifespan, it's soul crushing to think about all the time that I lost out with my dad. So that's a huge part of it. And the very last thing is, on top of all of that, I'm raising a 16-year-old daughter. The ideology of capital is omnipresent. YouTube, social media, are disgustingly shallow pop culture. All it does all day is shove into your children face. Money, wealth, status, big house. Look at, this YouTuber has a Bugatti. And, you know, now you've clicked on one too many wrong YouTube videos and Andrew Tate is screaming at you about how women should be subserved, whatever. That's another element, another terrain of struggle that parents now have to try to fucking navigate. Needless to say, the free and accessible porn that is on the

internet and all the horrific things that a child can stumble across. And then this, the ideology that is being punched into their heads since birth about the only thing really mattering is ego, money, wealth, status, fuck the haters, be an influencer, become a millionaire, be a girl boss, while that is fucking impossible for 98% of the population, setting children up for despair, low self-worth, if this is the thing being dangled in front of me, that this is what a successful life means. and just the raw statistical fact that 98% are not going to ever be a millionaire or a girl CEO, boss, or whatever the fuck, you know, that's setting them up for a certain way of analyzing their own life that is just horrific. So narcissism is fostered, this worship of the self and money is fostered.

If you pull children today, most kids say they want to be YouTube influencers now, you know, something that is just completely alienated from contributing to any sense of a productive. society that is shut off, by definition, for the vast majority of children anyway. And it just all creates a really scary situation for parenting. And we'll get into questions later about some people think it's cruel to bring a child into this world, et cetera. And I have a whole rant against that for sure. But yeah, it's not easy. And those are some of the many, many ways that living under this sort of system, especially the brutal American form of capitalism, the way that that brutalizes families and just makes life increasingly difficult, if not impossible for many. Wow. Yeah, thank you for laying out all those challenges and also the opportunity and

how it can be a source of motivation and inspiration for our work in the world. I certainly hear that and feel that. And so you articulated the kind of mainstream goal of parenting to get our kids into good jobs so that they can rise the ladder and be good capitalists and workers. What would you say is your alternative goal of parenting? And maybe what are the values you're trying to instill in them as you do that alternative goal? And maybe how? How are you instilling those? Yeah, that's a great question. So this is something I've thought about obviously deeply since I first had a child. In fact, I always tell the story of when I found out that my longtime girlfriend at the age of 19 that we had gotten pregnant, which obviously was not planned, it represented a huge paradigm shift in

wordly for me. So at that point, I'm 19 years old. What I'm interested in is, you know, doing drugs with my friends, you know, you know, whatever. The normal, the stupid myopic concerns of a teenager, which aren't stupid. A teenager is about to have fun. It's about exploring the world, you know, drinking, going to parties, hanging out with your friends, doing crazy shit. Then I'm working at a gas station at 19. I had already failed out of college. And so that was my kind of life situation. but there was no pressure to do anything about that because I was having fun. And then I get the call. I think I was literally at the gas station working when I got the call.

And I just remember just being like overwhelmed and needing to process that for a second, knowing that we're going to have the baby and, you know, do everything we can to make life as good as possible for them, but knowing that I'm in a really rough position here. Right. And so I remember just immediately thinking, oh God, I have to learn about the world and myself. If I'm going to have a child, I'm going to need to radically expand my worldview, my understanding of the world. I need to think deeply about what my priorities are and how I'm going to be a competent father.

And that immediately, like, shifted into, okay, I don't know where to start. I don't really have good guidance here. I'm just going to start reading books. And I just remember, like, going to, like, bookstores and just grabbing random books of any genre in reading. evolutionary biology, politics, whatever. And I would, you know, just read, read, read, read, started, like, that's when I started first entering, like, reading political texts, like, not theory or anything yet, but just

books about, like, mainstream politics and books about Buddhism and Eastern philosophy. So I immediately started reading, I immediately started having this interest in philosophy and politics, just as a natural outgrowth of just engaging intellectually with the world. And at the time I worked a night shift at a gas station. So there would be times where 30 minutes would pass without a customer coming in. So I had a huge swath of time on the job to just plow through these books. And so from day one, I had always been very interested in expanding my awareness, my understanding of the world so that I can be better positioned to help my child guide them.

And there's like a deadline. There's like nine months, right? So it's like I'm trying to pack this in. In the process of that, I said I should get back into. school. I mean, I'm a millennial. We were told if you want any future at all, you need to get a college degree. That was beaten into our heads growing up. That's turned out to be a lie. Now the college degree that you go tens of thousands of dollars in debt for is just as good as a high school diploma was 20 years ago as far as getting into jobs. But I felt like that's a necessity.

But I also felt that I just failed out of college. So I was trying to do like environmental science or something. And so if I was going to succeed in college, it would have to be something. actually cared about. I could not force myself to be interested in something or pursue something just because one day it might lead to a job. So wrongly or rightly, I decided that I was going to do philosophy. And I love my philosophy degree. Helped me enormously become a deep, critical thinker that I almost certainly would not be without that intensive philosophical training at a local state school here. I got a lot of debt for it, but there's also payoffs for it. So as my daughter comes into the world and is going through her first few years, I'm going to school for

philosophy, continuing my reading, getting deeper into like Buddhist meditative practices, which were crucial in helping me mature. Like, you know, just learning how to meditate correctly and doing that intensely as I'm becoming a parent, it's like I parented myself up several levels of just basic maturity, not like mind-blowing mystical experiences or anything like enlightenment, but just as a 19-year-old, you know, kind of a wild guy. chipping away at the ego, situated the ego to where it belongs, having the emotional capacity of loving compassion for total strangers, having the ability to sit with what is, like just the core benefits of a meditation practice really helped me grow up in a really important way in alignment

with the expansion of my intellectual understanding of the world through reading and then through my, you know, going into philosophy. So all that sets me up for the values I try to instill in my children from back then all the way till today. So one thing is I deeply try to teach my children from a young age critical thinking and the ability to critically engage with their culture and the superstructure, right? It's not about parroting my views. And there's a tendency for children obviously to do that. They look up to you, they love you, they respect you. And so whatever you're saying, whether you're a QAnon conspiracy theorist or a principled Marxist Leninist, your children growing up are going to be like as long as they don't fucking hate you they're going to be like yeah

that's my dad that's my mom they know a lot of shit that i don't know like obviously they're right about these things so you want to always hedge against that the parroting of views and so i'll often take the opposite view i'll often you know when they overconfidently say something i'll bring in a view that i don't even agree with but just to test them and i make that explicit like hold on hold on here somebody that disagrees with you would say this, how would you respond to that? And so what I'm trying to do and what I've always tried to do is teach them how to think, not what to think. Because teaching somebody what to think is very hollow. It's superficial. They don't actually have any convictions of their own. They're just parroting something that somebody else told them. We see this kids growing up in reactionary households, neo-Nazi households, Christian fundamentalist households, that they are brutalized by that. And they have, have to really off many of them often very struggle very hard as they grow up to try to break those chains and realize that that was kind of a form of intellectual abuse that they were never given the space to think and explore their own ideas they were never given the idea that they could

challenge what their parents were saying and so I bake that in from the very beginning in a million different ways always telling them to keep learning not to be arrogant or cocky about their views even if they're right but to embrace humility and to put their search for truth in service of a better world. One thing you'll realize when you have children, vast majority of them, all of mine, there's a natural human repulsion towards obvious injustice, right? There's a selfishness for young children, of course. As they develop an ego, that's my toy, that's my candy, it's not yours. That's there. But there's also just like a genuine repulsion at basic injustice. And so it's not like you have to indoctrinate your children into

being a good person, you just have to find that already existing seed of goodness that is in 99.999% of human beings from a very young age and cultivate that thoughtfully. So that's a huge part of it. Find what they love and help them develop that. So, you know, I don't care what is going to be good for capitalism. I don't care about making a bunch of money and becoming rich and doing something you might hate, but just because it provides you with financial support. What I'm interested in is creating and helping cultivate a multifaceted deep human being, right, that can pursue their genuine interests, that has the confidence to go out into the world that loves themselves, that is not plagued by an abysmal sense of self-worth from verbal abuse, from, you know, when some

parents are verbally abusive or hold their children up to the standards or live vicariously through their children as just an extension of their own ego project, I try to obliterate that, find what they're already interested in, and cultivate that. From a very young age, my son, who's now 10 years old, he would, when we allowed him screen time, and that's something that all parents have to navigate is like, you want to introduce them to technology, but you don't want it to overwhelm them. You don't want it to take the place of parenting for all the reasons I said before and what we'll even maybe get into later. But from an early age, when he did have screen time, he would gravitate towards like music and not only music but like piano on youtube and he had like a little child piano thing

i'm talking like three or four and he would sit in front of youtube and he would watch these piano things that taught them how to like play basic tunes and he would literally teach himself how to start playing the piano so right there that's something that could easily die out becomes distracted gets into other things and just loses that interest but okay that's a three or four year old showing an immediate and organic interest in something, let's consciously cultivate that. So despite the economic hardships and this is not financially easy for us to do, but we've got them and still have them in piano lessons, an hour every week. And again, that requires money. That requires time. It's not easy to do. But it's like I will sacrifice so much to make sure that

this skill can develop because being able to engage musically, being able to have that as a creative of an emotional outlet is going to be important for a human being. It has nothing to do with what sort of job he's going to have in the future. But no matter what happens in the future, he'll be able to find cathartic, emotional release in a form of self-expression through music and learning how to read music. And then I'm going to increase the instruments that he learns. My other son is very aggressive and athletic and physical with the world.

