Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Defending Socialism: Debunking Anti-Communist Myths (w/ Radical Reflections)

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Sept 2019 David Swanson of Radical Reflections invites Breht on his show to tackle myths, lies, slanders, and popular criticisms wielded against communism by its (often times lazy and unimpressive) opponents.  ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Ann Comrade Brett O'Shea, and today we have a collaborative episode to Tosh Your Way. I went on the podcast Radical Reflections, hosted by David Swanson. This comrade's from Ireland. He asked me to come on his podcast and do an episode about debunking myths, and then it was so fun, and hopefully we think good that we decided to double release it to both of our audiences. If you enjoy this episode, check out radical reflections. I hope this can be used when it comes to convincing a liberal friend or convincing a family member or some resource that you can give

somebody. This is like a nice little debunking the basic myths that people are taught. And if you're trying to get somebody to move leftward politically, this could be a really, hopefully, a good place to start, a good resource to give them to start. So I hope this works for that. And even if you're a veteran in the left. This should still be incredibly interesting. It was very fun. We tackled a bunch of lies and slanders and criticisms of communism broadly. I hope we did a sufficient job. So yeah, this is me going on radical reflections. Definitely check that out and enjoy the episode. Okay, Brett, thanks for coming on the show. It's a pleasure to have you here as our first international

episode. So at the top of the show, we always ask everybody how they identify politically their background and what's brought them to become a political activist as it helps to give listeners of just a feel of who we're talking to if that's okay. Yeah, sure, of course. So my name is Brett. I am the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, the co-host of Red Menace podcast. I identify politically somewhere in the general sphere of Marxist-Leninist, Marxist-Leninist Maoist. There are certain positions where I kind of oscillate between the two. I don't I don't want to obsess or fetishize, you know, a tendency here. So I just sort of am comfortable playing in that general sphere of left-wing tendencies.

And so, yeah, my background, I'm just a working-class person my whole life, grew up with working-class parents. And it was just, you know, the daily trials and tribulations of being low-income, especially in a cut-throat capitalist society like the United States. And so all of that experience was really, you know, funneled into Marxist political philosophy. as I got older and started understanding political philosophy and started seeing how they related to my experiences as a working class person. So I have, you know, that whole history was sort of

made sense, made the most sense in the context of my discovery of Marxism. And then from that point on, it's just really been deepening my understanding, trying to continue to educate myself and then turn around and hopefully help educate others. Yeah, great. I mean, you bring a very nuanced example of what we're looking for in the show is we don't really fetishize on tendencies either. We have strong political and theoretical inputs into what we want to do, but we're very happy to broadcast all tendencies. And I think you kind of fit somewhere in that, which is great and really why I wanted to invite you on the show in the first place. So just before we delve in today's topic in greater detail, just because we're an educational format as much as a theoretical one,

could you just outline what communism is? The educational side is very important, particularly for those who aren't familiar with the jargon, the terms, the phrases, etc. And solidarity, if you're new to this if you're listening in. Particularly the differences between socialism and communism and how they relate to each other, etc. Just so we can just cement what we're setting out to achieve with this episode. Yeah, absolutely. We're going to cover a lot of ground today. So I'm going to try to be somewhat brief in my answering of these questions. And then of course, if anybody ever wanted to have me, you know, expound on an idea or an answer, you can always reach me on Twitter, Patreon, anywhere. And I'd be more than happy to continue to elaborate. But in a basic sense,

Communism is what everybody on the revolutionary left from anarchists through Marxist Leninists wants, right? It's the end goal. And that is a classless, moneyless, stateless society. But the difference is, how do you get there? And that's where all the disagreements on the left come in. The Marxist understanding of what socialism is, is the transitionary phase between capitalism and that end goal of communism. So because it's a transitionary phase, it's inherently a process. And that process can take a bunch of different forms depending on the material context that it's operating in. So the way that socialism would look in 1917 Russia is different than how it would look in 1956 China is different than it would look in 2019 Ireland, for example. So understanding socialism not as a static state of affairs, not as something that, you know, a system that one reaches and stops at, but a transitionary process, I think is absolutely essential to the Marxist understanding of,

what that means. And then, you know, just for like an analogy for help people understand this, you can understand socialism in the same way that you can kind of understand a mercantilism, right? As mercantilism was this sort of transitionary phase between, you know, straight up feudalism and what would later become industrialized capitalism. It was the seeds of capitalism beginning to blossom in the soil of ongoing feudalism. And in the same way socialism is that transition, only this time it's from capitalism toward the end goal of communism. So does that answer the question?

No, it's great. I mean, for us here in Ireland and I guess Britain more generally, people view socialism as gaining reforms, you know, gaining tangible, which of course is a big part of it, but what we really want to put on this episode and bring it to clear before we even start

is that we actually want the working class, the vast majority of those who create the wealth to be in charge of what we create and devising resources in a more egalitarian way. So to say something like putting Jeremy Corbyn into power is socialism or putting Bernie Sanders into power in the US. That isn't socialism. It's the working class themselves, the mass movement on the ground, which pushes towards taking charge of their own lives and shaking charge of the wealth they create. So I just really wanted to put that firmly on the table before we start into the episode itself and debunk some of the myths and establish what we're actually setting out to do.

So thanks for that, Brett. Jumping straight into the subject matter then. the big two-part question which I'm going to start with on the major buzz topics of the topics that we face is I cannot count the many times I've been leveled with the attack that communism and fascism, left wing and right wing are almost identical and if you just peel back a couple of layers off the surface, they equate to the same thing and strive for the same goals. Can you please debunk this myth and maybe give your take on how this view has even materialized amongst so many people? Yeah, I mean, I'll start with the latter part of that question. Why does this view take hold like in whose interests does it serve to pretend like these two things which are the complete opposites that they are the same thing and the answer to that question is simple right it serves the interests of the liberal center because to claim that both the horrors of the nazi holocaust camps are the exact same as genuine proletarian movements trying to get freedom from capital it serves that interest because it says look you know don't you hate hitler and the nazis well the communists they're

just as bad be scared and it's what we call you know classic horseshoe theory this idea that the further out on the edges away from the liberal nice liberal center you get the closer to fascism and communism which are really the same thing that you get and this is of course bourgeois nonsense it's it is it is you know very much ideologically charged in that it does try to crucify working class movements to the whores of fascism and in that way solidify the control that the liberal center has on the political and economic system. So it's disingenuous in that way. And, you know, just talking about fascism on its own terms, I mean, what is fascism?

Well, Lenin told us, in part, that fascism is capitalism in decay. There's a reason why fascism pops up in capitalist countries, but you don't really see huge fascist Nazi marches in the USSR or in Mao's China. There's a reason for that, because fascism pops up when capitalism is under pressure by the forces of egalitarianism. Fascism seeks to maintain the hierarchies that are fostered under capitalism, the hierarchies of class, of race, of gender, of orientation, the way that the working class is divided under capitalism, those hierarchical structures, is what fascism seeks to maintain through

complete violence when the normal mechanisms of bourgeois dictatorship aren't there to make that happen. And communism, on the other hand, just seeks to destroy those. very hierarchies. Communism seeks to destroy the very hierarchies of race that white supremacist fascism is rooted in and founded on. So communism seeks to

eradicate the material basis, i.e. capitalism, from which fascism springs. And I think that's incredibly important. And then just looking over history, we can look at many times when fascists have arose and gained power. We can look at Franco

and during the Spanish Civil War. We can look at Hitler, Nazi, Germany. We can look at Mussolini. We can look at a bunch of different fascist movements and see how they've actually always cooperated to some extent with the capitalist ruling class. And fascists, once they have gained power, you don't see a move away from capitalism. You see a re-entrenchment of capitalism. So no matter what the fascist or the capitalist like to tell you, by going and looking at history and seeing how those relationships actually played out in country after country in different historical context, the same exact. pattern comes up again and again, well, that says something. You know, the fascist and the

capitalist when push comes to shove are on the same team and communism is on the opposite side of that line. There's a reason why, particularly here in Ireland, that the education system will push a line that Hitler is the same as James Connolly for many respects, because when push comes to shove, they will pick the ideology which lets a tiny minority of individuals and sex batter down the hatches and take everything for themselves whereas on the other side of the coin someone like james connelly for example they're pushing towards more egalitarian membership of society they're pushing for the majority to take over from the minority and to equate the tooth the same thing makes people feel like an ideology which splits resources amongst everybody

is inherently evil and i think you've brought out many excellent points out which will give people food for thought as to what we're trying to achieve here yeah really quick though before you move on like Anybody that says James Connolly and Hitler are on the same list deserves to be slapped in the face. And moreover, thinking about this idea that fascism is capitalism decay, you can look at the United States right now. Now, the United States is founded on genocide, on slavery, on white supremacy. It's always had huge fascist currents. But sometimes those currents come to the top of society, and sometimes they're repressed in different areas. Well, right now we see that the capitalist economy is working for less and less Americans.

after 40 years of brutal neoliberalism and then all of a sudden you see not by coincidence this huge upsurge in fascism now liberals would like to say oh that's Donald Trump it's all because of Trump that these forces of reaction are coming to the fore and to some extent sure Trump allows you know

sort of provides cover for them and makes it a little easier for them to come up but it's not because of Trump Trump himself is just a symptom of the diseased system that is American capitalism and fascism is the is that same sort of symptom Trump is just one facet of that broader reactionary symptom, you know, of the capitalist disease. And if we can be predictive, the further in the future we go, 10, 20, 30 years out, I'm using the United States as an example because that's where I'm from and I know best, I know that society best. You know, fascism is not going to become less of a force in our society.

