Rev Left Radio - Building an Internationalist Left in a New Era of Global Politics (w/ Breht O'Shea – Rev Left Radio)

Episode Date: September 1, 2025

Breht went onto the International Solidarity Podcast with host Ashwin! "In this latest episode, I'm joined by Breht O'Shea (who many of you will know as the host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of Red Menace) for a pretty wide-ranging discussion. We talk about the state of the left in the global north amidst the Gaza genocide and its inability to effectively do something about it, we talk about broader global shifts taking place at the moment, how the rest of this century is shaping up to look like, the role of spirituality or humanism in our left politics, combatting fear, cynicism, and individualism, the case for hope, and a whole bunch more.  Journal of International Solidarity Links Instagram:   / journalofintlsolidarity   Substack: https://intlsolidarity.substack.com/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@JournalofIntlSolidarity  

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. Today's episode is actually a podcast I did with Ashwin over at the International Solidarity podcast and we discussed many topics ranging from domestic, neoliberal, Trumpian politics to global hegemonic decline of American internationalism. We talk about climate collapse, economic collapse, the five, ten, ten, 15, 20 year future of the United States and the Imperial Corps more broadly, as well as the trajectory of the entire planet over the next 50 to 75 years at this great crossroads of our species known as the 21st century.

In the process, we talk about the faith of Palestinians, the atheism, inherent in Marxism, the despair experienced by many young people throughout the world as they see a world and that's offering them very little to any future whatsoever. Cultural critique, materialist critique, historical materialist analysis of the American project. He also plays clips from Torquil Lawson and Vijay Prashad that I then react to on left-wing strategy as well as the near-term trajectory for the Imperial Corps and much, much more. This is a wonderful interview from a wonderful host, Ashwin, and I highly, highly encourage people to go subscribe to International Solidarity Podcast, support the show, give him some Rev Left love,

really, really good principled work that he's doing over there at the International Solidarity podcast. I will link to it in the show notes so people can find it easily. All right, without further ado, here is my discussion with Ashwin from the International Solidarity podcast on kind of everything. Enjoy. Okay, Brett. Again, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. So I wanted to start by asking you, you know, we're almost two years now into the Gaza genocide. You know, these two years in many ways have felt like the opening of a new political era globally in which you see, you know, the full collapse of international law and human dignity. the beginning of this genocidal war in 2023 was quite jarring for me, I'd say. You know, I found myself wondering, you know, why we weren't able to mobilize effectively enough to, you know, if not stop the genocide, then, you know, cause serious disruptions and its ability to carry on.

You know, it constantly felt like we weren't doing enough and, you know, that's still the case today. My question to you is, you know, what do you think that Gaza genocide revealed about the state of the anti-imperialist left? the global north or the imperial core, you know, have we learned anything since then? And how do we move forward? Yeah, well, before I discuss perhaps what it means for the, you know, anti-imperialist left, which I think in short is not only sort of an overall failure to organize adequately in the era leading up to this event, but also is in and of itself an educational event. Maybe we can circle back around to that. I think what you were talking about in the beginning of that question, question is important to discuss as well, which is this is not only is Palestine the front

lines of anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and thus anti-capitalist resistance, right? Because if we understand colonialism as the prerequisite, primitive accumulation phase of capitalism, we understand imperialism as monopoly capitalism, as capitalism on the global stage, then we understand that Palestine is in this horrific life and death fight against all of those forces at once. So, you know, you have to make that clear up front. But what I also think it's doing is it's unmasking this entire order. It's unmasking for people across the political spectrum, right? Like, one of the worst things that could happen is an event for the coming from our perspective, like with our politics and thinking about the implications for the political systems that we live in is that there's a clean dichotomy.

Like, oh, the right supports this, the left doesn't. The left supports this, the right doesn't. allows the system to stay in some sort of balance with with a with the situation like like gaza the genocide and gaza the holocaust happening right now in gaza is a is an unmasking of the entire order and a full spectrum awakening to do you know the truth underneath the rhetoric of this system the truth underneath the rhetoric of the international rules-based order as they like to pretend to tell us and it's just also an unmasking of of of

pretensions of liberalism. This is actually what liberalism's always been, right? This is what capitalism has always been. Aside from the rhetoric of freedom and democracy and the respect for human rights and the respect for individual liberty and the sanctity of all that nonsense is just that complete nonsense. Liberalism, capitalism were formed through these processes. and what we're seeing now in Palestine is like a real time on our smartphones, hyper-technological capacity to see what colonialism has always looked like, right? This is a techno-settler colonial society, but this is what the U.S. was like during its manifest destiny phase, right?

It's overt phase of stealing that land and massacring its people. So in that way, it's sort of horrific, it's heartbreaking. it feels out of time in a sense like even the way that israel talks about itself and tries to justify itself is just it tries to apply this liberal sheen but really it is just this raw colonial logic at its core that anybody that has any any good faith attempt to try to understand what this is can see can see immediately so i do think it is this this crucial aspect in this de-legitimization of this entire system. And we've known that this system has been in crisis. When I say this system, I mean liberal capitalism, broadly speaking, which implies imperialism and colonialism, that this system has been in crisis for a while, for a long time. In fact, its whole history is a sort of series of rolling crises. But specifically 2001 with 9-11 was like the rolling of the credits on the American Empire, even if we didn't know it then. And 2008 was the end of the film. like you know this whole american experiment is over and it's all downhill from here and part of that

process and i think lennon points this out i can't remember the quote off the top of my head but he says something about like the bourgeois order must be like completely exhausted before people turn to something new like all the old forms of bourgeois rule have to be seen through have to be unmassed and this whole process takes longer than you or i would want it to take but it is a necessary process that is a part of this decay. The whole world can now see it for what it is. Now, coming back around to what it means for the anti-imperialist left, like I was saying, it's simultaneously an indictment of our failure, right?

Franz Fanon said that every generation must rise to the challenge, right, or disappear into opacity. Like, every generation has to step up and meet its obligations historically or fail to do so. And it seems clear that the imperial. core left, of which I am apart, right, has failed to build the levels of organization needed to even begin to go on any meaningful defense, let alone offense, with regards to an issue like Gaza. You know, it really kind of makes you yearn for the Soviet Union for, despite all of its flaws. It represented a real economic, military, and ideological block that in a circumstance like

this would have been met with some resistance right it would have provided who knows arm shipments into into Gaza maybe it would have used it as an attempt to send in proxy forces to fight back who knows exactly how that would have played out but that is what happened during the cold war where the cold war was a hot war it just wasn't between the u.s and russia or the soviet union straight on it was dispersed throughout the global south in the form of proxy wars um which is not an ideal situation by any means, but still there was some resistance. And with the fall of the Soviet Union, not only do you see the rise of this neoliberal austerity politics in the West, which there's no international system of competition for the West anymore. So we can kind of ramp it up

and do what we want, but also you see on the imperialist front that there is very little organized resistance. Now, we would hope that that organized resistance would not only come internationally, but would be able to come from within the Imperial Corps itself. And we have failed to build the structures and the systems and the levels of organization needed to do it. That's not to downplay the very serious protests and organizations that have risen, the encampments, groups like Palestine Action, who take direct action against weapons manufacturers that are slaughtering Palestinians and participating in this genocide. There has been worthwhile movements. Um, but it's clearly not enough to, to actually stop the death machine. And, um, so it's cold

comfort to the, to the Palestinians, unfortunately. Yeah. Um, related to this, I mean, I wanted to ask you, I mean, you know, you've been on the Marxist left, uh, you know, and doing political organizing work for quite a while now, you know, certainly longer than I have. Uh, in that time, you know, I'm sure you've learned a lot. Uh, you know, there are things that will have contributed to shaping your worldview. You're also someone, you know, who really emphasizes socialist politics as a politics of humanity, as a millennia long process of advancing humanity. So at a personal level, you know, I wanted to ask you, you know, how do you think this genocide has impacted your worldview and your sense of reality? And I asked this, I mean, it is a, like, it's a personal

question, you know, maybe it's not, you know, it might not seem like it guides political struggle, but I ask this because, you know, it might be clarifying for folks, you know, and helping them process the reality of the world. We, you know, find ourselves in now, you know, and for us to better orient ourselves toward political struggle. Like, the question is, what is it, like, meant for me personally and how is it? Yeah, like, I mean, I mean, I know for me, it's sort of, you know, shattered my, my, my worldview and my sense of reality.

I mean, how is it, how has it impacted your worldview and your sense of reality? it's i mean first and foremost it's been devastating um it's it's broken my heart every single day um and i'm a i'm a father of of three children and you don't have to be a parent to you know have your humanity and your heartbroken um but as a parent it's this surreal hyper reality wherein i am catering to my children giving them food making sure they're clothed kissing them goodbye on their first day of school while immediately I look back over or I'm just aware of parents just like me with kids my children's exact age who want to live just as much as we do who have dreams of the future just as much as we do who love each other just as much as we do being starved to death

brutalized and mass murdered in front of the whole world you know in world war two when the Nazis did their holocaust there was a real ability for most people around the world to say we didn't know like it kind of came out afterwards and we put the pieces together and when the red army marched in and liberated the camps they were horrified at what they saw got the word out that excuse doesn't hold anymore but this is the same thing and so in a previous era less people knew what was actually happening but the world in some sense came together to stop the nazi menace There's other reasons. It's in Europe. So that matters more to European countries. There's a whole bunch of variables we can discuss. But what I want to emphasize is the same thing is happening. The Zionist entity is the Nazi Germany of our time. It is conducting a Holocaust. We have no excuse to say with the communicative technologies of the 21st century, we have no excuse to say we can't see it. Those of us who do see it are just devastated by it. There's this horrific feeling of impotence in the face of it. that even though you know what's happening,

you see exactly with pure clarity what this is. You still live in a society where the major forms of media and political power are in full support of this macabre, grotesque mass murder campaign that you go to work every day, struggle to pay your bills, and you know that your taxes are not being spent on health care or education, or solving poverty or, you know, preparing to address climate change or anything meaningful for society. It's being spent in large part on the trillion dollar a year Pentagon budget broadly, but in arms shipments to fucking Israel and money shipments to Israel where these settlers have free health care and free education and they bring out their families to block aid trucks to starving children. It is grotesque. Words don't suffice.