Since a young age, he's just been throwing his body physically against the world. okay that's almost certainly going to probably manifest in some sort of interest in sports let's get him in that my daughter is very like you know very intellectual and interested in the world around her she's um the editor at her high school of journalism like the extracurricular journalist activities like you know interviewing like a she just interviewed a state like a representative recently about phones and school policies and you know it's so beautiful to see that part of her grow and develop and she also loves volleyball so we cultivate that so finding what they love and developing it outside of any concern for what their job is going to be, but mostly about how are they going to be as a human being? And as I always tell my listeners on Rev. Left, I tell my children, be into reading, have an appreciation for nature. And when you're ready, think about getting into practices such as meditation. Because in a world full of constant overwhelming dopamine attacking distraction, from a young age, if you can cultivate, not by taking them away from the world and saying you can never get on a screen, you can never, you know,

do this. A lot of fundamentalist Christian parents, like you can't read Harry Potter, you can't play video games. That tills the soil for rebellion, right? If you never give your kid a piece of candy, the first moment they're able to break free from your authoritarianism, they're going to stuff their face with candy. They're going to probably have bad diet habits the rest of their life because dialectically, you suppressed, suppressed, suppressed, and that's going to come out with a rebound effect. So you don't want to ever do that. You want to cultivate things and you want to find the middle path.

You want to find balance in the world. Being in the world, but also not being absorbed and destroyed by it. So cultivating reading, taking my like sun out, for example, we just did our first winter camping trip this year. I take him fishing. We wanted to get to ice fishing this year. It's probably going to have to wait until next year. But getting him out into nature, building a campfire, you know, going on hikes, showing him

the beauty of the natural world, watching a sunset over the Platte River. These are things that not only are forming deep bonds and memories with my son, but also cultivating with him a deep love of the natural world and kind of take care of yourself, right? Like, I can start a fire. I can put up a tent. I can cook food, cook a steak over an open campfire. He loves it. He loves it. He got so much existential joy from being out there and learning how to do that. My daughter burns through books. She just reads books after book after book. And I love that. And, you know, they're kind of still young for the meditation thing, but it's omnipresent in the background. They see their dad doing it. They see statues of Buddha everywhere. You know, I teach them basic breathing techniques when they're

overwhelmed emotionally and kind of setting them up. And I urge any parent. You have to understand the world of hyper distraction that kids are being raised in. As millennials, we had a pre-internet ability to grow up. My childhood in the 90s was running around all day outside with my friends until the streetlights came on. You know, that was, it sounds cliche, but my God, that was wonderful. I'm so glad that happened. I didn't get my first computer until I was 17, didn't get my first smartphone until I was in my early 20s. That's not true for kids growing up now. So we have to be hyper-conscious of that. And so yeah, just, and at the end of the day, I also want to instill deep morality, selfless love for other people, and unacceptance of

injustice, highlighting the ways that the current system brutalizes people, opening their hearts carefully and responsibly to the world. So the genocide in Gaza, right? Do I show them gory pictures of kids being murdered? Of course not. Do I tell them in a balanced way that is not too much for them to take in? You don't want to throw the weight of the world on a 10-year-old shoulders, but you want to cultivate, hey, this is happening in the world. Sometimes when you're driving in the car, hear dad listening to news. I mean, often my children see me cry. I'll be, I'll be engaging with the Palestinian issue, listening to something, reading something, watching something, and just break out crying. And my kids will obviously, like, look over at me, like, whoa. I mean, it's not unusual for

their dad to cry, but they'll see it and they'll know, like, what's going on? That opens up a doorway to talking about it and say, you know how much, you know, you love your family and your life, like, we have to stand up against people brutalizing others. Like, we can't accept it for our family. We can't accept it for others. And trying to responsibly cultivate that within children so that they have this deep morality that's not just about me and getting mine

and screw the haters and, you know, blah, blah, blah. Like our popular culture teach them, but to radically open up their heart to other human beings, to see themselves and others and to try to cultivate that as a parent is a tricky but deeply rewarding thing because what you're doing is you're instilling morality.

The very last thing I'll say and I know I talk too long so you can tell me to shut up at any point but the very last thing is if you want any of this to stick you have to have a good loving, open, honest trusting relationship with your kids

if you're an asshole if you're not open and vulnerable and honest with them if when you inevitably snap and yell and go over the line you don't apologize and humble yourself to them, if they don't feel safe coming to you and telling you about anything, then your values are going to be something that they are inclined to rebel against because they don't like you. So, you know, they don't trust you. They don't have a good

relationship with you. So why in the hell would they take your core base values as what they want to integrate into their life growing up? So nothing works as far as instilling values and teaching them if they don't respect and love you and have a deep relationship with you. So first and foremost, your kid is not an extension of you. They're their own human being. You have a deep responsibility to them. They're not a burden. You brought them into this world.

Step up and deal with that responsibility even despite the shitty conditions we have to operate on while fighting for better conditions for yourself and others, for sure. But to take that responsibility full on, to not see it as a burden, which is hard to do, especially in the trenches, of sometimes to realize that you have to give up so much of what you desire, so much of your comfort, your egoic moment to moment, I'd rather be doing this. So much of that is melted immediately. And you just have to be an endless service to others, which is exhausting and difficult, but deeply rewarding. Because this is training you how to get outside of ego, to get outside of your own myopic narcissistic once in needs and to selflessly serve another. And if you do that right, if you cultivate deep loving relationships with your children, not only are they going to

be better able to cultivate deep loving relationships as they get into their adulthood, but they will take what you taught them not only through your words, but through your actions and the values that you instilled in them much, much, much more seriously. So that is the underlying foundation for any of this to work. And if you don't have that, it's a house of cars that collapses. That's the foundation you got to build from. And if you build up from that and you do these sorts of things, you're almost guaranteed to have a really deep rewarding relationship with your children and be able to instill in them the sort of not only values, but capacities and skill sets that they're going to need to navigate the world no matter what happens. No matter where

things go, you're raising confident children with skill sets, a love for others, compassion, a love for the natural world, an ability to retain control over their own focus and attention. And that's going to serve them well no matter what. Beautiful. Yeah, thank you for all the ways that we can care for ourselves as parents, right? The meditation deepening our resilience and just that authenticity and really showing our emotions, being with our emotions, allowing them to surface. And then all these ways to parent to bring in the nature connection, the conscious cultivation of interest, the critical thinking skills, the, you know, interest in morality and care for others. Thank you for all of those. And, you know, as you said, you dove into a lot of study when you became a

parent first and also in your studies. I'm curious, you know, when you think about what Marxism, Marxist-Leninism has taught you, what has it shown you or taught you about parenting? And I know that you and Allison recently did a three-part series on the origin of the family private property and the state by Angles. And we'll link to those episodes in the show notes. But yeah, I would just love to hear what you've learned through your studies and through practice in relationship to parenting and Marxism. Yeah. So obviously, I would love to get into the origin of the family, private property, and the state. Like, let's definitely dive into that. And I'd love to, there's a lot of misunderstanding that surrounds that text and what that text is actually arguing. And

it feeds well into the question that's after that. So let's get back to that. But I'll just quickly, because I think a lot of the values are coming out, right? Like the Marxism teaches you the ruthless criticism of all that exists. Being suspicious of power, being suspicious of ideological conditioning, seeing the way it impacts you, overcoming it, and then being in a better position to prevent your kids from being sucked into that incredibly spiritually hollow, existentially empty pursuit of narcissistic desires and money and fame and status. It gives you the best understanding of the world that any political theory can give you. I'm sorry, that's just a fact. I studied philosophy. I studied political philosophy. I know all about liberalism

and conservatism, going back to Edmund Burke. I understand fascism. All of these different things. Hands down, what made me a Marxist, it not only gives you the clearest understanding, of the world as it actually is, it gives you the absolutely best chance to meaningfully intervene and change that world for the better. And if you want to change the world, you have to understand it. And that's where dialectical and historical materialism comes in as an analytical framework by which you can actually analyze the world. Marxism is not a dead doctrine. It is not a set of ten commandments you must follow. It's not what a guy named Karl Marx happened to think. It is a living, breathing, evolving, analytical lens to understand the world so that you can

change it. And any advance of Marxism that is not rooted in that is not Marxism. So just understanding the world, the importance of critical thought, the seeing how the superstructural ideological conditioning works, breaking through that, protecting your children from it, showing them values, teaching them values that are deeper than the shallow, on-offer values that society offers and that is radicalizing when you love other people even complete strangers that is radical in a world that wants to make you a hyper individualist that competes with everybody that has to step over others to get a leg up in this world if you want a job you got to be better than that person that person's holding you back that is a hyper individualistic

ego cultivating way of being in the world that leads to internal misery and perpetuates external misery and how do you break down that narcissism that self-obsessive ego-centeredness you break it down through love you break it down through connection with other human beings you refuse to be indoctrinated into it you refuse to orient your entire life around the things that society tells you to you find deeper values to root yourself in that are always going to be true no matter what happens and you let them being your your guiding lights what do i want out of my life I want a life that is connected to other human beings that is in service to other people and that leaves the world better off than I found it. I have no concern about money or fame

or status or winning anything. And not only is Marxism great for that, but that's where I'm always emphasizing Buddhism. We've done an episode, Della, you and I on my views on Buddhism. And, you know, there are many other paths to that. Every major religion has a mystical path within it. you can even do it in some certain ethical philosophies i think buddhism is really the most direct way to cultivate a different way of being to break down the psychological structures that capitalism preys on endless desire endless craving ego obsession the inability to connect to others what is alienation you know except being locked in and disconnected from everything else marx talks about alienation being you're alienated from yourself. You're alienated from others. You're alienated from the natural

world. And what do we really want? When we talk about happiness, we don't want money and fame and status. Those things do not bring happiness. What do we really want? Connection with ourselves, with other human beings, with the natural world. We don't want to feel alienated from those things. and so I find that a deep time-tested millennia-long practice of inter-cultivation like Buddhism mixed with a profound analysis of the world that seeks to also change it for the better bolsters you from the inside out and from the outside in to become the sort of person that we need more of in the world selfless loving people trying to change the world for the better and allows you also to be a better partner a better friend a better comrade

