Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Defending Socialism: Human Nature and the Nightmare of History

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

[Originally released Jan 2021] Twitch streamer CommieCon interviews Breht on a wide range of topics, including common arguments against socialism and how to refute them, Marx's conception of Species-Being and its relationship to alienation and human nature, Marxism v. Anarchism and what both have to offer, the evolution of human civilization through history, how violence is and is not conceived by liberals, and Nature's increasingly stern demand that we evolve or perish. Check out and support CommieCon on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/commiecon Follow CommieCon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thecommiecon Outro Music: "Bury Me With It" by Modest Mouse Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. So on today's episode, I'm actually putting out an episode where I went on a Twitch Streamer's page and had an interview with them, so they're actually asking me questions. It's one of those situations where, you know, I take an episode where I was the guest and posted on our main feed, just to get the material out there, but mostly so I can help direct people to Comic-Conn's Twitch channel. I know I'm not on Twitch, I'm not on YouTube, but I know

a lot of people are and more every day. And so it's really important that there's left principled, left, you know, content on those platforms. Every platform is a possibility and an opportunity for left-wing narratives and education, etc. And so, you know, Comic-Con

fills that along with many others on the Twitch platform. If you like this interview, I urge you to go check out, subscribe, and support Comic-Con's work on Twitch. And this was a wonderful conversation. We talked about a lot of really interesting stuff. It's really particularly good for people who, you know, are still trying to figure out some of this stuff, like, you know, what is personal versus private property? What is the Marxist conception of human nature? You know, we talk a little about a bit about growth and

degrowth or the liberal political philosophy conception of violence as the monopoly on violence from the state as opposed to violence or quote unquote violence like property damage inflicted on private property by those who resist brutality, exploitation, and domination. So we touch on a wide range of stuff no matter if you're new to the left or a veteran, there's still stuff in here that you will definitely be able to pull out and hopefully be inspired by. So I'll link in the show notes to Comic-Con's Twitch feed and I hope that you all enjoy this conversation. I really enjoyed having it. Where would you say that you're at right now?

You know, what were kind of the most recent shifts in like your personal tendency or ideology on the left? The reason why I say this is because, and also what were you kind of prior to your, your current tendency if you don't mind me asking? The reason I ask this is because not to like necessarily like make it a big tendency discussion or anything because we're not really into debate. tendencies. It's not really what we do on my channel. We're all pretty much under the understanding that like it's fuck capitalism and we need to organize across those lines because fuck capitalism.

The reason I ask this is because I want to kind of encourage my community not to necessarily be so like rigid in their ideologies that they that they can adopt new ideas, new information that inform their tendency and improve their organizing efforts or networking, you know, with with other groups. And I feel like if they hear, your, kind of your experiences, they may see that it's, it's okay to kind of change and grow in their tendency to, to what kind of fits them. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, completely. And, yeah, the first thing I would say is that, you know, everybody has a different set of influences. Like, the thing that put me on my road of going through various tendencies

over time, you know, is just really random. Like, you know, who are your influences? Who are your mentors? What was your first organizing experience and with whom? What were some of the first radical texts that you read, right? Like, these things are variable in it. And in the very beginning, they are largely sort of random, how you stumble into this, to this world, especially before the internet, which is when a lot of my political development started before the internet was what it is today, where you could really share these things quickly. And now I see online, like, you know, 17-year-olds having debate about Marxism, Leninism, Leninism, Maoism. And it feels so weird because that wasn't available almost at all during my early, early development. And so with that in, with that in

mind and realizing how I came across all these different things. I don't hold, I don't crucify people to where they are right now. I don't beat people over the head with my ideas versus theirs. I let people evolve and grow and I acknowledge and respect that people have different doorways into this stuff. As long as you have a good heart, as long as you're really down to change the miserable conditions on this earth, to challenge the oppression and the domination and exploitation of innocent human beings, you know, you're a friend of mine. As Chase said, right, if you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you're a comrade of mine. And that's truly how I feel. And nothing is more off-putting to me and just not my thing than, you know, going online and

seeing these, this blood sport across different tendencies, you know, trying to, trying to harm each other and put each other down and shit on each other. And there is room for debate. There's room for passionate disagreement, but there should also be room for some level of humility and recognition that we're all in a constant state of evolution. We are all learning new things and we're having new experiences every single day. And so we're all in flux. And the moment you start rejecting that reality, dogmatism sets in. And it can set in no matter what your political tendency is. And it becomes much easier to be dogmatic than to think critically and to stay humble. So with that said, you know, I started very early in my late teens, probably just

first being introduced to stuff like democratic socialism, you know, then moved into to sort of interest in anarchism. By the time I started a rev left radio, I was describing myself as a libertarian Marxism, you know, Marxist, which is like an anarchist form of Marxism, right, taking the Marxist critique incredibly serious and as the fundamental aspect of your politic, but having that sort of, you know, libertarian communist approach to things. Over time, I developed, you know, into Leninism and then into Maoism. And now I just kind of stand back from it all. And I don't over fetishize these different tendencies.

There are differences. They are important. I've talked about all these different things a lot. But I just refer to myself as a Marxist. And the things about Marxism that I really want to emphasize is dialectics, is the open-ended and experimental nature. of Marxist methodology, that the keeping of an open mind and the realization that, you know, material conditions, cultural, superstructural conditions are different in America, 2021 than they

were in 1917, Russia, 1949, China, etc. Those events were world historical. I take them incredibly seriously. I study them to learn their successes and their failures. And I respect the thinkers and the revolutionaries like Lenin and Mao, which took the Marxist theory applied it and by so doing in real conditions, updated it and expanded it. But it's not the end-all, be-all of Marxism. It is a developing thing. Marxism will continue to develop until capitalism is in its grave. And the socialist transition has happened globally and in earnest toward communism, which anarchist and Marxist shared, right? The ultimate goal being a stateless, classless society of equals, freely associating to produce and reproduce the means of life. And on top of that

political tendency, you know, and you, if you call me a Maoist or you call me a Leninist, I'm not going to correct you and say, no, that's not true. In many ways, I do follow that general path, but I'm also deeply informed by being a practicing a Buddhist. And, you know, I've been that way for many years. I was into Buddhism and practicing meditation even before I really got into politics. And, you know, I've dedicated my life to following the eightfold path, taken the Bodhisattva vows in the Mahayana tradition to, you know, empty myself of ego and search for enlightenment in order to be in service of all beings and to alleviate the suffering of all beings as much as I can. And the Bodhisattva vow within the Mahayana tradition

explicitly says that it is a vow to assist in the liberation of all beings. Now, in the Buddhist context, they're talking about the liberation from delusion and ignorance and ego centeredness and the ignorance that falls out of that, but expanding it more widely and including the element of the liberation of beings from suffering, the vow to assist in the liberation is also a political vow. It's a vow to fight the rotten structures of this world that make people suffer unnecessarily, that keep people ensconced in delusion and fear and ego. And so, you know, these two things weaving together, I think gives you the clearest picture of my worldview, my motivation structure, and sort of, you know, what I think is important in this

world. And I like the dialectical back and forth of transforming the inner as well and in parallel to the transformation of the outer. I always say, you know, we can build a revolution, right? We can topple these structures, these outward objective structures of capitalism and imperialism and fascism. But if we populate that new world with the same old, egoic, insecure, petty, bickering, confused people, I think we're setting a limitation on what we can achieve. And so the inner transformation that comes not only from within Buddhism, but within mystical branches of every major religion, Sufism and Islam, Christian mysticism, Kabbalah and Judaism, Hindu mysticism, that inner transformation, I think, complements and helps the outward transformation. And as somebody

who really is guided by dialectics, you can't separate the inner from the outer. And so the inner transformation as in parallel with the outer transformation just makes dialectical sort of sense to me right nothing is separated everything is connected and um and and so that's kind of that's my that's my guiding lights right but again i don't get too botched down anymore in parsing out the very specific nuances of of intersectarian and squabbling it's just i just don't have time for it to be honest yeah who has the time or energy emotional or otherwise for that um no that's that's and that's fucking awesome and uh definitely not not the perspective that you know i i think that since you and i have last uh actually had like a chat was um you know maybe a couple years ago and that kind of thing

um and so it's it's cool to see like other areas outside of just like uh politics or or personal tendency, also informing your tendency and stuff, you know, with your Buddhism and stuff like that. So that's really cool. And we do have some, some folks that are regulars in our community. They're also, you know, Buddhist leftists. You know, we've got comrade, you know, Kami Buddhist is another Twitch streamer that's a friend of the show. Very cool. You know, our friend, Josen Starr, shout out to Josen Starr, is another Twitch streamer who is a buddhist as well and good comrade and stuff so it's it's interesting to kind of like see that parallel happening amongst people but it totally makes sense you know i mean there's

there's a huge compassion element uh to to buddhism fundamentally um from my very limited understanding so i i can't i can't profess to be any type of i am not the bodhisattva i i got to let everybody know right now that I'm not him I'm not them so but from my limited understanding you know there obviously is a very deeply ingrained compassion within Buddhism that I think we we echo and mirror on the left for sure as you know are I think that anybody who's you know interested in in leftist thought would agree that you know first and foremost we are concerned about you know, the betterment of all people's and the betterment of conditions in society and on this planet and stuff for all creatures as much as possible and stuff in it. And it informs our

tendency. So it definitely makes sense that there would be a parallel there for that would resonate with a lot of a lot of folks and stuff. Yeah. And for me and I think for many others, this is not always true, but the thing that got me into to the radical left was that deep-seated disgust at injustice and the way that the earth is treated, the way other people are treated, the way the U.S. government, right, the government that operates and is funded in my name with my tax dollars and yours as well, treats the world, you know, broadly bombing people, slaughtering children, the nukes on Japan, little babies, you know, losing their family right in front of them, the Iraq war, that criminal bullshit, like, what got me into leftism was not intellectualism,

it wasn't a need for hate and revenge, it was always. always from day one about this desperate urge within me to play whatever role I could in helping alleviate the suffering of human beings and overthrowing anyone who used power and wealth to dominate, exploit, and hurt other people. So I think that's true for many of us where we're often pushed to this sort of radical politic out of a sincere, like, revolutionary love for other people and a deep belief in egalitarianism. Like, we're all equal.