It's going to become more of a force. As climate change ravages the economy and the country's ability to maintain order, fascism will, rise and that is a that is a sort of prediction based on this understanding of what fascism is so we can see how that plays out and in 20 years 30 years if I'm wrong I mean send me that send me that email letting me know yeah I mean I really I mean another good point to be brought out that just before move on to the next question is the idea of the gun laws in the US from what we see it here in Ireland that there's a huge problem with people wanting to take guns off the working class and arming the working class more say and to do that strengthens the capitalist state strengthens

Trump and there's a whole lot of different things to play in here. But the thing that we really need to push on here is that the left and the right are pushing for extremely different goals, extremely different methods of society, and in the long run, are completely different, and it only serves a small minority's interests to say that they're the same thing. So with that, we'll move on to the next, the jackpot statement of the two-part question. So communism doesn't comply with human nature. People are inherently self-interested, and this dictates how we interact with every issue, both political or social. Is this true and is communism really against human nature? Yeah, I love this one. So, like, the first question to ask is, is what is

human nature? And as much as people would say communism is against human nature, ask them to actually lay out what they mean by human nature, and you'll see the entire edifice of their argument collapse in a second. Because if you want to push forward this idea that people are inherently self-interested, well, you know, human nature just really is encompassing all possible behaviors and modes of conduct that human beings can engage in. And then that would push us to look at evolutionary history. Well, if there is such a thing as human nature, then certainly by studying how human beings evolved over time, we could get a good idea of what that may be. And the moment you start doing that, you see human beings have always been deeply communal,

social animals. Language itself, perhaps one of the most important things that gives us, you know, this level of intelligence over all other animals and allows us to pass culture down through generations and allows us to actually have a relationship with ourselves and our own heads is language. And language blossoms out of the fact that human beings are deeply social animals and need ways to interact and communicate with one another in increasingly nuanced ways, because that is how human beings evolved and were able to survive without the big teeth and claws that other animals have. It was our ability to be social and work together to cooperate with our fellow human beings that allowed humans to be so successful as an animal on this earth. So I just always

laugh at this idea that that human nature is conducive with capitalism because even if we take this broad idea that any sort of behavior that's possible for animals can be included in human nature, we can still make distinctions about what is more conducive and less conducive to human flourishing and well-being. And we can even use data, like about depression or anxiety rates, murder rates, to see how healthy a given society is. And once you start down that road, it becomes very clear that in ways capitalism might play to some of the, the worst aspects of human nature, but in other ways, it's actually deeply antithetical, right? If we take seriously the idea that humans are social communal animals and that, in fact, our entire

nature is really premised on the fact that we're communal and social, then this atomized, hyper individualist, constant competitive, consumerist capitalism that we're all forced to operate in is in a lot of ways actually antithetical to our human nature. There's nothing in our evolutionary history that suggests we should be sitting in front of a TV watching advertisements for 12 hours a day. There's nothing in our history evolutionarily that suggests we should go to work for eight hours of our day under the auspices and dictates of a petty tyrant we call a boss and slave away for a couple dollars an hour just so we can pay for food and shelter and clothes for ourselves and our children. Right. I mean, that in a lot of ways is the opposite of what is conducive to

human flourishing. On the other hand, if you're a socialist, a communist of any sort, what do we believe in? Well, we believe in community. We believe in cooperation. We believe in solidarity. We believe that you only get healthy individuals when the collective context out of which those individuals arise is healthy, right? It's not this dichotomy between a collective and the individual. It's a dialectical relationship between the two. Healthy communities give rise to healthy individuals, and healthy individuals go on to continue and propagate healthy communities. So in a lot of ways, the fact that, you know, the argument that communism doesn't comply with human nature is on its head. Human nature is deeply compatible.

with communism, and even Marx and angles and their assessment of history talked about this idea of primitive communism. This idea, like, before feudalism, before capitalism, humans lived in these tribal communal arrangements for, you know, tens of thousands of years if you're talking about

homeless apians, but if you want to go back and talk about our entire evolutionary history, you're talking millions of years that hominoids of one sort or another were evolving in these communal and social ways. So this idea that communism is antithetical to human nature is complete and utter bullshit, and the best way to push back against it is to either make

the person define what they mean by human nature and put pressure on that argument, or make them talk about what capitalism really is, and why, if this capitalist society is so conducive to human happiness and human nature, why are we have mass shootings every goddamn week? You know, why are people have depression and anxiety rates through the roof? Why is the suicide rate in our society increasing instead of decreasing? all of this data suggests that that argument is exactly wrong, is precisely incorrect. And so, yeah, those are a couple ways you could push back against that, that fallacious argument for sure. There's two points to be brought out of that, I guess. I mean, the first is that the role of

labor has a tangible role of everything we've done in society from the beginnings of mankind, evolution itself, and generally everything we do in society is made from labor. But the other point to bring out is to drive home here that capitalism really encourages an idealist interpretation of both history and philosophy, which of course establishes that the mind and thought dictate how the world around us functions, when of course the opposite is true and the matter and the material of our world dictates consciousness. So with that mind, those who control how these resources are accumulated, divided, distributed, and of course you also control how people think are raised, they're educated, everything. So capitalism is not a product of human nature,

but is a reflection of the mode of production itself and who controls how these things happen. Is that fair to say? Oh my God. That's, that's, That's incredibly well said, beautifully said. I could not agree more. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah. So another huge criticism level against communism itself is that it propagates and encourages dictatorship. So Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Chavez, Guevara, whoever your tendency is across the left, there's no doubt we've always been asked this question.

I face continual the barrage from mainstream media publications and outlets. So what does communism really mean? Is it a one-person dictatorship? Or how does it? that actually function. Yeah, great question. So again, like, you know, there, I don't want to pretend that there has never been abuses of power in proletarian history, right? One of the things that makes us principled Marxists is that we don't have idealized, idealist understandings of history, not even our own. And so we have to come to terms and wrestle with our successes and our failures all throughout proletarian history and not ignore chunks of it because it's inconvenient. So I just wanted to just put that out front. There are excesses. There are

flaws. There are errors made in proletarian history, and that should be, you know, wrestled with and, you know, fix so we don't repeat those mistakes in the future, but instead carry forward our successes. Having said that, this idea that communism is inherently dictatorial is absolutely absurd because what, what socialism, communism, true working class movements, what they require is mass support. You can't have an entire ideology and movement, which is based on the participation of the working classes separate from the working classes. So insofar as given proletarian movements had leaders, those leaders literally only existed because of the confidence and trust and love

garnered from the masses of working people and given to them, right? There is no Mao without the millions and millions of working class people in China supporting Mao and his movements, right? Their movement. There is no Ho Chi-Men without millions. of Vietnamese people wanting to beat back successfully this U.S. imperial invasion, and you can go right down the line. There's no Stalin, no Castro. None of these people exist without mass support because socialism requires mass support. Now, capitalism, on the other hand, doesn't. Because

capitalism funnels all of the wealth, all of the resources, and thus all of the power into a small set of hands at the very top. Therefore, capitalism has no need to mobilize the masses in order to defend it, it has the militaries, you know, these bourgeois nation-state militaries to defend its interests, and it does so brutally all over the, all over the world. So this, yeah, so this idea that that one is dictatorial and the other isn't, is absurd. But then we should also talk about living under a capitalist society. As much as liberals would love to tell us that this is a democratic society that takes everybody's interest into account and tries to navigate it for the better of everybody and that the state is actually a neutral entity just moderating and mediating

between classes. I mean, this is, this is bourgeois fog. This is a lie. In fact, we live under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. We live under a sort of dictatorship. It's better at giving us like these, these surface level appearances of democracy. I mean, after all, every four years, you go into that booth and you cast a vote. That's democracy, people. That's not what democracy is. What real democracy is is working class people having genuine meaningful control over their own lives, how their days are structured, what they do and what they can do in their free time, etc. And if you are living in poverty, if you are struggling paycheck to paycheck just to get by, if you're one or two paychecks away from being homeless and hungry, what democracy, what freedom, what liberty do you have? You don't have it. The U.S. is great if you're rich.

the United States is a playground for the rich. Capitalist societies broadly are playgrounds for the rich. Their liberty, their freedom to do whatever the hell they want at anybody else's expense is what's protected when they talk about democracy and liberty and freedom. But freedom and democracy for poor black people in our society, freedom and democracy for the indigenous natives of the United States and Canada in our society, you know, the immigrants being ripped away from their children at the border, tear gassed with their kids in their hands. What liberty and freedom and democracy do those people have? So this entire dichotomy of capitalism means freedom and democracy and liberty

and communism means dictatorships and domination and repression, it is complete and utter nonsense. And of course, it's ideological. It serves interests. And you see words like dictatorship and authoritarian very much get used in our society against really any non-capitalist society, but specifically against, against proletarian movements, socialist society, societies trying to gain more control over their wealth and resources. In Venezuela, for example, you have Maduro's government. This is one of the, you know, Venezuela during Chavez and Maduro's rise. I mean, this is one of the most open,

free, fair elections in the world. Even the Jimmy Carter Foundation, it's a foundation that monitors elections around the world and gives them grades based on their transparency and openness gave Venezuela the highest grades possible. I mean, they're even more. more of an open society in some ways democratically than the United States is. But what happens on our media outlets? Maduro and the Venezuela, the Bolivarian Revolution, they're called authoritarians. And they try to make fascists, you know, try murdering black people in the streets into freedom fighters because it serves the interest

of the global capitalist class. So not only the content behind these arguments, but the way that the words are used in our media, they're heavily ideological and they constantly serve one interests over others so be really interesting to see who does CNN and MSNBC and Fox News call authoritarian

and who do they not call authoritarian and that will that will give you an insight into how these words actually operate in this ideological way but yeah so again there's been failures in any history anybody's political movement if you look back and going to have some failures and oversteps