and, of course, a better parent. So I could go deeper on that, but everything that I say, my whole being is oriented through the lens in a lot of ways of Marxism and Buddhism, inside and outside. So everything that I say,

everything that I believe, all of my values, everything that I'm saying in this episode and every other episode I talk about, are deeply and inexorably informed by those two gorgeous traditions. And so, yeah, it's just inseparable. My parenting and the way

live my life is inseparable from Buddhism, but also especially Marxism. Yeah, I really hear that. And thank you for bringing in those points. So, yeah, I know that you and Allison did a three-part series on the origin of the family and private property and the state by Angles. And we're going to link to that series in the show notes. But I'm wondering if you have any key takeaways from that piece and your conversation with Allison in particular in relation to parenting. Yeah, absolutely. So we can, of course, you can go listen to those episodes. But I made notes for this one question because I wanted to be as precise as I could be. Just a very quick outline of the major argument that goes through the text because, again, I think there's a lot

of misunderstanding about this text and what it's actually saying. So, you know, obviously Angles wrote this book based in anthropological research at the time, examining the historical relationship between modes of production. So this is historical materialism, right? modes of production primitive communism slave societies feudal monarchies capitalist republics and the way that those underlying material bases shape the superstructure of those societies the law the economical ideas mainstream ideology culture and family structures right so this is really an historical materialist analysis of families through time and different modes of production and these are inextorably connected with the rise of the state

but importantly and centrally private property so what angles argues overall in this text is that family structures evolve dialectically driven by changes and the underlying economic base and conditions of their society i.e. their mode of production the origin of private property precipitated the emergence of the patriarchal family class society and the state so right here he is saying that private property the idea that this is mine and you have to come you know work for me me, cultivate this land, cultivate, you know, that gives rise to not only class society, because now some people own property and some people don't. So now you're a slave in ancient Rome or you're a serf in medieval Europe or you're a worker under capitalism having to sell your body, your time,

your labor to somebody else in order just to get by. So you see private property is at the epicenter of class society. It's also at the epicenter of patriarchal family units because once you have property, once you have inheritance, these things are dramatically influenced by your children and who you pass this profound, exaggerated wealth down to. Right. So that really necessitates, you know, think of medieval Europe. This is my firstborn son. That's so important, right? Why is that so important? Because under feudal relations, if you're in the nobility, the aristocracy, the king and queenship, it is really, it really matters who your heirs are because they're getting everything, you know? So that's a huge part of it. So again, just understanding that. And then the basic

ultimate idea in this text is that overcoming capitalism and private property will fundamentally transform the family, liberating it from oppressive forms of economic dependence and patriarchal hierarchy. So liberating the family unit from oppressive forms of economic dependence and patriarchal hierarchy. So yeah, we'll briefly go through just the family structures under different modes of production because it is helpful to kind of flesh these basic ideas out. So first you have primitive communism. This is the bulk of human history, hunter-gatherers societies, nomadic societies. You know, you have to go out and get substance through hunting, through foraging. This is the vast majority of human existence before the rise of class societies operated on

this. So what's the mode of production here? Collective labor, communal ownership, shared resources. There aren't rich people exploiting poor people. The divisions of communities are not stratified into those who have everything and those who have nothing and et cetera. This is why it's called primitive communism. It's primitive in the sense that there's not been technological development, right, which gives you basically put you in a state of nature, which we don't want to be in necessarily. But it's communism in that it is collective communal sharing of resources. What's good for the tribe is good for everybody. It's a collective unit, right?

there's not exploitation and oppression structurally. The family structure under the primitive communism is, interestingly, matrilineal kinship, so you trace your descendant through the mother, collective child rearing in a lot of tribal societies, they don't have hardcore genetic testing to see who the father is or hyper-isolated aristocratic bloodlines. It's like we're all in the community, children are raised because they're all of our children, and relatively egalitarian gender relations. you know maybe the men go out hunting and you know women don't hunt as much they tend to the camp more whatever so there's some gender differences in primitive communism but they don't take the form of patriarchal domination the key features of this are group marriage or pairing relationships that were flexible and collective women enjoyed relatively high status due to their central role in gathering and communal sustenance and there's an absence of strict monogamy or clear paternal lineage and this is

based not just in speculation, this is based at cutting edge anthropological research at the time Engels wrote this. And I'm sure these things could be updated now that we're 100 plus years after that and science has developed. Anthropology has developed, but the core claims still hold true. So then you have, after that, you have the emergence of class society. The mode of production is, this is slave-owning societies. The mode of production is agricultural surplus, which then leads to private ownership of productive resources, land, animals, and slaves, patriarchal, monogamous family emerges. So this is the family structure. Patriarchal monogamous family emerges to ensure, as I was saying earlier, clear paternal lineage for inheritance and wealth transfer.

Now that you have stratified class society, those that have a lot want to protect those privileges and hand them down in a clear line. And so, you know, you can think of slave societies like ancient Rome. You had an upper ruling class that participated in politics, had lots of leisure time, and the slave class is what made society function and allowed. those elites to have leisure time to engage in senatorial politics and philosophy and art, right? So the key features of this structure is that patriarchal monogamous family consolidates male authority controlling women and children become important to protect private property and inheritance. So women need to be monogamous to the man because the man needs to hand down

what he owns, right? So he needs to understand that he's handing it down to his offspring. And this demands control over women and their bodies and control over children because this is about handing down power, privilege, and property. And so those lines of handing that down need to be very clear. Women are subordinated, increasingly viewed as property of men. Ancient Roman senates were not filled with women. They're not egalitarian structures. All the ancient Roman and Greek philosophers, almost all men, they are the ones that are benefiting from this system. Strict monogamy and force, as I said, primarily upon women to ensure clear inheritance rights while men retains special privileges, including concubines and extramarital relations,

right? It wasn't as important that the man stay faithful, right, because men can go and whatever, spread their seed around in a patriarchal society, then that you have the idea of bastard children and shame to the family, but they're all just kind of discarded, and then you have your actual wife that needs to be controlled, and then your children that need to be controlled for inheritance going down. So we see the rise of patriarchal relations and economic relations and economic realities shaping the family. So then we, we go into, let's just go capitalist mode of production. So obviously this is industrial capitalism, wage labor, private ownership with the means of production. The bourgeois monogamous family becomes predominant. So what happens here

is it's all class society. So there's a certain similarity across class societies, but they have different inflection points under different modes of production. So the key features of the capitalist mode of production is that family is an economic unit. women are relegated largely to unpaid reproductive and domestic labor you have the separation of public i.e. economic life from private domestic life intensifying gender oppression marriage is increasingly tied to economic considerations and think of like 1800s and even today even though some of these things have been being destabilized by capitalism itself marriage who you married to economic considerations property relations incredibly important you know it's it's important that people of the same class come together because they have certain economic and property considerations to account for in marriage marriage is not oh i just love this person so i'm going to go and be with them you have to have much more

considerations and so it's scandalous when a man of the upper or a woman of upper bourgeois society marries or has relationships with somebody of the lower order it's scandalous especially back in the industrial age of capitalism. So women, while increasingly entering wage labor over the 20th century, remained now burdened by the double shift. And this goes into today. So at first, women were completely confined to the house. Men went out and, you know, made the bulk of the money.

And so they were economically subordinate and dependent on their husband, which made them obviously have to put up with, and Kristen Gottsey does a really good job of women have better sex under socialism, outlining these abusive and coercive elements of depending, financially on a man in a patriarchal class-based society, which people can go and look at. But when women enter the workforce, it doesn't liberate them, as like liberal feminists tell us. It liberates them from the doldrum soul suffocating, just being relegated to the kitchen aspect of that life. But now it's not that they're liberated from that. They have to also go work a job

to keep their families head above water. So they have to go and they work eight hours, get exploited for their surplus labor, then they come home and have to engage in their second shift of unpaid work and when it comes to domestic labor, child rearing, et cetera. Only recently has there been a more egalitarian shift in family structures, kind of out of economic necessity for lower class people where both people have to work. And there have been strides made in feminist theory and cultural shifts in society so that, you know, today to try to have a madman style relationship would be seen by the vast majority of people as just grotesque.

Like that guy's a fucking asshole. We should beat him with sticks. But, you know, so there are these shifts, but it doesn't make the burden any less. The burden is as much as it ever would be. So all of this leads into the idea, what would family be under socialism and communism? Right?