I don't care what nation you're from. what color your skin is, what language you talk, we are human beings, we suffer, we dream, we have hopes, we have families, and that is what unites us. And so I often say, like, I'm not an American, I'm a human being. And that's always been the guiding light for my politics. It's what got me into it in the first place. And I think it's an important current to keep alive and to keep nourished within the left that we're not here to just flip oppressors or to kill and get revenge for terrible shit, you know,

but actually we're here to help other people first and foremost. We want to overturn imperialism and fascism and capitalism, not because we want to necessarily hurt those people who do it or because we have just some intellectual ideas about it, but because we do it because those things hurt human beings, innocent people. And so, you know, sometimes I see aspects of the left be motivated by lesser motivations like hate and anger and the need for revenge. And, you know, I just want to, you know,

be a mild humble voice cautioning against letting that be taken too far so yeah it is what it is and and and i'm seeing lots of other people in chat you know jumping in and uh you know putem off states you know same spiritual spirituality was a gateway to political radicalization for me and stuff too so um wonderful yeah lots of uh lots of like minded comrades in chat uh so you're among good company there bret cool um and okay yeah thank and thanks for you know uh expounding upon that next thing I kind of wanted to ask you um you know so you're one of the and people were already asking about this little bit and I had to tell them okay chill out chill out like we'll get to it we'll get to it um you know you're one of the few people that I know

that can and I emphasize properly educate people on various ideologies you know and not and again it's not a situation where you like beat people over the head with uh you know this this knowledge hammer that you have right like uh it's not like that's never been like that that's why i've always followed you and stuff and but um you know you are one of the few people that i know that you could definitely explain my tendency to me better than i know my tendency like i i'm fucking no no no no i'm firm i'm firm in that like because um you know because you've also your um you're you're you're also formally educated in a lot of, you know, theoretical thought, philosophy, things like that, too.

So, I mean, you've spent a lot of time thinking about thinking. And I think that, you know, helps give a lot of perspective. But so I'm an ANCOM, you know, and I've no doubt that you can, again, you know, explain that to people better than I could. But kind of in your words, since this seems to be like, at least in the, in the, you know, in the organizing circles that i'm in or like the social media circles that i'm in one of the biggest kind of discussions that i'm seen regularly um is what are you know some big distinctions between in your words you know anarcho anarcho communism and like marxism leninism like between mls and and comms like what do you see is kind of like the big um differences there

in terms of like um how we want to bring about uh communism how we want to bring about uh communism how we want to transition out of capitalism and things like that yeah i mean it's a great question and it goes the big question i know i know but like you know just kind of in your words right you know whatever you think for sure yeah and i would just start off uh with with the prelude that you know this goes back to the founding of marks right like marks in bocunin those arguments um and it's not just bocunuchin there's other anarchist of course but it goes back to the very sort of um beginning the genesis of Marxism is this immediate anarchist current that challenges certain aspects of it. And, you know, that's a beautiful and necessary thing. We need that sort of, you know, two ways of getting at things,

two sets of ideas about how to go about doing this thing we call revolution, this thing we call anti-capitalism. And so, you know, in lots of ways as messy as sometimes the debates can get, there's also a mutually sort of reinforcing respect where, you know, Marxism presents challenges to anarchists and anarchists that want to be serious anarchists take those critiques seriously and vice versa. So I always see it as this back and forth that is necessary, inevitable, and meaningful. But some of the basic differences, and you know, you talk to a bunch of different people, they would give you different things. It's kind of like where you place your emphasis on where things actually differ, you know. And like I said, with libertarian Marxism, for example,

there are elements of anarchism that go to inform certain, you know, tendencies within Marxism and vice versa. So it's really a spectrum of thought. It's not these two separate camps. And that's what I would just say to begin with. But one of the big differences is, you know, we both agree that the ultimate goal is communism. We want to, we want to overthrow capitalism and move towards communism. And generally we agree that that movement out of capitalism and toward communism is what we call socialism, right? The socialist transition. And so the fundamental difference is how do we do that transition. And that leads inevitably and quickly to the first major area of difference, which is the conception of the state. There is an anarchist a priori distrust of the state as such,

a rejection of the state as a viable mechanism for even a socialist transition. We all agree that the end goal of communism is stateless, right? And, you know, Marxists and Angles and Marx themselves talked about the withering away of the state. And there's a lot of nuances and debate around that specific phrase. But I think that question of how to transition out of capitalism toward communism inevitably bumps up immediately with the conception of the state. And a Marxist approach, the best of Marxism, is not a dogmatic belief in the state necessarily, right, but rather a materialist understanding of the state as a mechanism of class domination.

And socialism, given that there are still classes under that transitionary period, the Marxists believe that often the state will be necessary to situate and organize the transition out of capitalism and also to defend against the inevitable reactionary backlash that comes when any people try to take their own future into their hand and, you know, buck off imperialism and capitalism. And so, you know, but we've also seen the state in previous attempts by Marxists become, in some ways, right? In some ways, they did what they were supposed to do. They initiated the socialist transition. They defended more successfully than any other form of socialism against reaction, right? Like the Bolshevik revolution, you had, what, 14 different imperialist countries, including the U.S. descending on you. Plus, you had elements within your own country fighting against you.

Like, that is a huge wave of reaction to the first ever successful proletarian revolution, and they were able to stave that off. What that state turned into later, I agree, wasn't ideal, right? It poses major problems even for Marxists to think about the limitations of the state as that vehicle. So that would be one major debate right away. And another one would be the theories and methods of organization, right? How do we even get to the point where we can conjure up the forces to go on the offensive toward revolution? And in the Marxist tradition, there is a belief in the party. And then with Lenin, it got updated with Democratic Centralism and these other aspects of, you know,

the vanguard party is made explicit with Lenin. And that's always something that anarchists, given their horizontalist sort of approaches, always was suspicious of, right? They always were suspicious of this party becoming not the leading edge of the working class or a vehicle for the working class as emancipation, but as something that stands apart and outside of the working class and can only, in that case, dictate to it. Now, obviously, that's not my view, you know, I believe when we're fighting an enemy that is highly organized, highly disciplined, centralized, funded with internationalist reach, we also have to meet that level of organization. And sometimes, you know, anarchists can not necessarily conjure up the level of organization needed to go on the offensive, not just in one little territory, but on the global stage, right? The goal, in my opinion, the necessity of the socialist transition is to challenge capitalism,

and imperialism on the global stage, not just in a territory, not just within one country. And that was accomplished in many ways by these big world historical Marxist revolutions in China and Russia, specifically, also in Cuba and in many other places, but those are probably the huge ones, that they really did cast a threat. I mean, the capitalist world was fucking scared of the Bolsheviks. They did not like that you had this huge powerhouse over in the east. that stood against everything you believe in, that fought back against you when it comes to imperialism, that funded anti-colonial movements, etc.

And in some sense, the New Deal, right, the New Deal here in the U.S., which is lauded by liberals as this wonderful achievement of liberal democracy, I mean, you can almost not imagine the New Deal really happening as it did without that Bolshevik threat, without the external pressure. And in some ways today, China for all of its complexities, right? and I'm not even going to get into the whether it's socials or not, you know. I have a more Maoist leaning. Yeah, I have a more Maoist meaning on that, leaning on that question. But my position is fairly nuanced on that.

But in any case, you can see that China poses a threat to unilateral U.S. hegemony. And that posing of a threat and that pushback on that global level, I think, is important. And it's something that, for better or worse, Marxist movements in the Leninist and Maoist traditions have been able to achieve in ways that I've believe anarchism simply hasn't. Now with all of that said, I would also like to, you know, play the other side of this coin and give credence to anarchism where anarchism do. There are as many things I like about anarchist. I have many anarchist comrades. I went through an anarchist phase that I took incredibly seriously and studied and wanted to be, you know, an informed, principled anarchist at a time of my life. I love their focus on prefigrative politics. It's a real concern

among anarchists that we have to organize ourselves today in ways that reflect the future we want to build. I think that's something that is taken just more seriously in general on the anarchist side of things. There are certainly Marxists who care about that. And my whole thing with Buddhism and the internal and external transformation happening parallel and simultaneous is in a sense, a form of prefigrative politics, right? It's this inner transformation that we work on as we go through fighting for this external transformation. I've always appreciated the militant anti-fascism of anarchism. Certainly there are plenty of Marxists and always have been in the anti-fascist struggle. You know, was the Red Army who invaded

Berlin and made Hitler bury one in his brain. That can't be forgotten. Liberated the concentration camps, etc. So long, beautiful history of anti-fascism on the Marxist left. But anarchists, particularly in the U.S. and in Europe, they have, you know, the black block tactic. they have this meet you in the streets, you know, proud boys come to Portland. It's a, it's a big anarchist milieu, you know, and they're the ones punching proud boys in the fucking face and kicking them out of their shit. In Washington, D.C., we have similar sort of dynamics going on right now as the proud boys are now looking continually, repeatedly, right?

They're coming back soon, and they just have some clashes in D.C. in the last few weeks. And that's, again, not all anarchists, but there is that militancy that anarchism fosters and always has fostered that I've respected. and they do give important critiques of hierarchy. They have an important suspicion of power as such that Marxists should take seriously and learn from. And ultimately, as I said in the beginning, we're all aiming at the same sort of goal.

