Rev Left Radio - Communist Study and the DPRK w/ Derek Ford

Episode Date: May 1, 2018

Derek is an organizer, communist thinker, and educational theorist who teaches classes in philosophy and history of education. He received his PhD in cultural foundations of education from Syracuse University. His research examines the educational logics at work in political, economic, and social systems, what educational theory can offer contemporary political movements, and how education can help us re-imagine and re-enact our ways of being-together. He has written and edited six books and published in a variety of journals. He is associate editor of Issues in Teacher Education and chair of the education department at The Hampton Institute. His most recent book is Education and the production of space: Political pedagogy, geography, and urban revolution. Follow Derek on twitter @derekrford Outro Song: "The Guillotine" by The Coup Support the Show: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen and support their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

Hey everyone. Now, before we start this show, I just wanted to make a quick announcement. We are going to be changing our Patreon starting on May 1st. So up until now, we have had the per creation format on Patreon based mostly on our ignorance of how Patreon worked initially. And that meant that if you donated, say, $1, that it would be $1 per creation as opposed to $1 per month. So I just wanted to make this announcement that starting May 1 first, we are going to join the rest of the podcast world and go to a per month format. So if you have a dollar that you want to spend per month supporting the show or $5 to support the show, we'd greatly appreciate it. Now, having said that, let's get to the show.

how unite the left against the capitalist lies and liberate the proletary as mine fight for all the working class hard for equality fight against the right free fascist ideology to tune it in and turn it up loud revolutionary left radio starts now Hello, everyone. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Ann Comrade, Brett O'Shea. And today we have on Derek Ford to talk about anti-imperialism, his work on communist study, and other aspects of organizing and leftist influences in his work and his praxis. So, Derek, would you like to introduce yourself and say a little bit about your background for people who don't know who you are? Sure, yeah. Thanks so much for having me on the show. I'm a listener, so it's nice to be on. I am currently a assistant professor of education studies at a small liberal arts college, right outside of Indianapolis, called DePaul University. I teach classes in philosophy and history of education, an international education, and pedagogy. I did my graduate studies at Syracuse University, I studied philosophy of education, and I did.

I'm an organizer with the Answer Coalition, stands for Act Now to Stop War and then racism. And I've been a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation since 2007. I joined, before I graduated college, I was at Goucher College, which is a liberal arts school in Baltimore. And got connected with the PSL through organizing against the war against Iraq. so I've been organizing with them for 10 years and through that had done a you know engaged in different campaigns social movements the latest of which have been focused around uh Korea and peace and reunification in Korea and I guess that's sort of enough about me yeah well that's awesome and we're extremely honored to have you on I want to give a shout out to our mutual

to my friend, Zach, who was the one that reached out to you and set up this interview. So thank you, Zach, for that. And then I also want to give a shout out to the Magnificast, our friends and comrades. We've had them on the show. I've been on their show. And I used their interviews with you as part of my preparatory work for this interview. So if anybody likes this interview and wants to learn more about Derek, you can obviously go read his books, but you can also go to the Magnificast and check it.

I think you have, I think you did three interviews with them. Is that correct? I think two. I think too. Okay. Well, people can go check those out. They're really, really good, super interesting, and I highly recommend them. So if you're ready to get into the interview, we have a lot of ground to cover, so we can go ahead and jump into it. That sounds good. All right, so speaking of the Magnificast, I was listening to one of your interviews with them, and you said something that's really interesting, and I would like to kind of flesh this out. You argued that two of the biggest obstacles to a socialist movement in the

U.S. were white supremacy and imperialism. Obviously, these two things are deeply connected, play interdependent roles, both domestically and abroad. Can you kind of restate that general argument and elaborate on it with regards to how socialist can maybe push back against these forces in our society? Certainly. So I think by way of introducing this relationship, a historical example could be useful. At the end of the 1990s, there was a growing, highly militant, anti-globalization movement that shut down the World Trade Organization, followed the IMF around, and, you know,

there were problems with it. It was, you know, it was like politically sort of anarchists and a bit more liberal. The national composition was not incredibly diverse, but it was a heightened social struggle that was taking place in the United States. And then Bush got elected. People hated Bush. there was a lot of protests against him and then

immediately after the 9-11 attacks Bush's approval rating went to like 95% and many most groups most peace and justice groups in the United States national ones and local ones were putting American flags on their websites and were remaining silent in the face of this

attack. So I think here we see white supremacy and imperialism as debilitating factors in the struggle. You know, the answer coalition, we organized protest against the invasion and bombing of Afghanistan, and many people said that we shouldn't do it, right? And it was a smaller. We brought tens of thousands of people out to the streets, but it was, it was important to do that and and this speaks to the second part of your question right which is how do socialists push back against its powerful forces on our society and you know i think the main way is through consistency and the refusal to give in and to alter our political positions and the expression of those political positions in the face of hostility and isolation because that's what we

face now, if you look at, you know, the sort of the state of the anti-war movement with regards to the recent bombings of Syria is we have to rebuild the anti-war movement because imperialism and white supremacy work together to create

this, you know, this othering and this sort of artificial U.S. identity that ties people to whiteness and to imperialism. Yeah, absolutely. And another aspect that I kind of find frustrating when, you know, trying to reach out and trying to talk to other leftists or people that might not be so far developed is sort of an entrenched liberalism when it comes to how they view other states, how they view socialist and communist history generally.