So it has, it's obliterated me. And I know it's obliterated other people who pay attention. And, yeah, it's, again, like that feeling over and over again that just words don't suffice that I fantasize, you know, if I could be dictator of the world for a day or if I could have Godlike powers, just going in and stopping this. And no matter what happens after this, right, no matter if there is or isn't accountability, no matter if history is or isn't on our side, of course it will be. that's not going to stop the slaughter happening literally as you and I speak. And so that that gap between knowing and seeing exactly what's happening and wanting so badly to stop it. And then the other side of that gap,

which is your seemingly complete inability as an individual or even as an organization at this point to do anything meaningful in real time to stop it, while watching your disgusting society either justify it or go about buying things like it's not happening right even people in my own life friends and family they just live their life like a fucking holocaust isn't happening and like they aren't paying for it and it's just this again this this surreal um dis i mean dystopian reality you know and and that's kind of the the price you pay for having a functioning brain and for having more than anything a sensitive heart in this world is that you you pay that price of of um

unfathomable heartbreak when you're living in the, you know, the belly of the beast in the U.S. Imperial Corps, just in the U.S. dominated order that we all live in, that you have to see this stuff, be aware of the injustice, and feel impotent to stop it. But that is our responsibility. Going back to the phenon quote, our responsibility is to build up the capacity to stop it, build up the capacity to do something about it. And what does that mean? It means building political power. And that's not that's not easy. And the system that is has spent decades preventing the organization of organized principled anti-imperious left-wing movements in the imperial core and throughout the global south, right? In the imperial core through

subterfuge and infiltration and suppression and ideological conditioning and in the global south through violence and bloodshed. Right. So it knows that it has to keep a lit up. on it. So I'm not trying to, you know, say it's 100% our fault. But that is our responsibility. And so there's that feeling of impotence, but don't let that sink you into despair because, as I always think and as has been said many times, how dare you and I in the Imperial Corps feel despair? You know, how dare we even contemplate giving up? The Palestinians, the people in the global South, the people of Yemen, do they have a choice to give up? They're facing hardship and brutality that you and I can only dream about in our worst nightmares, right?

They face it every single day and they don't have the choice to give up. So that's also that also inspires us. It's like there's no excuse. Yes, we're heartbroken. Yes, we're devastated. Yes, we feel impotent. But, you know, we owe ourselves the future of humanity and our brothers and sisters across the global south and specifically in Palestine to continue to educate, to agitate,

to organize as much as we can and certainly insofar as we're Americans in this grotesque electoral system retract all support forever for any party or politician that has done anything but oppose this every step of the way.

You can never again vote for a Democrat as the lesser of two evils after Joe Biden oversaw the first half of this genocide. As AOC, the pretender to be a representative of the socialist left in the US votes for ammunition

to restock the Iron Dome right? The greatest analogy that came out of that is like, well, I didn't give the mass shooter the gun. I just gave him the bulletproof vest so it's much harder for anybody to take them down. That is facilitating genocide. And so the least we can do is never forget

who the fuck was a part of this. Never let them squirm out of this. Because in five years, 10 years, all the people that remained silent that actually had like, you know, political power, people like in politics, people in mainstream media outlets who had the reach and the influence and the power to do something meaningful, to move the dial on this thing. Every single one of them that refused to do that in five to ten years will come out and say, just like the Iraq War.

After it's all done, after all the people are dead, they'll come out and say, yeah, it was a mistake. I was actually kind of against it the whole time. No, we have all the fucking communications. We have all your little memos you put out. We have all the tweets you put out every step of the goddamn way, and we will never, ever, ever let you live this down. But again, cold comfort, right? Doesn't feel like enough. Nothing ever feels sufficient. I wanted to expand on this, you know, question of despair, hopelessness, you know, that, you know, you were talking about. I mean, you know, a lot of people, particularly in the global north, in the imperial core, in addition to watching a live stream Holocaust and genocide are, you know, seeing the gradual

worsening of their lives. And from here, you know, really quite quickly, you know, turn to despair, cynicism or nihilism. You know, I see this particularly among people of my generation. A lot of people tend to, you know, have hope in the young generation, that kind of thing. I mean, there's that aspect of things, but there's also this other aspect of things, right, in terms of, you know, despair and cynicism. You know, and I say particularly people in the global north, because, you know, obviously, in addition to things around us, you know, getting worse and worse in terms of affordability, crumbling infrastructure, you know, greater sites of immiseration on our streets and abroad, of course, et cetera. I think there's also, you know, a cultural priming, right, in the global north where the media

apparatus is so strong that it sells back to us the idea that things just don't get better, there's no hope, and fundamentally that we don't have agency. This is sold back to us, not just when I say the media apparatus, not just through the news, right, but entertainment talk shows, you know, music, right, the music that we consume and listen to, Netflix. I mean, you know, the whole black mirror phenomenon and, you know, there's a whole spectrum of, you know, films and television that sells these ideas back to us, right? You know, and, you know, part of this, the whole thing is, you know, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than, you know, than the end of capitalism.

But yeah, you know, I think at the core of this despair and cynicism is the internalization by people that, you know, we just don't have agency to change things, you know, to build a better world. I think that's really what is at the core, you know, the question of agency. And so, you know, accordingly, the solution to, you know, cynicism and despair is this toxic individualism, which is, you know, also another important feature of Western society, you know, the idea that, you know, if we can't do anything to change the world, let's just do the best we can for ourselves, you know, forget the greater good, don't go out of your way for other people or or building something bigger than yourself, et cetera, you know. You touched on this, started to touch on this, but how do we combat this, you know, much deeper sense of cynicism, despair and individualism, that's linked to it great question and insightful commentary as you asked to the question there's there's so much there the first thing i remind people is look through all of human history right

this is life this i mean you know it's challenging it is hard like all periods all epochs of human history yes there have been recesses of relative stability or comfort but most places most of the time have gone through incredible hardship didn't have the technological buffers that have the day to kind of mediate a lot of that the human story is one of forced growth through challenge what is happening globally for our species is that we are we are now going through a growth pain process the pain is being inflicted on us because the way we are living is no longer sustainable right as a species and so climate change the attack on the biosphere the complete dropping out and hollowing out of any sort of spiritual anchoring or existential meaning in the world,

the commodification, the secularization of everything, the desacralization of everything, right, at the psychological and spiritual level, all the way to the material and social level. It's being hollowed out. And what we're living through is a crisis in our species. And more than that, in previous eras of crisis, it was often localized or regionalized, right? What was happening in China and 600 AD was different than what was happening in Europe at that same time. And it could be an apocalypse over here and just another Wednesday morning over here, right? But now we are so globally intertwined.

And not only with each other, not only through communication, but our technology is so powerful that now we have everything we do has implications for the biosphere and for the climate system. Right. So we're deeply feeling our integration with the entire Earth system, you know, and our human civilization is embedded within this Earth system and our political and economic systems are no longer balkanized around the world. It's really one, it's continuing to be one big system, right? If the American economy collapsed today, everybody around the world would feel it. If China collapsed today, everybody around the world would feel it, right? If the EU collapsed today, on and on and on. We are deeply, deeply integrated. So what we are being asked as a species by nature, really, but by the process of dialectical movement is that we have to radically change the way that we've organized human society and the way that we relate to one another and the natural world around us. If we fail to do that as a species, then, you know, I don't know if it's extinction. It could just be civilizational collapse. It could be bottleneck effects. It could be, you know, climate change tipping points spinning out of control and, you know, things setting us back.

hundreds if not thousands of years so that's like the the broad bird's eye view of what's happening at a species level we need to grow up we need to evolve um and that that has material implications i.e. we need to reorganize our political and economic systems and i think that also has psychological um you know orientations this hyper individualist consumerist lifestyle and expectation where we express ourselves through what we buy everything has a price tag and our economies are propped up by cultivating and plumbing our desires for more and more and more and more comfort and status and aesthetical showing off to other people that whole way of life is dying and when that collapses it also has pressure on on our own psychology's in our own

lives and now young people coming up in this system are seeing that like basically whether they can articulate this to themselves or not is that there's no future that you know at least in the u.s for many generations there has always been a sense of the future since the industrial revolution progress has happened such that your life is not only going to be technologically very different than your parents life but it should be better there should be a material development step by step by step and we work towards that's the whole idea of liberal progress right that this system of liberal capitalism is one step ahead of the other every generation takes a step forward and things get better and better. That's completely gone. That's completely gone.

And so young people coming up are now disillusioned. There's no future. They've tried to do things like on the left to vote for Bernie only to see that be stopped, right? This hope against hope that, okay, this guy at least is talking about core issues. Let's kind of vote from the Democrats say no way. No, that's too crazy. That hurts our donors too much. Shut up. Then, after you seated that ground on the left, the right wing populists get a turn. So dumbass Trump gets to go up there and pretend he's the fighter for the little guy, that he's going to fight the elites, that he's going to bring real change, right? I always say that Trump is the rights Obama, hope and change and more of the same.

Promises of we're going to do this and this and all the people get excited. I was 19 when Obama ran his first presidency. I got politically activated under the Bush administration as a teenager with the Iraq War. And so, you know, I was 19 years old. I was having my first child, my daughter. And I remember sitting in the room of the hospital room while my daughter was, you know, going to be born, watching Obama do his inaugural acceptance speech, right? And really feeling like, okay, after eight years of Bush, like, this is change. And Obama really was the last off ramp. Obama had super majorities in common. He could have changed things dramatically. He had. He had. had coming out of the war, mass disillusionment, disdain of all the systems, with the financial collapse, people hated the big banks. And Obama was the real last shot to shift this trajectory of this sinking ship in a direction that wouldn't hit the iceberg, right? But more of the same. And so Trump is now this tripling down on the same. More than this false idea that Trump is a break

with neoliberalism. He has neoliberalism turned up to 100, right? Just with this populist rhetorical Sheen. It's no mistake that he uses Ronald Reagan's slogan, Make America Great Again. And we have a joke on the left that every graph you look at where things get shittier and shittier, it starts in like the 1980s, right, with Reagan, and then everything gets worse, inequality gets worse, homelessness rises, home pricing becomes, you know, unaffordable for people. So under the banner of making America great again, this reactionary, nostalgic backward turn, Reagan ushered in the era of neoliberalism. And now under the banner once again of Make America Great Again, the new Reagan with a populace sheen comes along to just make everything worse. Whether you like Trump or not, you have to really be in the cult to think he's solving problems and making things better.