And right now, these differences about how you view the state, you know, how to conduct revolution, we're not there yet. We're still playing defense. We're still trying to get our shit together enough to be able to go on the offensive. And in that context, in these conditions, I do not think that most of these differences should get in the way of us working together effectively around our shared interests, which is anti-fascism, which is anti-imperialism, which is anti-capitalism. And so, you know, differences exist. I prefer to have those in a comradly environment of solidarity and mutual respect for one another as long as everybody can respect that that person has different views on this.

You know, maybe we can talk about it and come to a, at least. the better understanding of where each other stand instead of resorting to stereotypes and these sort of shallow misrepresentations of the other side that can only build up our movement and make us stronger and none of us are going to do it by ourselves it's not just going to be marxists doing the revolution it's not just going to be anarchists doing the revolution right and so i think that's an important thing to always keep in mind when we discuss these things and on rev left i actually had an ongoing series for a while called in dialogue with anarchism where i think three or four episodes where i had from various perspectives come on indigenous anarchists you know anarchists out of Europe

etc and we just went back and forth and had and sort of led by example of the sort of conversations that I think are much more productive than the the shallow sectarian you know squabbling that you see online so much so that that's what I believe in and you know I am on the Marxist side of all of these big arguments but I'm always open to learning more and I love hearing the perspective of principled anarchists when it comes to this stuff Awesome. Thank you for being so comprehensive. Again, I know that that is, it's one of the fucking biggest. It's probably the biggest question, you know, that we'll be attacking today and stuff. It's just that, and there's some like ebb and flow in terms of, you know, ideologies and things like that. Of course, according to, you know, the material conditions that people are facing and stuff like that, they find certain tendencies more, more valuable in their organizing and in their efforts and things like that. obviously if you faced a more if you're in an area that faces a more vicious fascistic direct threat then it's going to probably push you into more of a confrontational direct action type

tendency and stuff like that whereas if you're you know if food insecurity housing insecurity are more prevalent in your areas maybe your tendency might be informed by that and it might you know you you might focus more on that because it's what is sustaining your community and stuff like that too so and one more thing if you don't mind yeah the the anarchist sort of milieu that is engaged in anti-fascism right it it is the anti-fascist movement in the u.s as it is really benefits from this sort of decentralized cell structure that is inherent to anarchist political philosophy like you know you see the state trying, tripping over itself to label anti-fascists as, you know, a terrorist organization and these fever dream right-wing weirdos that have all these ideas of like, who's the leader of Antifa? You know, they're just so confused. It's me. I'm, I'm, all right, I am he. I am the one. But they can't do anything. They can't stop it because it's not an organization. It's not something that has a strict hierarchy with leaders that you can focus on and take out. It is just this, this organic up swelling of regular people.

decentralized cell networks who go out and say not in our streets. And, you know, we have to tip our hat to the anarchist emphasis on decentralization and self-structures for the efficacy of that movement and the inability for the state or the fascist to put a stop to it because, you know, it's a whack-a-mole. You hit somebody over here, another movement pops up over here, and you can't ever get your arms around it in the way that you might be able to get your arms around a more centralized party, the Black Panther Party, the Communist Party USA and its heydays in the 30s and 40s. These were organizations with clear leadership and the state took advantage of it. Now,

there's also huge benefits, right? The Black Panther parties did things that, you know, we all look back at today with lots of affection and we let it guide us. And so they were incredibly successful with Fred Hampton and stuff like that. But they took out Fred Hampton because they knew he was a leader. And by taking him out, they would, they would, they would, you know, land a blow against that organization. And so this back and forth between the ways that we organize between the Marxist and anarchist, I think is really important. important. I think the most successful, especially in a context like we are today, the most successful forms of organization are the ones that take both seriously, that have an above-ground

organizational structure with discipline and leadership and funding and, you know, planning and that. And then also underground manifestations that, you know, work in a cell decentralized way and they might do things that above-ground organizations can't. You can think of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. You can think of Sinn Féin and the IRA. Those things do work and um and so you know to to close yourself off to one entire form of organizing i think would be a mistake what can we learn from both of them and how do how could we bring them together to create an overall movement that is all the stronger for it those are the questions we should be asking awesome awesome thanks appreciate that uh that illustration there and uh i just want to say uh you know

up the raw to uh left's right hell yeah uh can i get it up the raw and show chat um no no that's that's awesome and you know it's it's one of the biggest fucky the reason i wanted to get into that a little bit is just for some illustration uh of of the differences in tendency and stuff but also uh because one of the things that i hammer the most on um on my channel is we don't we don't stop our organizing efforts because that that person's a fucking syndicalist and I'm an Ancom and you know this guy's an ML and like we don't like while we're fucking doing this like people are starving and the fascist creeps keep on creeping you know like while we're doing this this stupid bullshit back and forth so um and and nobody benefits more from us squabbling over some shit that happened a long time ago than capitalism. Exactly. And and fascist. you know what I'm saying so and the fascists the fascists have this big disadvantage where you know turns out they're all a bunch of narcissistic machismo assholes and and and so whenever they come together in real life there's constant splits and infighting and you've noticed that too yeah yeah you notice that and they always want to be the top of the heap and they want to be the next big tough guy and all this nonsense and that works to their disadvantage so insofar as we can lower the temperature on that on our side and work together around shared goals that can only be to our benefit and the benefit of the victims of fascism so let's not let's not let's not rep their mistakes let them do that because that's who they are and let us find other ways to work together and and that's what we're about we're about socialism social communal coming together working with people there's a theme here y'all's a theme here exactly yeah if if you don't want to take it for me take it from fucking brett you know let's again the blood sport we don't need the blood sport y'all like we have enough enemies and i love that every time i hear the term i'm like oh god it's so fucking

accurate you know like the fucking tendency blood sport shit for sure it's true like the debate bro so when i don't do debate bro stuff i don't um i'm not in panels and stuff like that uh with these kinds of things um my channel is different than a lot of other channels in that way uh because i don't find any benefit to squabbling over that kind of shit uh when we've got this fucking and, you know, capital C, uh, capitalism, you know, staring us down and, uh, we've got the fucking eye of soar on, for real, uh, watching everything that we're doing. Yeah. And the debates don't do shit.

I mean, debates, debates are what they fundamentally do most of them is that you just, you pick your side almost always going in, right? Most of the people are already settled what side they're on. You just hunkered down into, in a defensive position, defend the person articulating yours and, and shit on the person, you know, articulating the other view. But, like, it's not really productive. Right. And so anytime that I do have conversations with anarchist or people that disagree, it's always in a discussion format. Nobody's here to win. Nobody's here to dunk on anybody. You don't have to come in worrying about how to save face. We can just have a calm, loving sort of conversation. And that actually teaches people, not only the two people engaged in the conversation, but people watching. They don't feel like they need to get defensive and pick aside. They just can listen openly and take what is applicable and useful for them. I think that's a much better way to go about it than this. You know, this, because debate is so ego-fueled.

It is so much about how can I dominate the other. And I don't, I don't have any room for that in my life. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I've only got so, so many spoons, as they say, you know, so much emotional energy to dedicate to this kind of stuff. And, and yeah, and like you were saying, you know, a lot of people go into debates with a preconceived idea of what they're wanting to hear and something like that. And even those folks that claim, you know,

like why don't like i go in uh completely neutral and this and that it's like okay even even if you are doing that what what is the point like what at the end of it what does it matter if you've got two people that are both you know fuck capitalism like you and and you come out of it like well i i was neutral going in but now i like this person and i hate this person what what the fuck does that even do what good is that man exactly so so yeah just don't and and i'm not going to like go into this really deep and stuff but like currently the new hotness is claiming that uh people debating with people or like you know just fucking meaming and dunking on people on youtube or twitch or whatever maybe he is actually uh effective at like

de ratting nazis and shit like that that's that's the new hotness um you know that kind of thing so which i could fucking do a dissertation on how that's bullshit it like how you don't derad people like that and that kind of thing but yeah so i'm i'm glad that we're on pretty oh sorry hold on uh i need to turn off my alerts real quick i forgot to do that no problem thanks for the follow appreciate you um but uh yeah i'm glad that we're we're on the same page on that type of thing man um feels good but uh okay yeah cool so uh in and kind of the next thing I want to chat about is just we were talking about the uprising earlier and obviously if there's one thing that colors or one thing that kind of informs us this year

over other years is the fact that we've had a massive uprising and awakening in like in terms of class consciousness in terms of people doing street actions who have never ever been involved in anything beyond voting, you know, those types of things. And so, yeah, in this last year, you know, we've seen a pretty massive increase in class consciousness, huge new influx of comrades who are looking for information and inspiration from us that can kind of make them more effective in their organizing and inspiring others around them to kind of join the struggle as well. So that's really good to hear, you know, good to see that type of thing.

The biggest thing I kind of wanted to discuss is maybe like some specific leftist concepts that people may not know about that can kind of like counter that capitalist narrative and help people understand that like leftist ideology kind of gives people the most freedom, you know, kind of like we were discussing earlier, the most equitable living conditions and, you know, above all, you know, kind of empower people to self-actualize and kind of truly experience all that our lives like really can be, you know, like libertarian. like to promise that you know the free market is is what you know promises the or you know what gives people the best opportunity to really like self-actualize and and and we know that that's bullshit for so many reasons and stuff but um kind of like the the one of the biggest concepts that I always quote in here and it's sort of a little joke like anytime people come in and we get new followers in the channel and stuff like that I I kind of do a little aside about species being because species being is it feels like a fucking warm blanket man i can't really explain it it's it's just nice you know and it's it's a concept that i've used in my organizing to people

who may not be initiated to leftist thought that kind of gets them thinking about oh yeah liberal you know right libertarianism is is a you know fiercely individualist you know winners and losers type of ideology that, you know, tends to consume people at the lowest rung of the ladder and benefit of the people at the highest rung of the ladder and stuff like that. But that's not the way that it's ever posed in our society, right? You know, it's always posed as like liberty and this and that, you know. So I tend to hammer in on species being as being like, no, this is, check this out.