And then that bleeds over into how they view, you know, things like U.S. attacks on Syria. Can you maybe talk a little bit about how liberalism is so conditioned into people and some of the problems that sort of entrenched liberalism can crop up in attempts to bring people over to the socialist side? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think that liberalism is obviously another impediment, the liberal ideology of the free market, of the autonomous individual, of sort of artificial equality that exists. It's interesting, obviously a lot of discourse on the left has become liberalized. So for example, you know, instead of talking about class struggle, we talk about class privilege or classism, which is, you know, I mean, the idea that you should just basically be nice to homeless people, right? Not that you should wage a war or a class struggle and get rid of homelessness. And we see that co-optation, but there isn't even a co-optation of anti-imperialism, right?

I mean, nobody ever talks about like national privilege or something. So I think that this is the main sort of lacuna in the U.S., right, not just on the left, but in general. But I think that when you, you know, at least in my conversations with people who are not on the left, most people, you know, as soon as I say like, well, what right does the U.S. have to do this? They say, yeah, you're right, right? What right does the U.S. have to do this? So I think that, you know, on the one hand, there's this entrenched liberalism, but I feel like it's almost more prominent on the left than it is in most working. class and poor communities. Yeah, that's extremely interesting. I kind of want to touch on this, because I know you've talked about it other places,

but I find this fascinating and absolutely worth talking about, and it ties in with our anti-imperialist discussion. I know that you somewhat recently traveled to the DPRK, and you got a firsthand experience of that country, including its health care system. Western depictions of traveling to the DPRK, like the infamous Vice Mini documentary, if anybody remembers that, which painted a picture of like a sort of,

a very curated experience for the Western traveler. They have weird depictions of that society. So can you talk about your experiences and what you took away from the trip and what Westerners generally don't understand about the DPRK? Absolutely. So I was there in August. I left a day or two after Tillerson announced that they would be instituting a travel ban. So I was able to go right after it was announced and right before it actually went into effect.

I was there when Trump was promising to rain down fire and fury on the country and had a, you know, really, I mean, a marvelous time there, it's a beautiful country, beautiful people, was very warmly received. I organized the delegation through one of the answer coalition's projects, the Korea Peace Tours. And hopefully when the travel ban is lifted, you know, when the travel ban is lifted, we will be organizing more contingents. So that was, that was to be the first trip that I led and what was supposed to be a yearly trip. So we're hoping to continue that after the travel ban. The idea of a curated experience is interesting. You know, it's oftentimes people will say, well, if you haven't been. been to a place. You can't really speak about it.

I've done the DPRK, you go and people are like, oh, well, even your experience there doesn't discount the things that I've heard from, you know, US media or whatever. There's never any real independent investigation into the DPRK. Oftentimes people will say, well, we just don't know that much about it, which, you know, it's kind of like when my students come up to me, when their annotated bibliographies are due, and they're like, oh, I couldn't find any resources, you know? And it's like, well, you just didn't look. Because there's a whole bunch of information that we have about the DPRK. And, you know, it is true that in general, when people from the U.S. go to the DPRK, it's not like going to the Bahamas where you just rent a car

and you do whatever you want. There's several reasons for this, right? One is that the DPRK knows of the damages of colonial travel and Western tourism. They know how destructive it can be for a country and for a culture and for their people. And so they want to protect their country from that. But on the other hand, right, and then, you know, the other thing is that I just, I don't get the idea that where this comes from that I should be able to go wherever I want on my own terms, right? I mean, you know, it's like I go to, you know, indigenous territories in the U.S. and believe that I should just be able to go waltz around wherever I want, talk to whoever I want, you know, do whatever I want. you know do whatever i want it's uh you know this is an oppressed nation that my country is

uh it's keeping oppressed and it has bombed and destroyed is threatening to bomb and destroy again so any limitations that they put on my travel i would gladly accept uh and understand them however that was not my experience at all there uh we weren't restricted in any way we could go where we want uh we could talk to who we wanted to talk to and in general uh people in the dprk are very open to speaking with foreigners, people would come up to us, ask us questions, ask us about, you know, what life was like in the U.S. They were very curious, always to hear what we thought about their country. And, you know, I mean, my main takeaway is, is that North Korea is another country in two ways. One is it, it's just another country, right? I mean, you go there and you see people

holding hands and courting each other and fighting and laughing, and you see parents playing ball with their kids, right? You see people playing. You see people jazzercising in the parks and reading. You see people going to work, talking on cell phones. You know, just like you would, you know, in your own hometown. On the other hand, it's another country in that it's, you know, it's a socialist country, and it's a nationalist country in that it's a, it's a Korean culture.

It's Korean culture. There's no billboards of white people. Whiteness is not held up as a norm. that should be related to. Korean culture is held up as a norm. And Korean culture is what you see. Now, they do have Western media. I mean, they do have, you know, we went to the grand people study house,

and they had Harry Potter there. They had Madonna CDs. They had, you know, Western music and all that. But it's not fetishized like it is in many other places, you know. And it's especially striking if you've ever been to South Korea, which is like, you know, I mean, that's totally colonized culturally. I think that that's really what I want to say about it. And, yeah, that's what I want to say.

Well, you mentioned the concept of whiteness, and I think it's interesting to kind of drill down on this a little bit. You know, whiteness insofar as the U.S. goes into other countries and exports its culture to these countries, whiteness becomes a thing. And as you mentioned in South Korea, the sort of U.S. culture infiltration into that society has a bunch of nefarious effects. How does whiteness manifest itself in South Korea in a way that it doesn't necessarily manifest itself in the DPRK?