You've got to really be locked into this fever dream-ass cult to think that what is happening is not everything getting worse and tripling down on all of the worst policies and trends that have been the case for the last 40 years. so in that context people say hey on the left we tried we can't get it through the democratic you know so if you want to change vote for it we voted for it we were blocked then on the right they said okay now it's our turn voted for it and unless you're again totally indoctrinated in the maga cult it's not working out and there's many people on the right from nick foentes to Tucker carlson to the podcast bros that are realizing six months in that oops this is a complete catastrophe this is not what we wanted you know this is a betrayal of what he ran on etc and so then young people like okay i can't even use the political system you told me my whole life that at least if i wanted

change i could vote for it and i could have a candidate that would bring about to it can't even do that and so in that context what happens people become disillusioned and they live in a very hyper individual society as you were saying where it's just like all right i'm going to i guess try to get mine and so there's people like you know get the bag i'm going to you know i'm going to break out. I'm just going to do what I got to do. I'm going to invest in crypto. You know, I'm going to fucking go 24-7 hustle grind set, right? I'm going to get into finance. Like, there's that subsect of people who are just imbibing the ideology still in its rotting decaying phase. But a lot of other people, like, there's no realistic chance that most working class kids are

going to invest in crypto or become a finance. I live in Omaha, Nebraska. You're a young Gen Z working class, you know, kid like I was in Omaha, Nebraska. You're not getting into high finance you're not you know going to manosphere your way into a six figure income you're just fucked and so in that context what happens is despair disillusionment and what happens in an individual society people internalize that structural failure as personal failure they see themselves as not having lived up to what they wanted to be they see themselves as having failed to become whatever a provider for a family or or you know a successful person in any way and that inward despair turns into self-loathing um you know self-hatred recoiling from society um taking the black

pill if you will or just muddling through muddling through your shitty job um and biching about it online and then you know doing drugs so you can go to sleep at night um that's where this system was always leading. Where we are now is the logical outcome of where this system was realistically always leading. But against that despair is the reemergence of struggle, the reemergence of history, the reemergence of community through organization. That is still there. And what's going to happen in the U.S., unfortunately, we are not a proactive people. So it's not like tomorrow people are just going get inspired by you know you or my you know stirring words and start organizing come together some people will and god bless them that's our only hope but what's more likely going to happen is this

system is going to slam into the brick wall that it's always been heading to him this system is flying off a cliff and trump and and the techno oligarchs are hitting the gas pedal as we approach the edge it's going to fall apart and we've actually seen and only in the in the wake of that falling apart is there actually going to be room for the sort of change that we want to see? This is not a this is not pessimism or optimism, right? This is realism. It's pessimistic and then it's optimistic. But it's that we're going to come into some form of collapse before we have the widespread impetus for serious change and before the the cold grip on the system of the gerontocracy, of Zionists, of the deep state, of course.

corporations, before that grip can be ripped off the system, the system itself has to implode and fall apart. And if we go back in history, 100 or so years, we saw that happen with the Gilded Age, right, with the roaring 20s, and then with the Great Depression and then into World War II, and that gave rise to the deeply imperfect, and we can talk about the racial dimensions of the New Deal and the ways in which it protected capitalism instead of really challenged it, but also the ways in which it had to happen because of the Soviet, union threat of socialism for working people across the world and for the internal organizing of communist and socialist and IWW and radical movements leading up to it that pushed it in this social democratic the only time in American history we've had anything like social democracy was the new deal and that's not sufficient but it's better than anything we've had before since and that only came about that radical change in American life after the era of the robin barons

in the gilded age only came about in the wake of the great depression in world war two and so unfortunately i feel like that is going to have to happen and until that happens and it's going to happen right the system is unsustainable it's going to happen in one way or another climate climate pressures economic collapse world war three some combination thereof it's going to happen. And, you know, in the meantime, as a whole culture, we're going to kind of just drag our feet and droop our heads and go through this malaise until the whole fucking thing explodes. Now, for those of us on the actual organized left, the importance of education and organization is because in the inevitable ruins of that, we got to build something out of it. And we have to have the

collective organizational, educational, ideological coherence and levels to be able to be a real political force in the wake of that in of that collapse or catastrophe right um and in lieu of that if we if we refuse to live up to that responsibility then that vacuum after the collapse will just be filled by institutional fascism some sort of form of barbarism right some sort of climate authoritarianism trying to hold on to what the u.s has in a world decaying around the the edges of you know around the periphery as climate change really sinks its fangs into the human species and makes us hurt so so yeah the organization is non-negotiable we have to continue continue continue um but but truly i don't think revolutionary change is possible in this society until the inevitable collapse which is no longer

than 10 to 20 years out like you know the the economic system alone even if there is no outward pressure on it the economic system as it currently stands and has stood my entire life alone will fall apart in 10 to 20 years without anybody coming in and forcing it to fall apart. It's just unsustainable in its own right. But then you add on top of that global international crises, economic collapse, climate catastrophes, mass migration in the face of climate catastrophes. You put real pressure on that already rotting, decaying corpse of a system. It's set to explode. So that's our responsibility. And in the meantime, we have to build. community. We have to create psychological and emotional resilience. We have to understand that we are

part of a bigger human story and our ancestors. No matter who you are, your ancestors fought and overcame enormous challenges that you're lucky enough never have to even think about. And this is our historical moment. And we have to rise up and do our best to steer it in the proper direction. And ultimately, we're, as I always say, we are not the passive playthings of history. We are the vehicles through which history manifests our actions our choices is what posterity looks back on and calls history so this feeling of just being like a passive determined you know play thing of forces that can ever be intervened upon that is an illusion we are the we are history and and so that gives me some sense of of determination as well right like what we choose to do

dictates how can influence at least if not dictate how things turn out and then people in the future look back and call that historical forces but that was just human beings acting consciously on their world in the final instance so so yes very related to this i mean you know you're talking about the importance of you know political organization building political organization and then when we come back to the question of you know these the values or the emotions of you know despair and and hopelessness and things like that, you know, makes me want to get, you know, your thoughts a little bit further on, you know, you're a spiritual person. I would also, you know, I think maybe there was a point in my life where I was more spiritual. I'm, you know, coming back into

that, you know, what role should spirituality or like, you know, an explicit kind of humanism play in left politics? I mean, at least in the spaces that I've been, you know, you know, And again, like, you know, in the imperial core, we're relatively weak, you know, so in terms of organization, and at least in the spaces that I've been in, I would say there's sort of this, you know, this dimension that's sort of lacking. I mean, revolutions in the past have really won through will, resilience, and spirit. I mean, and you can even talk about, you know, this kind of thing playing a much bigger role in the global south, but even a If you zoom in on Palestine, I mean, you know, faith plays a big role in the continued resistance, you know, put up by Palestinians and, you know, not just the political resistance, you know, in Palestine and in the region, of course, but also, you know, the civilian kind of resistance. And of course, I mean, what's happening is atrocious. It, you know, shouldn't be happening in the first place. But to the extent that, you know, folks in Gaza and, you know, Palestine more broadly are are, are withstanding this. are, you know, pushing through this, you know, living to see another day. A lot of this is, you know, a lot of what's behind this is faith in the Islamic faith, right? You know, there is a spirituality. I mean, I think of the journalists on the ground in Gaza and, you know, seeing their

resilience, their steadfastness. I don't think it can be disconnected from, you know, this spiritual dimension of things. And then, you know, for us in the global north on the left, I mean, a lot of our global North left and especially sort of Marxist communist traditions come from a sort of both a reaction against reactionary, you know, religion in the form of organized, you know, Christianity, Catholicism, et cetera. I mean, I'm in Canada, right? I mean, in Quebec, you had the whole quiet revolution that, you know, quote unquote brought Quebec into modernity because it was resisting against the Catholic Church. You know, you know, the history of communism, you know, is largely associated with an

atheist kind of history. It's reacting to this history of religion. And so, you know, as inheritors of that tradition, we, and, you know, as inheritors of that tradition, we, we sort of internalize that, that aversion to religion or spirituality and, you know, those two get lumped together. And, you know, of course, you know, the lack of religion and faith and spirituality is good for capitalism. It's good for consumerism, of course. And I fear that, you know, sometimes we internalize that. We internalize that even in our politically organized space. So, you know, after that long prelude, you know, what role should spirituality or an explicit kind of humanism play in left politics today? Yeah, well, I'm notoriously long-winded, so never apologize for a good question. So many things

to touch on. So let's just go down a couple of things that you said. One, why is Marxism atheistic in its sort of foundational structure? Marxism came out of the Enlightenment. movement broadly conceived. It saw the enlightenment as we see liberalism as pretending to be something it wasn't as this half-formed revolution where some of the ideas were good, but how liberalism functioned in practice was anathema to its actual professed ideals. And so there's a sense in which Marxism is trying to actually fulfill the loftiest goals of the Enlightenment. And we trace certain strains of the Enlightenment back to Spinoza, you know, inseparability, deep connection between all things dialectics etc so all that is to say is that it came out of a movement the

enlightenment broadly but also political movements that were uh reacting as you said responding against a social order that was heavily drenched in institutional religion and that that institutional religion was inseparable from political forms of domination that they were fighting against in feudal monarchical Europe institutional religion and the power structures of the monarchy was a singular thing there really was no separating those two things out

and as feudalism came to an end you have the rise of industrial capitalism there was still that superstructural lag and even today we see in the U.S. Evangelical Church in the United States how religion can so often form and become attached to the dominant power structure That's always going to be a threat of religion, and we see it in many different instances, right? Hinduism in Modi's India, you know, Christian nationalism in the U.S.

I mean, you know, Jewishness in the context of Zionism in Israel is this sort of bastardization of a beautiful millennia-long culture, ethnicity, religion that is Judaism, and then the usurping of that for a settler, colonial apartheid genocidal project, which actually, you know, to tie yourself to that is actually anti-Semitic. You're reducing this beautiful tradition to this grotesque state project in the same way that American evangelical right-wing Christians reduce the message of Christ to this horrific nationalist capitalist, capitalist ideology that is just, you know, perfectly paired with the already existing status quo of the American ruling class. It's grotesque. That's always the threat of religion. And that's what Marxists saw incredibly clearly and we're arguing against.