This is a leftist concept. You may be familiar with right libertarianism and stuff, but like check, check out self-actualization and the idea of that from like a leftist perspective. you know could could you kind of maybe like give an overview of like the concept of species being and and how it sort of relates to self actualization and personal freedom yeah absolutely the first thing I would say before we get into this is you know libertarianism is is a dead ideology it's been proven wrong you know nobody especially in the midst of a pandemic and looking down the barrel of climate change nobody is saying the thing we need more of is rabid endless profiteering and

growth at all costs with even less regulation. Like, my God, it is, to defend libertarianism today is like to defend monarchism in the early 1800s, the time is gone. History has moved on. You're standing way back there talking about a dead ideology. And the closest you could ever get to libertarianism is really something like neoliberalism, because the big lie of libertarianism is that the state is not organized entirely under a capitalist context to facilitate the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

and interests of the ruling class over and above other classes. You know, the state is not a neutral arbiter of interest that sits in referees equally between contesting, you know, interest groups or ideas and whatnot. It is, as we say, with the Marxist materialist understanding, the classes are, I'm sorry, the state is a mechanism of class domination. And so anybody's still clinging to libertarianism. They're really a joke. I mean, they certainly still exist.

They'll always exist. People today are still monarchists. for God's sake, but history has passed them on, and I just kind of feel bad for them. It's pathetic to still be arguing for that dead worldview. But when it comes to species being, it touches on two important things. It touches on human nature, which we hear all the time, right? Capitalism is human nature. Socialism looks good on paper, but it's not human nature.

The laziest vomiting up of passively absorbed propaganda. They've accumulated throughout their life as if it's their own independent thoughts. And then also alienation, which is incredibly helpful, when trying to talk to working people about a capitalist critique. I often find alienation to be such a viscerally understandable concept to working class people that I often will use that as a doorway into these broader anti-capitalist arguments. And a species being really touches on both of them. So what I wanted to do, instead of just riffing on what species being is given,

that is such a complex, multifaceted sort of concept that Marks touched on in different works at different times, right? Marks, like all of us was an evolving person that had different ideas at different times and he placed different emphasis on different things at different times. I was actually just going to read a two little paragraph thing that I actually wrote this for Red Menace when we talked about species being. And I think this would be the best way to do it because with such a big and complex and nuanced topic to just speak extemporaneously, almost guaranteed.

you'll miss something important about it. So if you'll indulge me just for a second, I'll read this, and I think this is a great way to get into the concept and to understand the basics of it, and we can bounce back and forth after that. So species being for Marx is our nature as homo sapiens. It is what distinguishes us from all other animals on Earth. He explains that animals, although members of species,

don't experience their lives as such. They are not conscious of themselves as a member. of a species, but exist only in the immediacy of their individual lives. So, for example, a bear does not conceptualize itself as a member of the bear species because it doesn't have the capacity for conscious reflection that humans have. It merely experiences its own individual existence without any reference to bears outside itself, unless, you know, those bears are in its immediate awareness, be it they cubs, a possible mate, or a bear of the same sex invading its territory.

Human beings, on the other hand, have the capacity for abstract thought and self-consciousness, which allows us to understand ourselves as a part of humanity broadly. We do not see ourselves merely as individuals, but as members of our broader species, both historically and presently, in ways that other animals just don't. In other words, we understand ourselves universally and can take our species, the human species, and others, as objects of conscious thought, meaning we can stand back and reflect. on them. The life activity of an animal is simply what the animal does, how it acts on the external world in order to maintain its physical existence. The whole character of a species,

Marx argues, is contained in the character of its life activity. The animal is always just its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. So for example, a bird is what a bird does. It flies, it makes nests, it catches worms, it feeds its chicks, etc. There is no separation between its life activity and its self. Human beings, on the other hand, make our life activity the object of our conscious thoughts. We can stand back from what we do and reflect on it. This ability to become conscious of our life activity, to step back from it and ponder it in the abstract, is what makes us different from all other animals on earth, and it is this capacity that Mark says makes us into a species being. Because of this wonderful ability, we are not

strictly determined in our behavior like animals. We have freedom. Animals produce things like beaver dams and ant colonies and birds nests, but they produce them only in pursuit of the immediate needs of themselves or their offspring. Humans, Marx argues, produce universally. We produce even when we are free from immediate physical need. We make art. We engage in science. We come up with philosophy. We organize into political movements. We build cities and airplanes. We rocket ourselves to the moon and back. It is this productive activity upon the objective world through which we prove ourselves to be a species being. This free and productive activity is our life activity. We duplicate ourselves in our consciousness and also actively out in reality and we see ourselves in a world

that we have created. Last little chunk here. And this connects it with alienation, which is inseparable from this concept. So where does alienation come in here? Well, Marx makes it clear. When we are torn away from the things that we create, when we are alienated from the products of our productive activity, we are separated from our own nature as freely and spontaneously creative creatures. Mark says it changes for us the life of the species into a means of individual life and turns individual life into the purpose of our species. In other words, because that was hard to follow, it flips the whole situation on its head. Instead of consciously and freely creating our world together as an end in and of itself? Our life activity becomes degraded to a mere

means of our individual existence. Our spontaneous and free activity, which constitutes our very nature as human beings, is replaced with monotonous, repetitive, and unfree activity in pursuit of a wage, which we then turn into food, clothes, and shelter. In other words, we become alienated from our own nature. We become strangers to ourselves. Mark says, quote, a strange labor turns man's species being into a being alien to him, into a means of his individual existence. It estranges from man, his own body, as well as external nature, and his spiritual or human aspect. So that's Marx in the economic and philosophic manuscripts. I mean, that's what I wrote about Marx, right? So Marx lays out this argument and I summed it up in my own words, trying to make it as easy for people

to follow as possible. It is a complex sort of argument. But, you know, later, that was early. That was you know, economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844, but later in Capital, his most mature work, he says this, and this is the last quote I'll do from Marx on this topic, but he says, a spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of herself. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best bee is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects in reality. At the end of every labor process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. So this ability to stand back and to objectify

our being, our species, ourselves, and our life activity is what animals can't do and what we can. That's what makes us fundamentally distinct. And importantly, you know, Marx rejects this idea that human nature is this static, unchanging, and permanent thing, right? That's an idealist conception of human nature, and that is what is implicit in the argument that capitalism is human nature. Well, capitalism came about through a series of contingent historical events, and the way that the self is structured under capitalism is not the end-all, be-all of the way humans are structured. It's a function, a downstream effect of the context we have to operate in. So, you know, instead of having that permanent,

unchanging static view of human nature. Mark situates our human nature and our species being in its social relations and its historical context. And this is a materialist and dialectical understanding of humans because our nature is embedded in how we produce and reproduce our lives, right, materialism, as well as understanding our human nature as connected to the whole unfolding of nature and therefore subject to evolution. So as our conditions change, as our historical context changes as our social relations change, you know, the activity, the free and spontaneous activity we engage in also changes. And there are elements of being human that are universal and you can even say biological. But, you know, much of it is subject to the external

conditions in which we're born. And if you doubt how dependent humans are on being social creatures, just think of language. One of our best inventions, the very thing that allows us to produce and hand down culture over generations and build up a civilization and communicate in increasingly nuanced ways, the entire linguistic apparatus is premised on us being a social animal. And it goes back to humans hunting on the savannah and needing to, because we don't have big claws and strong muscles and sharp teeth, our mechanism of surviving in the world was cooperation. And language arose as this increasing need for humans to communicate increasingly sort of nuanced, you know, in a nuanced way, in a more articulate way in order to cooperate at

higher and higher levels. So our very ability to think, which is rooted in our linguistic ability, is a reflection of our radically social nature. That is what we evolved to be. And so instead of capitalism being part and parcel and synonymous with human nature. In so many ways, it's antithetical to human nature. It atomizes us. It destroys community. It destroys the bounds we have with one another. It makes us compete with each other on a marketplace. And in that whole process, we are alienated from ourselves, from others, from the natural world. I mean, you cannot create the disaster that is climate change without having high degrees of alienation from the natural world. Indigenous communities were able to live on this continent for thousands of years

without ever bringing the species to the brink of extinction. In a couple hundred years of European colonialist capitalism, we are facing down the barrel of our own extinction. And that goes to show that this is not human nature. You know, this is antithetical in so many ways to human nature. Now, it plays on aspects of human nature. I'm not going to say it's a wholly alien invention, right? But there is greed in human beings. There is a desire for social beings to rise above and set themselves apart from others, you know, to pursue status. And in many ways, capitalism preys on and incentivizes the lesser nature, the lesser angels of our nature. And socialism and communism, I think, point to a future in which our evolutionary nature and

our evolutionary history as homo sapiens, as a social being. can come back into the picture at a higher level and hopefully be able to mature into not a bunch of squabbling little nation states with racism and colonialism and all that, but as a global community, a human civilization. And that is the sort of loop we have to jump through right now. We're being tested by pandemics and climate change to become a planetary civilization, not a bunch of little warring nation states. And, you know, that's the pressure being put on us by climate change and a million other things. And we either, you know, evolve or we perish. We keep moving forward or we perish. And one of the most dangerous and absurd ideas, which is implicit in so much capitalist

reasoning, is that capitalism is permanent. It's here to stay. Because capitalism and the entire paradigm sort of cuts us off from history and makes it seem like capitalism is just a naturalized way that we exist, it cuts us off from even conceptualizing our self as historical beings in progress. And so you have a lot of people who genuinely, even if they can't articulate it, believe that this is the end all, be all. And sure, we might need some tinkering around the edges, you know, but this is the end of, this is the end of history ideology run amok. And it now stands as a major obstacle to our evolution as a species. No, man, fucking hats off for that actually really, um, you know, well simplified, uh, explanation of a

massively complicated subject, uh, Brett. And so I, and I had people ask me, you know, like, why, why do you, when people come in, you know, like, why do, why do you tell them? I always joke around. I'm like, you know, hey, we got plenty of species being on the table so you can self-actualize. Welcome in. You know, like, and they're like, why do you fucking say that? Like what? And I'm like, just wait. I'll tell you why And when I say I'll tell you why I mean Brett O'Shea is going to tell you why

