Rev Left Radio - Eric Mann on Revolutionary Struggle Part 2: Labor Organizing, The Working Class, and Proletarian Internationalism

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

Breht speaks with veteran organizer, revolutionary strategist, Elder of the movement, and author Eric Mann. Together they discuss Eric's life and work, including his book on George Jackson, the Hard Hat riot against Vietnam protesters, how to organize effectively in the work place, Eric's personal relationship with Howard Zinn, the importance of revolutionary  journalism, combatting chauvinism, and SO much more. Check out Part One of Breht's discussion with Eric HERE Opening clip from Mother Country Radical podcast More Biography of Eric Mann: Eric Mann (born December 4, 1942) is a civil rights, anti-war, labor, and environmental organizer. He has worked with the Congress of Racial Equality, Newark Community Union Project, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Panther Party, the United Automobile Workers (including eight years on auto assembly lines) and the New Directions Movement. He was also active as a leader of SDS faction the Weathermen, which later became the militant left-wing organization Weather Underground. He was arrested in September 1969 for participation in a direct action against the Harvard Center for International Affairs and sentenced to two years in prison on charges of conspiracy to commit murder after two bullets were fired through a window of the Cambridge police headquarters on November 8, 1969. He was instrumental in the movement that helped to keep a General Motors assembly plant in Van Nuys, California open for ten years. Mann has been credited for helping to shape the environmental justice movement in the U.S. He founded the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, California and has been its director for 25 years. In addition, Mann is founder and co-chair of the Bus Riders Union, which sued the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority for what it called "transit racism", resulting in a precedent-setting civil rights lawsuit, Labor Community Strategy Center et al. v. MTA. Get 15% off any book at Left Wing Books HERE ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

The police riot radicalizes SDS, turns it from a debate club into an army of militants. And while some members still want to focus on building a peaceful mass movement, Bernadine is determined to channel their rage, to up the level of protest and provocation. SDS is not, in the movement in this country, is not something that exists during the school year and it's going to start up again in the fall, and if they have to worry about whether we're going to be in the streets in the fall. They're going to be on the streets and in every institution in this country from now on. It all comes to a head at the 1969 SDS Convention in Chicago. These are leaders of the nationwide youth organization that calls itself SDS, students for a democratic society.

I'm Mike Klonsky, National Secretary of SDS, and this is Bernadine Doorn, Interorgan, Interorganizational Secretary. Bernardine and a group of student activists are out on the street outside the convention hall. We've always been quite willing to talk about... I will talk about socialism anywhere, and the streets are in the Senate anywhere. Mike Klonsky, one of SDS's two other leaders, is talking over her, but she doesn't seem to mind. They're having a good time with the reporters, giving this crazy, impromptu press conference, playing to the crowd. Is there a communist faction making a big power play for SDS? That's my mom laughing.

In fact, the whole thing is kind of funny. Inside, the convention is a circus of counterculture college students. It's like a model UN meeting on acid. A cramped sweaty auditorium, more than a thousand delegates. People are making speeches, moving and seconding proposals. Others are smoking pot, getting in shoving matches on the convention floor. All of it kind of ridiculously under Robert's rules of order. And then on the third day, Bernadine is up on stage, about to give another speech

when the Black Panthers walk into the hall. in sunglasses, leather jackets, bucket hats. What are they doing there at a SDS meeting? It would have been weird to have the National Convention in Chicago and to have the Panthers not be invited to speak. In other words, she's invited them. You know, it was a time where power was ascendant and the line was, you know, you should be a supporter, an ally, a revolutionary,

alongside of us. But, you know, your challenge was worse than ours, organized white people. And so that's what we tried to do. Not everyone in SDS agreed with this strategy. I'm not going to unpack all the complicated factionalism going on inside the organization at the time. There's too many acronyms, too many obscure political lines. But the central conflict breaks down into one single existential difference. On one side, PL, progressive labor, believe the revolution will come from the working class,

that students should become workers themselves, organize in factories and hotels, help build a broader class consciousness. On the other side is Bernadine. You can't talk about class in the United States without talking about race. And her group, the revolutionary youth movement, known in SDS as the action faction.