But to say that communism or socialism is inherently dictatorial, while capitalism isn't, is just absurd. And then, of course, lastly, you have to understand these movements like in the USSR and in China and in Cuba in the context of constant war against them. I mean, the moment the Bolsheviks won, for example, the revolution, the October revolution was successful, 14 different nation states, including the United States, flooded in on the side of the war. whites to fight the Reds, to defeat the Bolsheviks. So you had a world war, then you had this brutal civil war that they had to survive. Then you had another world war. In the meantime, you have all of this imperialist aggression, all of these economic, you know, all these economic sanctions against your country. And then after World War II, you have the Cold War where, you know, the United States is threatening to blow up the fucking world to defeat the USSR. And so in that

context, there is some clamping down on what the liberal West likes to call, you know, political freedoms. If you have a working class movement that is being brutally attacked internally as well as externally and you're fighting

for your survival, maybe you can't let fascists have their own newspaper, you know? And that's not a bad thing at the end of the day, in my opinion. No, again, you're bringing so much life to this episode and I'm so glad that we're debunking all these things. A couple more points to bring out on that is, again, it's kind of a reflection of how we're taught to view history

under capitalist society. You know, history is the act of great individuals in the conditions that we live. So in this, of course, in this scenario, Lenin, Mao, Stalin and others are viewed as impacting their viewpoint of history upon the people rather than viewing it as a class collective forming a spear in which the party and leaders are a sharp point rather than acting off their own accord. But more poignantly, for those who still believe, that communism is a dictatorship. The term dictatorship of the proletariat, for example, will always be interpreted

under capital society as a one-man dictatorship. But what does it actually mean? What is a dictatorship of the proletariat? You look at how they're projected throughout history and how they're interpreted out their history is it's extremely democratic for working class people. The dictatorial side comes out against exploiters, against the 1%

of society. So in that instance, capitalism will always view this as a dictatorship because it's viewed against the people who currently hoard resources against the people. And it's about working on your own working class perspective to say that the dictatorship of the proletariat is inherently in your interest, but against the people who currently exploit you in today's society. Is that a fair point? Yeah. I mean, that's exactly a fair point. And just to like to build on that, you know,

the Marxist understanding of the state is that is a manifestation of class society, that states are weapons of class domination. And so when Marx talks about the dictatorship with a proletariat, he's sort of taking on board this idea that the state is going to be dictatorial in favor of one class or another. Now, remember, communism is getting past class society. It's the transcendence of class society. But socialism is the transitionary phase from capitalism towards communism. So the state's still going to be present and the state is still going to be a manifestation of class society. And so the question then becomes in whose class interest should the state operate.

We've already done away with this idea that the state is neutral and that it merely mediates between class interests. No, the state in a capitalist society is the representation, is the managing class of the ruling class, right? And so the proletarian dictatorship is just like, oh, we're going to take this thing called the state, and we're actually going to run it in the interests of working class people to make sure that the focus of our society is no longer who can accrue the most wealth at the cost of everybody else, who can compete. the hardest and get to the top of the of the dog pile, but it's how can we use the wealth and resources that we have in our society to give every member a high as possible quality of life. And to do that, you're going to have to defend yourself against the forces of reaction and of capital that want to restore the old dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

And so then you have this, this really, this war that happens the moment a society says, we're not going to do it like the bourgeoisie wants us to do it. We're going to do it for our working class population and our people in our class. The moment somebody does that, the fangs come out and it's an all-out war. And so just understanding the way the word dictatorship is used in the context of the Marxist understanding of the state is really essential here. So another communist myth is a socialist state under the dictatorship of the proletariat comes under attack for being the only economic model that relies on state violence to uphold

this image for one of a better term. is this really true and equally on the flip side does this mean capitalism really ensures the freedom of individuals and nations right so we've definitely touched on on some of these some of these points so far taking seriously this idea that the capitalist system is really built on on state violence i mean okay the british colonialists they're trying to expand their empire right the the sun never sets on the british empire they come over to the quote unquote new world And they see all this frontier to exploit and use towards capitalist ends. But there's a problem. There's natives living on that land. So how do we get this land? Well, we brutally, brutally murdered tens of millions, you know, genocidly wipe out tens of millions of native peoples.

Okay, now the land is ours. Now what do we do? Well, we need to jumpstart this capitalist economy and, you know, labor costs. I don't really want to pay them. Oh, look at there's a whole continent called Africa. Let's go over there and steal a bunch of human beings. Bring them back and force them to work for us for free to jumpstart this thing we call capitalism. Okay.

Now we're into the 20th century. Capitalism is doing good. We're in this post-Cold War period, or I mean, sorry, post-World War II period where the United States is actually doing really well compared to everybody else. How do we maintain this? Through brutal, brutal imperialism all over the globe, especially in our hemisphere with regards to Latin America. And so you saw the funding of right-wing death squads. You saw the Cold War. You saw, you know, brutal bombings and slaughtering of people all over the world as capitalism now looked for a way to expand to new frontiers.

Because capitalism always needs to grow. It always needs to expand. It always needs new frontiers to operate on. And so what do you do when you've already taken up all the space on the North American continent? You go and you dominate other parts of the world in order to continue that growth model. And so in this way, capitalism is the economic model. of capitalism is rooted in and maintained daily by state violence. So this is more like a psychological projection than pretty much anything else. There has been state, wherever there's a state,

there is going to be state violence. Unfortunately, that's just sort of the nature of what a state is. But to say that state violence upholding an economic model is solely the realm of socialist and communists is just deeply, deeply disingenuous. or ignorant and then there's also the the idea of developing and industrializing right we know what industrialization look like in britain and the united states it looked like children losing fingers and looms and and eight-year-old kids being worked 12 hours a days in factories people getting pennies and living in squalor and ghettos by the by the tens of thousands hundreds of thousands so that developed and that was for over a long period of time so then when the russia or

China decides that they also need to industrialize, of course that industrialization process is going to be brutal. And that's just a sad fact about industrializing any country. Whether you do it under a capitalist or socialist framework, the industrialization process is brutal, not only towards human beings, but also towards the earth. So, you know, to try to isolate that and say that there's a unique problem with the industrializing process and the USSR and China is really to ignore the rest of that story, which is just how brutal and much longer it took for capitalism to industrialize and develop itself. So once we've done it over here in the capitalist West, we'll put that in the history books and we're fine. But don't you dare third world people or people of

different colors and different parts of the world? Don't you dare try to do the same thing or we're going to call you the worst sort of tyrants and authoritarian's relying on state violence, etc. We've all heard the bullshit. So I don't know. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, more great points. I mean, for me to say that a system, an economic system, which is chaining people to a production line for the profits of others, how can that ever mean freedom of individuals are more broadly a nation itself? And also coming back to the state violence point, those who realize that, and most who realize that if you're down tools to free the vast majority of society from the despotism of an individual, of a boss, or more broadly, a capitalist state, what happens then? The state violence comes out in droves. It comes out more than anything else that you have ever seen. I mean, you look at history in Ireland when we down tools during the 1916 rising

or more broadly, just across Britain, across British history, across US history. If you down tools, the state comes after you because it knows that you're striving for something else that will not let you, will not let the profit of others succeed what you want in your own social emancipation. So I think it's very important to realize that the state under capitalism

will do everything it can to protect the profit of individuals against the people. and the people need to effectively down tools economically to make a real tangible difference and strive towards their own social emancipation. Yeah, and I would just add one more thing. I mean, very well said. It's also important to understand how, you know, like I said earlier, how any proletarian project is immediately and brutally attacked,

forcing a lot of these formations into more repressive and defensive modes of operation that, you know, we would not think is ideal by any means. But it does ask the question, what would it be like if socialism in any country could flourish unencumbered? Like what if you had a China or a Cuba or something decide to do a socialist project and instead of brutally and immediately attacking it by all means necessary, it was allowed to just operate and develop of its own accord with no brutal interference? Well, then you wouldn't need a lot of what we now know as state violence and proletarian history to maintain that project. So to think about what socialism could be in a context where it's not immediately and brutally attacked would give you an idea of what would be more ideal. But sadly, we don't live in an ideal world.

We live in the real world and in the real world. Any working class people trying to take over the wealth and their resources for their own ends and for their families and their communities ends will be attacked by any means necessary by the forces of imperialist capitalist reaction. And that will always distort the way that these proletarian projects are able to develop. Great. I mean, that links really well onto the next question. I mean, you talk about the capitalist reaction itself, a main narrative coming out of every capitalist society towards historic social estates and also today, in today's world with China, Cuba, etc., etc., is human or communism, sorry, is responsible for 100 bazillion deaths and is inherently an evil ideology promoted by evil people? Is this really true? And equally, has capitalism itself come into existence by peaceful means? Yeah, I mean, so this is, this genuinely is, um, Nazi propaganda. This is, this is complete nonsense. This is cold war propaganda, cold war ideology. After the Nazis were defeated, um, we have a thing in the United States called Operation Paperclip, I believe, where a bunch of Nazi intellectuals and scientists were brought in by the United States to work for the United States. And out of that sort of reactionary community came a lot of these tropes because the idea was we have to make communism. look as bad or worse than fascism, and in the meantime, we have to cover up capitalism's crimes, right?

So by saying communism is responsible for 100 million deaths or whatever, it literally, and I urge people to find this, like if you were reading a book and an article and you see this stat, communism killed 100 million people come up, just start following sources. Go to the footnote. Okay, where does that lead? Where does that lead? And you will almost every time be led back to some far right weirdo propaganda source at the end of the day and again this is not me just telling you I'm asking you to try this out for yourself really follow the rabbit hole see where it leads

and you will see where it leads which is directly back to far right reactionary neo-Nazi nonsense bullshit what is counted in those deaths is like you know Russians who died in World War II or you know Chinese people who died in famines that was nobody's fault I mean any sort of death that can even be

somewhat conceived as being related to communism is counted in this death and said oh not only are these like related to communism no communism caused these deaths it is it is so absurd and it is so disingenuous and then the last part of your question is has capitalism come into existence by peaceful means

and this is the part of the conversation that every liberal and every reactionary doesn't want to talk about because as we've already covered genocide slavery brutal ongoing imperialism right-wing death squads, the nuclear bombing of, you know, babies and women and children, not once but twice in Japan, just so the United States could flex its muscles towards the Soviet Union and let them know we're coming after you next. I mean, capitalism, liberalism, it sits on a mountain of corpses, that anything is a molehill

in comparison to it. I mean, there's really no way to overstate just how brutal capitalism is. If communism, quote unquote, killed 100 million people, capitalism did that just with the genocide of Native Americans on the North American continent alone, all other deaths being taken out of the equation. So to be lectured and have a liberal wag their finger in my face telling me, look what your ideology has done. I mean, it's almost laughable at this point. So it really is. It's just one of the most absurd criticisms that communists get. And it doesn't come from a place of, you know, genuine curiosity.

or trying to find the answers to these things, it comes from the most disingenuous reactionary places imaginable. Another point to be brought out of that is the idea that you link communist deaths to natural, the so-called communist deaths to natural disasters, involvement in World War II. A lot of these things actually come back to capitalist society and the structure we're trying to get away from.