Well I appreciate that I hope I did it justice I'm sure somebody out there disagrees with me But it's You know and and it And it fucking feels as good now Hearing it as it felt to me Hearing it for the first time from you in 2017

Like same Fucking warm just A warm blanket man Just like washing over it and stuff And one thing that, to just to kind of piggyback on that, like, you know, we're always talking about like, or we capitalists are always talking about, you know, it's the best system and stuff. And like you said, you know, this idea that there is nothing, you know, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism, right? it's this this whole thing leaves the general population with such limited imagination that we become lazier in in our in our thinking and and the less imagination that we actually

possessed to be able to like you said you know like like we can see a building before we build it you know that's the way that it has to be um for us to be able to imagine our transition out of capitalism yeah you know and exactly And it is, it's against, you know, our, our natural species being, as it were, you know, to not be able to have that type of imagination to imagine a better system. If, if the best system that you went when libertary or when, you know, capitalists rather, when they say, you know, that this is the best system that we have, this is, you know, name a better system and stuff. And it's like, we're trying to, you know, but you keep killing us. it's it's yeah it's it's it's hard to get uh the the buy-in from people uh when they're so i'm i'm always hesitant to use the term brainwashed you know but uh ideologically conditioned

yeah that thank you yeah they're they're so ideologically conditioned um by by this rhetoric um from from capitalists that uh you know we we currently exist in the best system as it were and You know, and we people talk about like, you know, well, humans are, you know, we talk about alienations of humans are, um, naturally selfish or greedy or, uh, naturally unproductive and you got to force people through, uh, incentive structures and different things like that. And it's like, if anything, from what I've seen in this pandemic is a perfect example that that is not true and that people are naturally creative and naturally productive because how fucking many of us lost. our goddamn jobs this year and then you know i can't even tell you how many times i've been like i got nothing going on i'm going to go help this guy build a fucking fence you know like i can't even tell you how many times i've gone and done something like uh that that had no like um you know monetary uh value right for me um it had no incentive structure for me or or other people that have lost their jobs and stuff, but we do it because we want to feel productive.

Like we want to be productive. And that speaks to, you know, us being able to live in a communal setting or us being able to build our society in a way in which people will want to be productive in it. You know, I mean, you talk about, you know, some thoughts by Krapotkin of like, you know, like at least five hour work days or different things like that when they're discussing these you know, hammering out these types of ideas and stuff. And, you know, leaving people as much time in the day to be able to paint or dance or, you know, experience the things in life. And I think that that's a genuine view of what human nature really is. You know, I think that we

genuinely want to do good in the community. We want to uplift other people. We want to do things that make us feel productive and satisfy us. Just art alone, just physical art painting alone is an outstanding argument against the idea that people only do things because there's incentive structures.

Yo, I know very few fucking people that paint and make money off of painting. Very few. And I know a shitload of artists, my guy. Exactly. You know? So if anybody knows somebody who paints like do they have artwork that's that's hanging at the fucking met probably fucking not you know do they uh sell paintings for tens of thousands of dollars certainly not um you

know so i'm i'm getting tangential on it and stuff but uh yeah i i really appreciate you kind of riffing on that and and kind of explaining uh than i better than i could a very complicated uh concept that we always referred to here in the chat and stuff so yeah for sure And what you just mentioned about art is perfect, right? Because that goes back to what Marx is saying about free and spontaneous activity, right? We do things because we like to express ourselves. We do things because we like to be productive, contributing members of a social group. You know, capitalism's incentive structure, it eradicates that community.

It eradicates that whole context in which people can freely and spontaneously create. And it replaces it with, like, you know, you need to get a wage. And so even when we have these interests like art, like music, like philosophy, we always are constantly being forced to figure out how to monetize it. And in many ways it can deaden your interest when you're forced to have to partake in these things in order to get money. It sort of strips it away of its appeal, some of what you love about it is that you can do it for its own sake. It doesn't have to be a means to some economic end. And, you know, people are deprived of that. that to the extent that people actually aren't even given the chance to find out what they like.

They're not even given a chance to find out what they really are moved by and what gives their life meaning because from day one, they're told you have to have a career. You've got to have a job. And so their entire life then becomes not about finding out who they are, not about self-actualizing or discovering their interest that they might, you know, become enamored with. But rather, how can I make a living? What is my career going to be?

what is profitable to me. And that in and of itself, deadens, you know, deadens life. It's a form of alienation when you're no longer able, as Mark says, to be that free and spontaneously creative being. And then the other thing I would say is, you know, just one of them, I always say this and I just love making this point, but the most, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but the most insidious aspect of ideology like, you know, communism killed 100 million people or capitalism is human nature or it looks good on paper, but blah, blah, blah, right?

is that you're regurgitating things that you've passively absorbed throughout your life, but you do so convinced that what you're saying is the product of your own independent critical thought. And that's the insidious aspect of ideology as it gives you ideas, but it makes you feel as if they were your own. It's not being beaten into your head. It's just passively absorbed from media, from art, from popular culture, from schooling. And then all of a sudden you're saying something like,

um you know capitalism is is human nature and you don't even know why you're saying it you don't even know where that idea came from but you're saying it as if it is the conclusion of your own deep internal thought and like the a few years ago if you remember like post new atheist free thinker movement right everybody wanted to be a free thinker but it was the same old repackaged garbage same shit but they were convinced that they were free thinkers that they were on the cutting edge of intellectual society and that is that's how insidious that shit is yeah yeah it's It's, it's funny because it's like, uh, you're rehashing, uh, capitalism tropes and you're like, uh, calling everybody else sheep. It's like it is, you know, I love, you love to see it.

The irony. Um, and yeah, and, and further, you know, uh, capitalists, you know, they, they, they look at, uh, leftist ideology and another one of their big arguments is that if we, you know, it will, if, uh, if people aren't forced through like some type of incentive to, uh, to do the work that, uh, uh, uh, uh, that needs to be done to like boost the economy or whatever whatever they want to argue you know like uh everybody's just going to sit around playing xbox you know they're just gonna nobody's gonna do shit because people are fucking naturally lazy and stuff it's like and they don't understand how much they fucking tell on themselves that sitting around playing xbox my dude that is a reaction to being forced to do work that is alienating like we we fucking get home from the office after doing that shit for eight 10 12 hours of fucking day and of course we want to go home and all we want to fucking do is is play xbox and and just fucking veg out for six hours or eight hours and not have to like do anything or worry about anything like if anything it's capitalism that conditions us to to do things like that and it's like yeah it's going to take some time as well before we're going to be able to like break away from this like oh i and feel like oh i can i can do i can do anything that i want to

today you know like again you know I go back to the unemployment thing and it's like anybody who's who's been unemployed for any time any extended period of time knows that like yeah man it's fucking cool for the first couple weeks you know maybe few weeks to like be like I don't even have to fucking I'll get up at 10 I don't even have to fucking change clothes the day man that's pretty cool but then about week three fucking starts sitting in and that that itch starts happening, you're like, I don't even just, dude, I don't even want to just sit around and fucking play Xbox for 10 hours

anymore. Like, I don't even want to do that. I need to do something. I got to do something. How many times have people that are, that have nothing to do be like, man, I got to get out, I got to get outside, I got to go do something. Exactly. You know, that's not, that's not fucking any type of incentive structure that's making them do that. That's because

they feel called to go do something productive. Like, that's that's the true essence of it. Yeah, we didn't evolve to sit on our asses all day. That is an escape from the conditions of alienation. And, like, another example is, like, you know, huge amounts of people who work Monday through Friday. And then they just go out to bars during the weekend and get thrashed, trying to just reclaim some humanity to numb themselves to what their normal life is. Everybody's like, fuck tomorrow's Sunday.

That means the next day is Monday. You're always sort of, you know, your whole life becomes about these tiny little moments where you can reclaim something like. your own humanity and when all of your days are just this drudgery and toil, you know, the first instance that rubber band sort of snaps back is going to be, I just want to be productive at all. I just want to sit here. I just want to go get drunk so I don't have to think about anything. But then after a while, you're right. And I think anybody that's been privileged enough to enjoy quarantine and not have to go out on the front lines and work, you felt this. You know, people call it going stir crazy. It's like, yes, at first it's nice to sit home and not have

anything to do, especially if you're taking care of economically. But eventually you do get that it. You want to get out and do something. And it's not just, I want to go out and get drunk with friends. You know, that might be part of it. But it's like, no, you know, this can't be what life is. I want to go out and be productive. Humans all through our evolutionary history. We were in communal groups. We had rights of passage. We hunted together. You know, we had social roles we played. You know, everybody, no, they didn't just sit down and do nothing all day. So, yeah, I mean, we could talk about this stuff all day, but it really is just so absurd to hear those sorts of arguments, these half-assed arguments that people think are deep. Yeah, no, absolutely true. And I just want to say, you know,

you mentioned Sunday. So we definitely got to do a shout out to friends of the show, Tim and Eric, who taught me all about the Sunday scaries. Nice. Love Tim and Eric. But yeah, no, I appreciate the discussion on that, man. Thank you. Yeah, and capitalists, you know, they want to that without like a limitless profit potential, you know, we'd stagnate as a society. We'd, you know, an innovation and creativity would wither away. You know, and we kind of touched on a little bit a little while ago, but can you just kind of elaborate sort of like on how that's weaponized, that idea that without that. It's also weaponized to turn workers against other workers and and against their own self-interest sort of.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know, the dominant ideas of a given culture and epoch are the dominant ideas of the ruling class, and they trickle down, and some segment of the working class will internalize those values and those ideas and really believe them, and it's not their fault.