Yeah, well, I mean, one thing is that people speak English. Another is that you see U.S. troops walking around. Another is that when you're in downtown Seoul, you see the U.S. embassy is bigger than the Korean Parliament. Wow. And it's more prominently featured than the Blue House. And it's very clear that Western dress, Western styles of music, U.S. styles of dress in particular, U.S. styles of music are prominent. And when you go to the DPRK, you don't hear Western music, you don't see Western styles of dress, you see Korean styles of dress, you see Korean styles of dress, you listen to Korean music, you see Korean TV, you watch Korean movies, people speak Korean, and they talk about Korea. So it's really kind of night and day in terms of culture and the role of historic Korean culture.

Now, you got sick on your trip to the DPRK, if I'm correct, and you actually got a firsthand experience of the healthcare system. Can you talk a little bit about that and sort of what you went through in that situation? Yeah, sure. So oftentimes when I travel to other countries, you know, my stomach gets upset for a little bit, getting used to the food and stuff like that. So, I don't know, it'd been maybe day two or three. Basically, I asked my friend Rung Ill, who I was with, if that day we could stop at, like, a pharmacy so I can get some Emodium ID. And he said, oh, no, no, no, we have to take you to the hospital. And this was like a couple of months after they had said Otto Warmbier home.

And he was in a coma at the time. And I think that they were just really, really scared that I was like, you know, that this was. the onset of some illness, and I would go home and, like, get sick and die, and then the U.S. would blame it on the North Korean, so they were like, we have to take you to the hospital. So anyways, I did go to the hospital. I had two doctors and four nurses throughout my time there. I don't know what they gave me, but they gave me something, hooked me up to an IV, put some fluids through me. And it was interesting when they were giving me the IV, before they were giving me, I said, you know, no, I don't really need this. And, and,

And they said, no, we have a moral obligation to help you feel as good as we can, which is interesting, because I've never heard a doctor in the United States talk about a moral obligation. Not that many individual doctors, I'm sure, don't feel sort of some sense of moral obligation, but it doesn't enter the discourse in hospitals, you know, and the treatment was free, and I was very grateful for it. And they, you know, treated me with immense hospitality. They gave me a hard time about being a weak American and joked with me about that, and they were very friendly. I was glad to meet them and glad to sort of meet and see, you know,

because the World Health Organization, actually, I think it was in 2010, maybe in 2011. The head of the World Health Organization, Margaret Chan said that the DPRK's healthcare system is the envy of the developing world. Yeah. Wow. That's, I mean, just the, this is the very notion that you can go into a health care building and receive health care with absolutely no financial obligation on your end is just so so alien to me and in my entire life experiences here in the US but yes first time for me yeah before we close on the dprk and move on there have been recent opening up of relations between the north and the south and korea um what are your thoughts on this what do the korean people in so far as you can tell from your research and your experience

one for the two countries moving forward so i think that this is a a situation where it's highly conjectural, right? I mean, so the DPRK took advantage of the strategic patience of the Obama administration to really shift the balance of forces to their benefit. And then you had the Moon Jain, who was brought in on the heels of the candlelight revolution. Moon is a centrist, but he sees a historic opportunity, right? And many people around him are much more progressive and have historic ties to the peace and reunification grassroots movements. And then the Winter Olympics, right, provided a platform for the two Koreas to do something practical that would not be military or political, but more like cultural and humanitarian. And it made it impossible

for the U.S. to step up anti-Korea rhetoric, right? And what happened, these sort of three developments came together to create an opening for the North and South Koreans who ran through it, right, as fast as they could. The Americans, you know, who would, like, weren't able to block it. And so there was this sort of, you know, breakneck speed at which things were developing. and there's an incredible momentum on the peninsula for reunification. Because there's, you know, there's 10 million families who are divided who haven't seen each other, you know, since, since 1953 or earlier. And, you know, so no one could have really predicted this. These are all, you know, conjectural opportunities.

And, you know, most recently the DPRK announced that it would sort of halt its missile tests and close down a test site. From their perspective, they've completed the test, right? They're no longer needed. They weren't trying to become a major nuclear power. They just needed a sort of foundational nuclear capability, really, to do what they wanted to do. And they're not giving up anything that they care about at the moment. And that's what the U.S. media right now is picking up on and sort of attacking them for. They're suspending and freeze in the program.

There's going to be a pushback from the U.S. for sure. I think in terms of North-S.-Routh relations, I think that that sort of has a momentum of its own. And the U.S. can, you know, I think as long as the U.S. can, you know, I think as long as the, the DPRK, the DPRK were to conduct another missile test. I think it could sour it. It doesn't look like that will happen. So I think that North-South improvement, improving relations will continue. People are very hopeful about that.