For something like Russian deaths in World War II, that's an imperialist war for start, which is started by capitalist countries going to war against each other. Something like, I mean, it's very topical in today's world, a natural disaster, that's incumbent of climate change, which comes back to the capitalist mode of production itself. So what we're trying to get away from and what we're even equated for killing people for is often pushed onto the capitalist mode of production rather than us and what we're trying to save each other from. The other point to be brought out of that

is the capitalist mode of production itself has tangible links to literally murdering working class people out of hatred. You look at something like welfare, you look at something like, we call it universal credit here in the UK Ireland, UK and Ireland, sorry, where working class people do not have the economic resources defeat themselves. They do not have the correct amount of economic social freedom to literally empower themselves so much

as to get something to fucking eat seven days a week. It becomes a mental stress, which then leads into mental health, which then leads into suicide. And you see tangible links between the capitalist mode of production and suicide rates and working class deaths. Whereas with communism, it always seems to come back initially to the system we're trying to save each other from,

which is obviously capitalism more broadly, and really lead you to take on that working class perspective and push towards socialism and ultimately communism in your daily life and everything comes back to politics and it's that we really need to get back to it and we need to stop linking ourselves back to sources which, as you say, are written by right-wing weirdos more broadly but are actually written by capitalist academics

who have an extremely tangible want for keeping this system alive so they can profit off other people. I mean, how do you feel about that? Is that? Yeah, no, I completely agree. And again, like, if you're skeptical of any of this, like, we're not telling you to just take our word for it. We're encouraging you to please go try to find sources for this. If somebody says this line, ask them to cite it and then go examine that source critically, and you'll immediately see that we're not pulling this out of our ass.

I mean, this is 100% correct. And if we were to do to capitalism what they do to communism by just pinning all these, you know, deaths on communism, I mean, yeah, exactly. You're right. Look at the world wars alone. Those are imperialist wars started by capitalist imperialist nation states for the interest of capitalist imperialist nation states. And therefore, if we're using this logic, every single death in both world wars can be put at the feet of liberal capitalism. And of course, they don't want to play that game. So tell them nicely, don't play it with us then.

Yeah, I'd like to bring out the point you said that this is not some sort of propaganda coup that we're bringing on to the podcast. We're literally looking you to look at sources, look critically at sources. I mean, we're not sitting here trying to batter down everything in the world. We're literally looking for tangible evidence which shows that our ideology, communism, socialism, or leftism more broadly, is the correct path because of the tangible resources it will bring to ordinary people. So thanks for bringing that out breath before we move on. We're also often told that communism is completely against human rights and that Western capitalist countries hold the beacon of morality for protecting the sanctity of peace and equality throughout the world, often citing legislation. like the UN's right to protect and Western intervention into places like Libya as primary examples of this. Are communists really against human rights or is the narrative distorted

and indeed misled by prominent capitalists throughout the world? What would a communist state's social policy actually looked like? Okay. So let's start this dialectically, right? And to do something dialectically means not to do it in a false dichotomy way. And if we're going to to do this than granting liberalism some credence, it is certainly true that there is this idea in liberal philosophy and the foundations of liberalism about human rights. And liberalism is certainly better than fascism. It's certainly better than feudalism. And in a lot of ways, as any good Marxist knows, liberal democratic capitalism is superior to what came before it in a lot of ways. So, you know, I'm not going to say that there's nothing in the liberal world that is good or that protects human rights

Because there is. But on the other hand of that, you have to understand that what does and doesn't count as human rights and what is and isn't considered a violation is deeply controlled by the interests of capital, specifically the interests of the United States. These ostensibly internationalist organizations, like the United Nations, like NATO, like IMF and the World Bank, they like to present this idea that they're neutral arbiters of peace and prosperity in the world, that they do not, you know, serve the interests. of any one nation state or any one class. But the truth is, the United States has a radically outsized influence on how all of these organizations work. And if you are on the bad side of the United States, all of a sudden, these organizations will start pointing out your human rights violations, but are completely quiet when it comes to the human rights violations that happen every single day in the United States. For example, the United States has about 4 to 5 percent of the global population.

of the entire world, but we have about one quarter of the world's prisoners. So this isn't even in overall terms, this is in per capita terms. In both ways, the United States has more people in cages than any other country on earth. And when you go into those prisons, these are some of the most grotesque institutions. I mean, people living in literally little boxes with malfunctioning plumbing. So urine and feces is coming up. People can't even sleep on their mattresses. I mean, this is a completely depraved situation.

And then you add things like solitary confinement, which is by any reasonable standards, a form of torture. And it is ubiquitous in our prison systems here. Not one, not one sort of legislation in these international organizations coming to the four, chastising the United States for its human rights violations when it comes to its prisoners. And not even to talk about its border. I mean, you're literally right now, you know, kids are separated from their parents. because their parents are fleeing depraved conditions largely caused by the economic and military intervention in those countries by the United States and its interests.

So you destabilize these places, you siphon out their wealth and resources, you create corruption in your wake, you go back up to the north, then people who want just good lives for their kids and families see no opportunity in those places that you've devastated. So they move northward to try to find jobs. And what happens when they get to the border? They're brutalized. They're ripped away from their families. Imagine being a four-year-old kids, you know, being pulled out of the arms of your mom, put into a cage,

never, not knowing when you're going to see your mom next, not knowing anything about politics or borders, but being brutalized and being traumatized by this disgusting fucking country who will then turn around and say that they're the leading light of democracy and human rights in this world. It is disgusting. Go to any major American city and you will see in every downtown area, blocks and blocks and blocks of homeless people. And if you walk by those people and you just talk to them or try to interact with them, you'll see that a huge proportion of those people just have mental illness.

They just need health care. They need housing and health care and somebody to care about them, but they are left out in the streets to rot. And this is the society that wants to talk to us about human rights, that wants to be the international beacon of liberty and freedom and democracy and human rights for everybody else, and tell everybody else what is and isn't considered good or evil in this world, get out of my face with that.

It is, you have to, I mean, it is the most sort of condescending, patronizing thing in the world to be told by these people what is and isn't human rights violations. And so that's sort of my first volley. What are your thoughts on that? Oh, I completely agree. I mean, you're bringing out everything I wanted to bring out. The other thing I would like to say is that where does the human rights violation actually come from. It comes from where the US imperialism, but world imperialism more broadly, is threatened

economically. So you look at Cuba, for example, the United Fruit Company, when you start lobbying against their shares, when you start working against the capitalist motor production, or you look at Libya where you're talking about nationalizing the banks or even in Greece and the EU with the austerity program that they got. So where does all this stuff come from? It comes from your hurting capitalist economic interests. And for that reason, they will then find these quote unquote human rights abuses. Look at Venezuela is another example. where you talk about, they talk about an election system which is stuffed with ballot papers when actually the whole thing is electronic. So, you know, you talk about democratic, you talk about democratic violations. You talk about human rights violations. It all comes back to where are we being hurt economically. And if we being hurt economically, we will find human rights abuses to go with that. But we'll be very quiet about what's happening in Yemen. We're very quiet about state forces in Ireland. We'll be very quiet about everything, which doesn't go against our interests. But if it starts to go against our interests, then we will find all kinds of fabrications. to make the world turn against you and it's up to us as leftists and socialist and communists

to debunk this narrative and turn the aggressors turn towards the aggressors rather than acting in their own interests absolutely absolutely beautifully said and just talking about Yemen I mean the United States again these these are things you don't hear in the news but the United States would help Saudi Arabian jets fuel in midair so they could go back and like double tap bomb these places last year a school bus of kids were blown up by a Arabian fighter jet that was fueled in air by the United States military so we could go carry out that thing. But you never hear it. Libya, you know, for whatever its flaws may have been before the U.S. invasion, now has open air slave markets. And they want to talk to us about human

rights. There's two things that you can do as a country if you want to ensure that the United States will be your mortal enemy. That is taking over the wealth and resources of your society away from international corporations for the benefit of your own people and two challenging U.S. and Western imperialism on the international stage. If you do those two things, you will be attacked relentlessly and brutally and unendingly by the United States and its allies no matter what. Venezuela does that. Iran does that. All of these countries, whether they're good or bad, it doesn't matter because what they really are doing is they're getting in the way of American and Western interests. And that interest is ultimately an interest in wealth and resources,

is a capitalist interest. Completely well said. And all of this actually kind of leads very nicely on to the next question in that communists are often attacked daily, weekly, whatever, with the claim that our ideology clearly isn't appealing,

but it doesn't work if so many were terrified to the point of migrating or fleeing from countries where communism, socialism is taking root, the eastern bloc countries of the USR, Cuba, etc., etc. The same could be said of the mass migration everywhere across the world

where the victory of the revolution has happened. Can you debunk some of these myths involved here? And equally, does capitalism reduce the amount of desperation amongst national populations at large? Okay, so I'm going to do a little thought experiment. I'm going to paint a picture for you, okay? Imagine if in the United States a successful proletarian revolution was conducted here and the working class took over the state apparatus, right?