It's like, this is how ideas get spread. This is in dominant ideologies. They get synthesized into something like common sense, and people just don't even question it in a lot of ways. But the funny thing about the claim, that, you know, without this limitless, without the profit potential that, that, you know, this limitless growth and going out and getting it and everything like that, that we would stagnate as a society, it's hilarious in the face of climate change, right?

Because the very mechanisms that they tout, limitless profit chasing, endless growth for its own sake is not only stagnating our society, right, but it's actually threatening our entire civilization through climate change. That very pursuit of profit at all costs, that very worship at the altar of growth is what has gotten us to the brink of mass extinction events, which are already underway and the possibility of if not destroying human civilization as we know it, tossing it back, reducing it, weakening it, devastating it in various ways. So this entire ideology of profit and growth is the stagnation, is hitting a wall. It is the, you know, the capitalist system turning around and now beginning to devour its own tail. So, you know, that off the top is something that needs to be said in the face of those arguments. But also, if you think back through history, right, the greatest, and we touched on this a little bit before, but the greatest philosophers, scientists, artists, religious mystics, inventors were rarely motivated by getting super rich.

A lot of these people weren't, you know, given a shit about in their own time, right? A lot of them didn't even become well known or respected until after they were dead. A lot of them lived, you know, not always in squalor, but, you know, and nothing like, you know, this life of luxury. And the things they did from Darwin to Marx to Jesus and the Buddha, none of the big things that we think about in human evolution were done for profit. You know, Darwin was, for example, scared as hell about his theory because it challenged the religious hierarchy of the day. he sat on his discovery of evolution via natural selection for a long, long time because he didn't want to put it out in the world, scared of what its reaction would be. There's nothing profitable. He was going to get attacked, and his family was going to be put under a microscope, and he had these

bouts of deep anxiety during this period of time. Marks lived his entire life in tatters, and, you know, he'd sell his pants to make bills, and if wasn't for angle, his entire family would be cast into the street at multiple periods throughout his life. And that's true. true for so many artists, for so many monumental religious figures. You know, the best of humanity is not motivated by a desire to profit the self. It is motivated by a desire, going back to our communal origins, of contributing something meaningful to humanity, whether that is art, philosophy, science, or anything else. And so, you know, rarely is that the deciding factor for the people that we look back in history and really love and respect their contributions to our civilization. It's

just asinine on its face. And then, you know, our species being, as we said earlier, is one of this free, spontaneous creative expression towards self-actualization. It has nothing to do with becoming rich. And there are studies on the wealth of pinnacle, right? Like, you know, tracing wealth alongside happiness. And where does it plateau? And is it true that the richer you get, the more happy you are? And it's just not, right? And in the American context, given our economic scales, but this could be put in any different context, on the cost of living, et cetera, something around $70,000 a year is where people peek out and plateau on their satisfaction of life. And why is that? It's because at that level, you can more or less

live comfortably. You know, you can pay your bills, you can feed your family hell. You might even be able to put a little savings away. And that's what, and then you can use that base of comfort to go out, find hobbies, do art, express yourself, et cetera, right? So above and beyond that, In many cases, not only do you not get more happy, you get more miserable because you're so invested in this accumulation of things that everything becomes a threat to it. And then you have this pathological need for what really amounts to economic hoarding by the likes of people like Jeff Bezos, for example, who never seems to get enough. that can't be a happy person and that certainly can't be the orienting principle of our species, of our civilization, of our nature to just profit and grow at all costs. In fact, looking down the barrel of climate change as we are and that pressure being put on us in our economic and political institutions, something like degrowth, right, eradicating growth as the orienting mechanism of life, particularly and primarily first in the developed world. It's certainly a great argument by the global south that no, no, no, America and Europe.

You're not going to develop to a post industrial situation and then tell the rest of us that we have to arrest our development because of climate change that you contributed to, right? So in the West, in the so-called first world, there's going to have to be a degrowth, a radical reorientation of our entire ideology, inherent in capitalism, and a realization that what makes life meaningful is not pursued. of wealth and profit and status and all of this nonsense that our culture feeds us as the answer to happiness. People find that stuff. They get the fame and they get the wealth and they get the status and they go crazy because they realize they've been lied to their entire life that that's the path to happiness. What really gives us happiness, as we've mentioned over and over and over again, is to freely and spontaneously be able to create, to self-express, to work towards self-actualization and to be a productive, meaningful member in your community,

in your social group. And we're also trying to widen what we take as community, as our social group. It's not just a tribe or a neighborhood or a state or a nation state, right? But can we extend our notion of community to encompass the entire world? Can we extend our conception of community to include all people and then advance from there to the animals that surround us, these beautiful fauna and flora that make our life gorgeous and really underpin the biodiversity and the ability for the earth to continue. And then beyond that, right, the question of other alien life.

Can we expand our conception of community to the cosmic level? That is the, I think, the way to go if we're going to be a civilization that lasts into the future and can make our mark as an intelligent, wise species and not, you know, these little monkeys that fight in these invisible boundaries on the dirt and have racism and colonialism and dehumanize one another and genocide one another. Like we can keep doing that. We can keep living as capitalist and imperialist and we can perish or we can evolve and step up to the next level of our species and civilizational evolution and open the doorway to fantastic new futures that we can't even imagine.

But you can't do both. And so in order for our society to evolve, the things that hang like albatrosses around our necks like the very system of global capital needs to be transcended. It needs to be pushed beyond and we need to look back at it as we look back on slave states and on feudal states as perhaps a necessary stage we had to go through, right? There are benefits. Marx talks about the benefits of capitalism and the creation of wealth. But, you know, none of those systems stopped. We didn't stop in feudalism for millions of years, right?

these things as an evolving historical process and it's time for us as nature is telling us in no uncertain terms to evolve or perish and there are elements of humanity like you and i and people listening who are ready to evolve pushing that envelope further and there are as there always have been elements of humanity who want to drag us back to some sense of a mythologized path or they're just scared of change and they don't know what comes next and you know what what is known even if it's brutal and killing us is for some people more comfortable than what is unknown. So it's the human psychology, it's historical development, all of it is in play right now. And this idea that limitless profit and growth is the orienting principle of human life,

it needs to be rejected and discarded and moved beyond. And I think that's where we're at right now and that's what nature is forcing us to face. And all we can do is play our role as a mechanism of history. history of nature and fighting back against those elements that want to to stagnate, stop us where we are, or the fascist elements that even want to take us backward. Absolutely. Well, well said. And the reason I wanted to include that is because these are the conversations that you're

going to be having, you know, in your workplace around people that you're, you know, spending the most time with. And these are these are the conversations, you know, you're going to be having. be encountered with, the arguments you're going to be encountered with from people that have been sort of conditioned, as Brett said, into believing these capitalist ideas that the only thing that's saving us from all of us, you know, tearing each other apart is the free market, is limitless profit potential and things like that when it's absolutely completely the fucking opposite. exactly sure um and i did want to and and i agree with like fucking everything you said bret but

unfortunately man i i i just got to say you cited jesus and the buddha as examples of thinkers that were not rich but look jesus was known as the king of kings fact okay and i have seen fucking my guy like i know you know buddhism stuff but i've seen plenty of statues of the buddha and i think that we can both agree um they were well fed And so maybe you're being a little bit intellectually dishonest there, Brett. So I just, I got to hold you to it. I can't just be a yes man for you. You know, how dare you?

My community expects better of me. Jesus said it is easier for a camel to get to the eye of the needle than a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven. And Buddha himself left his life of privilege as a prince, left his entire wealth behind to first become a renunciate and an ascetic. And then later to find the middle path of Buddhist enlightenment. and that whole practice, but your joke is well taken. My chat, oh, my chat is fucking roasting me right now, dude. They, uh, they're calling, now they're calling me a debate, bro. Someone says, we don't expect shit from you anymore, call me.

Spider-Elley says, Buddha was the first folk punk. Hell yeah. No, no, I'm totally meaning poodle moth. I'm totally meaming. but yeah so anyway anyway sorry sorry to hijack it I can't stay

it's not in my it's not in my nature it's not in my species being to be too serious of a person too much so but yeah cool so did come me just say jacket no not that kind of a jacket clap

yeah so neoliberals this is a pretty hard pivot away We've kind of been talking about, you know, more concern, more existential things and evolutionary things and more of like a humanism kind of thing. But I wanted to kind of talk about, so neoliberals kind of with the uprising and everything that's been happening and stuff, we've sort of seen this, this liberal attitude towards, you know, what is proper protest and what is, you know, what's an okay. expression for people who are being, you know, facing state repression and thing, you know, there's this like whole bullshit argument and discussion, fake discussion, rather, that's going on. Neoliberals only kind of seem to want to define violence as civilians using physical force against cops or other civilians or property, you know, like nothing, nothing makes a liberal

clutch pearls like the sound of a window shattering, right? yeah um and you know doing the the mrs lovejoy thing you know won't somebody please think of the fucking windows and shit uh can you kind of discuss maybe other forms of violence that are inherent in capitalism that the neoliberals refuse to acknowledge as being violence where do we even start um yeah just i know that's big i know that's that's really big but uh you know just whatever whatever you want to uh to touch to touch on with that absolutely and perhaps the place to start is is this idea in liberal political philosophy that, you know, the state has a monopoly on violence.

And certainly it makes sense if you're thinking of like a Hobbesian state of nature and you're thinking of, well, we can't just allow people to, you know, to take revenge and do vigilante shit. And so, you know, organizing, you know, violence, you know, law and order at the level of the state, at least through human progress and evolution has made sense in some sense. But it gets reified and turned into this absolutely laughable worldview, where the you, I mean, we could take this topic by topics. Let's just, let's just do that, right?