This is the important question. Angles argues that family structures reflect material conditions as we've established. So, under socialism, which is a transition period, and fully developed communism, humanism, eventually the classless society were gearing toward, families would transform dramatically. So under socialism, we would see socialized domestic labor. Many traditionally, quote-unquote,

female roles and responsibilities, child care, cooking, cleaning, elder care are socialized, supported by public services and collective provision. Women's economic independence, women fully enter productive labor as equals, removing economic dependence on men. And then you have legal and social equality. So the legal abolition of patriarchal privileges and property-based marriage, giving rise to relationships based on genuine affection, equality, and mutual respect. And this is what Kristen Gottzi shows actually has happened already under socialist experiments. So this is not far off in the future. This happens now in socialist societies when that economic sort of burden is lifted off the shoulders of families a bit through public services and community. And where

proletarian feminist ideology forms the basis of a superstructure, which allows for total equality and marrying those two things together, which again, go read Kristen Godseatsy's amazing book about how this actually plays out in the real world, in past socialist experiments. This is not pie in the sky. This has already happened. And in fact, those socialist experiments inform our relationships today. So we can actually still have, even in the, under the boot of capitalism, especially in forward-thinking families that are aware of this stuff, we can already integrate, we can't integrate public services, right? We have to fight for that collectively, but we can do that. But we can integrate social equality in our relationships, and we can

really sort of prefigure the sort of societies and relationships we want to have by being aware of those things and integrating them into our relationships today, right now. But under communism, what would this look like? You would have voluntary, egalitarian relationships. Families and relationships would no longer be driven at all by economic dependence or inheritance concerns. Love, mutual affection, and respect become the sole foundation of relationships. You have the elimination of any gender division of labor, dissolving totally the distinction between public and private life. You have parenting responsibilities that begin to become shared widely with the community, extended networks, preventing oppressive dependencies or

isolation, you would have the dissolution, like from an economic base up of patriarchy and hierarchy with no private property to inherit. To inherit family loses its function as a tool for perpetuating class privilege, becoming an entirely voluntary and egalitarian association, and the family becomes flexible and responsive to human emotional and social needs, evolving freely according to individual's desires rather than societal coercion and economic necessity. So summarizing all of this, the key points that this text shows is that the family form is not eternal or fixed. It changes as productive forces and social relations evolve. That patriarchal family and gender oppression emerged historically alongside private property and

class society. So if you really want to overcome patriarchy and gender oppression, that necessitates the fight against private property and class society. That's dialectical and historical materialism for you. And finally, socialism and communism often, often, for liberation from patriarchal and economic oppression, laying the groundwork for genuinely free, equal, and loving relationships that can flourish totally independently of economic necessity. And this would, of course, bring about fuller human liberation, radically transform families and communities, be much more egalitarian. And this is how the underlying mode of production of a society can constrain or liberate interpersonal relationships. These things are not

separate, although capitalism tries to convince us they are. They are deeply and dialectically intertwined. And so what the origin of family, private property and the state is, is dialectical and historical materialism applied to the family structure to make sense of it historically, presently, and to point forward to the future on how we can dramatically change it through socialist revolution and ultimately global communism. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Brett. O'Shea. We'll be right back. I'll be nice on you

I want to look nice for you I'll be the background to your icon mounting to your art and when your eyes are cracked and your mirror slants on I'll be your eyes, I'd look for you and tell you what is true. I like your eyes, I like your smile, I like the way you wear your feelings.

You gotta get dressed to hang out with you. I want to look cool. You could wear those cool odds, they look nice on you. I want to look nice for you. I meet the background to your icon your art when your eyes are cracked in your mirror sense

I'll be your eyes I look for you and tell you what is true I like your eyes I like your smile I like the way you wear your feelings Hey, you got to get dressed to hang out with you. I want to look cool.

Now, back to our conversation with Brett O'Shea. Thank you for going over the text with us and the history, and then also for going into the visioning, right? Like, what does the family and marriage and parenting look like under communism? And also what has it look like in actually existing socialism? And I also love that you brought in Christian Godsey's book, because you're absolutely right. She really clearly demonstrates how,

capitalism so many decisions are made from economic necessity and really offers this alternative perspective of like what would it look and feel like if people got to decide you know who they wanted to be with based on things like love or interest and I know it seems so crazy to even think that that we don't have that and yet when we really feel into you know life under capitalism we can actually see where so many of our decisions are made from this economic necessity, like you said. So thank you for going over that and also how we can pre-figure right now those family structures, those relationships that we're seeking to work towards. And, you know, one thing after we shared our first episode on post-capitalist parenting with Toy Marie Smith,

which one part we explored marriage under capitalism, we got pushback saying that, you know, marriage has actually existed for long before capitalism. And so I know you spoke about this briefly in what you just described from the text. But what is your understanding of the connection between capitalism and marriage, particularly as we know it today? How would you describe that relationship? Yeah, so the text by Angles really helps a lot. And I have not actually listened to that one. It's on my list of things to listen to. I haven't gotten to it yet. So by no means am I, if I happen to agree or disagree with that other guest, it's just by accident. I haven't listened to that, but I plan on it. And this is an interesting and really worthwhile series that you seem to

doing on parenting that I think is very helpful for parents and non-parents alike. I think ultimately, and I think the place to start is what angles his text doesn't say, right? It doesn't prescribe any specific way that love and romantic relationships can flourish. It doesn't say that family is going to be completely obliterated, right? The idea that me and my wife would have children and that those family bonds would be meaningless in a post-capitalist society. Angles isn't saying that, and I don't think that would happen. I think it would open up community. It would open up new ways of experimenting with

families. It would certainly bring back what was present in primitive communist societies, which is communal upbringing of children. But there is, I think ultimately, and what does Angles say, he says, it would liberate you from economic constraints. It would liberate us from patriarchal domination, and it would liberate us from arbitrary hierarchies. But what the important thing I think is to say is that that doesn't say that there's any one prescribed way of being. That's another way of imposing a constraint. I think 100% that in socialism and even under communism, there's nothing wrong with choosing monogamous relationships. I don't think that monogamy would disappear. The coercive aspects of it would, the economic considerations of it would, the patriarchal

element within it would, but it wouldn't disappear. But it also doesn't mean that other forms of coming together would be looked down upon either. I think pair bonding is real. I think it persists for a reason. And as somebody who has three children, I love that I am in a monogamous, committed relationship with my wife, and together, we are raising children together. I have, luckily for me, very close family that lives around me that sort of can replicate the communal aspect that we need. I have great, amazing friends, many friends who don't have kids, many friends who are polyamorous or non-monogamous in various ways.

I know people that have marriages that are open, right? I think you let people choose what they want to do. I don't think that under socialism or communism that people will just say, I don't ever want to be monogamous again. I think there are benefits, psychologically, social. to monogamy. I think there are reasons people choose it, but that is never to denigrate non-monogamous ways of being either. So I think we should be suspicious of anyone who advances a one-way-fits-all approach. Liberated from patriarchy, from economic concerns, from hierarchy, given social

provisions that make everybody able to live a decent and dignified life, I think we would be quite surprised at the many different ways that family can manifest and the different ways that people can experiment with different forms of relationships. You know, you spoke about the ways that you bring your values and ideas to parenting. I'm curious, how do you embody your values, particularly Marxist values, through co-parenting with the parent of your first child, but also with your wife? So like, what do your values and ethos look like in terms of partnership as a parent? First and foremost, radical egalitarianism. There are no specific gender roles. And of course, it's hard because you're living in a society. You have

generations of momentum moving in certain directions, and it's not easy to just immediately break those bonds. It takes concerted work. Just like overcoming liberal ideology and capitalist ideology takes concerted effort. So too does integrating your deepest values into your relationship. But we do value faithfulness to one another. We value egalitarian sharing of duties. Our specific work situation allows for the fact that we can both be in the home a lot, which is different, right? And there's many different ways that that takes where one parent stays in the home and therefore they have the burden of child raising,

but the other person has to go out into the world and make money, right? Because they or else they would just not have anything. And so you have to bring in the money. Sometimes you have two parents that have to go out and then they're very stressed from work and they come home and then they both try to egalitarianly work with the childhood burden. there's plenty of patriarchal relationships where both parents go to work, come home, and then the mom is just expected to pick up the extra work, and the dad kind of sits back and relaxes, and that's not fucking cool. So you have to be, just like it's a constant struggle to fight against the

indoctrination that we've had from the ideology of our society, that also bleeds in to these relationships. But radical egalitarianism as a core premise, showing love and affection to each other, despite the fact that we're stressed, that we are burdened, that we still find time to show physical affection, kiss my wife, we hug, we tell each other, we love each other in front of the children, because role modeling qualities and values that you have and role modeling healthy relationships is so important because more than what you say, your kids watch what you do. And we're not perfect at this, like, by no means am I pretending that we are some super enlightened beings that are perfect parents. There's no such thing. the perfect parent you will fuck up you will lose your cool you will fight you will let the stress bleed into your relationship and find yourself bickering with your wife or your husband you'll find yourself arguing in front of kids and that's you know you feel terrible about that later so by no means am i trying to paint a perfect rosy picture of what life is like you know but it's it's it's the goals and the striving and importantly it's the ability to self reflect to put your ego aside

to take accountability, to apologize when you're wrong, and to work through your problems openly and honestly. So when you do have a fight with your partner in front of your kids, okay, that happened. You can't rewind the tape and make that not happen. But your next steps can be really, really impactful on your kids. Do you go into your separate rooms and not talk to each other the rest of the night? Or do you, after a moment of cooling down, come out, apologize to each other first, talk about how it's important that we go back to the kids now that we've come to terms, let's go to the kids and talk to them, hey, we had a fight earlier that was not cool, you know, blah, blah, blah, explain the reasons it happened, take accountability,

apologize to your partner in front of your kids. If you snap at your kids, right, you're stressed, you're burdened, your kids aren't listening, you yell and you make one of your kids cry. That's going to happen, okay? Only people that don't have kids think that you can not do that, right? It happens. I'm sorry. It's stressful. But it's how you react to that's the most important. So you go to your kids, have an open, honest conversation, apologize for your role in it. Say, I would like you, when I ask you to please clean your room, it's important that you at least try to listen to me. But it's also important that I show you how to regulate emotions and that I speak to you respectfully and that we have an egalitarian relationship, even though that there's a parent and child relationship here, right?

You're still a human being. You're still deserving of respect. Your emotions still matter. even in those instances where we're at logger heads over something. And so more than being perfect, which is impossible, I've come to learn that it's the role modeling after the fact that matters most, that when you can sit down, be vulnerable, set your ego aside, take accountability, apologize, and show your kids how to work through big emotions

that even adults have, how to work through and navigate conflict in a healthy way, how to take responsibility, how to apologize, how to put the family ahead of your own egoic emotions. I'm angry, so fuck everybody else. No, what matters most is that this house is a loving, safe house for all of us. And that requires something from us, and that requires something from each other. So I think that is really important. And it's not just saying that.