But we're also dialitians. So we don't just copy and paste what Lennon and Mark said because they lived in a different time. We now live in a post-religious, completely commodified, desacralized world where everything is just a price tag. Nothing has any meaning beyond itself. There is no meaningful relationship with the infinite or with the majesty and mystery of the cosmos. At the same time, many of us do find it hard to go back and embrace the beliefs of our great grandparents, right? even if I wanted to become a Christian again because I see certain benefits, I can't make myself believe, you know, in the actual specific Christian dogma. So there is this thirst for a spiritual connection for some deeper meaning in the spiritual desert of consumer capitalism, but there's also this, as there always is, this prevention from going back into history and getting something out of it.

And just as reactionaries nostalgically want to go back to a romanticized golden era in the past, the attempt to go back and re and trad in the modern American context try to do this, which is I'm going to go back and try to revive an older religion thing. And it doesn't really, it feels inauthentic, probably inwardly to themselves, but certainly outwardly looking in. So society has moved on. Material conditions have changed. We now live in a post-religious world. The death of God, as Nietzsche would talk about, right? And in the wake of any higher anchoring or meaning in the West, there is all these forms of nihilism that emerge. And I think consumer capitalism is a form of nihilism.

Hyper individualism is a form of nihilism. There's all these social neuroticisms that emerge in the wake of that. So now our task is not to go back and try to reclaim an older religion. I think the dialectic is always pushing us forward. The only way out is through. And so what we need to do, just as communism is returning to community. at a higher level. What we need to do is return to the sacred at a higher level. And we can get into what that means. I don't think it is conceptual or belief oriented, right? It's not a matter of

like, I need to believe these claims about Jesus or Muhammad or the Torah. It's not about believing in conceptualization. It's about experience and transformation. So is there a way to engage with the sacred, with the utter mystery that is life, which everybody should have some relationship to the fact that we're here at all talking on this spinning rock in this beautiful mysterious cosmos having no idea where this came from with our consciousness like there's a deep mystery and profundity at the core of moment to moment experience that is often just overlooked so there's something real there we know that life is more meaningful than just buying and selling things just extracting and plundering and buying and then oh i get a new cd and i get it oh cd jesus i'm i'm a 90s kid um i you know i get a new

my phone, I get a new, a car, I'm going to get a new house, get more things, get more things. Even if you got a million, million, cajillion dollars and could buy everything you wanted, there would still be a howling void at the center of your soul wanting something more, because consumption is not the way to happiness. So humanity is coming around to kind of realize that and fits and starts. So we understand why Marxism was atheistic in the past. We understand the material conditions have changed. We understand that to move forward, not only,

requires outward social revolution it requires inward psychological and spiritual development we need to grow up and my big argument i'm writing a book about this and i've made this argument in many places is that ego identification identification with the sense that we are you know who am i really well i'm not my body i'm not my legs i'm not my hands i have hands i have legs i have a body what am i really i'm something up here right i'm i'm like if you ask me where i really am i would say i'm like behind my eyes between my ears kind of like the humunculey looking out at a world that is not me right i'm in i'm in this bag of skin looking out at a world that is fundamentally not me and that's actually hostile to me and and that's that sense of separation that sense of i'm in here every

everything else that is not me is out there that ego identification which comes with talking to ourselves in our heads all day. That is a fundamental illusion that ancient religious traditions have actually been able to see through and that at this time in human history, not only are we being asked to move beyond class society, what Albert Einstein called the predatory phase of human development, class society writ large, capitalism in particular, we're being asked to see through the illusion of our separateness, that you are not actually inside this bag of skin looking out of a world that is not you you are the world right you and i are the earth become conscious we didn't get put on the earth from some outside force we bubbled up out of it and in so far as the earth

bubbled up out of the cosmos we bubbled up out of the cosmos we are the subjectivity of the earth we are the the intelligence of the earth and thus of the cosmos and there is no separation there's no separation ultimately even though it feels this way there's no separation between me and the grieving mother in Palestine. And when your heart breaks wide open and you weep for a total stranger, that truth is coming through, that that's not actually something different. You can't just say that's over there somewhere. You feel in your bones that the injustice they're facing and the pain that they're experiencing

is also to a lesser extent, but still really your pain too. And we also understand just at a quantum mechanical level that there are no separate individual things, right? this is a metaphysical idea that things are static and individualized if you get down and you zoom out to the level of of quarks and protons and atoms the whole cosmos is a soup of energy and like eddy's in a whirlpool it takes a form here it takes a form here star over here black hole over here human being over here frog on a log over here right but that these manifestations are temporary expressions of a deeper fascinatingly and inexorably

connected soup of energy, for lack of a better word, that connects us all. And you can see this intellectually through science and philosophy and dialectics, but you can feel it viscerally through spiritual practices that have been in the Sufi Muslim tradition, that have been in the Kabbalah Jewish tradition, that have been in the Christian mystic tradition, that have been in the ancient, you know, Vedic texts of the Hindu tradition. And that was really like sort of the practice was synthesized into a particularly potent form, in my opinion, through Buddhism, which is like really just like get to the practice itself that unveils this reality inwardly. And so I think that we can contribute to the evolution of humanity through outward political work of revolution and inward

political work of expanding our consciousness beyond mere ego identification to see the inseparability of us and others and us in the natural world. And that maturing process creates wisdom and compassion and responsibility that humans don't have. I believe human beings are in their adolescent phase. They are in their adolescent phase. They want things. They're sort of reckless. They have these like really now kind of adult powers, but they still have this childish mindset. I'm talking about our species as a whole. And so that is why we can build supercomputers. We can build AI. We can build the James Webb Space Telescope. We can build, you know, the large hadron particle collider

and at the same time we can have ethno supremacist Israel trying to starve children so they can take their land and we can have Donald fucking Trump leading the most powerful country on earth and we can have a society where

you know we're just like scrolling on our dumbass fucking phones looking at stupid shit we can't even remember five minutes later it's like this is a this is a gap that needs this is a contradiction that needs to be resolved so I do see spirituality as a psychological and existential component of this broader movement forward that we can actually contribute to through our own actions and then the last thing I would like to say is

you mentioned the faith of the Palestinians while I'm not particularly capable perhaps of believing in you know the the dominant cultural religion of my time Christianity in the way that my great great grandparents did I still see that it it gave them certain capacity, certain depths, certain connections, certain comforts. And in the Palestinian context, there is no doubt that their faith is a core aspect of their strength. And that's just true. And if the same thing happened to secularize, desacralized, hyper-individualist Americans in the

imperial core used to comfort and meaninglessness. and narcissism, it would, and not that it hasn't destroyed Palestinians in so many ways, it's a brutal fucking thing. It would destroy any human thing. But we would be much less capable of facing that level of hardship and tragedy because we believe in nothing bigger than ourselves. No matter what a lot of people in the West say, when push comes to shove, they really don't believe in anything more than themselves. And they'll say, well, I do care about my family and stuff. That's just a narcissistic extension of you, right? And so, So there's nothing, you're not living for anything bigger.

You're living so you can get money, so you can get comfort, so you can get the people around you, money and comfort, and that you have this vision of an old age, I'll retire, and whatever nice rosy image of the future you have that will actually never come to pass. You're not living for anything bigger than yourself. So when we see a people that still live for something bigger than themselves and have unshakable faith in something bigger than themselves,

and that their life is imbued with meaning outside of their individual self we see an enormous amount of strength and resilience that a lot of us over here we might fool ourselves into thinking we can have but we really can't fathom and so I think it does boil down to something bigger than themselves

and our task now is in the hollowed out desert of the death of God in Nietzsche in terms here in the West we have to forge a way forward that takes seriously that spiritual and existential component and that is not anti-science, right? It's actually, instead of being pitted against the scientific worldview,

it's an extension of it. Science is also just constantly bumping up against the mystery. I mean, go into cosmology or theoretical physics or quantum mechanics, and there's fascinating theories, but nobody knows what the fuck is going on. It's amazing that our little monkey brains can figure out how much we have, figured out. But really, there's still, at the end of every scientific line of inquiry, a huge gorgeous shining question mark

and that doesn't mean that this religious faith or that religious faith is true again I'm getting away from beliefs and I want to I'm interested in a religious orientation or a spiritual practice that is experiential not belief centered

and that actually transforms and uplifts the human consciousness not one that reentrenches its already existing ego and biases which a lot of evangelical Christians the day, just like, God talked to me and said, I got to vote for Trump. That's not God. That's your ego. You're talking to yourself in your head and you're mistaking that for God. And you're using

God to justify your already existing egoic structure as well as you're already existing social, political, and economic biases and prejudices. That's not transformative. That's using God as an extension of the ego. God is love and interconnection and it like Kali destroys the ego. It brings death upon the ego. you know collie with all the human heads you know that the goddess of time and death holding all the human heads that is enlightenment holding all of your your your personality components right your egoic structures just dangling there dripping with blood they're done that is that is true transformation so um yeah again this could be seven hours of discussion but that's kind of my

my approach to these things some people don't agree with me it's totally fine but that's kind of the space i'm carving out and the message i'm pushing and i think it's an important one as well at that. I want to now shift gears a little and, you know, talk about the second Trump administration. You know, just a brief question here. You know, I wanted to ask you, you know, to what extent do you see this Trump regime as marking a paradigm shift both on the global stage, similar to, you know, to the shift toward neoliberalism that happened in the 1970s and 1990s, but also domestically, you know, what does this mean about the strength of the political right in the U.S. going forward.