So one topic, imperialism. So keep in mind that liberals and conservatives, we go out, there's a protest, some windows get broken, protest turn violent when, you know, vandals did this and this, you know, somebody getting evicted from their house during a pandemic, swings at a cop, they're going to jail. That's violence, you know. They turned violent when they were trying to be evicted from their house, blah, blah, blah. So they set the entire sort of baseline of how we think of violence. It's never that the police gassing and brutalizing and mass arresting people, often unconstitutionally,

you know, that's rarely described as the police turned violent in a recent protest, right? It's never that. Any attempt to resist that onslaught is violence. Any attempt to do any property damage is violence because property is the god that the neoliberal world order worship. and so you know broken window to them is is more violent than uh the iraq war right it's almost like you're you're uh you're deconsecrating a church or something it's almost like you you know you smash a window on a fucking chase bank and it's as if you smashed a window on a fucking church exactly you know exactly and so let's just take it step by step imperialism what does

just focusing on the u.s. state because that's where we're we're headquartered um imperialism is just this brutal grinding daily violence. America is the number one arms dealer, you know, for example, around the world. We sell arms to anybody and everybody that will buy them, except, you know, people trying to build socialism, of course. But, you know, Saudi Arabia wants a bunch of new fighter jets so they can bomb Yemenese children. And America is the facilitator of that cell.

The U.S. military, the number one contributor to climate change of any single entity the world over, doing violence to our planet as they go out. and do violence to the world around them, you know, dropping nukes on the heads of little, only country in human history who dropped not one, but two nuclear bombs on the heads of innocent civilians. And not because, as the insidious ideology of the conditioned American will say, well, it prevented a ground war and there would have been more, like, you know, they just regurgitate that

lie that, like, you know, if we didn't do that, then it would have led to a ground war and that would have killed millions of people. Well, a ground war is armies fighting, okay, and a nuclear. bomb is you dropping huge weapons on the heads of babies and toddlers and families, you psycho. And that's just one chapter, the Korean War, the CIA in Latin America during the 50, 60, 70s, and up to this day, sanctions against places that you don't agree with, like Venezuela, during a pandemic, when they need medicine and they're not able to get it because of the sanctions imposed on them by the U.S., the brutal half-century-long embargo.

on Cuba. We could go down the list. This is violence. This slaughters people. This devastates families. This throws entire countries back into the Stone Age. This is brutal grinding violence, but it's a bipartisan accepted thing. We just, for example, had the first veto ever of a Trump veto, right? Is a veto override by Congress. And what did they override that veto to do? To pass the National Defense Authorization Act to fund U.S. imperialism. So more money for bomb daddy. Exactly, right. So these patriots that want to talk about violence of a shattered window. Let's go down the list, health care, right? It is violent to insist that people must pay a certain amount to either get the treatment or if they get it to not go bankrupt in the face of it.

The number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States is attached to medical bills that people can't fucking pay, even in the middle of a pandemic. That is violent. That is violent. That is violence. You are ruining people's lives. You are devastating. If your mom or your spouse or your child gets cancer, that's already a tragedy, right? But then to lose your house because of it, that's a crime. That's a crime.

That's violence. Poverty. Half a million Americans at any given time are sleeping out under bridges and in gutters. Is that not violence to force a human being to sleep in the fucking street? While the rulers that dictate this entire system have four or five or six fucking? houses, that's violence, the precarity that not only the American working class, but let's say the global South, you know, the women of Africa, the hiding, the holding on by the skin of your teeth to just the basic necessities of food, water, and shelter. This is imposed on billions

of humans so that a small handful of humans, other humans, can live in extreme luxury and extreme comfort. That's violence. So, you know, the breaking of a window, the standing up to police who are brutalizing you, even the punching of a Nazi, right, or the fighting back against a cop who is brutalizing a loved one of yours, you know, that's framed as violence, but all of this stuff is just the background noise that's acceptable. That's never, ever covered as violence. And that is the hypocrisy at the heart of this entire order.

More and more people are waking up to it, left, right, and center in various ways. This is a criminal government. The U.S. government is the largest terrorist organization on planet Earth, and they have no right to wag their finger at anybody over anything having to do with ethics, morality, or human rights. America is a human rights violation in and of itself. And to hear these vampires and ghouls wag their finger at us and tell us what is and isn't violence, it's fucking laughable.

And we should shove this shit in the face of anybody who tries to defend that entire ideological apparatus of what is and isn't violent. Hell yes. Fucking hell yes, brother. Absolutely. I get worked up. I'm sorry. No, no. That's that's that's that's that's that's fucking magnificent and, uh, you know, people in our chatter saying, you know, uh, louder for those in the back.

And I, and I, I, I second. I second and third. Absolutely. Um, yeah. it's it's a big concept that I think always should come up in conversation any fucking time we're talking about protests and demonstrations and things like that where uh you know people like windows may get broken or people are resisting uh state repression from the police and things like that all never fucking forget to remind people of all of the things that are

not considered violence that are horrifically violent that like you said absolutely fucking devastate people's lives and ruin them potentially for fucking ever and put them on the fucking street anytime that you see uh homeless comrades uh in your area that that was violence done upon them that they would have to scratch to barely be able to to come up with uh you know basic amenities and things like that in addition to having to try to overcome any any type of like personal struggles in their lives that are uh you know keeping them locked into that cycle as well like the the state would prefer to keep them there unless they can um generate some type of um you know funding for something in society

unless you can generate profit for somebody your your life is is determined to be uh relegated to to uh you know precarity and and uh and anonymity um absolutely and that and that's violence that is the direct result of capitalism as you said so fucking magnificent and and passionate and and i really appreciate that that examination of it we're uh i kind of wanted to to try to get wrapped up here this is my last like major point then uh kind of want to riff on maybe a couple of things for just a little bit but um just kind of quickly you know what is what do you consider to be the difference between uh private property we're discussing property as you know uh before you know what's what do you consider to be like the difference between you know

when we're talking about private property and personal property there's a lot of misunderstanding when it comes to um especially from capitalist when it comes to like leftist ideology and stuff and transition from capitalism into socialism into you know eventually a stateless communist society and stuff uh what do you view is the difference between private property and personal property and and kind of in your view you know what would society look like if it were to uh reallocate or reclassify private property, you know, to benefit regular people. You know, what are some of kind of the biggest hurdles, I suppose, to overcome if you were to actually abolish private property or even at the very least, reallocate it in like a more

equitable way, you know, just kind of your thoughts. Yeah, well, actually, the distinction is not difficult in and of itself, but the reason it is so muddied between private and personal properties because under capitalism, under liberalism, they're synonymous. You know, if you own a factory, if you own all the land, that's your personal property. And so, you know, it's muddied because the very ideology of liberalism insists that they're synonymous and that is, of course, internalized in subtle ways by people. And so this distinction, which on its face is actually not hard to understand is the water is so muddied around it that people struggle with it.

But private property in this context really refers to capital to the means of production, right? Somebody owns land. Somebody owns a factory. And then they put other people to work on it, to work the land, to do the stuff in the factory that pumps out products, right, in order to generate capital and profits for themselves. So, you know, private property is not a relationship between a person and a thing, but it's actually it's a social relationship between the person. who owns that property and the people who work it to make it profitable. And that is an inherently unequal relationship and it's inherently a relationship of domination, exploitation, right? And often you see people like Elon Musk who comes from big

money, often ill-gotten money, turning that money around and using that as leverage to tell people who don't have any money generationally or personally that, you know, and this is true for all of capitalist businesses, to come work for. For me, I'll give you a wage, but, you know, I'll collect the profit. So this goes back to Marx and Engels talking about social production versus individual appropriation. You know, all of the products, you know, all wealth is social wealth and that it's socially constructed. Not only by a bunch of workers and an army of consumers who buy those products, but also historically, all the workers that came before us to build up the infrastructure and to create the capital in the first place that then gets turned to open new factories or whatever. So understanding that all wealth is actually generated socially, but is appropriated by individual capitalist or sets of investors or, you know, shareholders, whatever, that is the private property that we are talking about overthrowing, ending private property, meaning ending the ability to own disproportionate amounts of capital and land to then make others through the leverage of your wealth, work those to make you more profitable while you give them.

a pittance, right? Not the full value of the labor that they create. Personal property is simply the possessions that you actually use, like the use value of things, like your home, your car, your bed, your dog, the clothes that you're wearing, things that you use personally to get by. You're not, you know, using these things to make a profit. You're not dominating or exploiting others in order to have these things, you know, to create these things in the first place. They're basic goods and services that individuals use for themselves or their families. There's no domination inherent in that, right? And this whole idea of like, we're coming for your toothbrush is like a sort of meme that arises out of this misunderstanding where people who don't understand this distinction, you know,

think that by us wanting to overthrow private property, that means we're going to collectivize everything that you personally own. And that's just a complete misnomer. But how would it look if under socialist, you know, a context, under a context in which we abolish private property, which Marxist and anarchist all agree that we should, it would be owned, the things that would be collective, right, like land, factories, financial institutions, hospitals, and health care, right? Instead of being owned by individual corporations or individual bosses, owners, shareholders, et cetera. Those things, they're not personal use, right? A hospital and a factory and natural resources aren't personal property. They're different kind of property, but under socialism,

they would be owned collectively, um, worked and they would be operated in a context in which we take into account all the externalities, all the other interests that society as a whole holds historically in Marxist revolutions that has come in the form of state ownership. But it need not be. And maybe state ownership is a step in the early process of transitioning away from capitalism. But generally, you know, we're aiming at collective ownership of the things that need to be owned collectively for the betterment of all of society and not letting individual capitalists or small handfuls of capitalists individually appropriate the productive, you know, consequences of that land or that factory or that mine or that natural resource, etc. And the biggest hurdles to

accomplishing this, it's not really technical. You know, in Marxist revolutions, there's this concept of taking over the commanding heights of the economy. So first and foremost, you take, you nationalize the banks, right? You nationalize the health care system. Those are the commanding heights, and you, maybe you let little petty bourgeois, mom and pop, you know, firms continue until, you know, you can do more, you know, deep transformations of of society overall, right?