You have to take action. You have to do something. They're trying to follow the example of black and brown people fighting nationalist struggles overseas. To build a small but militant resistance, like the Viet Cong, the Cuban Revolution, the Tupamaros in Uruguay. Or here at home, the vanguard of the revolution, the Black Panther Party. They were a rising force, and they were well-known, deep, had a radical platform. When the Panthers walk into the convention hall, SDS members like Eric Mann and Jeff Jones

can feel the energy shift. And they went to the microphone, and they said, we will judge SDS by the company it keeps, and P.L. is no good. That was the dramatic moment. That's when everything changed. Shaka Walls, the Panther Deputy Minister of Information, tells the convention the Black Panthers are the vanguard,

because they've shed more blood than anyone. And, referring to PL, these armchair Marxists haven't even shot rubber bands. Jeff Jones remembers this as a turning point. And so there were hundreds of us in the Coliseum. And what happened at that moment was chaos, confusion. The people affiliated with progressive labor began to boo the Panthers. Our position was we follow the leadership of the black liberation struggle. And so this was a very challenging moment.

Even more challenging, because after Shaka Walls accuses white activists of being useless, deadweight in the struggle, he starts mansplaining the role of women in the revolution. We believe in the freedom of love, he says, in pussy power. Someone asks about the role of women in the movement, and another panther, Jewel Cook, says, you sisters have a strategic position in the revolution? Prone. Female activists start booing. The place is in an uproar. Mark Rudd, the third SDS National Officer,

remembers it as a full-blown cultural revolution moment. So immediately the Progressive Labor Party kids took out their little red books and held them up and started screaming, you know, fight male chauvinism, fight male chauvinism. And so the rest of us held up our little red books and screamed fight racism. Bernardine is on stage at the podium.

And it was complicated because things were said about women that were not cool. But, you know, things were said about the black struggle that was cool. She has to decide what to do. Whenever white people have a choice, you can't make that choice without thinking about how easy it is to not stand up for black people at a given moment. I never felt like I wasn't choosing women. but I felt that, you know, the essential American dilemma is white people standing up not just once, but consistently over time, against the apparatus of black slavery. Yeah, that one's easy for me, in fact, and not that complicated.

My mom's a feminist, but she's never seen women's equality as separate from anti-racism. If anything, she sees the Panthers, the majority of whom were women, as important feminist allies. Or as Angela Davis puts it, she knew exactly how to make those connections long before the term intersectionality had ever been introduced. At a time when we hadn't yet developed the vocabulary that allowed us to talk about gender issues in an intersectional way, I read some of her communiques, and my reaction was always, you know, right on. So Bernardine makes her choice. And then there's a quick little huddle up at the front of the room around the podium.

And I was on the periphery of that. Bernadine was at the center of it, and the discussion was going back and forth and back and forth. And literally, Bernadine stopped the discussion. And she said, there's no discussion. White youth must choose sides now. We must either fight on the side of the oppressed or be on the side of the oppressor. She grabs the mic, says,

we're siding with the Panthers. PL is out. If you're with us, follow me. And the place went nuts. It was mainly yelling and booing and applauding. And for a lot of us, it was a challenge. That moment was an extremely challenging moment. It was a decisive moment.

What were we going to do? Were we going to follow her lead? Many did. Around a third of the delegates left the convention with her. Bernardine's walkout split SDS in two. And in fact, some people, like fellow SDS leader Mark Rudd, have come to see this as the moment the peace movement went bad. The end of the good 60s and the beginning of something else.

We created a split in the anti-war movement around the right to revolutionary violence. It's bullshit. But from Bernardine's point of view, the good 60s hadn't stopped the war, hadn't stopped the assassination of black leaders. She thinks the only way forward is to respond to the intensifying violence from the government, to follow the example of the militant black liberation struggle and fight back by any means necessary. SDS is not the only radical organization splitting apart at the time. The Panthers are also starting to fracture over similar questions,

whether to pursue a mass movement or radical violence, expansion or escalation. We'll get to that in future episodes. For now, what's left of SDS after the walkout is a much smaller group, the action faction, the hardest of the hardcore, just Bernardine and her most radical comrades. They call themselves weathermen, after a line from Bob Dylan's subterranean homesick blues.