So, you know, those two dimensions, you know, domestically with a political right and globally, you know, a larger sort of political economic shift. Yeah, so globally, this is the context of American decline. That American hegemony, you know, that was alive and well, you know, hemispherically with the Cold War, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union was the unipolar hegemonic moment for the U.S. And out of that moment, we got phrases like the end of

history from Francis Fukuyama, this right Higalian insistence that liberal democracies and capitalism, yeah, there's still some flaws. We got some kinks to work out, but more or less we've figured out the optimal socio-political economic system, and we just need to like sort of advance it, tweak it, refine it, and we're good to go. That was the hubris of an ephemeral moment in history. That was the hubris of post-Soviet collapse, U.S. hegemonic you know triumphalism and 9-11 was a stab in the heart of that whole picture and then we talked about the economic collapse

and we've been in a zombie zombie economy ever since I also want to touch this moment where the end of history comes out and I just posted this on Instagram the other day the first lines of my favorite TV show of all time in 1999 The Sopranos Tony is talking with his therapist

over B scenes of like suburbia and he's saying you know you ever feel like you come that you came in at the end of something that the best is behind you and um his therapist says i think i think a lot of americans think that well tony was talking about the mob right the mob in the late 90s it's kind of it's the ricos happened it's been decimated it's not what it was in the 70s and 80s and he feels like as like a mob boss he's coming in at the end of a mob era but it was this prophetic moment about the end of american um empire that it What hadn't happened yet, but that there was a cultural feeling that was moving in that direction.

And I always think about what were the cultural products of the late 90s, early 2000s? It was rage, pessimism, this masculinous despair, think fight club, WWE wrestling, South Park, Limbiscuit, Eminem, right? I'm a 90s kid, so I was into this shit. I was born in 1989, jackass. it was this adolescent, petulant, aimless, directionless rage at the peak of empire. The roller coaster was at the very top.

And, you know, for a lot of white suburban fucking kids in the 90s America, life was idyllic. You know, Gen Z and Gen Alpha, they now nostalgically look back on the 90s. It was like, damn, I wish I had my childhood back then. And not for no reason. But there was this cultural milieu of like, fuck you and just like stupid,

adolescent frat bro punching a hole in drywall feeling to the moment and a cultural product like the Sopranos kind of got at something prophetic and after 9-11 you get the war on terror and that's the decline of empire and then with 2008 that's the decline of american capitalism as such and and we've been living in the wake of those events ever since then and in fact the holocaust in Palestine cannot be separated from the war on terror all of the ideological accoutreum of the war on terror is now shoved in our face either savages they hate gay people they'll throw you off the building if you're queer um you know israel is the only democracy in the middle east the most moral army blah blah blah blah blah so it's fascinating how that comes back you know first

as tragedy then as tragic farce but here we are so i just wanted to make a little a little interesting cultural critique of the the late 90s early 2000s as this moment of change but ultimately the american empire is in decline Its hegemony is waning, but it's not dead yet, and it's lashing out, and it will continue to lash out as it further and further declines. And in the face of decline, there are always these ravenous movements and these nostalgic movements of which Trump is the perfect paradigm of, make America great again, where there's this attempt to revive this dying corpse internationally globally. We're going to make America great again. We're going to be the biggest military and economy in the world. We're going to basically without saying it, and I don't even know if Trump knows this word.

we're going to regain hegemony, right? And I'm going to do it through the pure force of my insane egoic will. And then people just need a strong man, daddy figure in uncertain times. And they line up and say, do it, please, you know, come save us, protect us. And so that's the global context. Now, multipolarity has already arisen, and it's only going to get furtherly entrenched. I think the U.S. and China could live in a theoretical world where they, like, are cooperative and see that their interests are not separate

and they should work together to build a better world for both of their economies but actually what's going to happen in this real world is there's going to be eventually a move to take Taiwan and the U.S. is going to belligerently

try to reassert its hegemonic power in the east and confront China over Taiwan and that's I think perhaps if not World War III it's a great power war that we haven't seen in quite some time and that something like Russia and Ukraine really pales in the face of what could

happened in that context. So I think that's where we're headed. And then domestically, what's fascinating, and I call the Trump administration and the techno oligarchs backing him, death drive accelerationists. For the techno oligarchs, all of which were at his inauguration, all of them, you know, just fucking jerking him off constantly in the lead up to his victory because they know that if AI is what the Silicon Valley fever dream techno freaks think it's going to be, it's going to drastically change the world. And if you own these AIs, you will be vaulted into trillionaire status. And so they're getting on board the Trump train because they think Trump is going to give them the best shot over the next four years,

which their timeline is like 2027, 2028. They really think this whole thing is going to come together and radically reorient the world and Trump's deregulatory pro-corporate and also like subservient administration where you come kiss the ring and I'll give you what you want. They come and kiss the ring and they're hoping that they can get this stuff online and they can become these techno corporate overlords of the future moving forward over this next four year span if they can get in Trump's good graces. And Trump is genuinely, he's, not breaking from neoliberalism. In words he is, he talks, I mean, he does tariffs, and that's, you know, anathema to neoliberal. And he talks about protectionism, but he's not doing industrial policy that would make tariffs function. He's not doing any sort of redistribution that would uplift the working class. He's not bringing back manufacturing. And even if you bring back manufacturing, it's not manufacturing as such that people are nostalgic for. It's the unions that made manufacturing. good jobs 50 years ago but again the global economy has really changed our americans going to go

in mass into into warehouses and factories again um and then fight for a union i don't know we'll see i'm not so sure that's going to happen and again the manufacturing base itself is not necessarily going to be back so what what trump is actually doing is which is all right wing populism this pretension to change this pretension to solve the problems right i'm going to fight the elites i'm going to I'm going to arrest the criminals. I'm going to make America great again. I'm going to bring up the working class. You know, blah, blah, blah.

That's right populist speech. In practice, just like all fascist and reactionary movements, it's a re-entrenchment of capital. And so what's actually happening is what I call death drive accelerationism. Death drive because by accelerating, you're going faster off the cliff. And accelerationism as like, we have to get this in. You know, we have to like just let like fucking take the fetters off this AI shit. take China, compete with them with no guardrails. Israel is doing the same thing. The American population, 50 and younger, are turning against us in future iterations of political power in the U.S., regardless

of what that looks like. They're not going to let us do what we're doing. They're going to become more and more of opposition to us. Trump is probably our last best hope, especially after this genocide. The whole world has woken up to what we really are. Trump is our last best hope to finish this project, to finish the Nakaba. And so that's what I think. think they're going to try to do. And they still have three and a half years to do it. So they're kind of slow rolling. There's this contradiction within Israel between the far right Likud Party wanting to do the greater Israel project, do the ethnic cleansing right away. And the military itself, which is like, hey, we're under-resourced. Our reservists are exhausted.

Like, you can't push us into this next phase. We're going to, we need time to kind of re-entrench and re-encamp and bolster our resources. And so, you know, Netanyahu is kind of threatening. We're going in. But then he's like, oh, maybe we're not. because he's trying to navigate these tensions and he knows his entire career and life is really hanging in the balance of what happens with that contradiction. So all that is to say that American decline lashes out with less and less power and by doing so exposes itself to the international community for what it really is, never a responsible leader. You know, weaponizing its currency in the form of sanctions and people are now forming bricks and that's a part of the multipolar process.

and then domestically this this faux populist pretension to change and behind the scenes it is just this re-entrenchment of corporate domination now buffeted by new technologies specifically in the form of AI so that's what we're living through and you know if you go through a lot of these political rounds you see the you see the game for what it is but I always think every four years somebody turns 18 somebody comes into political consciousness at age 21 they fall for it all over again and in four years what's going to happen the Democrats are going to run three APAC approved corporations in a trench coat, and the American population so beaten down and beleaguered by four years of Trump insanity will vote for a pile of shit over Trump, just like they did last time with COVID in 2020 protests. They voted for decaying corpse in the form of Biden. They'll just vote for anybody that Democrats vomit up. And then we'll have four more years of feckless, corrupt, neoliberal, oscillating, spineless, you know, no attempt to solve the real problems, satiate the donor class nonsense, and then we'll get another psycho-fascist who's going to scapego, whoever the scapegoat of the day is. And we're in this cycle until collapse.

Or unless we can make a real intervention in political power, I don't think that we have the organizational capacity in the next five years to do so. So I think that we're in this oscillating loop where people are just turning to the other party, turning to the other party, hoping something will change until we hit that brick wall. And so that's the death drive accelerationism, domestically and globally. And I think the two close, I'll wrap up on this, the two closest times in history

that we have to this current moment is the late 1800s through the early 1900s end of the British Empire. It was an empire overextended, funneling its resources

out to the fringes of its empire while its core decayed and eventually that resulted in the shift of being a global power over to the U.S. And I also equate this time to the roaring 20s. I call it now the groaning

20s. The 2020s are the groaning 20s. It's not really roaring. It's roaring for the top 5 to 10%. For the rest of us, it's just this creaky, achy, fucking slog through shit. And that, you know, that that period of time right before

the Great Depression in World War III is kind of what we're living through again. So those are the two. End of the British Empire over extension and internal decay. And the robber baron gilded age leading up to the great depression in world war two those are the two closest historical analogs to what we're going through right now and if you really want to become more sophisticated in your analysis of the present going back and studying those two

periods of history certainly can't hurt i knew i timed my next question well with how you would have responded to the previous one but basically um now i want to get your reaction to uh you know an episode we just did with Torka Lausen, who, you know, I know you've had on your, on your podcast. You know, we were discussing his latest book, The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism. You've also done an episode on that. I'll play this approximately three-minute clip, and I want to get your thoughts and reflections. You know, so here, you know, Torka Lausen is, you know, discussing how he sees the politics of the global north moving forward. what will happen in the global north

I think is that I think that in the first instance we will see that they will go back to some kind of in a defense mode both as in state but also as the working class they are trying to

defend the centuries of imperial mode of living it's classes which are now see their privilege positions in the world system threatened and they hope that the NATO powers can defend their freedom and their imperial mode of living in my part of the world, the Scandinavian countries, I think 90% of the population are supporting NATO and they are seeing Russia and China as aggressive.

powers which are trying to take their privilege positions in the world system. But I think that in the coming decades we will see a huge economic crisis. We will see a huge political crisis because the ruling class is built and cannot find what to do and we will see the ecological and climate crisis develop. And in this long crisis there will be some kind of learning process which can change the attitude. But what will happen in America, I cannot predict it can be a collapse and a meltdown in a more or less peaceful way as the Soviet Union melted down. But I can certainly also see the development of civil war scenario taking into account the settlementality and the amount of weapons in the U.S.