I'm actually headed to South Korea on Tuesday to participate in a peace and reunification conference. And I'm excited to speak more with the people there. But in general, you know, the DPRK has also really done wonders for on South Korean perceptions. and while many you know most even liberals in the in the in the south have always been open you know everybody wants reunification except for like you know five 10 percent hard right uh reactionaries there is there's just a very favorable opinion right now for reunification and people are very hopeful i was talking to to one organizer who who said they could have reunification within three years he he thought so you know i i can't necessarily speak to like the evaluating

that claim, but I think that it's important to put out there. Yeah, one thing I think I wonder about is if there is, you know, a reunification in the near future, you know, the two societies are very different and they run along different economic lines. What would, like, I know this is an impossible question to answer fully, but like what are your kind of thoughts on what a reunification would look like for that peninsula economically and politically since the two sides are pretty far apart on both of those both of those friends well it would be a federation it would be a federation of two independent states uh for a period of time kim il san said it would have to be something like i don't know 30 or 40

years um of course that you know was said decades ago but uh but you know the north koreans uh still take that to be quite serious that sort of timeline but yeah no it'll be a federated states uh two two states um but one people and that will be the most important thing right and improving interstate dialogue, communication, cooperation, not just between the leaderships, but between the people, and allowing all Korean people access to the entirety of their peninsula, which as of right now, the U.S., you know, South Koreans can go to North Korea, but North Koreans can't go to South Korea. And South Koreans can't go to North Korea because of the U.S., right?

and because of the occupation of their country. The North Koreans don't have anything against letting the South Koreans in. It's totally the other way around. So, you know, and I talked to, you know, I remember having a conversation with young people last time I was in the South in June of 2016, and they were saying, you know, we just, we want to go there so bad and we want to camp in the mountains. That was like the main thing they wanted to do. And so, you know, it's things like that, you know, it's not always like sort of high level delegations.

It's the sort of these, you know, desires on behalf of, you know, the entire population to engage in these kinds of acts that are, you know, should be so simple. It should be so simple to go to one part of your country and camp, but, you know, the occupation of it makes it impossible. Yeah, and that's something to remember, you know, this is overwhelmingly what the Korean people themselves want. They want reunification. They want the families to be reconnected. And in order for that to really happen in a robust way, the U.S. needs to get out of the situation altogether. And so the job of leftist here in the Imperial Corps is to constantly be, you know, sounding that alarm and pushing back against every ounce of U.S. propaganda and imperialist aggression against the DPRK and the peninsula generally, because this can't happen if the U.S. has its hands in the situation as much as it wants to have its hands in the situation. So just something for people to think about.

Yeah, 100%. So let's go ahead and move on because in 2016, you published a wrote a book called Communist Study, Education for the Commons. Now, there was so much to talk with you about that I couldn't spend the whole interview on just one subject, but I do want to touch on this work of yours because I think it's important. Can you kind of summarize what you set out to do in that work and what you hope people ultimately take away from it? The book, I wrote the book right after I defended my dissertation and ultimately,

I was interested in educational questions that arise in revolutionary movement. So oftentimes on the left, reading leftist literature, communist literature, there's often reference to education in educational terms. We talk about sort of forming study groups. We talk about learning. We talk about teaching the masses. We talk about learning lessons, right? we even talk oftentimes about testing.

And there's never any inquiry into the sort of particulars. And so because I'm a philosopher of education, I thought that really if there's one thing that my academic labor can contribute to social struggles, it can be the articulation and the proposal of educational processes and educational concepts to help us both understand our current order and also contribute towards the organizing for a new order. And so communist study takes up this question of study. And what I do is I show that capitalism rests on the educational logic of learning. Now learning is the acquisition of predetermined habits, knowledge, customs, dispositions,

anything like that skills and this is the reason why learning can be measured and evaluated is because we know what x looks like beforehand and so as a result i can judge your competency on your path towards x whether that x is becoming a productive worker or a productive citizen or a mathematician or even a a communist organizer right i know what this looks like and so i can sort of measure and evaluate you evaluate you along the way. And in each case, it's about identifying a potential and actualizing that potential. And one thing that this does under capitalism is it serves to prop up capitalism because learning always is about predetermined things. It's about what is, not necessarily what can be. And so it's inherently a reproductive mode of educational engagement. And it's also one in our particular sort of precarious post-fortist workforce, right, where we are continually having to retool and reskill ourselves to meet the ever-changing demands of the global, flexible economy.

Today we oftentimes don't even learn certain things. We rather learn how to learn. And so learning is an educational logic, educational state of being is so ingrained in us. So I think, you know, my contention is that we need to develop alternative educational logics if learning is tightly wedded to capitalism, which doesn't mean that it's like, you know, inherently capitalistic, but it's tightly wedded to capitalism in this moment. So we need alternative forms of education. And so I propose studying as one such form. And studying is in many ways the opposite of learning. When you study, it's not about an end. It's about actually sort of exploring things, and you may have an end in sight when you set out to study, but that end retreats very quickly. The goal is sort of held in abeyance as you wander through the archives, right? As you follow link after link on YouTube or J-Store or, you know, Twitter or whatever, and you sort of get lost in things. And in that getting lost, you open yourself up to unforeseen arrangements and social relations and feelings, and so.

so on. And so studying is very much a process of opening oneself up. It's something that we, today, in education, we see studying as an impediment, right? We often see, when we're studying, we often think of it as we're distracted, right, because we're distracted from the end goal. And so, because studying is precisely opening up the end goal so that you're open to other things along the way. And so I'm really interesting. in this as a sort of communist idea as something that can return us to a commons, to a common exploration of the world as it is and the world as it could be otherwise. Yeah, we have many educators and teachers that listen to this show. And so again, the name of

that book is communist study education for the commons. If anybody is interested in pursuing that further, I highly recommend it. Now, you've alluded to this in that last answer, but also in other interviews, you've actually said, quote, schooling plays an absolutely pivotal role in the reproduction of capitalism and, more importantly, capitalist social relations, end quote. I think leftists generally have a vague understanding of how this kind of works, but can you maybe flesh it out for us in some detail? How does capitalism shape the educational system that we have today? Sure. Well, in the United States, our educational system has its origins in the early 19th century between 1830, 1850, 1860 with the common school movement associated with a guy named Horace Mann.