It's the role modeling of that. So no matter how bad, you know, a mess up can get, how bad an emotional outburst can be from the kids, from the parents, whatever, it's what happens next that matters the most and so you know sometimes parents put so much burden on their shoulders i can't you know did me screaming at them mess them up did us having that fight in front of them you know scar them for life and like we can't do that we can't do that it's like you're you're holding yourself to too high expectations try your best not to do that try to set a plan ahead of time to deal with your emotions or you know to to use communication as a way to de-escalate instead of waiting until it gets to the point to boil over but most importantly

respond to it in the most healthy way possible and then with my with my daughter's mom this has been maybe one of my biggest our biggest accomplishments as a family it wasn't easy at first you know me and my my daughter's mom we broke up we were young we met when we were 15 right we broke up in our very early 20s a couple years later maybe i can't remember the exact time i met my wife and then we started dating at first that relationship was contentious right my daughter's mom okay not only is is he with a new girl which has its own issues but now we have a kid so now i have to share parenting with another woman right that's hard for anybody i don't care what anybody says especially when you're when the relationship hasn't been over for that long it's a difficult thing and i have all the

compassion and sympathy in the world for my daughter's mom having to navigate that and i'm not sure how I would have dealt with it if the shoe was on the other foot. If after a year of us being broken up, she got a new husband and now my daughter had a stepdad. It's not easy. These are difficult things. And when you're in your early 20s, you don't exactly have life wisdom and deep emotional maturity to deal with these things. I know I didn't. But over time, and it took time, trust was built, love was built. I made it very clear that you are my daughter's mom, you are my friend, you are my family. And that has resulted in the relationship we have today, which could not be better,

that we see my daughter's mom as a part of our family. In fact, the biggest thing that we did together is last summer, me, my wife, my daughter, and my daughter's mom, just us four went on a family vacation down to San Antonio, down to Texas, a full week vacation, sharing hotel rooms together. my wife and my daughter's mom had time to really cultivate their own friendship they spent a lot of times together just joking laughing going off on their own doing things together we now have family pictures where it's me my wife my daughter's mom and my daughter together at cool sights on the beach in the ocean my daughter now has memories where it's not just like here's my memories

with my dad here's my memories with my mom those memories are now integrated my daughter's sweet 16 is coming up. She's getting a car for the first time. We're integrating our economics, right, to buy her the car. We're throwing the party together, taking different roles. My wife has shown to my daughter's mom that she really has her heart in the right place, that trust had to be earned, that you love her daughter. You take care of her daughter. And so once she saw that the relationship between my daughter and my wife were great, that allowed for the opening up of that relationship between my wife and my daughter's mom. And that's not always going to happen. I did not think that would ever happen 10 years ago, right? It seemed an impossible thing that that would ever fucking

happen. But it has happened. And it's come through trust and love and communication and always telling my daughter's mom that we're not just co-parents. We didn't just have a kid 15, 16 years ago and now we're stuck together. I love you as a human being, right? You're one of my closest friends we've been through so much together and so you are a part of my life you are my family i have your back and she has mine and my wife has her back and she has my wife's back and it could not have been better but again that came with a lot of work a lot of time and a lot of maturation which we didn't have in our early 20s but that we've cultivated over the years into our into our now fuck i'm getting old late 30s so those are some of the ways that i try to embody those values

again not perfectly it's a rocky road things won't always work out that way in other situations with other relationships but to strive for that to do your best to not be a perfectionist and hold yourself up as a parent or a partner to impossible standards but to take accountability and the last thing i also want to say about partnerships i always say this your partner's not not there to make you happy you cannot put all of your demands to be happy on your partner a relationship is built through mutual trust, mutual sacrifice, and importantly, taking responsibility for what is rightfully your responsibility. It is not my wife's job to make me happy, to solve all my childhood traumas, right? It is not her job to be this thing that I say,

if I just get this, then I'll finally be happy. So I got this. Why am I not happy? It must be something you're doing wrong. No, it is not your partner's job to do that. That's where accountability, self-reflection, deconstructing and transcending your own ego, taking responsibility for your own shit, serving your partner as a loving person that wants to give, not as somebody that demands to receive. I am not demanding you give me things. I'm not demanding that you make me happy. I am trying to give in a reciprocal, egalitarian, loving relationship to build this thing together that requires both of our input, both of our sacrifice, both of our contributions. And as for my own happiness, that is never going to be laid at the feet of

another person. Happiness comes from within, from internal work, from maturation, from finding meaning in life. It does not come from getting somebody else or getting a thing or getting the new house or getting the wife or finally getting enough money or getting that new job or getting the validation you've always wanted. If you're searching for happiness, outside of yourself, you will never find it. And so I think that's a huge aspect of maturation as well as it's not your partner's job to fulfill you completely, to meet your every need and to make you have lasting happiness. Happiness is an ephemeral emotion. It comes and goes. What our life is about is about meaning and purpose. So even when you're suffering,

even when times are hard, the meaning and purpose are still there. Happiness isn't, but meaning and purpose and relationships are still there and that's what matters and so i think that's a part of growing up as well absolutely yeah thank you for that deep spiritual wisdom on happiness and also the ways that you that you parent that you co-parent and and i'm happy for you and your family and and how those relationships have matured over time and i hear that it was not easy so thank you and you know one thing i want to return to is something you mentioned at the very beginning. You spoke about this sense that some people feel due to the state of the world that it's actually maybe cruel to bring children into this world. So, you know, as we look at

what's happening and the state of the world in terms of the climate, political situation, the future, et cetera, and the sense of hopelessness that can arise for some, you know, what would be your response to this idea that it's actually cruel or, you know, we have to think twice before we bring children into what's going on right now. What would be your response to that? Yeah. First of all, it's a common sentiment. I understand the reason people would feel that way. I'm not trying to disparage those very real feelings. As a parent, I already told you, it is scary to think about their future and to think about what is life going to be like. What world are they inheriting, right? That is scary. And importantly, I also want to make this point that everything I'm about to say is not

apply to people who decide to not have kids for their own personal reasons, right? There's a million reasons that you might not want to have kids that are totally valid. So if you're like, it's not in my life plan. It's not what me and my partner want. It's not what I want for my life. I have this other thing I want to do instead. All of that is totally valid. I am not speaking to you. I'm speaking to the person who says, I'm not going to have kids or I'm scared to have kids or I don't want to have kids because the world is shit, or the higher, harder claim, which I'll hit with a harder stick here in a bit, the idea that it's actually immoral to have children. So those are the two things that I'm responding to here. My first argument is this, when in the fuck, in all of human history

has it been rosy, perfect time to have children? When looking over the 250,000 years of human evolution. Can you pinpoint a time? Okay, now it's safe to have kids. The world isn't cruel. The world isn't uncertain. Everything is super stable. My kids are guaranteed to have a great life. It's never happened. So there's a myopia involved here that today is uniquely cruel or bad or uncertain. That's life. A core fundamental truth of Marxist dialectical materialism and Buddhist impermanence there is nothing constant but change humans themselves are a transitionary creature right we're always evolving we're not the pinnacle of anything we're in a process society itself is in a constant evolutionary process and unfolding and what is the bridge between past and future constant change

constant difference which means constant uncertainty so there has there has never been a period in human history where it has been better than right now to have children because before science and medical advancements straight up worse to have kids in every situation even if you're rich 50% of your kids die in the first couple years right that's why life average life expectancy was so low throughout all of human history it wasn't that people never lived to their 60s and even their 70s or their 80s, it was that most people died before they were five. And so the average lifespan was dramatically brought down. Marx himself lost children, right? After he died, actually some of his children, his daughter committed suicide, when he was alive, his young son, who was about the

age of my son right now, died. And reading the stories, I think it's in the book Love and Capital, which I highly recommend it explores Marx's personal family life, which gets to the heart of this discussion and shows how Marx and Jenny navigated these exact questions with lots of kids more than I have. He lost, I believe, his 9 or 11-year-old son. And it always brings me to tears hearing the stories of him at his son's funeral. It was just some sickness, right? Almost every fucking person that had kids lost kids up until like 100 years ago. And at the funeral of his son, which again, unfathomable 10, 11 years of deep intimate connection and Marx was a great loving father and because he didn't have a goddamn job he spent a lot of time with his kids so he had a

deep relationship with his kids and his kids fucking adored him he had to be held back by his friends from jumping into the grave crying tears weeping uncontrollably a grown man had to be held back from jumping into a six foot hole to jump on top of his son's coffin because he was so destroyed about that that is life that is the risk of having children but that's the risk of being alive. The price you pay for life is death, is uncertainty, is tragedy. Who knows what comes after this?

Maybe what comes after we'll validate this whole experience. Maybe it won't. But we know for a fact we have this one life that we're here and I don't care how hard life gets, how much suffering I have to endure. I'll punch that ticket every time. Some people might disagree. But I would take that ticket every time

to be a conscious self-aware being in the utter majesty and mystery of the cosmos. To be able just to hear birds chirping on a warm spring day, to be able to feel love for somebody else, that is worth all the suffering and tragedy that life can shovel on top of me. And eventually I will die. Everyone I love before me will die until it's my turn. That's the tragedy of life. and the future is always uncertain

there will never be certainty you will never have control over what happens next that's what the ego wants the ego is desperate for stability for certainty and for control and you have to realize it never has it in the first place and trying to get those things

just causes more suffering because you're trying to have the impossible and you'll never get it so there's that element of it so the people that are just like hey I would like to have a children, but, I mean, and even financially, like, yeah, it fucking sucks. When has it ever been easy? The love you have for your kids and the relationship you have for your kids, I'll go a million dollars in debt.