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. It's a way of saying the revolution is coming, like it or not. We could tell you, weathermen could tell you, but we don't even need to, because you can see it with your own eyes. And we're not going to wait for it either. We're going to make it happen. Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. All right, on today's episode we have back on the show, Eric Mann, an absolute very very very very very very very. veteran of the class struggle here in the United States, a real revolutionary elder that is

still organizing, still has such clear-sighted and sharp and theoretical analysis, is still totally committed theoretically and practically to Marxism and the revolutionary struggle for liberation. We had him on before for part one in which he tells his life story. This is part two where we continue his life story, his organizing, his personal friendship with Howard Zinn. the book he wrote on Comrade George Jackson, how he just got out of prison, and he just got out of prison when George Jackson was killed and began, you know, writing articles and stuff about George Jackson that culminated into a book. He talked about his time organizing within the UAW as a communist,

some of the contradictions in the American trade union, some of the reactionary attitudes you bump up against, but also, you know, trade union consciousness, the pros and cons and limitations of it. We talked about the hard hat riot, which was an instance in which ostensibly representatives of the working class, a bunch of construction guys and literal hard hats attacked an anti-Vietnam demonstration physically violently beating up anti-war protesters,

highlighting a contradiction about the labor aristocracy in the Imperial Corps. And throughout this conversation, although we are kind of tracing the arc of Eric's personal life and organizing history and his fascinating friendships and relationships to many left-wing figures, authors, organizers, etc., that all, you know, organizations like the Weather Underground, the SDS, SNCC, CORE, you know, as we trace that trajectory, we're also touching on all that history and analyzing all that history. And we end this discussion on a discussion about contemporary fascism and how, a settler colonial state like the United States is a permanent fascist state. It is not a bourgeois democracy descending into fascism. And I think he makes it really articulate and important argument about why the United States is intrinsically a fascist state and why phrasing, framing is like framing the U.S. as bourgeois democracy gives it too much credit that we should be really thoughtful about. We talk about operating on the shop floor.

establishing yourself as a serious worker to be a labor organizer. We cover so much stuff. We cover so much stuff. And it's a really fascinating conversation. And again, we have connections to history and traditions. There are comrades that came before us. And this is an obvious point. But I say that to say that when we have somebody on the show like Eric Mann,

I think it's a wonderful opportunity for those of us, you know, that are younger, that are in our 20s, 30s, 40s to learn from somebody who was doing this before we were born, that went to prison for doing this before we were even born, that was organizing on shop floors, organizing in black communities, you know, before many of us had any political consciousness at all, or before many of us were even born. So I think it's a fascinating conversation. I really want people to check it out. I also want to remind people that we still have a relationship with left-wing books, which is connected to the publishing outlet and blog, Kersh Blabladeb, where Rev Left listeners can type Rev Left at checkout and get a 15% off any book in their store.

And they have, I mean, so many wonderful books. I just looked up some stuff because we're talking about George Jackson in this episode with Eric. They have books Prison on Fire, George Jackson, Attica, and Black Liberation. They have When Dragons Fly, select writings from New African Political Prisoners, Meditations on France Fanon's, Retched of the Earth. Lumpin, the autobiography of Ed Mead. They have a bunch of stuff on Palestine. They have a radical Jewish calendar, which I think is really cool. You know, various calendars like a certain day's freedom for political prisoners calendar, stuff like that.

Just a great collection of resources and material that they're giving all Rev Left listeners 15% off. So you can just go into that store, get anything you want and get 15% off just by typing in Rev Left at checkout. It's a really cool little thing where, you know, we have a connection. They share a similar spirit and politic, and if we can help one another out and direct each other to one another's work, it's a mutually beneficial thing. So go check them out, show them some love, get some good resources and books in the meantime at a discount. And without further ado, here is my conversation with veteran and elder of the movement. Eric Mann, enjoy. Hey, everybody.

This is Eric Mann. How do I introduce myself? Well, I think I'm going to talk with my book. You know, all the, there will be a conversation also. The author is revolutionary. The author is book, promoter. The centrality of books is a big theme in my understanding of revolutionizing during practice. So the book I'm working on is called We Made the Revolution with Our Bodies on the Live.

the journey of a core, SDS, UAW, and strategy center organizer. And it begins with we made the revolution with our bodies on the line in terms of today's conversation. I want to make the case that after all the ideology, which is critical in the theory, are you willing to put your body on the line, work on an assembly line, march for the people of Palestine knowing that there will be police brutality.