And this is, actually what's interesting is that they're very explicit about the reason for this. One is the production of a national identity that there needs to be a sort of cohesive identity instead of various fragmented ethnic identities. And also, they are grappling with the question of founding this new republic, which is both democratic and capitalist. And if you read the industrial capitalist at the time and the political theorists at the time, they're really concerned with how you have these two antagonistic things together. And because, of course, democracy is supposed to be like one person, one vote, and it's all about equality. capitalism is one dollar one vote and it's all about inequality and they know this and they're like how can we have these two things coexist because if we if we don't manage this contradiction sometime quickly then the republic is going to be overthrown and so the introduction of common schooling was the answer to this to this contradiction and in particular through the logic of meritocracy the idea being that we will give everyone an equal access to schooling and then we will be able to shift the blame from capitalism to the individual when workers end up as workers, poor people end up as poor people and capitalists end up as

capitalists. They were really explicit about this. I mean, you know, the schooling system is a site of struggle, right? So people are demanding access to it. They're demanding transformations within it. And there's the capitalism is always reacting upon it. One way, there's a, there's a a historian of education named David Labrary and he talks about this what he calls the elevator effect which is that as the working masses

demand access to education they oftentimes get that access but then the elite classes they create sort of a higher rung of education so in other words when the working classes demanded in one access

to higher education in the early 20th century then tracking was introduced. So workers were tracked in lower tracks and the rich people were tracked in higher tracks. And then all the rich people went to college. And then when workers got access to college, well, that's when master's and PhD programs came into fruition. And when workers start to enter graduate school, that's when you get things like postdocs, which are sort of the more elite form. So in other words, it's an elevator because as the bottom comes up, so does the top. So there's never actually an equaling of opportunity. There's just an equaling of access.

So it's, it doesn't, schooling has done nothing to alleviate inequality in the United States. Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. I never heard that argument about how there's like this tiered situation that always is trying to keep ahead of workers moving up that ladder. That's a fascinating way to look at it. This is kind of a more of ground floor level analysis of, of, of of this question, but at the same time, I think it's important. And when I'm at work every day, I see this weird, it's patronizing and it's condescending, but this weird reflection of what it was like to be in school. For instance, on Valentine's Day, at my job, I work in an office environment, hourly wage worker, et cetera, administrative work. But on Valentine's Day, we did the

thing we used to do in elementary school where we all, we're told, I mean, we were told to make our own little boxes and we gave each other Valentine's Day cards. I mean, I opted out of that, but a lot of people took part in it. On Halloween, we're allowed to dress up. There's times when we're being too loud, and the bosses send out an email like, hey, can everybody quiet down a little bit? We have a uniform that parallels the school uniform. We have segmented days, and once in a while, when we have a really hard week, our bosses will even take us out on a field trip to go bowling or going to the pumpkin patch or something. And in those parallels, I always find it so absurd that we're just replicating the same sort of hierarchical structures that we had in elementary

school. And I personally find it just dehumanizing and infantilizing. That's just one way, though, that I think those sorts of structures are replicated in the workplace. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, schools in the United States resemble prisons because they were actually built by the same architects as those who design prisons. So schooling comes, mass schooling comes about in the same, basically what's happening with the economy is the creation of a national economy through canals, turnpikes, and so on and so forth. And so now as capitalism accelerates and more workers become wage workers, the elderly and young people and those who can't work for whatever reason are thrown off of the land, right? They're expropriated from the land that they

we're working on and the wage earners can't support them and so we have schools for the children we have hospitals for the elderly we have asylums for those who can't work because to not be able to work is to literally be insane and all of these institutions are created at the same time to deal with these kind of surplus populations and they're all about disciplining people into capitalism basically and so you know what's what's important in school is not necessarily the content of what you learn is that you learn what to do when bells ring right you learn how to uh well there's a there's a these guys samuel bolz and herbert gintas wrote this excellent book 1976 uh schooling in capitalist america and they argue in general that there's sort of a correspondence

between the social relations of school and the social relations at work not just between students and teachers but between uh students and students and teachers and administrators administrators and administrators and teachers that they all sort of mirror the relations of the workplace and I think that even today that argument still holds a lot of water although it's different because now we don't know we no longer capitalism no longer needs a massive really workforce you know like people who are going to be filling like clerical jobs and things like that so oftentimes so this is one of the reasons you know it's one of the drives behind school closing is capitalism simply doesn't need education people as much anymore. So schooling is often much more about just sort of warehousing people. Right. And I also noticed, yeah, absolutely. And in my own workplace, I also notice the racialized hierarchy of our general society

being sort of reflected and distilled in the workplace. You have immigrants and people of color often working the janitorial jobs and the higher up the hierarchy of the workplace you go, the wider and wider it gets and the more male it gets. so I mean even in the workplace itself it's it's sort of a microcosm of the broader society generally and it's it's hyper racist and it's classist and all of that stuff um people have people generally on the left sort of I mean maybe not to a huge extent but they kind of understand how capitalism shapes the educational system but one thing I think a lot of people have trouble with

is is how education would be different under a socialist or a communist society and I know you've talked about this before so how would education be different under socialist society and a communist society, in your opinion? Yeah, well, you know, here's the thing is that oftentimes, because of where socialist revolutions have taken place, there has definitely been an emphasis on producing workers and producing skills in order to develop the economy and develop the productive forces. There's also, however, has been historically an emphasis on things like self-determination. So, for example, in the Soviet Union, if your child, which had, you know, over a hundred different nationalities within it, and, you know, throughout its existence, alphabetized hundreds of languages and made it legal to speak them, right?