But I think it is the duty of Marxists in the U.S. and in Marxists in all countries to be able to say in a five-year perspective, what will the political and economic development be? What is the event or which can start out, we can trigger a revolutionary situation? what should the paroles be? Like the Russian Revolution, it was bread and peace. What is the crucial issue? What should our strategy be? What kind of struggle will be wage? What kind of struggle will be weighed

and what kind of organizations will be need for this kind of struggle? And this is very important issues for any Marxists to try to answer this question in each and every part of the world. So, Brett, is the U.S. going to collapse more or less peacefully, like the USSR? Yeah, so I love Torqu and I agree with them.

A lot of what he said overlaps quite well with my thinking on the subject. This imperial mode of living is an important aspect of this, right? And that cuts to the heart of the unsustainability and the injustice of the system. And one of the things that I'm trying to do is a Marxist in America talking to regular Americans who might not have as much political education. is to constantly tie your desire regular American for like a decent stable life with the war machine that is that is robbing you and robbing you and robbing people across the planet that you can't have what you want as long as the Pentagon needs a

trillion dollars a year in endless wars and the weapons manufacturers need you know endless wars to keep going but also this is a harder pill for them to swallow the imperial of living is this hyper commodified delivered to your door in 24 hours as life that we're living this door dash you know Uber Amazon delivery sort of consumption based economy everybody has to go into debt so they can keep consumption up way of life that has to go too okay well now Americans like hold on I can't drive my SUV to McDonald's every fucking day Like, you know, my $70,000 extended cab, Chevy Silverado that I've never taken on a gravel road before. I just take to Costco and back home.

I can't do that more forever. And it's like, no, no, for us to continue to live as a society, and if we want to solve the contradiction of imperial plunder and the imperial mode of living in the imperial core, and we want to just be happier because ultimately this consumption doesn't lead to happiness, we have to decommodify our lives and shift our economy away from mindless consumption. And that means shifting away from a capitalist system built on the profit produced by superfluous production and the incessant, growing, manic consumption that it demands. And a life of actual more, you know, in the sense of commodities, like a less commodified life,

means less shit, less trinkets and gadgets and plastic stuff. But it means more community. It means more connection to the earth and the people around you. It means a slower pace of life. And this manic quest that capitalism has entrapped us in for infinite continual growth, right? If the GDP, if the economy stops growing for three months, we call it a recession. After six months, it's a depression. That means this system cannot survive unless it is manically.

going forth and consuming and plundering and consuming and producing. Okay, that served a historical role, right? That sort of production and consumption served a role to create an economic machine that is global and that has reached unprecedented levels of wealth. But it is unsustainable. And the whole thing of socialism is taking that insane machine, taking the best qualities of it, the medical and technological aspects that it's developed, changing the social social relations away from profit and exploitation towards communal flourishing and moving

humanity into a new phase of out of their adolescence into a mature adulthood that is constrained, that is community-based, that is embedded in real community, and that isn't dependent on endless superfluous consumption and infinite growth for its own sake. That's a much harder pitch. So the first pitch, everything you want, you know, health care, better weight. wages, your tax dollars to be funneled back into community investment and infrastructure and uplifting regular Americans and solving poverty and solving homelessness, all those things that people, most people do want.

The only way you're going to get that is you stop the imperial death machine that takes trillions of our dollars and goes around the world and tries to slaughter people for corporations. Okay? That's step one, and most people can nod their head in approval. And I think if a political party emerged in the U.S. that had true working class economics and true anti-war politics we would call it anti-imperialists but for messaging more broadly anti-war we're against the deep state we're against the CIA we're against the pentagon we do not need to have our military bases all around the world huge majorities of people would support that political

party if it was sincere it wasn't just an attempt for the democrats to rebrand or the fake populist on the right to pretend they're they're in supportive but was real was rooted in like labor unions and shit people would flock to that party but it's that second level that's a little hard but guess what that second level of giving up your your consumption life that's coming to an end anyway it's going to come to an end through managed mature understanding and shifting away which is not the american way or it's going to come to an end through smashing into a fucking brick wall creating climate and biosphere catastrophes plastic pollution right now you and i are sitting with microplastic flowing through our fucking blood like lead flew through our the blood of our

parents um and and that whole way of life you know it has to it has to come to to an end so that that consumption based lifestyle is coming to an end one way or another that's the hardest thing to get through to a regular american we should do the proactive managed thing we're not going to do that we're going to do the slam into a brick wall thing unfortunately but um what happens is it going to be a soft landing um is it going to you know he says civil war um i think in order for there to be a civil war, Americans have to get a lot less comfortable. So, you know, the guy that's a Patriot that has AR-15s at home that drives his big ass fucking truck to work with the Punisher logo on the back of his truck, that guy's not fighting and dying in the streets for an idea.

You know, that guy is going home to his air-condition fucking McMansion and watching Fox News, and, you know, and overeating before he passes out and farts into his bed all night. That's what that guy's doing. So to, get Americans out on the street to fight and die, the level of comfort and stability has to completely erode. That's collapse. So a civil war will only come out of collapse, which is to my point earlier, a revolution can come out of collapse, and balkanization can come out of collapse. So more than even a civil war, I think the possibility of a balkanized U.S. under all these contradictions exploding mid-century could result in, you know, maybe like a standoff between

states, you know, secessionist movements or blocks of states that are against the executive, you know, going their own way, creating constitutional crises in the process. This happened once in American history. It was the American Civil War. And more than ending slavery, what Abraham Lincoln wanted to do was preserve the union, right? So there's some historical precedent of the threat of balkanization and civil war, trying to address a core contradiction in the United States, which was there since its founding, which was slavery at that time. And so there are some of these historical precedents that we can look to and kind of think about. But yeah, and then the other thing I really love that he said there is that crises are learning processes, that throughout

this long 21st century, and my God, it's just getting started, we are going to go through crises, economic, environmental in particular, and many more, and technological, that are going to bring about immense suffering in the short and medium term, but that through the process are going to reorient people's

views of all of these things. One example is climate change. Climate change is not being addressed. It's going to be bad. If I had to put my money on a final degree of change that we're looking for, I bet we're going to be in that 2.5

to three degree um rise in temperature by mid to late century um which is catastrophic for huge parts of the world is catastrophic um you know you can go through all of the the implications of that for different areas in the world but it is going to be catastrophic it's going to create mass migration but what that also does and this has happened throughout human history is that it's going to force our entire species centering our politics around this new perpetual crisis to continue to develop technologies and poor resources in as well as intellectual resources into understanding the climate system such that in 100, 200, 300 years, humanity will evolve to a species that has pretty much total control over its climate, right?

That through the crisis of climate change, which humanity is not proactive and stopping, will live and suffer through, and then will come out the other side by, by, necessity pouring resources, technology, manpower, intellectual power into this problem will come out the other side, a species that is now, at least on that front, more mature in its relationship to the natural world. And like we have a thermostat in our house, we will build the infrastructure to have a thermostat for the planet. That's 2,300, 2,200, who knows. But that's the process we're going through. Now, think about that on the social, economic, and political levels as well, that this crisis of the 21st century is a crossroads for humanity. It could result in our collapse as a civilization.

I think that's on the tail end of probability. It could result in AI and the techno-utopians being right and all of a sudden we usher in this new era of productivity and AI's take over and manage all of our problems. That's on a very tail end of probabilities as well. What's going to happen is we're going to land somewhere in the middle of the bell curve, right? A mixture of advancements and horrific regressions and crises and localized collapses reverberating throughout the global economy and then socialist experiments let's say in the global south trying to find new ways to live re-entrenchment and refusal to change from the global north but the contradictions bearing down so much that change has to happen we'll see fascist movements and climate authoritarians arise

we'll see you know new forms of green parties win socialist parties win even in places we don't expect, and we're going to fumble through the motherfucking century. Humans are not going to go extinct if I had to bet money on it, but we're going to have perhaps the worst global crisis that we've ever lived through it in human history, precisely because of its global

nature. That these are not localized, this is not the fall of Rome, right? This is a global, biosphereic, climatological, driven series of crises that never end and get worse and worse and worse until we start solving it. And so, you know, it's

it's not a pretty picture but still and i always want to bring it back to this because we're not taking the black pill here out of the ruins and even in the crisis comes incredible opportunities that we cannot foresee and our level of organization and education will largely dictate the trajectory of these various societies whatever society you're in right now the more organized your revolutionary wing is your left wing of your society the more political power it accrues the better position it is to push that society in the midst of chaos or in the ruins of it in a positive direction and in lieu of that you will get barbarism you will get corporate re-entrenchment you will get fascism that's the lessons of history so this is not take any

responsibility off our plate but it does necessitate that we become a lot more resilient a lot stronger mentally emotionally physically politically and that we really don't have a chance our choice the world is we do have a chance we don't have a choice right the world is forcing us to respond meaningfully and uh and that's our great responsibility so yeah torco lawson um in my analysis i think dub tell doubt quite well yeah i think so as well um so we'll we'll get you to react to uh another clip here um this is you know a previous episode we we did with vijy prashad um and here i had you know i'd asked him uh you know In light of, you know, sort of, let's say, the zenith of socialist struggle being in the 20th century, and then you obviously had the history of the collapse of the Soviet Union, a historic setback for the left, that kind of thing. I asked him, you know, where is the socialist horizon today? And, you know, how do we orient ourselves toward that? And just to give you a little context before I hit play, you know, he started out by talking about how the space for contesting politics, you know, more broadly, has really shrunk.

and, you know, how much the center has shifted toward the right in the neoliberal era. So he's talking about, you know, the importance of opening up space as an immediate task. Yeah, okay, so having set that up, you know, we'll play it from here. If you're on the street and somebody just excessively with a belligerent personality wants to, you know, rumble with you, other people will intervene and say, hey, take it easy, guy, you know. That's how the world works. There's a lot of people who want to say, take it easy. It's called the United Nations.

Yeah, we've got to strengthen it. in the United Nations, all of this is moving towards building near a socialist agenda. Right now, the socialist agenda is really a social democratic agenda until we push the gates further and see the class struggle intensifying. You know, right now, most of the things socialists are talking about eradicating poverty, you know, peace, development, these are basically things that if there were social democrats in the world, they would be fighting for, they don't exist. Yeah, they have become neoliberal. So we have paused. to do their historical mission.