This is a process. This is not a thing that happens overnight. et cetera. But the biggest hurdles to all of this are not technical, like I said, but they're ideological, right? To bring up this idea to people and you'll see the confusion. You'll see that that is a major obstacle in people's political imagination. You said earlier, easier to imagine the end of the world and the end of capitalism. Billions of people have internalized that reality to differing degrees. And so just this very discussion can put some people on the ideological defensive. And then the other major obstacle to doing that, which we're going to have to do

if we're going to survive climate change. Like, we cannot keep this system. We're going to have to collectivize and perhaps nationalize so many different things to collectively own. So, like, social wealth is owned socially, right? That's the goal. But aside from ideological obstacles,

there's also the inevitable reaction by the global bourgeoisie. Nobody gives up power willingly. The kings and queens of yesterday year did not hand over power to the rabble. In many cases, they were pulled out of their castles and beheaded in order to clear the way for a new social order to be. So nobody with all the wealth, all the privilege, all the power in a given system

is going to willfully give that up. And every time anybody has tried during capitalism's reign to do things differently, to challenge imperialism, to bring their natural resources under local community control as opposed to offering it as a smorgas board to multinational corporations, what happens? They're immediately attacked with all of the weapons, all of the wealth, all of the power centers that capitalism and imperialism can possibly muster. Even something as simple and as tepid as Bernie Sanders-style social democracy is met with by ferocious reaction, not only by the right in the Republicans, but by the democratic

establishment themselves. Obama going behind the scenes during the primaries to make sure that all the centrist dropped out and got behind Biden, but that Liz Warren stayed in so she could split the vote with Bernie after Bernie won the first three you know sort of um the states and the primary which nobody who has won that many uh went on to lose the general election right and so they had to step in like oh god things are getting serious and so it doesn't even come from the far right it comes from the center um as well and that is always going to be inevitable that's the big obstacle because they have the militaries they have the power they have the banks they have the multinational corporations they have all the leverage all we have is our numbers

And the only way those numbers even mean anything is when they're organized effectively to go on the offensive, right? Formed into a tip of a spear that we can jam in the guts of our enemies, metaphorically. In Minecraft. Yeah, exactly. So I see those as the big hurdles. But again, this is not a complicated distinction. It makes intuitive sense once it's laid out. But importantly, under capitalism, private and personal property are seen as synonymous.

and that goes a long way to explaining the confusion around the issue. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm glad that you started and ended with that because that is probably the most important thing is that we have to understand when we're speaking with capitalists that in their minds, there is no fucking difference. They cannot separate, you know, like your toothbrush, you know, if we're meaming, they cannot separate my toothbrush from my fucking factory, you know, they can't. They don't have the ability to, again, they lack imagination.

And people that, you know, people are like, I'm a capitalist. It's like, where's your fucking factory? Like, you're the shittiest fucking capitalist I've ever seen, you know? And, but is how I, that's what I want to say when I want to hear people say. But what I really actually say is like, okay, well, you know, you're not a capitalist because, you know, you don't, you don't own a factory. You don't have workers. You know, you don't have people that are subservient to you. repentance wage and things like that you know and in it's always been thoroughly confusing even

even since I was a kid um that we don't we don't when we need steel somewhere or when we need raw materials somewhere things like that we don't uh we don't just like ship those things to where they need to be at right we don't just like move these materials or or you know utilize these these industries and things like that for the betterment of the common good and stuff like that, you know, and then we get into situations where whole city's infrastructure is falling apart and things like that. So it's always been really staggering to me. And once I understood that, oh, they don't get it. Like they, they see, there's a dollar to be made. And so they could give a shit less, whether or not what needs to get to a place gets there. What matters to them is,

if they can produce the thing and make money from it. So make sure that if you're going into these conversations that you are framing it in a way of like, you know, personal property, personal and private property are not the same. And nobody's going to come and fucking blackbag you for your toothbrush in the middle of the night under communism.

Okay, it's not going to happen. Exactly. And that's everything. And I would just say also really quickly, keep in mind the argument about the social creation of wealth and the individual appropriation. That's an important sort of distinction.

You can go back to Marx and Engels, socialism, scientific, and utopia to hear that argument laid out in full. But once you hear it, it's very convincing and it's a great way to convince others. And then they also refer to, as you just said, Kami,

the anarchy of production and anarchy is not in this sense, the political anarchism. It's synonymous with chaos, right? Under capitalism, there's this anarchy of production where it's like individual capitalists producing what they can for profit.

There's no efficiency. There's no, a nation and there's externalities and that's why we're at where we're at in part with climate change is there's no mechanism under capitalism to efficiently control what we produce given a broader understanding of the impacts on the natural environment we don't need little you know millions of plastic bags or water bottles or these little action figures that that rot in garbage heaps forever like this the anarchy of production there is no sense of confinement there's no sense of catering or caring about the natural world and its inherent limitations.

It's just produce, produce, produce whatever you can for or profit at any cost. And that is bringing our entire species to the brink. And so if we're going to face climate change as a global civilization, it is going to have to entail the distribution, the cooperation, the efficiency of something much more rational, of rational, communal-oriented production and distribution. that doesn't have these tragic and fatal externalities with like the giant Pacific Ocean, you know, garbage patch. And what that also implies is a reduction in consumerism.

I'm sorry, but you can't have three fucking F-150s, and you can't have 17 houses, and you can't just go out and buy everything in plastic boxes and take it out two seconds, throw the plastic bag in the trash. Consumerism is a result of the anarchy of production, and it is the death nail to anything like sustainability, going forward. And that's why capitalists for so many years, the ruling elites have, especially on the right, have had to deny the reality of climate change. They would often call it. We heard

it our whole lives. You know, they would say it's a hoax or, you know, Trump said it was manufactured by the Chinese communist or they'll often say that climate change is a hoax created by the left to overthrow capitalism because on some level, whether conscious or subconscious or somewhere in between, they know that this entire system, what the premises of this system are not conducive to long-term human health and civilization. And so tell on themselves. Exactly. And rather than face that fact and I don't know, change your worldview and your ideology,

they'll just deny the problem exists. Same with the pandemic. Trump had no mechanism, no ability, no interest in stopping the pandemic. So he just denied it existed. And now, you know, 30, 40, what, 45 percent of a. Americans have taken that on board, internalized it. It's a hoax, and you see these maskless protest in stores, these poor workers forced to work for shitty wages,

having to deal with these selfish assholes marching up and down their store. And like, oh, God, I just want to go home. You know, I just want to be with my family. I don't want to deal with these people coughing and screaming in my fucking face because they're convinced that their daddy Trump said it's a hoax, and so it's a hoax. And it's a global conspiracy in 5G and Bill Gates. I mean, the fever dream conspiratorial thinking on the right.

is really a manifestation of the growing gap between how they think the world is versus how it actually is. And as that gap gets bigger and bigger and bigger, they have to resort to fever dream conspiracies to glue haphazardly this worldview together and hold it in. More and more people, though, gratefully,

are waking up and seeing the truth of this stuff. And it's our job as people who understand this on some deeper level to try to find ways to communicate it to our loved ones, our friends, our coworkers, and anybody else we can in ways that that makes sense and are not mired in unnecessary jargon. Absolutely. And from my view, the biggest reason why we want to have these conversations when

we can is because there's really two ways that we can awaken people to these kinds of things. And one is we can discuss it with them and try to help them understand, you know, exactly what's going on and try to bring them around on that. side or the other thing is that capitalism can continue its fucking death march and people aren't going to wake up until we have massive amounts of death and chaos and destruction and people are left with absolutely no other fucking choice but to um you know resort to like violent tribalism and and you know and society just completely self-destrored.

trucks and there's just, you know, wide swazzo, just a myasma of death, right? So the whole idea of us trying to share these ideas isn't because like we're, we're going to like with an iron fist push this stuff on people. It's we know this system is fucking collapsing. It's falling apart all around us. And we're just trying to be like, look, here's the imagination that you can possibly, here's the imagination you should have. Like, please be able to see this vision.

Because this is a way that you, you, me, and everybody else don't have to die before we, we wake up and actually do something about this shit. Exactly right. Exactly right. We have a work cut out for us for sure. But we have to try. We were shooting out a mountain of dirt. Well, nothing was broken. Nothing was hurt, but I probably really should have been at work.

But if my free time's gone, would you promise me this? But you will pay, bear in there, worth it? Peace, bearing me with it. Well, sure as plan has come, I know that they end, and if I'm here when that happens, you promise me this, my friend. Please, barrenet with it. I just don't need none on that Mad Max bullshit Well, the two got tight and it's split at the seams

But I kept it out of half and I kept it real clean But if it's getting faded, if it's running out of thread Could you do this for me, my friend? And please don't Please bear in a weapon Please Barronet weapon Well, we moved to the left and we moved to the right.

That sure's how we stayed at almost every single night. But if the party's over, if the farm has to end, could you do this for me, my friend? Would you just pay? Baramet weapon? Pais! A barrenet weapon! There were news for people who love bad news.

We've lost the place. How did we just Don't see We are humming birds We are just not A little moon And there's Good news

For people We love bad news Yeah Our honey burns We lost to And we will We have We have goodness

If you're on And love bad news We were aiming for the moon, we were shooting at the stars, but the kids were just shooting at the buses in the cars. So don't drink the water, don't you breathe the air, and if it's gotten that point, then I have to declare that you could Pace, barrenet weapon Pace, barrenet weapon Well, fast they come and fast to go God I love the rock and roll

Well, the point was fast, but it was too blunt to miss life handed us a paycheck we said we weren't harder than that Pace Baramette weapon I'm very many weapons Oh shit, now Oh, shit, now Well, I'm telling him Oh, get on sick

I'm going to be watched It's not. And there's New million of small people a bad man was hunting that he lost and we will know in the family head

goodness and the same all you learn that's bad news