Who would be fleeing from that new state of affairs? Well, certainly all of the parasites of the ruling class that had up to this point been able to dominate and exploit the people for their own financial gain. You know, you'd have the high political families in both parties. You'd had families in finance, in banking, in industry, monopoly capitalists. They would all want to flee if they were defeated. And they'd flee probably to Britain. And what would their narrative be about the United States and the revolution? Well, it would sound a lot like the Cuban exosite.

in Miami talking about Cuba or the Venezuelan bourgeoisie fleeing Venezuela and talking about Maduro and Chavez because this is class war and because the media in the in the world broadly but especially in the Western capitalist nations are dominated by the interest of capital they're going to propagate the sort of ideas and messaging that serve their interests so after the Cuban revolution all of the people that worked for the Batista regime that got privilege and rich and fat off of the exploitation of the Cuban people. Well, when Castro and Che and the Cuban people, you know, kicked Batista and the United States out of that little island, all those people that were benefiting from that previous system and were actually

assisting imperial and reactionary forces and exploiting their fellow countrymen, of course they flee. Now, if Che and Castro and on all of the new revolutionary government in Cuba murdered them all, we would hear endlessly about how authoritarian and dictatorial and human rights violate Cuba is, right? But if they let them all flee because say, hey, okay, fine, get the hell out of our country, we're running it our own way, be gone. And even like assisting them getting off, like, I forget what Castro did, but he made it like very easy for people to, to flee who no longer wanted to be in the revolutionary state of Cuba. And then all those people went 90 miles north and they settled in Miami, and now Miami is a hotbed of reactionary, bourgeois, conservatism, anti-Castro, anti-Cuban propaganda, etc.

So you have to understand these mass exodus from these newly revolutionary areas as a natural form of class war. And it's the same thing if those positions were switched. You had a socialist situation, a bunch of working class radicals won, and then you have fascist and capitalists come in, overthrow that revolutionary government and reinstate capitalism some form of reactionary capitalism all those freedom fighters all the union leaders all the people that fought for the revolution they would either be imprisoned killed or have to flee themselves so this is just class war and to only focus on one half of it or to pretend that the people fleeing cuba were the working class and poor people and not the the rich privileged well-off people who used to own land and property

and wealth and resources in cuba before the fall of the batista regime it's just so disingenuous. But of course, again, this serves certain interests. And this is what we mean by ideology. Marx talked about the use of ideology needing to fill the gap between how things appear to be and how they really are. There's a gap between how things appear to be on the surface and how they really operate in the roots of things. And ideology has to fill that gap. So you see ideology fill this gap when Americans don't know shit about the Batista regime. We don't know anything about the Cuban country or the history of Cuba. All we see is these rafts of people coming over and then the U.S. media is telling us, look at these are innocent people

fleeing the brutalities of Castro and his dictatorial regime. That's what we're fed every single day. That's the sort of shit that we're given in this society. And so it's not a surprise that most people don't critically engage with it or overcome that conditioning, but just fall into it. It's the easiest thing that you can do. And then to the question, does capitalism reduce the amount of desperation amongst national populations, no. In fact, I had an episode in Revolutionary Left called Red Hangover, and it was with Dr. Kristen Gottzi from the University of Pennsylvania, and she's an Eastern European ethnologist. And she spent her entire career studying how the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Soviet Union and the implementation of capitalism in

Eastern Europe, how that actually affected the people in those countries. And she shows that the reintroduction of capitalism actually was showing. showing up in the average birth weights of people in those countries, meaning they went down. And that's something that you only see in times of, like, brutal war. So the reintroduction of capitalism in Eastern Europe not only came with a bunch of fascists who were happy to fill that vacuum that the communists left. And so you have, like, a lot of these Eastern European states, even to this day, are highly reactionary, ethno-nationalist, white supremacist as hell.

That's not a coincidence. But just the brutal reintroduction of the class depravity of capital. pushed so many of those people into extreme poverty to the point that now most people in Russia, especially people who were alive during the USSR days, they want to go back. There's actually huge polling numbers in a lot of Eastern European countries that show that they actually are sort of nostalgic for this pre-capitalist time, not saying that they want everything that was unsavory about the USSR to return, right? It's a new time.

It's decades later. New material functionings are at play here. so it's not the exact same thing, but there was a nostalgia because no matter what the flaws of those USSR states were at the time, the fact is working people had childcare, they had housing, they had food, there's no homeless people in Cuba, right? There's a reason for that. And yeah, you might not be able to have an iPhone and a private vehicle and a flat screen TV and an Apple laptop, but you have health care, you have housing, you don't have to worry about going to be becoming homeless if you miss your next paycheck. And so, you know, again, what class formations do those different societies function to serve?

I would argue that while you might not have as much material consumerist, you know, goodies and gadgets in Cuba, to be a working class person in Cuba means being taken better care of than being a working class or poor person in the United States. And then if you take into consideration what it would mean if the United States lifted that half a century long economic embargo and let Cuba freely trade with the rest of the world, you would see, rise in prosperity, but the United States can't have that. They can't have a successful Cuba. They can't have a successful proletarian revolution anywhere because a successful proletarian revolution would mark a real challenge in the minds of human beings across this planet to

the capitalist ideological hegemony and the idea that only capitalism is good. That's why the United States and Western imperialist countries spend amazing amounts of money and time and energy and resources combating any and all proletarian movements around the world because they can't let even one succeed. The United States spends $800 billion a year just in our military budget while people are starving and going without health care in the gutters of every major city. So what society would you rather live in? So yeah, no, capitalism does not reduce the amount of desperation. It just shifts it. It shifts the desperation down to the lower classes, while the upper classes who control the media control the the the the ideological state

apparatuses of society those people are going to have a disproportionate control over the narrative and of course they're going the narrative is going to be skewed towards their interests because they own and dominate all that shit so those are all things to think about when when we're thinking about how capitalism and communism interact with the with the populations and what my mass migrations really mean in the context of class war yeah i couldn't agree more i mean I mean, the main part you brought out there, which I really want to hit home, is the idea of who is fleeing the country when this happens? And equally, what is the mood on the ground in the country itself? So I know I keep coming back to this example, but it's the country I've been to, it's the country I've seen it the most in its country.

That's really helped my political development the most as I went to Cuba. And you go to Cuba and there's nobody homeless on the ground. Everybody has somewhere to live. Everybody has basic necessities. Everybody has health care. All the things you point out. But equally, all the voices you hear coming out of Cuba about how Castro is a day. dictator, which we've already debunked, but all these kind of arguments, they're coming from

people who are exploiting the people owning large amounts of land, taking the natural resources and hoarding it for themselves. These are the people who now have been overthrown. And of course they're going to be, they're going to be fucking annoyed when this happens because they had a privileged lifestyle at the expense of many. And now they're in the opposite position. So obviously they're going to put out reaction and rhetoric, which is going to be eaten up and propagated all over the world by the Western capitalist system. But the other point I really want to bring out is does capitalism make people less desperate? And this is something that has really hit me in my life as an Irish person. Because everybody in my generation in Ireland knows somebody who has migrated. Everybody knows

somebody in this generation. Masses amounts of people who have left our country. And why is that? Because we can't afford basic necessities. There's no employment. Education is fucking through the roof to try and get into any kind of educational program. And basic, you are priced out of basic necessities as a working class person in Ireland. Of course, we then have to fucking leave. So you come back to this argument that capitalism reduces desperation and look at what socialism doing with people with rafts, rafts leaving countries. That's happening under capitalism. And what we're trying to do is we're trying to get the people who are doing that out of our country so we can build a socialist state where the working class people take ownership of everything. And it just,

it drives me insane. You see capitalism. You see people in yachts and rafts in the rafts in the Mediterranean trying to flee from war-torn countries that have been ravaged by Western imperialism. How can we equate the two? They are completely different, they are completely different parameters and they are working towards completely different gains, which are taking completely out of context because it hurts the people who propagate the narrative that capitalism is good. Yeah. And yeah, beautifully, beautifully said. And like, you know, everybody in the world knew about the Syrian toddler that washed up on European shores because the raft sank as they were fleeing the Syrian Civil War. What is less known is here in the

United States, we recently, just a couple months ago, had a similar situation in the Rio Grande, which is a river that borders Mexico in the United States, where a father and his two-year-old daughter washed up on the shores of that river face down. They had drowned trying to cross that river for a better life. And these are the people that are reactionary, conservative, wing elements and all of our societies want to blame. You know, those are the people that are scapegoated as the problems and the reason why these things are failing. So, of course, capitalism likes the right more than it likes the left, because what does the right do? The right points towards the most powerless, the victims of global capitalism and say, they're at fault. The

immigrant, the people with different skin colors, the people with different languages or different religions. Those are the people that we should have all of our hatred for. And so capitalists fucking love that. What does the left say? The left actually points in the opposite of direction, to the people with the actual power, the actual money, the actual domination and exploitation of everybody else and says, those are enemies. So the capitalist class will never pick the left over the right. And as capitalism decays, of course, the capitalist veered to the right because the right is more conducive to them maintaining their interest than the left will ever be. So whether that's in Cuba or Ireland or the United States, that same exact pattern

continuously and relentlessly unfolds every damn time. Yeah, great. I'm really looking forward now to the next question. It's the one that really gets me fired up the most is we're also taught to fear communism in Western society because of the supposed uniformity and inflicts upon its subject's individual expression is suppressed and creative spirit is violently repressed as well. Is this narrative accurate or how does it compare with capitalist society today? Okay, so one I'm going to say, I'm going to take a little shot at George Orwell here, right? Because George Orwell, whatever you may think, like he did some good stuff, right? Like he was a very talented writer. He had the Road to Wigan Pier, which is like an investigation of British working class in his early journalist days, which was good, blah, blah, blah. But what did George Orwell's ultimate legacy? What is it actually?

And that is Animal Farm in 1984, because those things are taught to, I don't know about in Ireland, But at least in the United States, in our high school, those two books, no matter what state that you're in, those books are taught to us because it serves a certain interest. And one of the things about Orwell writing 1984, which, you know, of course, they associate with communism. And I mean, Orwell meant it to be a critique of communism is this drab uniformativity, right? This idea that everybody wears the same gray outfit and there's a big great man of history on the screen that tells us what to do, blah, blah, blah. So just the role that George Orwell has actually effectively played in this capitalist ideological obscurantism is interesting and worth noting. But to get to your question, and I keep coming back to the United States because I'm a working class kid. I've never had money.