And if you, if your child went to school and you're of a national minority and there were at least three other national minority children at the school, you would have. have the right to have your children taught in their own language, which is, you know, I think incredibly progressive and a great model. If you can think about how many schools in the U.S. are not where there's not only like where national minorities are the majority, but they are forced to learn and speak in English. So there's always a sort of decolonial elements to socialist education in socialist states. But I'd also give, give an answer by turning to, you know, to education within communist parties and youth groups within communist parties.

One of the interesting distinctions between youth groups and communist and socialist parties in the early 20th century was that socialist youth groups were always about preparation for adulthood and membership in the party, whereas communist youth groups were actually members of the party themselves, and they actually did the work themselves.

So in other words, in the socialist youth groups, they were sort of looking, learning about what it means to organize, and they would go out and they would sort of fundraise for strikes and stuff like that. But in the communist youth groups, they were actually treated as agents in their own right and as people who could act now. And so they organized their own campaigns. And so I think that that's an interesting distinction where under communism, one is treated, the child is not defined by their not yet being an adult. that distinction between the socialist and the communist differences is super interesting and I appreciate your work on that front let's move on to the third segment of this interview like as I said before we have a lot of ground to cover so it feels like we're kind of jumping around but it's important to address a wide range of issues here you've mentioned jean francois leotard in previous interviews can you talk about what influence leotard has had on you as a revolutionary and to thinker and what you think leftist today can and should take away from his work I was sort of brought into the socialist struggle at a very young age,

both, you know, when I was in, when I was in elementary school. And so when I was in undergraduate, I had already sort of, you know, a set of political convictions and a sort of background in, you know, in Marxism, not to say that I was like a developed Marxist, and I think that, you know, we're always developing. But in any case, when I got to college and I started to read people who, you know, weren't associated with Marxists, and oftentimes were, you know, Marxists hated, and they maybe even hated Marxists, I always had a different tact to it because I was always looking at like sort of what it can gut, what it can, how it can contribute to the struggle.

And the same thing happened when I was in graduate school. And one of the things that I try to do in my academic work is to translate philosophers and theorists who are outside of the socialist tradition or sort of, you know, ancillary to it and provide some translations. show how they can be useful to social movement theorizing. And so Leotard, I took a seminar with a woman named Margaret Grebovich in undergrad and came back to Leotard, and he's someone I continually come back to. And he's interesting.

He was a socialist and left, it was a part of the group socialism or barbarism in France and left that and had sort of a series of polemics against it and then is associated with this thing called postmodernism, although he. of course, never calls himself a postmodernist. He actually doesn't really talk about postmodernism. He talks about a postmodern condition. But in any case, Leotard, there's several things that are very useful. One is he has an excellent critique of democracy.

For Leotard, the problem with democracy is that it can't tolerate any absence. By that, I mean, it demands that everything be explored. rest. So, well, Margaret Grubovich at one point says something like, you know, under capitalist, under democracy, it's like you had the right to do this or say that, right? Why didn't you? Why don't you? There's always

this demand to actualize. There's always this demand to articulate things. And it's at that point when those things can be, that are brought to articulation, can then enter in circuits of exchange. And so what I think Leotar shows us really is an advanced

an advanced analysis of how democracy and capitalism work hand and glove. Democracy fashions us as subjects who constantly need to express and articulate, and then capitalism provides the circuits through which our articulations are put to the use of the production of surplus value, right, in valorization. And so he's also that interested in theorizing that which escapes democracy, which he calls the secret. And we call it many things. The secret is one name for it. He calls it event elsewhere. He calls it figure elsewhere.

And this is, you know, sort of opacity. There's a Latin American theorist named Eduardo Lissant who talks about the right to opacity. And this is something he's not talking about leotard, but I think that there's a deep connection here, that there's always something that escapes us and that escapes capital and escapes democracy. and I think that that can be a place of resistance. And in fact, I would argue that Jushe, the Jusche ideology, functions in precisely this way as a refusal to articulate and to put ideology into Western language, which is why all the translations of Jushe ideology always seem a bit off. I think that this is sort of intentional.

I think in that many ways part of Jusier is actually this refusal to articulate and this sort of keeping of the secret. So I think that leotard gives us interesting resources here, some aesthetic resources, and I see part of my work as trying to bring these into social struggles to people who otherwise wouldn't, you know, would it maybe have discarded leotard? And, you know, certainly it's, you know, I don't take all of him.