The question of commitment and sacrifice is a very humbling experience because you can think you're really great, but when those police come, you understand your look for the person on the left and the person on the right

and that's what the revolution means. So that's my introduction. And Brett again, a real pleasure to work with you. I'm ready to the question. Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you back on. It's an honor to be able to speak with you, as people will have known having listened to the first episode. You're a veteran of this movement. You've dedicated your entire life, struggling and organizing to try to build a better world and, you know, the sacrifices you've made in your life to, in pursuit of that, are really admirable. And so it's a genuine honor to have you on. I'm so

glad to have you back. And I enjoy our behind the scenes conversations as well. So, and I was going to actually bring this up as I recently had dinner with Bernardine Dorn and Bill Ayers, who are your friends and comrades. And I brought you up and they had nothing but wonderful, kind words to say about you. And you could tell, like when I mentioned your name, they both lit up. They both had smiles on their faces. And so to see that respect between people that go back decades, it was a really cool thing to see. So I just wanted to mention that to you as well. Well, that's very important to me because, you know, in my book,

I'm critical of a lot of the political choices that Bernardine and Bill made as well as phenomenally appreciative of their whole role in history and their dedication. But more importantly, we're friends. We're just friends. We never, ever lost a friendship, not even close. We learned to disagree, but they are two of the finest people I work with. I joined Weatherman because of them. You were very good recruiters and organizers.

They've gone out to live just a very exemplary line. So it's mutual and thanks a lot for it. That's awesome. And thanks a lot, Jillian Bernstein. If you're out there, I'll send you nothing but big love. Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. All right, let's go ahead and get into it.

So the last conversation you and I had, it left off around your prison sentence and getting out of prison. I'll link to that first episode in the show notes. I'll release that a day before, so most people will have caught up on it. But after prison, you turned to journalism and political writing. You wrote a book about George Jackson, and you did a column with actually Howard Zinn called Left Field Stans. Soon after, you joined the August 29th movement, which later merged with the Black Revolutionary Communist League to form the League of Revolutionary Struggle. So what drew you from writing about revolutionary movements to trying to build one once again inside the league?

And how did those years shape your understanding of a multiracial Marxist organizing in the U.S.? Well, as they always say, great question. But I want to clarify something that I think is important. Please. You say, what drew you from writing about revolutionary movements, try to build one again? I'll make the case that writing about revolutionary movements, if you're part of those revolutionary movements, is being a revolutionary.

When I got out of prison, I didn't think I wanted to write. Howard's, my friend, I wish we talked about Howard, maybe at the end of this, because I'm about to go on December 7 to the Howard Zen Book Fair in San Francisco. And I urge anybody who's going to be in the Bay Area to come to the book fair and look for myself,

Channing Martinez, and Clinton Cameron, because we're never own Frontlines Press boot. And we're going to be doing a program at 230 to 4 about the role of books, bookstores, and revolution. Nice. So, and yes, you can reach me at Eric at Voices from thefrontlines.com. No, I'm still an organizer. that. So the thing about writing is that what we call it is a difference between affiliated, is my wife Leon's concept. There's affiliated revolutionaries and intellectuals and bourgeois intellectual. And bourgeois is not because of this class from which you came. It's the role you

play in society. So when I got out of prison, as I write in this book I'm about to publish, I didn't know what I was going to do. I thought I was going to take a break. Sort of meditate on, you know, weatherman, year and a half in prison, lots of time in Saudi confinement. And as soon as I got out of prison, I went to Berkeley to visit my daughter, Lisa,

and I'm walking down Telegraph Avenue and somebody says, you know, George Jackson was killed. And I really say, you mean Jonathan Jackson. They say, no, no, no. George Jackson was also killed, just yesterday. So that threw me immediately into, and I don't know why, I got to write about this. Now, I didn't know that there might be 100 people writing about it, but I wanted to write about it maybe as a way to extend my prison experience, to build on it rather than lose it. And I worked on

this article for, it was called the Real Paper at the time, which was originally Boston After Dark. It was, and back then they could pay you. You know, they actually, this is after the underground papers, these papers actually had a budget. And I called them up and said, I figure I want to do a story about George Jackson. And they said, that'll be great, that'll be great. But I didn't know much about George Jackson

besides Soled another brother. And I didn't particularly, I mean, I knew how to write, but I didn't know how to write long think pieces with history or theory and I just sort of you know, I had the will and the rest would figure it out. So I started writing about George Jackson

and I went through a long process of studying and meeting with, of course, people in the California prison movement and I met with Taryn Wall, an old friend of mine at Cornell, who had become one of the press spokespeople for the Cuban Revolution, especially to the West.