We are not, there's no space for us to say, let's intensify the class struggle, yeah? Then you'll be sectarian out here saying, I'm not interested in solving the poverty question. I'm intensifying the class struggle. Okay, you're, you may be right. That's what Marxists are supposed to do. But right now, a historical mission is basically

being shifted because the social Democrats and liberals have vanished, you know, you see a person hungry on the street. You can't just say, hey, listen, there's a liberal behind me. He's going to feed you. You know, I'm building the class struggle. I can't, you know, I can't solve you. You can't do that.

You're a human being. You've got to say, how do we feed these people? How do we fight for, you know, soup kitchens and so on? That's the problem with socialist politics today. So when you say, oh, Zoran Mamdani, he's a limited social democratic. But so are you. What's your agenda that's so radical, you know? How are you able to intensify the class struggle by yourself?

The tempo right now is not moving in that direction. So don't lecture Zoran, Mamdani or myself and say, you know, you guys are just like liberals. Well, yes, because they have absented themselves. So we have to fight against hunger and we have to fight against illiteracy and so on. Yeah, we have to fight in this terrain until sufficient numbers of liberals are back on the field, social democrats. Then we can go and say, I'm against the politics of social democracy. I want something more radical than that. Unless the people are on the streets, you know, strikes and so on.

You can't just stand there and say, hey, go on strike. I want to. Right now the class struggle is defined by the bourgeoisie. know the owners of property are the ones who are driving the class struggle the workers are not you know that's the stage of history we're in so i can't stand on the sidewalk like some mad person saying i i've been communicating with aliens you know workers go on strike you know the workers will look at me and go man i'm an uber eats guy i got to go deliver the food can you just make room for my bicycle yeah i think it's a it's a hard pill for for some people

on the on the radical left to swallow but it is ultimately true what's happening is with the decay of capitalism imperialism comes the decay of liberalism and where liberals and social democrats once formed a block once could be reasonably seen as a progressive force in history that period is over and they've abdicated the field and so then the far left is there and we sometimes get too subcultural meaning we are so far into theory and abstractions that We are alienated from regular working people. And when some of us try to go and appeal to regular working people, even fighting on the electoral terrain, it's far too easy to just dismiss them as liberals, mere social Democrats, blah, blah, blah. But then VJ has a good dialectical response.

What are you doing? And I have many reasons to be skeptical of Mom Donnie. right but if he actually does open up you know state subsidized grocery stores he actually does you know make rent easier to pay for for workers he actually does take on the establishment of the of the you know new york city elite milieu he will be advancing the ball um you know bernie sanders we all have critiques of him he advanced the ball for class consciousness in the united states there is there is no question that there are countless people on the Marxist, anarchist, you know, left com, whatever left today because they went through the Bernie

Sanders moment. But what we need to do as much understanding as what I'm talking about here in the Imperial Corps, we do have to think about what are people's real problems? How do we organize to solve their real problems? And not just in mutual aid going out to a park and ending out food. That's beautiful. I've done that. That's great. But conquering political power and putting our policies in front of the entire society, in front of the masses, and moving in that direction. You know, if Bernie Sanders would have won, he would not be a revolutionary Marxist. But he would advance the ball for working class organization. He would have shifted the Overton window, and in some ways he still did, to the left.

He would have brought to the four core problems and reframed them for a population that has been, you know, lobotomized by right-wing corporate ideology for decades, and that would have cleared so much space for more radical organizing and action to take place. So I do think that there is a balance to strike here between not being naive and supporting anybody that comes along dressed as a lefty, right? We can see problems with people, you know, like AOC, who takes the socialist mantle. That's what's dangerous. It's not like I'm a progressive or, no, I'm a Democratic socialist, takes that mantle, brands herself with that label, and then waters it down through, you know, being cozy with Nancy Pelosi, refusing to take on the Democratic Party, supporting Zionism, and just being,

just being pushed around, right? Like, when AOC came in, Nancy Pelosi and the fucking snake-eyed elites in the Democratic Party are like, we can cowtow her, right? We can scare her. We can spook her. We can tell her that she's going to lose her career if she doesn't do this or that. We can shut her out from the upper echelons of the Democratic Party and make her a fringe figure, you know, if we want to. And we can make, we can bend her to our will. And if we can't, we can isolate her. And the Zionist lobby kind of did the same thing. They sent people to give her pity parties about like, hey, you know, innocent people.

Like, you know, we don't agree with what's going on with Netanyahu either. But, you know, the Iron Dome, it just protects regular people who are just going about their lives. And she doesn't have any political spy. blah, blah, blah. We all know the story. So we have to still have the ground to critique that while at the same time not being so dogmatic that anything short of, you know, insane revolutionary action tomorrow is some sort of a betrayal or a failure. And there's a way in which people who just get their politics from online, who spend all day typing to each other and being in these echo chambers and these discord servers and on Twitter eight hours a day who become just

kind of warped in their analysis of reality in such a way that they cannot relate to or communicate with regular people politically. They cannot talk about issues that regular people care about. And if we're ever going to win, we have to be able to do that. We have to marry high knowledge, high theoretical knowledge with on the ground material, practical work that advances the ball for our class. And that will require undoubtedly in the United States over the foreseeable future struggling on the electoral terrain. That does not mean become a part of the Democratic Party. No, our struggles in the electoral terrain have to be in direct and loud, principled opposition to the Republican and the Democratic Party in totality. And that's where Sanders failed.

Bernie had the chance after 2016 and even after 2020 to some extent to do what Corbyn is finally doing now in the UK, which is I'm breaking completely from this defunct party. It is completely taken over by the corporations, by the military industrial complex, by Zionists. I need to create a, use my political capital with the people. Bernie Sanders still to this day ranks as the most favored politician in the United States by Americans. That's incredible. Take that social capital and shift it in to a principled democratic socialist political party that can bring up young politicians that can run under our own band. that can have our own forms of organization outside and in opposition to the Democratic Party.

And I truly think that that is our task. Because, you know, we can't just be seen as radical militant extremists that like march through the street sometimes, you know, and like cheer on Luigi when he takes out a CEO. If we're just that, then we're just marginalized and for the average person living their life, they do not see how our politics as they see it connects at all with their daily. requirements and needs. I need to fucking feed my kids and I need to figure out daycare and I need a raise and how am I going to fucking retire and health care costs are insane

how do we address those problems not by you know chanting marks or mouth quotes at them you know not just by rioting in the streets although there's plenty of room for that at times but it is by creating the organization and the capacity necessary

to intervene on the political level and and actually show our ideology, our policies, and be able to pursue those policies and put them in practice. Once people start seeing that it's the crazy socialists that are actually solving my problems, all the ideology, the anti-communist and antisocialist ideology dissolves of its own accord because the material comes first. If we solve material problems, the ideological superstructure of anti-communism collapses around it. And so instead of trying to fight on the level of superstructure, actually communism is right and, you know, this is what Stalin and Trotsky and

this is blah, blah, blah. Okay, there's a place for that. But instead of fighting in the superstructural realm solely, we have to fight primarily on the material realm. And that will require getting our hands dirty in the electoral front. And that will require compromises in some sense, on some levels, not on our core values. But that will require maneuvering and strategy and organization and sometimes just screaming out your politics is a vacuous stand-in for real politics which requires talking to people who don't agree with you struggling sacrificing your own personal careerism to contribute to something bigger and the messy reality of trying to create real change in the world as opposed to sitting in a vacuum of purity and just bestowing upon the

world your perfect ideas right that's idealism so i think vj is is definitely on to something the liberals in order to maintain the liberal order they have to go to the right if capital if fascism is capitalism in decay and liberalism is the political ideology of capital we know historically and certainly presently in going forward that liberalism is not going to move to the left liberalism to entrench its underlying material reality will have to move to the right and so that creates a huge vacuum on the center left all the way to the far left

where it's really been abandoned and it's our job I think to to take that over and like BJ said solve people's real material problems and you can do that in organization at the community level right now while we build towards the higher forms of organization that allow us to do that on large on larger scales.

Thanks for that, Brett. As we approach, you know, the end of our conversation here, you know, I wanted to ask you about, you know, the question of fear. People today, you know, even those who are politically on our side, you know, but who are not organized, you know, are scared to turn their, you know, maybe personal politics into action. And for those that are already, you know, acting on their politics, certainly fear stops a lot of people from going further, from escalating further.

you know, this is a very real concern, you know, civil liberties in the global north have really plunged since, especially October 23, you know, whether we're talking about the fact that you can literally be, you know, kidnapped in the U.S. by ICE at any given time, you know, greater clampdowns at universities in North America, the designation of a nonviolent group, Palestine action as a terrorist entity in the UK. And then, of course, you know, we've seen these brutal videos of the German police violently. terrorizing Palestine solidarity protesters, et cetera. The examples go on. So I wanted to ask you, you know, as someone who's, you know, had their head bashed in by the police before you've been paid visits to your home by some special people, let's call them, you know, how should the left be contending with the question of fear at this particular moment, particularly when, you know, the world and our societies demands more of us, you know, and particularly in the global north? Yeah, it's a big question. There's two sides to it initially. The first side is, and I always remind people of this, is that crackdown is a sign of the status quo's weakening, that they're no longer able to use ideology to buffer opinions and lock people out. They have to resort to raw violence suppression, which every time they do, they over-extend themselves. They create new people that are like, what the fuck is this system? Like, we command. out and we just protest. We get attacked. You can go mass murder hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians, but if somebody tries to spray some chemical into the weapons that you're using to kill those people, that's a crime. People that are fighting back in Palestine or protesting on college

campuses here in the U.S. for human rights are the terrorists. But Netanyahu, who is the Hitler of our time, can come and get standing ovations in front of Congress. So as their system weakens, they lash out more violently, and every time they lash out more violently, they reveal more of themselves to more people. This is the dialectic. So there's that aspect. On the other hand, okay, that's all nice and fine, but in the short term, like, we're at threat. That's true. What buffets and buffers your safety is community and mass movements. So like when when Mahmoud Khalil got arrested by ICE and detained, right if there weren't mass protests if there weren't journalists writing about it every day if there weren't political educators talking about it if there weren't progressive lawyers willing to fight back

if there weren't this entire array of people coming over and over and over again to the streets and to his trials and having his back and making noise about it not letting people forget about it they could have easily just disappeared him quietly right and they've done this throughout history many times during the ferguson rights and stuff a lot of those people those black organizers that got disappeared or mysteriously killed they didn't have for whatever reason the mass movements behind them that could keep concerted pressure on on the the forces of of the state that were imposing that suffering and and keep those stories going and cycling you know things get memory hold and moved on so how do you stay safe you build community and an organization but community itself when you're going

and you're organizing in your community you're building community with other people who have your back right here in Omaha we have many organizations in a mid-sized Midwestern moderate to conservative city and in a deep red state um and we had ice raids and i have a good friend of mine who actually just driving to driving to work and saw an ice raid taking place against the family and jumped out of his

car and went and stood in front of this ice truck trying to take somebody away, trying to disappear or somebody. And he was charged with all these federal crimes like federal felonies of, you know, assaulting a federal officer, whatever this shit, they throw charges at you.