You know, I will do whatever it takes. I'd rather have my children than more financial flexibility. I don't give a fuck. The relationship I have with my kids is deeper than anything else could possibly be. I love my children more than I love myself. and so for me I would make that trade off any day of the week

so that's that's geared towards the people that are just saying like I would like kids but you know I'm scared to have them welcome to humanity welcome to being a human being welcome to life every single ancestor you've ever had has almost certainly unless you come from a very privileged bloodline

almost certainly lived in way shittier conditions with way less resources no scientific or medical help whatsoever and they had enough children to have you here talking about this exact issue. So, again, if you don't want kids for other reasons, totally fine. Not wanting kids because life is uncertain and scary is not a good reason. It is not a good reason. Now to the harsher version of this argument, which I'm going to be harsher in my response to.

So if that's your argument, you can walk out of the room right now. We've debated. You can debate that. You can agree or disagree. There's another way that people take this. It's called antinatalism, this idea that. it's morally wrong to have children. I'm not only not having children, you're an immoral person for doing it. Life is so much suffering and tragedy that never having it at all is actually

morally superior to having life. Therefore, we should try to discourage people from having kids. In fact, we should tell them it's morally reprehensible that you would think about having kids. And the extreme forms of this argument, which do exist, are saying that we should have a managed decline and slow extinction of humanity that because being conscious as a human being in the cosmos comes with so much suffering and because humans cause so much suffering to other sentient beings and the natural world that we should actually have as our moral goal to phase out human life for me that's repulsive one element of this we are not separate from the earth we are the earth

we are what happens when the earth wakes up and becomes conscious through millennia and millions and billions of years of evolution cosmic and biological we are what bubbles up out of the earth the earth is literally conscious through us okay so if the

if we are like apples to the apple tree humans are to earth if our consciousness our art our love our suffering is actually not at all inseparable from the earth in the first place, but it's actually one way the earth manifests itself, and the earth only exists because of the cosmos and natural laws, then scientifically and logically, not spiritually, although it's also true there, scientifically, logically, on a chemistry and biological level, we are the cosmos waking up to itself. We are the subjective side of the cosmos. When you look up and you see the stars

and the planets and you see the trees and the rivers and the clouds, that's the objective side of nature. And when you look inward and you feel emotions like love, like compassion, like anger, like fear, that's the subjective side of the cosmos. You can't separate those two sides from one another to be conscious at all means to suffer because we're limited finite beings that are self-aware of our own mortality in limited bodies that slowly decay and eventually die and in fact if we didn't have suffering of various sorts and we didn't have the horror of death and everything we love coming to an end what would be the meaning of life if we just lived in perpetual comfort forever and never died how would we get meaning

Why would tears flood our eyes when we're watching a movie or the news and somebody else is being harmed? Why would any of that matter? What does it mean to become somebody if I just live forever? What does it mean to foster relationships if they're just temporary little things that in the grand scheme of immortality mean nothing? No, life is made beautiful by death. Consciousness is made beautiful by the lack of it. Love is made beautiful by suffering. So this is the dialectical integration of all opposites.

You cannot rip apart only the good and the comfortable and the nice from the bad and the scary and the uncomfortable. These things come together and that's actually what's beautiful about life. And happiness and meaning and connection wouldn't mean anything if we didn't have the loss of those things. So that's one aspect of it. But then the anti-natalist argument overall, I believe is anti-human. It's anti-life. It's a uniquely modern form of nihilism that shows. shifts very quickly into eugenics, which I think is disgusting. It's the ultimate resignation,

the ultimate refusal to believe that things can get better and a total unwillingness to fight for anything, right? It's not a philosophical position. It's a rationalized groan. It's an intellectualized sigh. Nothing more. It is literally like dumerism taken to its logical conclusion. I think it's reactionary. I think it's nihilistic. If any of our ancestors were this existentially hollow, so against life itself, so against the human experience, the human condition, none of us would be here right now talking or thinking about this. We would never experience love and connection. We would never experience beauty and truth. People in the past dealt with conditions that we can't imagine. They created life while surrounded by death. They faced

the tragedies and the uncertainties of human existence with bravery and courage and love and they kept moving forward despite all odds. And it's this resilience, this adaptability, this profound capacity for bravery and courage that is one of our best qualities as human beings and is actually a quality of the cosmos, is a quality of earth. If we take seriously that we are the earth and the cosmos become conscious, where the subjective side of earth and, and the universe, then this is actually not some horrible mistake of nature. It's a beautiful blossoming of subjectivity within what is otherwise a dead universe.

That's what atheists and materialist reductionists tell us about the universe is like our consciousness is a mistake of nature, shouldn't have happened, all there is is dead matter out there in the universe. This is different from historical materialism. This is ontological materialism, reductionism, that says that none of this matters. There's no God, there's no meaning, there's no purpose. You're just a monkey that got a little too smart. Your prefrontal cortex swelled up a little too much for your own goddamn good.

When you die, you just go back to sleep, and this was all for not. This is just a mistake. That's not dialectics. Dialectics says objectivity and subjectivity are two sides of the same coin and must be integrated. The inside and the outside are actually aspects of the same process of evolution, and we should embrace that. So if people could do this and have children literally 200,000 years ago, they could do it 10,000 years ago humans were fighting saber-tooth tigers and woolly mammoths in the Ice Age, making love, having moments of intimacy in the cave around the fire, creating new life, sacrificing themselves for their new child, right? How many countless parents have stood in front of danger, literally a predator in the long march of human history, and gave up their life so that their offspring could continue on? That's not just, oh, it's all just genetic determinism.

It's just your whole being is just a vessel to spill your genes into the next generation, and nature doesn't care at all. No, that is nature. That love and that self-sacrifice is nature. and I find it cowardly and reactionary and again nihilistic and uniquely modern form of nihilism. Go back 5,000 years, go back 100 years, go back 10,000 years, and just tell humans like, hey, it's just immoral to have children, to have life, to have intimacy, to create. It's just laughable. The cosmos is, if it's anything, uniquely creative. Biological life, uniquely creative.

this strain of creativity flows through everything and whether we're creating art we're creating philosophy we're creating connections or we're literally creating life we are participating in this great magisterial mysterious flow of the universe and we are it we are not hurting it we are not separate from it in fact the only reason that we are a burden on the natural resources of this planet that we don't care about other sentient life is because we are conditioned to think we're separate from it. The ego looks out and says everything outside of this skin is not me. So how can I use it to get what I want in here? I want something. Everything out there is just dead, meaningless, nothing to me. It's just stuff I can use to get what I want in here. You see how

that fits perfectly with ecological destruction, with capitalism, with the stupidities and brutalities of class society? Can you see that overcoming that internally would create space and facilitate the attempt to overcome that externally? That when we dissolve those distinctions and those separations and stop seeing ourselves as something separate from life, something separate from Earth, something separate from the universe, that we can actually have a scientifically informed and spiritually enriching engagement with the world around us that makes us understand that those mountains and that forest and those animals in that forest are not separate from me they are not things i can use to get what i want they are literally me

and whoa what a paradigm shift that is and when you think about communism when you think about the sort of people the sort of people on a society-wide level that could actually manifest communism and live under that? These are not egoic people. These are not frightened, desiring, self-centered, narcissistic people. These are precisely the sort of people that realize at a deep, existential, spiritual, and visceral level that there is no separation between you and me, between inside and outside. What is good for the biosphere, what is good for my community,

what is good for the human being across the planet, is good for me too. that is the awakening internally that we can start prefiguring right now through spiritual practices while we simultaneously fight through organized political struggle to create the material basis that would allow that form of consciousness to flourish. And this is not idealism. This is dialectical and historical materialism. Marx told us it's not the consciousness of men that determine their social being. It's their social being that determine their consciousness, meaning that these two processes are interwoven. And if we can raise consciousness like we do through organizing,

like we do through political education, what do we say? We're raising class consciousness. We're increasing awareness. Let's take that a step further. Let's see how the egoic illusion of separation itself acts as a limiting cap on what we can achieve externally. And let's start right here and now working on transcending that while we fight for the sort of world that would allow that consciousness

to become the mainstream consciousness and spread like wildfire. That's dialectical integration. So, in summary, if you want children, have them. There's no better time. There's no time where life's going to be just so perfect that it's going to be finally comfortable to bring more life into the world. If you want them, have them. If you don't, don't.

And, hey, our enemies aren't having these conversations. Our enemies aren't like, hey, we shouldn't have kids. Elon Musk is out there trying to psychotically spread his seed and his values and his privileges as much as he can. Right. Reactionaries and trads are trying to do the same thing. No, let's raise revolutionaries. Let's have children. Let's build community. Let's teach our children if we decide to have them how to be forces for good and change in the world. Because if it's the radical left that is saying, no, no kids, fuck kids, we don't want them, or it's just cruel to have them. How could I ever do this?

while our enemies are having them by the boatload and indoctrinating them and teaching them how to be cruel ego monsters just like them? No, no, the left should not hand the creation of life over to our goddamn enemies. Build community, create whatever you can, art, philosophy, children, build families, build relationships, build connection, instill your values, cultivate your own, you know, spiritual and existential maturation processes within and go out in the world and serve others. That's what we should be doing. Again, if you don't want a kid for your own personal reasons, that's totally fine. But don't tell me that it's immoral for me to have children. I don't want to hear it. I scoff at the very idea. So, yeah, that's my argument.

Thank you. And I'm hearing this quote from Martin Shaw. He said, when we prematurely claim doom, it's like we've walked out of the movie 15 minutes before the end. We could weave our grief to something else possibility. Gorgeous. And so I just, I really hear all of that in what you're sharing. And also that times have always been tough. We are always in both the great unraveling and the great turning at the same time. And I also love that you brought in this beautiful concept of, you know, life is inherently

regenerative and creative. Absolutely. And there's many ways that we can create, one of which is, you know, birth, life in terms of parenting, but there's also other ways that we can create. And I also love that you're really taking us upstream, you know, that when we go upstream from the challenges of our time, we find separation and power over. And then when we go upstream from that, we find this sense of self, this small egoic sense of self that's isolated, that is the homovaled. That is the homoer. Economist, the rugged, isolated individual. And the antidote to that, the alternative, is this more ecological self, a self that remembers itself to the web of life and to each other and sees our common humanity with those who are millions of miles away from us. So I really hear that.