And she worked with me on the article. Then I went down to L.A. and Tom Hayden said, you're not paying up attention to his relationship with the Black Panthers. And I would say, really, that I probably only do 10% in the article, but in the process of writing, I became transformed. And I'll say that again,

the theory of transformative organizing, is you begin by trying to transform a society, then you try to transform the ideology of other people, such as writing a book, but then you become transformed in the process. And I became radically transformed in the process of just the process of knowledge to build. So I wrote this long article,

and I went back to Harper Barnes and Stu Urban, who my editors and Harper Barnes were a great book about and you get the neighborhood about a black uprising in St. Louis. So they sat down at me and said, look,

and they were sort of afraid of me because I probably came out of prison. You said, how do you feel about it becoming a three-part series? As if that was, I said, are you kidding? That's phenomenal. So when the articles came out,

it was something I already done in Newark. I already done it with SDS. in Columbia is I'm very good at explaining militancy, making the case for violence, making the case for retaliatory violence, making the case for urban rebellions, to explain them, explain them in terms of a say, now I'd just explain it, and this is often, not just white people, but this is often white people, but even some black people. Wow. Yeah, I guess if I was George, Jackson, I would have done the same thing. If I was black people, I would have burned down Newark too. If I was black and white people of Columbia, I would have taken over the buildings and

maybe destroy property. So my goal was to explain George Jackson, but in the process, or I have the book right in front of me. So the book is called Comrade George, Investigations of the White, political thought and assassination of George Jackson. And the most important thing I want to people to understand for most black people is political thought that a lot of people saw George Jackson and Gibralic. They might have even thought so that I brought it was a great memoir. But I said, no, George Jackson was a brilliant political thinker. And in fact, in my book, somebody in a lot of the prisoners said,

they killed George Jackson because of his writing. We say the objective conditions are correct in the black community for a revolution. today that all this missing here and there are a few of the subjective the objective conditions are there the subjective conditions are missing here and there and we're moving forward on that with our programs and with our movement and by movement I mean the shootout on Central August 7th and all attempt to and all actual on all actual

efforts made to put the fascists to death but like I was saying perhaps the weathermen do understand the focal motor theory and looking at it in a much broader sense than we are like before when I said

the ideal embraces in its essence in its heart two distinct entities of political and a military thrust one can't exist without the other that's why you know

Shay died and believed because he couldn't get the political you couldn't get the political infrastructure that he needed to support his military thrust but let's say with this with this

last comment that perhaps the weathermen are viewing the world situation. Perhaps they're saying that the objective conditions may not be absolutely right in the white middle class community. But the conditions are right in the black community and the conditions are right in the world. So here I come full circle. Revolutionary writers are people that are revolutionaries first.

And they're the best ones to write. Because you understand the solity and complexity of things that no one can understand, or very few, I shouldn't say that. Very few people would understand who have not directly engaged in practice. What does Mao say? You can't understand an apple until you bite the apple. So I became a revolutionary writer because immediately, when Howard Zinn called me up, he said, oh, so first George Jackson was killed. Then I come back, and that was in August, I believe, of 1971.

In September of 1971, I get a call from Howard Zinn, which one of my was very close. And he said, Eric, have you heard what happened in Attica? I said, no. And he told me this horrific story. Of course, it was all in the news, but I was probably an hour or two behind. And he said, you got to do something. And I said, of course. So I called already, I think there was an Attica Brothers Defense Committee.

I called them up. I said, I just got out of the joint. What can I do? And he said, well, we're having events in Boston. We're having events all over. You can be part of the panel to explain the rebellion. Well, again, I had to first understand the rebellion. I had to understand.

I didn't know the details of what's happening in Attica. I didn't know the whole backstory or I call it the black story. Try to learn. So I'm saying to our listeners, you've got to learn first. You know, you can't teach until you learn. So I learned a lot about the Attica Brothers. So now I'm working with the Attica Brothers Defense Committee. The Soledad Brothers came back to them.

And I think this six defense committee. So my point was I was among the leading writers, in the Revolutionary Prisonism. I wrote nothing without consultation with the prisoners. I always took copious notes back then, but I also could write in their voice because I could hear their voice. I can hear their intonation.

If I'm talking to Frida Drumgo or I actually had a meeting with Rochelle McGee, I have my notes, but then I closed my eyes and I listened to how they spoke. And so many persons that, how did you get it so right? I mean, that's how they're just like me? I said, that's the point.

Of course, that's the point. I want that it to sound just like you. So what I'm getting to is today, my book, Comrade George, I mean, I mean I've met 100 prisoners, most of them black. And of 100, I say I'm Eric, man. They go,

you wrote Comrade George? You wrote Comrade George. You know, we still have it. Did you know you can go throw them solitary if you caught with it? Wow. So my book, Carmar George, is a defense of the Revolutionary Black Prison's Movement. And it lives, we are going to republish it someday soon, like in a year, let's say. But when was that?