If you have ever been arrested at a protest, You know, they just vomit out charges on you and very few of them stick, but it scares you. It intimidates you. And a big reason they do it not only is to lock you up in legal nonsense and molasses, but is also to intimidate you from doing it again. But what happened in that case is that because there's community here, people made noise, people showed up. People were taking care of his kids and his pets at his house, making sure that they collected money to pay his rent so he wasn't evicted when he. he got out, showing up at his hearings, you know, trying to find lawyers who will fight for him pro bono. And that eventually got the charges way reduced, got him out, and now he has a real fight.

In lieu of that, he could have just been, you know, just completely at the mercy of the brutal state and its legal system. So community, getting out in the world, getting out from behind your computer screen, taking on some level of risk, but being smart about it, right? you're not an individual hero you don't need to be the next luigi look what happened to louisie i mean we should still have his back and that's exactly what i'm talking about make noise you know uh continue to stoke um support around him because it's a it's a core issue in our society and he is like an avatar for that and in some sense he's like being punished for something that we all agree with like that this entire system is disgusting and the person he killed was profiting off of people's suffering and misery our own family suffering and misery

so we show out for him but he went outside of community outside of organization did a deed and now he himself is paying the consequences for it for a very long time so you got to be very strategic with the sort of risks you take in the background conditions in which that risk is conducted when i did get you know at early uh anti-fascist rallies in 2017 um you know we would show up and confront these these organized groups of genuine fascists and the cops would crack down on us of course and um yeah that's when i got like pepper sprayed tackled my head was you know grazed like into the concrete as i was saying i'm not resisting like you know you know how they do um but it was the community that bailed me out that when i came out

they had food and you know almost chokes me up a little bit talking about it but but drinks and food and comfort they stayed with me every step of the way they came to my hearing they supported me And that was not only psychologically important for me to go through that process, but it showed the system, hey, he's not by himself, you know, every step of the way you're trying to make an example out of him or something, they could still do it, but there's going to be resistance. There's going to be protests. There's going to be people who are writing him that give a fuck about him that are going to show up for him. And that in and of itself can be a deterrent for some of the more grotesque directions that the state can take suppression in. So again, the answer. is not romantic it's not easy it's organizing in community over and over and over again uh that is our only hope um and so fear is warranted fear is healthy fear is an evolutionarily programmed emotion that allowed us to survive for all these uh you know um hundreds of thousands of years as the human species so there's a there's a role that it plays but when it controls you when it prevents you from taking a stand from speaking out from organizing then it becomes a tool of the ruling class that

has worked on you you know they have they have they have successfully mobilized fear to shut you down and so you have to balance strategy and and repercussions with i'm i'm going to do what i can in this historical moment to live up because if everybody just shuts up because of fear nothing ever happens again then we're just totally dominated it's the people that in the face of fear still stand up and do something, that push the ball forward and make it safer for other people behind them to come up and say some stuff or to do some stuff. So that's the kind of cause and effect, domino effect of fear and the balance that has to be struck. And ultimately, I want to emphasize the protection that is offered by community and organization and how doing stuff in big groups

with people that love you and have your back, which is different. One last point than like January 6th. Whereas a bunch of individuals coming together, they didn't have mass movements. They didn't have community connections, right? They flew in from all over the world because they're just having their brain fried from Fox News. And there were a bunch of individuals and the government just picked them off one by one, sent their asses to jail. There were some little protest, you know, January 6 people. There's no community rootedness. There was no organization that really had their backs. And so they were made an example of. Not to say that that can't happen still with organizations. in community, but it's less likely to happen, and you have more leverage than you otherwise would

have. So those are some thoughts, but again, not an easy time, and there's no easy, easy answers here. Lastly, Brett, you know, what is your case for hope and optimism? You know, I think this is an important question at this juncture. You know, we talked about the timeline ahead, you know, even with Torkel-Lausen, he was talking about, you know, 2050 is really a turning point. You we're talking about, you know, mid-century to late-century. I mean, we're all going to be, I mean, you and I are going to be alive, hopefully, during, you know, that time. I also, I mean, I think, you know, the case for hope and optimism is important. So, you know, what keeps you going?

Why should others, you know, be political optimists? Sure. And I will just make one quick point to. Mid-century, things are completely going to have to change. But every year leading up to that is still going to bring its own crisis, its own, its own intensity. the 2030s are going to be fucking insane. The 2040s are going to be fucking insane. So it's not like we can just sit back and have this system creak by for another 30 years.

No way. But yeah, by mid-century, things are going to be forced upon us. That's when climate crisis really kicks in. Economic systems, totally unsustainable by that point, et cetera. So, yeah, just the point about the timeline. But yeah, so optimism is important. You know, Gramsci, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. We are in a long line of human beings who fought against a wide variety of incomprehensible challenges and came out the other side.

Every single one of all of our ancestors listening right now survived and reproduced, right? Every single one going back 200,000 years. That's a long line of people who refuse to be squashed and snuffed out. We owe it to ourselves, to our neighbors, to our loved ones, and to the future of humanity, do everything we can, and ultimately what gives me optimism, and this comes from Buddhism as well as dialectical materialism and Marxism, changes the only constant. We are not going to be stomped by a boot forever. We are not going to have to live in this rotten system forever. Getting out of this system is going to be crazy and chaotic and scary. But our ancestors did it

before. The end of slavery, the fall of the Roman Empire, the end of feudalism, the French Revolution, the Haitian revolution go all through the global south all their national liberation struggles people over and over and over and over again through history have been placed in historical moments they did not choose and they rose to the challenge in various ways

despite the fear, despite the repression despite the consequences and oftentimes even the self-sacrifice but the fact that things always change and that we are living in a period of change it's exhilarate it doesn't have to be scary it can be exhilarating that that we are living through a crucial moment that will determine the next several hundred years of human life

and and that is in some sense overwhelming but what's the alternative that we just keep working our shitty jobs and keep buying stuff until we die and then the system just goes on forever we don't want that either so i would rather have the i mean necessary exhilarating also scary and challenging and challenging and challenging upheaval of a rotten dying system and the possibility of creating something new than just the status quo forever. And part of being human at the psychological level and the political level is accepting change. That change is the only constant. It's a cascade of constant change, dialectics, evolution. It's always happening. It's never resting. And I do believe in the human spirit. I look back over, you know, the entirety of human history.

and we're still here you know we're still here and we've been on the goddamn moon and we have space shuttles and and you know we're smashing particles together to try to figure out the secrets of the cosmos and we're still fighting for human dignity and decency and liberation so there's no reason to think that this is the end this is just another turning of a chapter and um and yeah so strap in and and get with community organize make yourself more robust intellectually and spiritually and emotionally through certain spiritual practices and community that I've laid out here in other places and um and rise to the challenge of of the moment this is life this is life it's never going to be just a nice comfortable sitting in a recliner you know

eating your favorite snack forever life is challenge and growth and fight and all of nature is in constant churn so accept that at the deepest levels you can can possibly accept something. And that clears a lot of the way for you to be able to act meaningfully in that context. And to think constantly about, I am trying to contribute what I can to the future of the human species. And everybody that comes after me will live in a world that is at least partially influenced by the choices I make. And that is a huge responsibility, but it's also a liberating opportunity. Yeah, totally. And, you know, I'll also, you know, in terms of the case for optimism, I'll echo what Vijay Prashad had said on that previous episode we had, you know, the whole world is not the North Atlantic. And I think there's, you know, a lot of, a lot of reason to be optimistic looking at the global south. I mean, one example I'll give is, you'll find this interesting, Brett. I mean, when I was just, you know, coming to learn about Marxism and moving, you know, further toward the, I guess, the revolutionary left, I mean, the first episode I heard of,

of Rev. Left was actually the one with, you know, the one on Thomas Sankara. And, you know, that was like what? That was like four-ish years ago. I mean, 2021, you know, little did I know that, you know, like I would, you know, we would see sort of the reincarnation of that revolution as embodied in, you know, Ibrahim Troy today. Like, I mean, after, you know, two or three years, I mean, it also, that also, I mean, in line with the rest of the conversation we're having. I mean, that shows sort of the pace of history too you know it's fits and starts and uh you know the lenin quote about you know um god i'm gonna butcher it but you know the decades um there are decades when nothing happens and or there are weeks when there are weeks when decades happens

something like that there you go yeah yeah or yeah there you go um so you know um yeah and i mean a lot of things coming out of china as well i mean we've been talking about the ecological uh collapse i mean if the world is serious about it, it would get serious about trading, trading with China. They're, you know, quite advanced in terms of their green technology. They've already worked out a lot of these problems, you know. I mean, we can work through that together. Obviously, the imperialists, they don't want to by definition. Anyway, you know, I think that's a good note to leave it on, Brett.

I really appreciate your time here. You've been generous with it. I mean, you know, I'm sure the listeners are familiar with you and your work, but can you just let the listeners know where they can find you? Yeah, well, first of all, if you're listening on my feed, go subscribe to International Solidarity Podcast. I'll link to those in the show notes, because I think you're doing really, really good work and, you know, looking at some of your other interviews, very principled, very informative, and I really appreciate your voice in this space. So keep up the amazing work. As for me, you can find what I do at RevLeftRadio.com. There you can find Red Menace, which I do with my co-host, Alison Escalante.

We cover texts as well as current events, and then RevLeft Radio, which you can find all the stuff needed on that one website. And so, yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time to have me on your show, and I'm honored to be a part of your esteemed list of guests that you've had on. And I hope that your listeners get something out of this conversation. And again, I'm really in really appreciative of you of you having me on. So thank you so much. I'm going to be able to be.