And from that different sense of self, that more ecological sense of self, we cultivate a sense of solidarity, of humanity, of connection, right, with our, with, you know, our human siblings, but also with the more than human world. So thank you for taking us on that journey upstream. Yes. Beautifully said, beautifully said. Yeah. And I, one thing I really have to ask you is, you know, we know there is so much work to be done. And yes, I'm referring to that Lenin text. And, you know, you mentioned that we need to do this work to fight. And we are acknowledging both you and I that times are challenging, as they always have been, but, you know, there's also a particular flavor to how challenge they are right now. How do you balance being a parent and the work

there is to be done? And I'm asking this particularly as I think about, you know, parental leave and how much time to take off of things like upstream. You know, there's so many more, you know, episodes and conversations and and also mutual aid and activism and actions and just projects that that really the world is calling for us to participate in and to create. So how do you balance the being with your family, being with your wife, being with nature, you know, going on that trip with your son? How do you balance that with, you know, the work to be done? The organizing, the fight, the supporting, you know, those in palest. Palestine, your neighbors, right? People suffering under the current administration. How do you

hold that balance? It's a constant struggle. There's no way to make that any less real than it is. Like it is a striking of a balance. It's the constant recalibrating. But when you're motivated from this deep sense of love and connection and responsibility, right? Like our society talks about freedom a lot. The idea that you could have freedom without responsibility to others is a child's understanding of freedom. Freedom means responsibility to your family, to your community, to the world at large. And so when you really feel that in your bones, and when you really love people in your bones, you can't stand seeing people brutalized by a stupid system. You can't stand seeing the worst people in the world elevated to power to platforms of such power and grotesque wealth even while they

tell us that they're harder workers and they're more deserving and they have better character than us and that's why they're we just see through it all this fountain of just complete energy and motivation is within you now it is that is also balanced out by just the the raw physical and psychological limits of a human being. And I often bump up against exhaustion. I'm often, you know, incredibly stressed. All of us are. I'm trying to go to class. I'm trying to get my master's right now so that I can get a job with health care and a pension maybe so I can provide for my family better while I'm at home with my wife, raising kids, while I'm trying to continue to educate myself about the world and go out and do my little, you know, my little contributions

through my political education work while I'm organizing locally and taking part in the socialist night school and lecturing two classes and preparing for that in local organizing context. And it is hard. It's brutal. Thank God for people that support the show enough to give me the freedom to do those things. At least creates more space to allow me to do more of those things that, you know, before I just would not have the time to be able to do. But it's not easy. And so first and foremost, we want to fight for policies, even reforms in this rotten fucking system if we can do it,

that just take the boot off the neck of working people a little bit more. Anything that advances the ball to create more space and time for working people to actually connect with their families and find out what their interests are and pursue them and take some time to rest and breathe. the better. You know, I kind of accept on some level that I am throwing every ounce of my life force into what I care about. That I am being in some ways whittled down, right? Stress, financial pressures, huge debt, so many responsibilities. There is an element of it that feels unsustainable. but because it comes from this place of my deepest values

that there is this ability for me to keep going and everybody has their own limits everybody can juggle and take on only so much or more than others or less than others everybody has their own specific mental health issues they have to cope and deal with I've spent the last 12 months of my life wrestling with an OCD episode

that I'm just finally now kind of knock on would getting a grip on. So I understand how just having a mental health issue can just completely sideline so much else of what you want to do. I'm dealing with physical health issues. I just had surgery and I have another appointment for another physical problem that I'm having, which literally physically limit what I can do. But I just try to find what I can do. I try to strike that balance. I try to be motivated from a place. of deep love and responsibility to others while also taking care of myself as best I can.

Thank God I have my wife and my family because although it's stressful, right, to worry about your family and financial pressures, it is also a refuge that at the end of the day, you know, I get to crawl into my wife's arms and she gets to crawl into mine that, you know, no matter how hard parenting gets, one little cute moment from your kids can erase an entire day of stress. one, you know, hearing my son go into his room and belt out a beautiful song on his piano can just make it all worth it and prioritizing what really matters. What really matters is like my family, my community, and trying to leave the world better than I found it. And if I'm doing actions and activities that are deeply aligned with those core values, there's an extra

amount of energy that comes from that. If you are living your life in a way that is inauthentic, that is not aligned with your core values easier said than done plenty of obstacles mental health obstacles a shitty job obstacle financial obstacles i'm not trying to say that those aren't present but to find out who you really are and who you want to be and live in accordance as best you can with those deeper values is possible in any circumstance and if you can do that there's energy that comes i think the body has an intelligence the psyche and even the unconscious have an intelligence. And if you are living in a way that is deeply antithetical to who you want to be, that is antithetical to your own well-being, the body and the mind

rebel against that in various ways. And one of the ways that that happens is burnout and fatigue and, you know, mental health issues, physical health issues. And stress will do that by itself for sure. But I've noticed in periods of my life where I'm not living in alignment with what I deeply care about, that those are more likely to happen and that I'm more prone to burnout. But when I align myself with those deeper values, I do have more energy, but you can't do it alone. It's impossible to do it alone. And thank God, I have community and family and friends and comrades. And now, even comrades in other parts of the country like you that I've never met personally, hopefully we'll change that one day soon. But being in a broader community of other

people that are focused on making the world better, that's energizing, having community and friends and family, that's energizing, looking over and seeing what the people of Palestine are going through. I mean, just that alone, when I start, you know, whining in my head to myself, this is harsh, maybe this harshness isn't good for everybody else, but I tell myself, shut the fuck up. Look at what those people are dealing with. And yet they fight. And yet they laugh and yet they have dinner together and yet they make babies and they have intimacy and they love one another and they still build and they're living not in ideological and cultural rubble they're living in actual rubble and they're still creating space for faith

for family for community for flourishing and if the people of palestine can do it you and i can do it too and that's what i mean when i say Palestinians are the the moral compass of humanity. They should not have to endure what they are enduring. But despite what they endure, they are so beautifully human. And they refuse to stop being human. They refuse to stop creating life and art and philosophy and meaning and family and community. They refuse to stop building. They refuse to stop resisting. And they have it almost certainly worse than anybody listening to this podcast right now has it. And that's not to denigrate the stuff that you're going through. That's not to say that you don't have your own very real stresses and challenges. Of course you do.

We all do. But they're the moral compass for the best of humanity. And we can try to live up to that in our own ways. We can show solidarity with them. We can be part of the broader global resistance against what's happening to them. We can identify people around the world who are also going through similar levels of tragedy and horror and align ourselves with them. And that deep, spiritual, existential connection to the world is a form of community. And it's a form of renewal and meaning and purpose, which then gives you energy. So it's not easy. There's no easy shortcuts.

But community being aligned with your values, looking at people who have it worse than you, and seeing how they manifest their humanity in the face of. conditions we can't fucking imagine. Those are energizing. And when I talk to my friend Willie on the on the ground in Gaza episodes, we've had two of those on Rev left where he's a medical volunteer that's gone over to Gaza twice. And he talks about his experiences there, good, bad and ugly, tragic. But one thing he says every time, Palestinian people, the most generous people on earth. These people have nothing. They're being brutalized by the strongest military powers that have ever existed in human history

bombed into oblivion their genocide is rationalized and normalized through mainstream media corporate press and the Western ideological apparatus and what do they do? They give him their last scrap of food. They offer him their last tea bag so he can have some warm, comforting tea

in the midst of a brutal, harsh, gauzen winter, wet, cold winter. they give they give they give even in moments where any human being would be totally validated in grabbing whatever they can for them and their family they still give it all away and so Palestinian people they are North Star they are leading light that's who we need to stand in solidarity with and we need to learn from they represent the best of humanity and the forces that are attacking them murdering them, genociding them, and rationalizing their slaughter are the worst aspects of our

humanity. And so we want to cultivate the best and we want to defeat the worst. And we can do that externally, politically, we have to do that. Externally, politically, socially, economically through organized, militant, class, anti-imperial, anti-colonial struggle. And we can also cultivate that within ourselves through various practices of inner uplift, transcending the small, petty, ego, which is driven by fear and desire and wanting to stabilize itself at the cost of everything else, overcoming that within ourselves, and giving, giving, giving, giving our time, our energy, our last scrap of food if it comes down to it, to the other, in order to build a better world where nobody ever has to endure that sort of suffering again. There's plenty of suffering that

just is on automatic for being a sentient human being in the cosmos. We get old, we get sick, we suffer, we watch people we care about die, and eventually one day we die. That's necessary suffering. There's no way out. We can face that bravely, but there's also unnecessary suffering. The brutalities of class hierarchy, the imposition of scarcity where there need not be any, the tossing of human beings into the gutters for not having enough money in their bank account, crushing families under debt because they got they had the crime of getting sick or wanting an education brutalizing and bombing and committing genocides for land grabs and and geopolitical power and the opening up of new markets that is unnecessary suffering and we can fight against that we must

fight against that and dismantle that entire death machine so that humanity itself can be liberated from those unnecessary forms of suffering and come together as brothers and sisters to face life with bravery and courage and community. That's our vision of a better world. Some people call that extreme. We're extremists. We're radicals.

Maybe we're even terrorists, no. We're human beings with big beating hearts and we refuse, refuse to bow down before this disgusting death machine and we will fight it until our last breath And that is meaning, that is purpose, that is love in action. And that's what we should strive for. Absolutely.