71, I don't know, or 30, oh, my God, over 50 years ago. The book is still in big circulation, because, it explains the humanity of a great man, George Jackson, the life, political thought, and yet that he was a saturday. So what I'm getting to bread is that it's not like I left writing to go back to make a revolution. I wrote as part of the revolutionary movement, and then I often be on these panels that they wanted me to be.

So I worked with the Attica Brothers Defense Committee. They told me what to do. they gave me advice on what to do. So I was what we call an affiliated revolutionary. That's the answer to the first question, is what did I do as a writer? And I argue that I definitely was the liar as organizer and the organizer's right. Absolutely.

And I totally agree with you that that is a crucial component of any revolutionary movement is the writers, the intellectuals, the artists, the journalists, right? I think we need a lot of journalists, especially today, in a fragmented media culture. There's lots of commentary on politics, but I think there's less investigative journalism that is in service of a revolutionary movement that I think, you know, could be very useful. I do want to kind of give you a couple minutes if you want to talk a little bit about your friendship with Howard Zinn. Howard Zinn is a big figure. I would love to hear more.

Yeah, that's, I'd love to. you know all, let's just say, in my book. Yeah. So the first thing is that I met Howard Zinn. I was the SDS re-organizer in New England. And, you know, we go win-win. There's a lot of story about building the movement, struggles of progressive labor.

But what I realized, and this is also, one of my themes, is I was what we called also a regional trialhood. So I went to different campuses and helped them and met with the leadership. But I realized that I need to have my own base. I don't want, because if I'm going to everybody's campus, who might? I mean, I was a regional organizer for core, but I worked in New York and I worked in Harlem. I work with the Trailways Bus quarters, as you know. So, you know, in my book a playbill that says build a base and never walks alone.

So I didn't want to walk alone and I wanted to build a base. So through my work with the different FDS chapters, I show Boston University is sort of perfect for me. First, it had a really great chapter. So I was helping a great chapter get better. I particularly want to thank Craig Kaplan, who was of all the different leaders of SDS. a terrific organizer leader in the BU chapter.

So I'm trying to build a base. Somebody says, do you know Howard Zinn? Now, I think I knew of him, for sure, but I went to meet this guy, Howard Zinn. Now, the first thing about Howard is he had taught his Spelman College. He was with the student nonviolent coalition. one name to me. And he wrote this book called Snick, the New Abolitionist. So here's, and there's

also the theme about Jews, Craig Kaplan was a Jew, Howard Jim was a Jew, Murray Levin who were talking about was a Jew, Sherry Rabinowitz, Donnie Alper. I mean, 80% of the leadership of SGS were Jews, and Howard was a Jew. So he and I hit it off right away because we started with core or instead. We didn't start, and we had a theory about white students, and this is Craig's also formulation. We did not think we were revolutionaries. We thought we were radicals, and used to our very positively, in support of the black and Vietnamese revolution. We did not, as later as some of the white people, did, including Weatherman, including the rim, including PL, started jumping, we are revolutionaries, we are revolutionaries.

And I think white people should be very careful, because the odds are you not. And the more you say you are, the odds definitely are that you're not. So the fact that we understood ourselves, as white members of the civil rights, we were not white allies. We were both among the few white people, an overwhelmingly black current text. Howard Dent had had

great students at Spelman. One of them was Marion Wright, later become Marion Wright Edelman, the Children's Defense Month. And she's told the story about it's in my book. I got it from something where she said We all loved Hallie, was called. My father

was also called Howard. We'd love to go to his house. That was a place where Roz was his wife, Ross had the two of them. We would go there and it would a place where we could laugh with Howard had a great sense of irony or an ironic sense of humor. And it was like a safe haven.

And also Alice Walker was his student. Imagine that. and she went on to the book to write the color purple and many things. The point is, often, you're meeting with people who have greatness in them already. You can see it. You don't know how they're going to end up or who they're going to become, but they already are somebody. You know, you can see, I've seen it in the strategies that I'll meet with a 17-year-old or a 19-year-old.