I've never been able to travel the world. I've never been outside of the United States. It's all I know. I don't feel comfortable speaking about societies and countries that I've never been to. So I'm using the United States as my sort of focus because that's what I know best. So excuse me for constantly focusing on it. it. But when we think about conformity, we think about diversity, go to any city in the United States and just drive down the road. What are you going to see? You're not going to see the blossoming

of different cultures and totally new aesthetics and people playing around with freedom of cultural crafting and artistic stuff. None of that. You're going to see a Taco Bell. You're going to see a Walmart. You're going to see a gun shop. You're going to see a Dollar General. You're going to see a McDonald's. Repeat. And you do that endlessly. So this idea that capitalism is conducive to diversity is actually the opposite. What capitalism does is it bulldozes, any sort of cultural differences, anything that cannot be fit inside the commodifying consumerist market is expelled with. It's rolled over.

It's destroyed. And the first ever attempt to do that was obviously, you know, or not the first ever, but, you know, a first attempt was the genocide of native peoples in these new territories that capitalists were expanding into. that represented real diversity, whole new philosophies, whole new histories, whole new ways of understanding space and time. Those things were crushed in the service of building capitalism. Capitalism does not give rise to diversity of expression.

It makes you think that consuming different things is a way to express your individualism. So the only way that your individualism can really be expressed is through buying the latest thing, wearing the latest fashion trend, having the newest iPhone. That's how capitalism urges you to express your individualism. If you want to express your individualism in a way that in any way challenges the hegemony of capitalism, that is seen as not a legitimate way to express yourself. And now it will either be co-opted by the forces of capital or it will be crushed. You can look at this with like lifestyleism in punk music or the fact that there's Che Guevara shirts out there in the world.

Right. Capitalism is great at co-opting subversive forces and turning them into commodities to be sold back to us. So you could have punk music or hip-hop music that is deeply revolutionary and proletarian to the core. But once capitalist industries and the music industry gets its tentacles on it, it starts to strip away the subversive content and just commodify the rest, sell it back to us as if we're buying back our own radicalism. And that is one way that it's able to sort of submerge subversive. forces into the commodifying force of capitalism itself. But again, like what passes for diversity in capitalist society is just an inverted form of conformity. It's a submission to consumerism and to hyper individualism. And you have to ask yourself for true diversity to flourish for the opposite of uniformity to take place, you would have to have people that can actually

self-actualize. Right. You'd have to have people that are given the space in their life. to really find out who they are, to find out what they're interested in, what their hobbies may be, what they want to explore, and then to have the time to explore those things. If you're being pushed to the grindstone every single day at your job, two jobs, three jobs, just to get by, you don't have time to self-actualize. You don't have time to figure out who you are, how you want to relate to the cosmos and to nature. You're pushed into this little bag and told to buy shit. And when you buy different stuff, your car and your clothes, that is how you express yourself. And that is really a deformed, impoverished understanding about what the real flourishing of human individuality and human expression could be.

Yeah, great. I mean, there's a couple of great points to be brought out of that. Firstly, if you're taking your morality of talking animals on a farm, then there's something, there's something to be said for where you sit in life. But secondly, an excellent point that you've brought out already, the idea that time is a massive thing. And if you're chained to a production line for the profit of somebody else, then you don't have the time to take on the fullest expression of yourself, as Mark says. So whether that be reading, whether that be enjoying nature, whether that be gym work, whether that be sport, whatever your topic of interest is, it cannot flourish under capitalism because you're endlessly chained to a production line force. somebody else. I mean, it brings me back to the Bolshevik slogan of eight-hour working day,

which in today's capitalist society, you could argue we could have something like a four-hour working day because of the advanced technological output and productive output technology-wise that we have. So to say that communism preaches uniformity is such a nonsense. It's absolutely the other way that we feel uniformity in capitalism because we are endlessly chained to production to produce profit. And as you say, to buy the shit that we make at overpriced. often we can't even afford to begin with. So the uniformity comes back to the capitalist mode of production. And if you want to individually feel your fullest form, it comes under socialism.

So you've got all the time in the world to express how you feel about things and how you want to take your life, whether that be a football or a American football season ticket or delving into academic literature. You have the fullest freedom of yourself to do so. And I really hate it when people use the uniformity argument against me. It's something I love to debate people on, you know. Yeah, it's absolutely silly. And I just want to touch on something you said, this idea of, you know, given the levels of productivity in our societies, we could drop down to a four-hour work day, but why don't we? And it's precisely for the reason you gestured towards, which is this idea that capitalism constantly needs to grow. The market is a constantly competitive place, and you have to continually get profit. So what could be, you know, automation could, in theory, liberate the masses of toiling people and enable them to go live their lives while the machinery does the work. But under capital, you know, automation could, in theory, capitalist context, what actually happens?

Automation just becomes one more thing that the worker has to compete against because in the interest of the capitalist is profit. And so if that robot does your job, but doesn't have to take a piss break and doesn't have days off, well, that capitalist is going to pick that robot over you. Because at the end of the day, all of these new technologies like automation that could be potentially liberatory are then subverted to the capitalist incentive structure. and we're just now forced to compete against artificial intelligence and robots, you know? That is the sort of dystopia that we're being increasingly ushered into every single day.

And, you know, that is heartbreaking and devastating for the vast majority of people. But it makes the people in power a lot of money. So they're going to keep doing it. Yeah, we've recently had a campaign in London, which is working against the idea that train guards should be taken out of operation. and placed in by automated doors, which brings back this whole contradiction in capitalist society that potentially liberatory technology is used against the people, and we need to use that to our own gains

instead of capitalists picking the technology over people because it's more profitable for them. It's an absolute nonsense of a system, and I can't wait to we fucking break it, you know? Amen, amen. And equally linking that even further, it's often common to hear that Marxists and socialist and communists, they're absolutely, they're lazy people,

and they're branded as individuals and collectives that don't want to work and are quite idle in their day-to-day life. Is this really true? And what do we think? Is there a legitimacy in pulling yourself up by your bootstraps to use the old age fallacy? Well, ironically, this is the laziest critique because it's really just, you know, a desperate attempt with literally no understanding to try to project onto other people that you don't understand what they're motivated by. So you just say, oh, they must be lazy because they want things, right? There's no attempt to actually understand where we're coming from, no attempt to actually understand that.

The working people of the world are the least lazy people ever. We don't have the luxury. We can't afford to be lazy. We have to survive every single day. Who are the actually lazy people? The people that can be at the very top of the hierarchy and live fat and happy and luxurious lives of extreme comfort while the rest of the masses of the human beings on this planet

toil away to enable them. to live lives of extreme comfort. Nobody's more lazy than the kid of a rich kid, a rich kid, you know, than the children of rich people who don't have to do shit to get by. They can relax on the fact that they'll always be taken care of. But if you're born to poor or working class parents, you don't have the fucking option to be lazy. To be lazy in that context might mean homelessness, hunger, prison, or death.

So there's no such thing as people being lazy. Even criminals in the lump and proletariat, they're fighting every day to get money. in the worst ways, of course, in some cases, but still there's nothing lazy about it. There's nothing lazy about the working class. So this idea is really just a projection from the minds of reactionaries who don't understand anything but want to tear down people and ideologies and systems and values that they don't understand. The truth is, going back to our human nature discussion, people like being productive.

I mean, people like contributing to a community that they have a sense, that they have a place, You know, they have a sense of, I'm contributing my part to something greater than myself. People love that. Nothing is more fulfilling than a hard day's work doing something for your family, your friends, or yourself that you really want to do or is necessary in order to make life easier for the people you love. But in the context of clocking in at a meaningless job, having to structure your days in a way that you have no democratic say over whatsoever in order to serve an economy that will never serve you. I mean, in that context

laziness is almost a virtue. Like, you know, take, go to the bathroom and take a shit for two hours on the clock. I mean, milk these motherfuckers for everything that they're worth because this is not human beings naturally and organically being productive and flourishing and contributing to something

that contributes back to their own well-being. This is us being brutalized and put into a subordinate position and having to work to make sure that the small class of people at the very top can maintain their life of extreme lazy, and luxury. So especially when you hear this critique coming out of the mouth of working class people, I'm less likely to be angry and attack them. I just want to flip it around. I'm saying, okay,

you know, you're a working class person. You've obviously been conditioned with reactionary, ideological, you know, ideas that serve the ruling class. But think about rich people. Think about all these, whatever society you're in, we all have rich people we can pick from. Think about how little they have to do every day just to get by and how much you have to do every day to get by. And sometimes you can actually switch a working class person's paradigm around on this issue, you know, somebody that's been given reactionary nonsense their entire life. But when you point out, like, nobody is hated more by the working class than rich kids. Their entitlement, their petulance. I mean, people immediately connect with that. So if you actually want to

convince somebody that this argument is wrong and they're a member of the working class, or at least sympathetic to it, you can use that argument. You know, maybe a, maybe a full-on aggression wouldn't be the best way to approach that specific person, but sort of reorienting these stuff and showing them how actually the people you think are lazy are the hardest working people and the people that you think earned every dollar that they have that pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, often they are the most entitled lazy people on the planet. Yeah, it's a, it's a brilliant answer and something just very quickly to bring out before we move on is the idea that the thing I always say to people on this issue is if the workers stop tomorrow, what would happen?

And if the bosses stop tomorrow, what would happen? We would still create, we have created everything throughout history. I mean, the Great Wall of China, the latest, everything from the Great Wall of China to the latest iPhone has been produced by us. And if we kept coming to work, that would still happen. But if the boss doesn't come to work tomorrow, it still happens, you know. So you really flip the narrative as to who is really the lazy one in this argument. I mean, all capitalism does is it detates who gets paid for what. So we still make everything, but the boss gets paid for it.

You know, that's kind of how this system works. So what we're trying to say is Marxists is we're not lazy people. Of course we're not lazy people because we make everything. What we want to do is to channel the wealth and resources into the full value, into our own pockets and spread equally among the population rather than paying somebody else for something that I make every day, you know what I mean? Exactly right. Exactly right.