So as I'm hearing you, I'm thinking of another quote, O'Rea Mountain Dreamer. She has a poem called The Invitation in one of the lines is, I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruise to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children. and I'm also hearing that, you know, what is a truly renewable resource or source is community, solidarity, and love. And I really hear the way that those qualities energize you

and energize us in the work that we do. And, you know, I want to close with your final invitations for post-capitalist parenting. So just in general, you know, anything by way of that phrase, what does it mean to be a post-capitalist parent or to do post-capitalist parenting in any invitations? And, you know, finally, what would it feel like or what do we do to raise revolutionaries if that maybe is an aspiration of yours? But, you know, what would that look like to raise the next generation of people who can carry on this work that we're doing? Yeah. And absolutely we have to, right? Like, it's not just a political preference to be revolution. it's an existential demand and we need to raise children not to just imbibe and parent like I said

earlier our personal ideological beliefs but become big-hearted human beings that care enough to want to intervene on behalf of others who want to build a better world who are motivated by love and connection so that's essential and I'll get to that in a second but what comes to mind when I hear the phrase post capitalist parenting there is this prefigrative aspect we've discussed so many different angles you can take on that prefigrative aspect from personal spiritual and existential growth through time-tested spiritual practices to sitting with stillness and silence being present with what is and then also the prefigrative aspects of role-modeling in your own home the sort of values that you want to teach your children understanding that

what they see is going to be more important than what they hear you can tell them everything but if the way you behave is antithetical to what you're telling them it means nothing and children are way, way, way smarter than they're often giving credit for. They're much more intuitive than they're often given credit for, and they can sense those things. The goal is not perfection. The goal is to be as best as you can be, try to be better every day, try to be dignified and responsible and be vulnerable, open, and honest when you inevitably make mistakes. But post-capitalist parenting also means parenting in the context of broader social supports. We need to fight like hell for free universal healthcare, education,

child care of family endowments. Remember that $300 or so dollar child rebate that we all got during COVID, that Biden cruelly and disgustingly for no reason whatsoever cut off, plummeting child poverty back down into abysmal rates when it had solved half of it, just by giving parents a couple hundred dollars. We can give Israel billions to murder kids. We can give these private companies billions of taxpayers to build new ways to murder. murder people. Can't we funnel money into supporting fucking working class families, giving parents a little break at the end of every single month? We have to use credit cards just to get groceries, right? Just to get groceries. We don't have big consumer debt. We don't have a nice

big house. We don't have brand new cars. We ain't got shit. We're trying to get health care and education and groceries and housing. And we can't even do that. And most people are in that position. you know the vast majority of working class families they don't talk about it a lot of people internalize it as personal failing instead of structural ones we got to change that through education but a lot of people are dealing with this and they're silence about it and they just carry on and when they post on instagram they're posting their smiling family they're not posting their bank account they're not posting how much credit card that they've been in they're not posting that new bill they just got in the mail from their fucking doctor saying they owe this much or from

their shitty health company saying health insurance company saying okay you're nine hundred a month payment due. They're not sharing that because people want to present themselves as happy and well put together and I get it. But underneath the surface, we're all struggling unless you're wealthy or come from wealthy parents, which most of us don't. So post-capitalist parenting includes robust social supports for families and for human beings in general, expansion of community and free time, right? People can't find themselves. They can't spend time facilitating community. can't even politically organize if they're working two jobs a week just to get by so we want the expansion of community the expansion of free time dismantle egoic hyper individualism i don't want money i don't want

fame i don't want status i want love and community and connection and if that means i can't have an iphone if that means i have to have a smaller tv if that means i don't get to consume as much if that means i don't get amazon delivering packages to my door so be it i will take a more meaningful connected, sustainable life than this hyperphrenetic consume, consume, consume, everything has to be ultra convenient. Let's exploit labor in the global south so our cost can come down to fucking zero and I can order it off Tmu to have a ship blow carbon into the air for 72 hours straight so I can get this little knick-knack delivered to my door. I will happily live without it. And being willing to really give up that unnecessary gadgetry, convenience, consumerist nonsense for a deeper, more

meaningful life, which I think is going to have to be required if we want to live in sustainable relationship to the natural world. And then finally, post-capitalist parenting means raising well-rounded human beings, not future workers, well-rounded human beings that have the ability to retreat into art, into books, into nature, that these things are prioritized, over your grades, how much money you're going to make, what job you're going to have. There's no even guarantee that there's going to be jobs, right? What people want is to be able to live well-rounded, creative, expressive lives, not just make money forever and gear their whole life towards doing just that.

So how do we raise revolutionaries? We raise critical thinkers with big hearts. We raise people that don't just pair what we believe, but that see us role model it, that have good relationships with us so that they trust it and that are taught how do think critically about their society. The injustices, the brutalities, the way society wants to impinge certain values on you and how you can resist that and always cultivating big open hearts that can't stand injustice. Can't stand it. That is crucial. We want to raise children that can control their attention. If your attention is scattered,

smartphones, YouTube, scrolling over here, closing this, this app, opening this app, it destroys children's mental health, it destroys children's sense of self-worth, it destroys any practical capacities they have to go out in the world and engage with it meaningfully, to go out in nature and be able to sit in silence and listen to the birds chirp in the river flow, and their ability to focus in on reading a book to understand the world around them. What better neoliberal subject could there be than one that is dopamine addicted, that doesn't know themselves, that doesn't have any deeper values than consumption and self, you know, aggrandizement or the opposite side of a big ego is insecurity,

right? The people with the biggest egos that need to impress upon you the most, how cool and confident and rich and strong and sexy they are, they're doing that out of a place of insecurity. You cannot have a big ego without having a huge amount of insecurity. It just doesn't exist, two sides of the same coin. And the bigger the ego, the more they're trying to hide that from you. But anyways, the perfect neoliberal subject is an egoic, self-obsessed person that wants to express themselves and only knows how to express themselves through consumption that buys into the dominant paradigm of what success and meaning actually mean and who can't fucking control their attention, who cannot sit in silence for 15 minutes, who can't get through a chapter of a book,

let alone sit in meditation, or go spend time alone in nature with no headphones on. that's the perfect neoliberal subject you're maximally malleable you're subordinate your whole life is geared around consumerism which is great for the profiteers you're the perfect worker because you're probably in debt so you need to work that off i mean i'm in debt too we're all in debt there's no escaping that but just all these things combined together make you the perfect capitalist subject and so find find be very explicit in your head what makes somebody the exact sort of person that an Elon Musk would want us to be? What makes us the exact sort of person

that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook and these attention-destroying dopamine machines the sort of people they want us to be and then be the exact opposite? And when you're the exact opposite, you're deep reading, you're meditating, you're building community, you're spending time in the natural world,

you're fighting back against this disgusting fucking system, you're educating yourself and others. So, yeah, and then teach loving the natural world, take them out into the natural world with no technology. get in a hiking walk around your your local lake you know go involve themselves in the natural world and make memories with them in the natural world as the backdrop so they have these wonderful memories and this love of nature because if you love nature if you spend time in nature you will

fight like hell for nature and you'll stop seeing yourself as separate from it if you're bunched up in a big city never get out never touch grass looking down at your little dopamine casino eight, nine, ten hours a day. You are alienated from nature. So when they say, hey, this national park is being closed down so that we can drill and extract fossil fuels from it all the way across the country and you're sitting in a, you know, whatever, a big city on the east coast dittling away on your phone. Like, oh, that sucks, but there's no connection. I don't give a fuck. Like really, how does that affect me? Right. So you're alienated more from it. So fight against that with your your children and then let parenting be an act of selfless service when you have a kid it's no

longer about you and some people can see that as a huge downside and it sucks at first the transition period sucks and it's stressful but it destroys the self-centered me me me me me me egoism that so many of us are indoctrinated with that you just know if two in the morning your kid just threw up you only have one hour of sleep you got to wake up at six to go to work or to do whatever and now you got to get out of bed and go clean up puke in the middle of the night service to another instead of being like this fucking sucks i fucking hate this i shouldn't have done this oh here's an opportunity to set what i want aside and go serve another person and that matures you it's not the only way you can mature right i'm not saying you have to have kids to mature but having kids

definitely one way to mature yourself but even if you don't have kids being in community with people that do have kids, having comrades that do have kids, engaging with them, loving them. If you have parents in your life that you know are stressed and you don't have kids and you have some free time, if you just reach out and say, I would love to take your kid to the museum today, give you guys some time to relax. From a parent's perspective, you don't know how much that would fucking mean to us. You don't know how beautiful that would be. And then there, you are actually doing the thing. You don't have kids yourself. But you're creating. community, you're helping parents who do have kids, you're connecting yourself with children,

and that's a mutual engagement. You're both learning. When you take a little kid to, you know, your, your comrades, kids, or your nephew or niece, and go do something with them, you are now having that existential back and forth of that kid. You love that kid. Anybody tried to hurt that kid, you would put yourself in danger to protect that kid. So you can still cultivate those deep, beautiful traits and the community that goes along with it, even if you choose that kids for you are not right. And so I highly encourage people listening to do just that. But there's much more to say on this. Nobody's perfect. Do your best. These are all just ideas and things that people can pick up on, be motivated by, be inspired by, and try to do their best.

But yeah, that's my vision for post-capitalist parenting and for how we might be able to start raising revolutionary. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Brett O'Shea. activist, organizer, political educator, and host of the podcast Revolutionary Left Radio, and co-host of the podcast's Red Menace and Shulis in South Dakota. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode and for past episodes in our post-capitalist parenting series, along with past episodes we've done with Brett.

Thank you to Club Cafe for the Intermission Music and to Carolyn Rader for the cover art, Upstream theme music was composed by me, Robbie. Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bi-weekly episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show,

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