I can see the greatness in them right away. My job was to elevate your greatness. So Howard and I start talking about. out the SDS campaign. And we both agreed that one thing white students had to do is support black studies more. And of course

the white students who were doing great. We had to do more to build anti-war movements on the campus. And if I can just take a minute. One of the things that's important about theory about organizing is if we look at how we're going to help the people of Palestine,

we're not going to end the occupation for a very, very long time, obviously, and they know that. And the other ones who have to lead the resistance to the occupation and the racist seizure of their own country. But what people don't understand is that it's not that the protests are not important. And folks is a very important. But I'd argue that the main goal is what I call institutional organizing. That's to say, getting your union to take a real position on Palestine. Because that involves talking to people and winning arguments and losing boats and winning votes. Because the system knows that if your union takes a span and if the university takes a stand, which they're not,

you begin to erode the institutional support from peers. So Howard and I understood that the purpose of the organizing of BU was not just to march against the war, but to delegitimize U.S. imperialism at Boston University. So I came up with this idea of the anti-military campaign, and I got it from Colombia, where I didn't work in, other places in SDS, such as the Dow Chemical Campaign, which was great. You block recruiters from Dow Chemical. You de-legitimize the CIA, the State Department. So we came up with this program with three demands.

One was to get rid of the BU Overseas program, which was academics paid for BU who worked with the Department of Defense to go to U.S. military bases and talk to GIs and about education. not knowing that Howard Jin was going to be one of the people doing the education. The second was to get rid of the Reserve Officers Training Corps, and the third was to end all military research at BU. So, I had a long talk with Howard, because Howard was in the BU Overseas Program.

And I said, Howard, you know, I want to move to the demand to end the BU overseas program. And he said, well, it's a complicated thing because I'm doing anti-war organizing through that program. I'm meeting with the GIs and military bases to do anti-war organized. And I said, yeah, Howard, but you know you're the exception to a bad institution. And we have to get rid of that institution because you don't want to be in a certain way legitimizing the very institution where it gets. And he thought for no more than a second, he said, of course, absolutely, I'm out. I'll tell the university about the program.

Now, there's a story that I convinced Howard is in of something. Yeah, it is. But more importantly, Howard Zinn is a real person. He had reasons for doing what he was doing, and we could talk. And then he became a, then he could speak against the BU overseas program was called, because he had been in it. But it's another example of Howard, which is back then you convinced somebody and they go, okay, yep, I'll challenge my cooperation, whatever you need to do.

So that was another great thing about Howard was just about that. But he became my friend. He became often my point of reference, especially with the growing sectarianism. He and I was saying, what the hell? We're trained in the black movement. why do these white students some of them are like on drugs they really think

they're more important than the people of Vietnam they think they're more important than the black studies and we have to build a chapter that has a certain sense of humility about the role of white people that we are in the correct sense subordinate

to the interests of the black movement subordinate and subordination of the people of Vietnam subordination does not mean you know, God forbid I'm subordinated. Yeah. Less important then under the leadership of those struggles. Then, oh, an interesting story is that when I was in Weatherman, Howard's daughter,

and I should know who she is and where she was, but she hid me in the back of her car. She was driving me somewhere And I had to, you know Basically be on the floorboard Because I was afraid the police went to get me So then When I got out of prison

I went to see this guy Tom Winship Was the head of the Boston Globe I said to him You know, you got a lot of liberals A lot of conservatives You have no radicals and revolutionaries In your op-ed department No, I had influence coming out of

I was very well on in Boston, of course, they just came out of prison. To my shock, you said, that's a great idea. You need another person. I said, I know exactly who it is. I called Howard. He said, Howard, you want to work together on this column?

And he said, I love to. I said, what about calling it left field stands? Like the baseball analogy, you know, taking a stand, but also being in the stands of the God, forbid the Boston Red So he and I alternated Collins and we wrote every other week. It was great. We did it for about three years.

And then I wrote my first article on Israel and I'd already moved to Berkeley at the time. And I got called and they said, well, not that you're in Berkeley. You don't have a feel for Boston anymore. We don't have to end you. I'd have to end you. That's a good right thing. And I went, wait, I've been in Berkeley for a year by mailing in my articles. Yeah, but this thing about Israel is just very of transit and probably said anti-Semitic even back then. So I was fired.

So I called Habitsa, you should resign in protest, which is pretty arrogant. He said, why? He said, do you really believe that? I said, no. He said, okay, good. So I'm obviously, you know, very upset that you got fired, but isn't it my job to continue to the Met?