But the thing about his work in general, he's often read as some postmodernist who's just all about difference. But he's actually not. And often, and he's always, he's interested in what else is there. He's interested in the new, but he's never interested in sort of critically celebrating the new or the different. And he actually believes that otherness and repression need to be held in tension. So he gives us, in other words, a way to access new things that we may not be able to articulate and indeed that we maybe resist articulation. but he doesn't say that like yeah that's it that's just what we need to do right we just need to

sort of be uh be excessive be surplus be insurrectionary he also is recognizes the need for repression and for bringing things to discourse and bringing things to articulation so in effect i see a dialectic at work in leotard that i that i think is incredibly useful for us yeah that's all really interesting um for anybody that might want to learn more about leotard based on what you just said there. What would be maybe a recommendation that you could give somebody to dive into him and his work? He has a book, a short book that's called The Postmodern Explained that people might be interested in. And also for people who maybe don't want to delve into Leotard per se, but are interested in like his sort of political utility, there's a book called Leotard

and the Political. And I'd also, you know, I'm always happy to send people my own stuff if they just email me. All right. Great. Yeah. And we'll definitely link to you. when we post it on Twitter so people can find you on Twitter and then go from there. But yesterday, me and my organization, the Nebraska Left Coalition, we're organizing a sort of a fitness program mixed in with a communist education program where we kind of do everything together. And we were talking about organizing generally. And you had a quote that I brought up in that discussion that I had read earlier that day.

You've argued that, quote, organizing always has to be undertaken as doing the grueling, mostly boring, preparatory work for the insurrectional moment. end quote. I think this is essential for especially younger comrades to learn, but for organizers generally to understand. So can you talk about what communist organizing is and what aspects of it you think are crucial for leftist organizers of all stripes to understand? Yeah. I mean, you know, I say that because honestly, I really don't like organizing. I don't like going to protest. I don't like organizing protests. I mean, I like people. I like talking to people,

but I would much rather not struggle. Like it's not something that I, that I, that I, that I, that I, that enjoy doing i mean you know of course when i when i am struggling with people when you're in a struggle you know i mean it's because i have these goals and i think that this is the this is the distinction is that um whatever joy i get out of organizing doing this grueling work right i mean most most organizing is terrible like you're you're you're alone or you're with a small group of people uh you're doing repetitive work right you're making flyers you're editing them you're printing them out you're handing them out um you know you're going door to door you're calling people you're making placards right painting banners a lot of time consuming stuff and it's just

not it's not glorious but what is like what I'm driven by is not that activity right it's the goal it's the it's the it's the revolution right and that structure is retroactively everything that we do and so you know like obviously when I'm in a protest and I'm you know shoulder to shoulder with with workers and oppressed people and we're like in a struggle, we're fighting, right? I do feel good because I feel our power, right? So I like, I like protests in that sense. You know, I feel powerful. I like being with the people.

You know, I love that feeling of possibility and seeing people fight, seeing people struggle, having that, you know, give me courage to struggle harder to fight harder. But, you know, struggling is mostly this grueling work. And so it's about sort of taking, like if you're in a protest and a struggle, you're feeling that power. You've got to keep that power with you when then you go to organize in your own community or some new task, right,

with the grueling work and the boring work and the work that nobody sees instead of, you know, as if it's just the sort of protest that it's just when you're, you know, fighting the cops or, you know, whatever, whatever it may be. So to me, that's communist organizing. You know, it's organizing.

Organizing is basically just sort of getting people together and, and mediating, discussions and then you know figuring out action plans right it's often interesting how people sort of present organizing as some like uh you know some unique skill set um and of course there are skills one can have that can like make organizing easier but you know in general organizing is what do you do yet there's a problem you call a meeting and you see what people want to do about it right but when you're doing that as a communist you have a um you have an end goal in mind which is revolution and you're also a member of a party so you're not doing it alone you're doing it with the

collective base of knowledge and experience yeah and yeah you touched on this the feeling that we get in protests there's really nothing like it i talked with jody dean about this in our discussion a few months ago but the the feeling of solidarity the feeling of community the feeling of real power is something that is so unique to the protest movement for all of the limitations of protests in and of themselves. There's something deeply communal about it, and there's something that you can actually feel the power of numbers, of an organization, of a group coming together

to fight back against their own oppression and to fight their oppressors. And that's worthwhile in and of itself, but the day-to-day work of organizing generally, as you talked about, is not romantic. It's not glorious, but it's fundamental, because it lays the groundwork for whatever may come. famous Lennon quote that says there are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when

decades happen. And if we're going to wait until something pops off to start desperately trying to come together and figure something out, we're going to be steamrolled. So we have to have the networks in place, the organization in place, the programs in place for if and when that moment of collapse or insurrection comes that we have that groundwork laid so that we can start operating immediately and effectively in our communities. Yeah, precisely. So last question. I just mentioned Jody Dean, and I know that you're friends with Jody Dean and both of you are part of PSL,

and we've had her on the show a couple months ago. Both of you argue passionately for the importance of a communist party. Why is the party so essential, in your opinion, for any successful communist movement, and what should a communist party look like and do? Yeah, a good question. So, you know, Jody's theory of the party, what she adds to it, is a, psychoanalytic element where, you know, she argues, I think really brilliantly and helpfully and accurately, that the party provides an effective infrastructure that acts on its

members and provides a gap in the world so that we can see and experience each other and ourselves as really agents of world historic transformation and such as activists who are going to a protest. And how that sort of effective infrastructure then plays itself out when we're doing the grueling everyday work of organizing. My sort of contribution to theorizing the Communist Party sees it as an educational structure, right? Now, the reason why, you know, we argue for the Communist Party, I think, is the same, which is that it's the most effective vehicle to overthrow capitalism, right? Now, what's interesting, though, is in the founding document of the Communist International in 1921, which is like guiding, right, explicitly the formation of the world's communist parties, point two of this talks about how there's no, like, correct, immutable organizational form for communist parties and that, like, the conditions of struggle are subject to change and are, right, subject to unceasing processes of transformation.