And I'll even give a little anecdote from my life. Like, you know, I've worked almost any job you can imagine for a long time. And for many years, I worked as a dishwasher in a pizza restaurant. And the bosses who owned the place, they totally neglected the place. You know, like I had black mold, like growing around the sink where I had to work for 8, 10, 12 hours a day. And the bosses would come in maybe once a month and they'd walk around the place and they'd point out things they want differently. Like fix that, make sure this is cleaned up, blah, blah, blah. And then you wouldn't see him for another two, three months.

And I've worked at plenty of jobs where the relation between the workers and the bosses. was exactly that. One of my more recent jobs is more of like an office-style job in retail. And the boss who inherited the family business from their grandparents, right? So did no actual work to form or invent this business at all, but just got handed the business because they happened to have the right set of parents. They would come in once in a blue moon and walk the entire store pointing out everything that they wanted fixed. And you had to keep up. They walked fast and they would just point to something and you'd have like 10 or 12 workers like scrambling behind them, writing down notes, trying to organize who's going to fix that, who's going to fix that?

It was the most stressful like day of the month when this boss would come in and everybody was like, oh, this is the worst day. You know, you have to be on the top of our game. And this person did nothing to earn this position. Why is this guy, you know, walking around, pointing out things for me to fix like he's a fucking king? You know, I'm the one that's actually doing the work. And my coworkers are the ones that are doing the work that actually makes this. business succeed in the first place exactly as you said if we went away tomorrow you'd be walking

with nobody in a field by yourself because there wouldn't be a business but if you disappeared the workers would just have one day of less stress yeah it's so true it's so relatable in my life as well it's an excellent point you've brought out there so moving further on it's also often quite common to hear particularly from the centrist and the liberals but also from the right in quarters that we are far too rigid in our doctrine and this pushes individuals away from grasping and truly supporting the concepts we promote. First of all, why is that dangerous? But secondly, can you debunk the myth that Marxism hasn't been constantly evolving since Marx and Engels brilliantly set out their ideological map? And any examples you can think of that are relevant to demonstrate that? Yeah, it's dangerous

because it wants to pretend that Marxism is this static set of ideas or that Marxism just means whatever Marx himself said or thought. And that is like a complete, you know, disingenuous, destruction of what Marxism actually is. What we call Marxism is just historical materialism. It was a methodology of understanding how societies develop over time and what the laws of that societal change were. It's called historical materialism. Marxism is just easier to say than, oh, I'm a historical materialist communist. So we say, I'm a Marxist, but it's the same thing. The opposite of dogmatism is dialectics. Dialectics is an ongoing process. It says that the only constant is change, that change is constantly occurring. And Marxism

didn't give us a set of things we believe in. Marx and Angles were the founders of this thing we know as historical materialism in the same way that Darwin was not, you know, just had a bunch of ideas that we all believe in now because he said him, no, Darwinism is important because he started this thing we know as evolution via natural selection. It's the science of evolution that Darwin gave us, It's not Darwinism, and it's the science of historical materialism that Marx and Angles gave us, not quote-unquote Marxism, as if it's a static thing. So by the very nature of historical materialism, by the very nature of what Marxism is, it is an evolving thing.

It is meant to have an understanding of how things develop, how they change over time, and how they can be brought to an end in the case of capitalist exploitation, and how a better world can be brought into existence in the form of organized working class, movements fighting against their capitalist and fascist oppressors. So, you know, again, I love to, I love to say that the opposite of dogmatism is dialectics. That does not mean that some Marxists or anarchist or anybody along the political spectrum can't be dogmatic. We see dogmatic Marxist and dogmatic anarchist every damn day. Just open up Twitter.com. But it's easier. It's easier to be a dogmatist than it is to be a dialectician. And it's dialectics that Marx really gave the world,

and really helped formulate. And then people like Lenin and Mao and countless other working class heroes that we might not even know the names of, they picked up that methodology. They picked up that understanding. The world was demystified through their comprehension of historical materialism

and that allowed them to form these actually effective revolutionary movements that were able, like no other left tendency, to topple czarist regimes, to topple nationalist regimes, to defeat imperialist. even when the imperialist had every single advantage in the case of China versus Japan or in the case of Vietnam versus the U.S. or a bunch of other examples as well.

So Marxism is an ongoing, open-ended science of historical materialism and dogmatism is the exact opposite of that. Does that answer your question? No, there's great stuff to be raw there. That is a perfect answer. One thing I would say is that, you know, we do take a somewhat rigid stance on stuff purely, for the example, that it, it would. works, it has quantifiable results throughout history, but that does not mean that we are not continually adapting and we adapt according to material circumstances on the ground. So what I mean by that is, for example, something that works in Ireland where we're a colony, we're still under

British suppression, we're still in a British ruling class indoctrination for one of, to put that more bluntly. But what works in Ireland will not work in a hugely developed capitalist nation like United States of America. There's distinctions to be made there. There's distinctions to be made there. And because of that, we are continually evolving as a science according to the material conditions that we face. And what works in one country will not dogmatically be taken across to the US or anywhere else in the world because it doesn't work there. You've got to look at the material conditions on the ground. Is that a fair point? Yeah, it's an incredibly fair point. And just to like reiterate that point, you know, when we're talking about Darwin and evolution, you wouldn't,

you wouldn't go to an evolutionary biologist or, or a medical doctor who believes in vaccines and say, oh, your belief that vaccines work is dogmatic. No, my belief that vaccines works is rooted in my understanding of the science of evolutionary biology and et cetera, right? I'm not being dogmatic in asserting vaccines work. I'm saying all the evidence that we have right now points to the fact that vaccines really do work. And in the same way, when we say, like, you need the proletariat to be organized with good leadership in the context of a party in order to advance the class struggle, or you need to implement the mass line when you're organizing in order to ensure that your cadre stays connected to the masses. You're ostensibly trying to serve and represent.

These are not dogmatic stances that just come out of thin air. These are things that throughout revolutionary and proletarian history have worked over and over again in different contexts, totally different environments. These things have worked. The Black Panthers were able to successfully implement the mass line, just like Mao and the Chinese communists, we're able to do it back in their day in totally different circumstances. So we're saying, hey, there's a lot of evidence that suggests that these things actually do work. And to just say, no, these things are authoritarian and they come out of these horrible Stalinist and Maoist movements. We need to reject them.

That's actually dogmatic. That is being dogmatic. That's refusing to analyze the evidence with an open mind and think about what does and doesn't work and come to a reasonable conclusion based on the evidence. So it's oftentimes the very people that want to call us dogmatists that are in their own unique way being hyper dogmatic. Yeah, it completely well said. And it kind of leads on to the next question and the idea that we often hear particularly from the centrists that we're constantly hiding our mistakes and we refuse to learn from history. Is that true? Let's debunk that myth because that's a nonsense for a start.

Let's do it. Okay, let's do it. So no, as I was just saying, like we learn from history. In fact, if anybody cares about history, it's. the Marxists. When we say we're historical materialists, we mean that our worldview is literally founded on the understanding of history and how society changes over time. But what we won't do is we're not going to play the bourgeois game of saying, oh, those proletarian movements, like in the case of the Russian Revolution, the first ever successful proletarian movement

in human history, successful in the fact that it actually toppled the capitalist class, we have something to learn from that. We're not going to say that we just need to push that out of our minds because it wasn't perfect. Look at the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It had a bunch of flaws, errors, excesses. The French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution and it ended in blood and Napoleonic reaction. You have, history doesn't work in this perfectly linear way. There's a half a step back, two steps forward, two steps back, one step forward sort of way

about it. The transition from feudalism to capitalism took place over centuries, but capitalists are never asked to answer for their first ever attempts and why they went wrong, right? But here on the socialist, communist left, we're asked to say, if your movements are not fucking perfect the first time out of the gate, then you are wrong, you're terrible, you don't learn from history, et cetera. No, no, no. We learn from history, and we study capitalist history just as much as we study proletarian history. We know it better than our interlocutors than our critics ever could hope to understand it because it's built in to our very political understanding, our very way we go about analyzing the world, you know? Yeah, incredibly nuanced. There's a couple of other

decent points to it. It sort of takes me back to what's really sharp in my ideological pencil for one of a better phrase from foundations of Leninism where Stalin talks about as a proletarian party, we must admit our mistakes because if we don't do that we can't move forward to you take an example like the Paris Commune where they didn't fully nationalize the banks they didn't take the first steps towards

making a truly lasting proletarian state and that's why they got rampaged by the reactionary forces from around Europe and it's taking that and taking these examples and moving them forward so you get to something like the Bolshevik state where they realize the mistakes of lesser

or sorry previous examples and emulate it so they can create the first proletarian state in history in Russia and we move towards that in the present day where we learn from some of the mistakes of past projects and take them into our everyday lives so that we can make socialism a reality and you make an excellent point about capitalists are never held up on their first attempt to implement capitalism and we should not be held up for past the first experience of implementing a socialist state and we're working towards a socialist world and we need to learn from

our mistakes move that into the future so we can create a truly lasting system which rises out of the previous conditions that we face. Exactly, exactly. And there are actually anti- or non-Marxists, leftists who, I mean, for all intents and purposes, sort of buy in to this liberal anti-communist rhetoric of, you know, this Bolshevik revolution and this Chinese communist revolution. They're authoritarian. They weren't perfect.

Therefore, we have nothing to learn from them. And you see a lot of people, and I'm not calling out anarchists as a whole, because there are plenty of really good principled anarchists. who learn from all of proletarian history. But there is a subsect of anarchists who like to pretend because of their their sort of liberal understandings of proletarian history that anything that was Marxist didn't really exist. They don't really take it into account.

They do the same thing liberals do, which is just dismiss the entire history as just one of blood and chaos and we have nothing at all to learn from. And then they're forced into these weird positions where they only have like two or three examples of what they consider quote unquote real socialism. And if you only take a small segment of proletarian history, because the rest of is too messy for you to deal with, and you just slide at a nice little slice of proletarian history and say, okay, this is what we actually like. Everything else is shit. You're an idealist, you know?