and so like the party and the proletariat have to appropriate forms corresponding to those changes. So I think this is interesting because the party is an organizational apparatus, right? It's sort of most capable of meeting the challenges at the moment, what particular the farm it takes, right, to be open, but it's a vehicle, right? So, you know, the idea is that we don't have a party forever. We have a party in struggle. And what I'm interested in and hope to contribute to theorizing on the party is that it's an educational apparatus that engages and organizes different things like learning, studying, teaching, and testing. So, for example, in Lenin's book, Lenin short pamphlet, Left Wing Communism, which I really think everyone should read, especially those who are new to the movement.

Lenin's writing it around this time, right, as the, as the communist international, the third international or the common turn is forming, and after the success of the Bolshevik revolution, and he's reflecting on that success. And his argument is that you can't understand the success of the Bolshevik revolution by looking. at the insurrectionary moment that it was decades of very unique particular circumstances and it was because of the Bolsheviks really like endless flexibility in tactics that allowed them to accumulate. In other words, to learn the experiences and the knowledge that they needed to learn to be able to execute and to pass the test of revolution. And I think, you know, what's so interesting about it is you see just all, I mean, they were anywhere the masses were, right?

I mean, even the Black 100s, which was like a union that the Tsar set up specifically to entrap workers, right? It was like, it was straight up, like, you know, it wasn't just a reformist trade union. It was like a Tsar, a trade union. And the Bolsheviks sent people into it, right? I mean, they were like, that's where workers are. That's where we got to be there. the way that they combined the legal and the legal activity, the underground, the above ground activity, the way that they were able to discern where to go, when, and what they were able to do with that knowledge. So they were able to accumulate to learn these lessons that no individual could learn.

And they were able to learn these lessons that no organization that didn't operate according to Democratic Centralism could learn. And so they were also then able to pass the task. test of the insurrectionary moment. And that's one of the things that I'm interested in most recently is the test, which, you know, has a really bad rap because of the sort of deadening standardized tests and stuff. And there was recently a very terrible defense of the SAT and Jacobin. And I don't mean that. I mean the sort of test in general.

Like you can think about the protest as a kind of test. Like the protest is a pro test. And all sorts of kinds of tests are happening, right? the leadership is tested. The leadership is testing slogans on the people. You're testing the protest that came before it. And you're both in that you're sort of like seeing if it's still where it was before or if you can push it to a new level, right? If you can sort of have a test that creates a new set of conditions like a scientific test, which tries to create a new truth about science or something like that. So I think that we have to look at the Communist Party

as a complex educational organism and that it's only that kind of educational organism that can effectively intervene on the side of working class and oppressed people in the contemporary struggle against imperialism. Absolutely. Yeah, well said. Now, before we let you go, you have a new book coming out this year, if I understand correctly. What is the name of that book and what are your goals for it generally? Yeah, so the book is called pedagogy and politics in the post-truth era, insurgent philosophy and praxis. And, you know, initially when I heard the phrase post-truth, I dismissed it as a bunch of sort

of liberal nonsense. But then I was thinking about, like, could this be a, could this have utility? Should I not just dismiss this? And I thought, yeah, well, if we actually conceive of the post-truth in the way that Leotard thinks about the postmodern. And for leotard, the postmodern doesn't come after the modern. It's something that inhabits the modern and interrupts it, sort of destabilizes it. And so the post-truth moment right now is a moment of crisis and instability. And so therefore, it's a tremendous opportunity for the left to intervene.

And so my argument is that politics never corresponds with the truth. Politics is about the formulation of new truths and the struggle to make those truths, truths. And so an example of this would be the work day, right? According to, right, I saw my labor to the boss. So it's my labor. I should be able to say, these are the conditions of my work. This is my work day. My boss says, I bought your labor. I should be able to say how long your work day is and what the conditions are. Within the juridical framework of capitalism, it can't be solved. It's only through force and struggle that it's solved. So both, both when I say, you know, these should be the conditions of my work and my boss says those could be these should be the

conditions of your work both of those are true but only one can be correct and so politics is about the struggle to make a truth correct to make it actually correspond to the conditions of reality so the book is a series of explorations for the pedagogical and political impulses needed to use this particular moment to fight for and produce new truths truths that of course are in accordance with justice for the world and its inhabitants. Yeah, and thanks to you, I was able to read the introduction to that book, and I'm extremely excited for that book to come out and be published, and when it does, we'll absolutely have you back on to discuss that book in full. So thank you, Derek, so much for coming on. It's been an absolute honor to talk to you.

I hope we can talk again in the future, but before I do let you go, can you let listeners know where they can find you in your work online? Yes, so I'm on Twitter at Derek R. Ford, D-E-R-E-K, and I also have an academia EDU site, which has all my work, and my email is Derek Ford at the pod at EDU, and you can email me for, you know, any papers or whatever just to just say hi. And I'm definitely, you know, I've really enjoyed this conversation, and I'm really looking forward to and hopeful that we can talk again. Absolutely. Thank you so much for coming on. Let's keep in touch. All right. Take care. Hey!

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