You're a utopian. And more than that, you're playing right into the anti-communist hands of liberals and reactionaries who make that exact same move whenever they can. So I just urge people on the left, even if you aren't Marxist, even if you aren't Marxist, Leninists to please understand history and proletarian history in its entirety, and instead of dismissing it because it's not pure enough, learn from it, learn from the flaws, learn from the successes, at least understand why you disagree with it before you disagree with it. And I don't think that's too much to ask from people who genuinely want to be principled and want to be successful, you know, going forward. Yeah, I often find it a great shame that many leftists

across the spectrum end up siding on the side of CIA and, you know, reactionary propaganda. It's a real shame that that happens. I can almost see why that happens. I'm not trying to slate tendencies. I'm not trying to, you know, slate individuals for their, their opinion that they reach. But it is a shame that we can't take proletarian history as a whole context instead of just latching onto subsections in anarchists or Trotskists or whatever it may be. We've got to take it as a whole so we can dissect the mistakes. We realize that there are obviously worse on mistakes. We can dissect those, move forward and make a lasting proletarian movement, which will last this into the future and will continue to grow

and develop and become a strong unit to implement socialism across the world eventually, you know? Exactly, exactly. And the reason why our enemies hate communism so much is because it works, right? Where's all the time and energy dedicated to crushing movements around the world?

It's communist, Marxist movements. I mean, the CIA even helped translate post-colonial anti-Marxist works of philosophy into English to help the left become more confused about Marxist history. So when the CIA is literally trying to get

anti-Marxist left-wing rhetoric translated so more people can read it, that's really a signifier that they think that Marxism and Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, specifically is a real threat to power that this is actually what works. And if we can obscure and muddy

the waters, and if we can make ostensible left-wing radicals also believe in this bullshit, then we can go a long way in undermining from the very beginning any possible effective working class movement in this country. Yeah, that's an absolutely excellent answer. And it again sort of pushes us towards the final question of a very informative episode

in that there's a huge strand of thinking, particularly in the academic field, amongst people who gravitate towards ideas of Fukuyama or Daniel Bell, amongst others, that the fall of the Soviet Union in particular has coincided with the end of ideology and that we now look at pragmatic approaches toward politics and treat every single. issue in different ways to reach solutions. Is that true? Is ideology dead? And if so, will communism never succeed? Okay, so is ideology dead? Now, I want to make a distinction here, because there's two ways that we often use the word ideology that can be confusing to people that are trying to learn. On one's hand, we mean ideology, which is like any set of coherent political beliefs,

you know, fascist or ideological, liberals are ideological, communist or ideological. You can't be involved in politics and have a set of political beliefs without being ideological because ideology just means a set of ideas. That's on one hand. On the other hand, in the more Marxist sense of the term, and even like Jizek, who does a lot of work on this, especially when you're combined with like Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to understand like subconscious and stuff like that. The mixture of Marxism and psychoanalysis gave rise to this more coherent understanding of what Marx referred to as ideology, but we've really been fleshed out since his time, which is this gap between how things appear and how things really are. So ideology

in that sense of the word is a sort of fog. It's a mystifying thing. It's trying to use ideology and conditioning to paper over the class contradictions, the class struggle, and these real, you know, these historical materialist things that we need to analyze. And so you'll hear like the representation of the founding of the United States as like, oh, you know, these wonderful pilgrims came over. They had this Thanksgiving dinner with the natives and these brilliant founding fathers had these ideas of democracy and freedom and liberty and they, for the first time ever, put them into the documents of a new country. And that is a very, not only idealist, but ideological way to understand history. It is covering over the things that you want to cover

over to offer a different, a historical, incorrect understanding of what actually happened because it serves your interests. So in that way, anybody, who claims to not be ideological, especially if they're in the U.S., especially if they're well-off liberals, are the most ideological people in the world. The very attempt to pretend like they don't have an ideology is a hyper-ideological move, and it serves to obscure and mystify the realities of history and how things actually happen in this society and in this world. So when Fukuyama declared the end of history after the fall of the Soviet Union

it was Marxists who were the first to start mocking him immediately what are you talking about the end of history that only could come out of the mouth of a hyper ideological liberal idealist history doesn't end we're not even close to the end of history and the next 20, 30 years

has proven that history by no means has ended so in this sense ideology is present everywhere ideology is how we are taught to understand the world in a way that it not really is. This idea that America is the shining city on top of a hill, this idea that America and capitalism is synonymous with democracy and freedom. These are all ideological obscurantisms.

They are ways to obscure and mystify our understanding of the world because it preserves the status quo. It preserves the ruling hierarchy and the ruling classes position atop that hierarchy. So to dismantle that ideology is absolutely a sense. essential. And then to the question of will communism inevitably succeed, you know, there is a sort of determinist strain in Marxism. But I want to work against that determinist strain because I think you can go back to Marx himself and realize that we don't really believe that communism is inevitable, right? You've heard the term socialism or barbarism. I think it was Rosa Luxembourg that said that,

but even Marx said that, you know, class war can result sometimes in the, in the, in the mutual ruin of all classes. And so this idea of socialism or barbarism, I mean, our future could just as equally be barbaric climate dystopia as it could socialism. There's no predetermined historical path that says, we're just going to wade it out and eventually we'll get to communism. And in fact, that really makes people not take action. They think that they can just sit back and let the forces of production develop and we'll get to communism inevitably. I think that's a bad reading of Marx. I think that's a bad Marxist take. And it actually serves to to diminish revolutionary movements history moves in a direction it is true

but if we don't want barbarism if we want socialism then human beings are the funnels through which history acts that means we have to act there is no sitting back and waiting for communism to come about it will only be brought into existence through persistent relentless class struggle and the organizing of one class to overthrow and topple the ruling class and so if we do get to communism, it will not be because it was inevitable the entire time. It will be because people took up the historical task of fighting for their class interest and as Marx would say, becoming a class for itself, understanding itself as a class and then going about the revolutionary work of trying to institute the working class as the dominant class in the socialist transition

so we can get to a point where there are no more classes. That is the goal. But again, it will only get here if we organize and fight right now we cannot sit back and think that history will take us there it won't if we just all sit back and play that game then history is just going to lead us directly into barbarism because the ruling class of this society and of this world the capitalist ruling class would would make profits every single day until the oceans are black and we can't breathe the air if we leave it up to them so we have to fight the question of whether ideology is dead and whether we pragmatically look at single issues in different ways to get solutions is an absolute falsehood. Case in point here in Britain and Ireland, the mainstream media

have been waxing lyrical about, I don't know whether you see this in the US, this idea of throwing a milkshake over Nigel Farage. Do you see any of that in the US? That's to be completely called out. That's to be completely demonised. We shouldn't be doing that to, you know, everyone should have freedom of speech, etc., etc. But then you look on the other side of the coin, I think it was a couple of weeks later. It certainly wasn't long after a climate change activists infiltrates a conservative party reactionary dinner night and campaigns against, you know, the conditions that are causing climate chaos. And she got violently taken out. She was violently assaulted and violently dragged out of the room. So you look at these questions

and you think, is ideology dead? And of course it isn't because the two things are a abating a right-wing sentiment, which could become useful if capitalism continues to decay in Nigel Farage and his fascist tendency. But on the other side of the coin, an anti-capitalist demonstration in this sphere is violently opposed, is violently called out and violently told not to happen both physically and in the press. So is ideology dead? Of course it's not. Yeah, no, I actually did hear about that Nigel thing. I saw the milkshake and then I saw that it was a woman protester, if I'm right, just getting absolutely physically manhandled by this guy. So, you know, throwing a milkshake on a fascist, that's very bad. A man, manhandling a woman in front of

everybody, oh, that's okay. I mean, that's exactly what you're talking. about it. It's repulsive. Yeah, I mean, it all leads us on to our final question of the episode and this has been an excellent experience and really informative. I'm so glad to having the show. We just wonder, could you wrap up the episode in your own way? So give your final thoughts, takes, messages and where we can find your work online, where you're organizing, all that good stuff to finish of the episode. Sure. Well, firstly, I'll just say, like, thank you so much for having me on. It's been a complete honor for me to come on, talk to somebody from Ireland. You know, my ancestors came from Ireland, but we were completely disconnected.

from that entire history. So to see that Rev Left has gotten to the point where comrades over in Ireland are engaging with our work and then you call me up and me and you have this wonderful discussion. It's beautiful. And I would just like to offer,

you know, any time you want to come on Rev Left, you're more than welcome. I would love to have you on. I've been meaning to do an episode on the IRA. So if you want to come on and tackle that with me, that would be cool. But in any ways, you have my email so we can work out a time when you can come on Rev.

Left and we can have another discussion because it's honestly a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much, Brett. It's been an absolute pleasure having on. I'd love to take you up on that sometime and Rev Left if you ever get the time. Thank you very much for coming on. I hope this has been an interesting experience for people who are new to Marxists, but also people who aren't and we can sort of debunk the myths together from from wherever ideological perspective you come from. So moving forward, we can all just be stronger together. That's the aim of leftist politics. That's the aim of our podcast. That's the aim of everything anti-capitalist, socialist, communist, communist, Marxist, try to do is link all these things together to create a broad collective of strong, political. activist that can tackle the system together and create something which is just better for the vast majority of people, you know? Exactly. And just for my last words, like, you know, as much as we're made out to be these dogmatic monsters that don't care about, that human rights and people survive, all this dumb stuff

that we hear about communists and Marxists, just know, like, from the bottom of our hearts, we are born and bred, working class people, and we just want a better world. We've seen our friends and our family and our communities be devastated by this way of organizing, this irrational way of organizing the wealth and resources of our planet. We see every day the incoming climate chaos that's going to devastate countries all over this world and ruin the... I have two kids. I mean, this stuff is my children's future that we're talking about. So if you're really into critically engaging with the world and trying to understand people as opposed to just buying in,

through the laziest stereotypes about communists and regurgitating them, then please understand that even if, you know, I may be wrong about some things, that our heart is in the right place. And at the end of the day, we just want to build a better society that works for more people where the depravity and the violence and the heartbreak and the devastation can be brought down to a minimal and that we can all benefit from the wealth and resources of our planet as opposed to just a small, tiny minority of ruling class people at the very top. Thank you for listening.

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