I said, of course. So he wrote something, I think, about Veterans Day and why Veterans Day was a sham, and then he got fired. So the two of us had the honor of being partners in this, and I urge people to go back and get those left field stands, articles. so which will be on my book and some people were generous enough to go find them on microfiche but those are terrific op-heads and Howard and I

back to the right of his revolutionary had a lot of influence even on the movement so there's more I can say but the main thing I'll say that is even beyond that is Howard's very very charming

very confident a certain way self-effacement self-effacing in a good sense. He had a sense of irony about himself. And he was one of my best friends. Oh, I got to tell this story. This is important. Yeah. So I wrote this, this is also, I wrote this, I used to write for the Boston, Phoenix, Boston after Dark. So I wrote this article called Freed Dot by the Waitresses, Freed Dot by the Freaks. And I was all about how these people don't tip the waitress is the main point. And I've been a

bus boy and a waiter. So I talk about these guys, you know, they're talking about life and blah, blah, blah, and they ask the waitress for 16 things on leave and sniffer. So I said, what they should do is go beat

up the guy and leave some blood on his tie-dye t-shirt. So, you know, of course I come out of prison. have a relatively violent world deal. Howard called me up and said, that was wrong.

It was such a good article. Why did you have to deal with punching somebody? Of course, like on prison floor, but, you know, these are sort of contradictions among the people. You did a really good job of exposing the hypocrisy, a really good job of exposing the rights of the waitresses

and defending the waiters and waitresses but you messed up the whole point by bringing you violence into it. And I defended myself, of course, but I knew he was right. I have a thing or sometimes I'm not the first, I even know I'm wrong, but I'll still fight for a while before I have to give up.

And I was very influenced, but my point is We were close. Yeah. We were very close. He could call me up and tell me to go to Attica. He could call me up and say, you were wrong with that. And I remember eventually apologizing to him and Roz, because they really cared about me.

And I thought, yeah, why am I beating on hippies who just didn't tip well enough? So there's a lot of stories in there, but it's also about I could convince him of something, he could convince me of something. What an amazing man. And that's before he wrote a people's history. of the United States. And also he went to Vietnam.

One of the first people to go to Vietnam. And now I'm going to the Howard Jin Book Festival, which is magnificent. And he'll come alive in my book pretty much this way. Oh. And I was sort of saying this, and Brian, I really appreciate this. We were not white allies.

I take, you know, I understand there's a risk in saying that, but we were, white common. There were very few of us. But the white people went down from South, were not white allies. They were, there were white allies, don't get me wrong, who were amazing.

But the white people went down the South, Mickey Schorner was killed, and Andy Goodman who was killed, were not white allies. They were white comrades. And as I say, you don't join the black movement, you get accepted into it,

like you don't join Harvard. you get accepted. The black community will choose what role you want to play. They don't want you to play. And for some people, it's a phenomenal, you know, you're out of college, your friends, and then. But I just want to say, for Howard and I, we were part of the black, rural whites,

inside the black movement, and as a result, we stood up against the sectarianism of both PL and a revolutional youth movement because they were starting to objectify the black movement and speak on its behalf, criticize it, think they were helping it by expanding their role in history, though, is not right.

And the BU chapter never had that problem that we saw ourselves in service to the black community and service to the Vietnamese revolution. Yeah, fascinating stuff. And yeah, Howard Zinn was huge for me. me reading the people's history when I was young was a was a crucial turning point in my own political development his uh his famous quote you can't stay neutral in a moving train i think is right it's a perfect synthesis of like a dialectical worldview where everything is in constant motion

and constant evolution and neutrality and statickness is impossible um so i always love how succinct that that quote is um and yeah a lot of the contradictions that you wrestled with and still wrestle with among the white left and and a sort of egoism and an unwillingness to sacrifice and a narcissism that puts the spotlight back on themselves. I mean, that's certainly something that is still very relevant in movements today. And humbling yourself, you know, realizing that here in the imperial core, that we're not the vanguard of the global revolution in a lot of ways we're the rear guard, meaning that we're here to provide unapologetics support in any way possible to the front lines of the global revolution, which are in places like Palestine and in places like

the indigenous and black struggle here in the United States. And there's a way of de-emphasizing the self and the individual ego and subordinating yourself to something greater and more important than your own ego that we all have to really internalize. And I think you did a great way of explaining that. I do want to move into this next question. Sure. Thanks, Brett. Yeah, absolutely. I want to move into this next question. And I'm personally interested in this because I've recently, you know, joined a trade union and it's a really interesting dynamic and I'm already starting to organize within it. And I'm making some contacts with representatives from a rank-and-file caucus developing within the union, which I think is

really cool. So I have a lot of interesting trajectories that I can pursue now that I'm in this union. And you spent years on the auto assembly line and you played a leading role in the keep G.N. Van Nuys Open coalition, which brought together labor and the black and Latino communities around the plant. Can you talk about your time struggling in that context in particular? What principles allowed that coalition to succeed where so many shop floor fights failed and kind of the overall lessons that you think are relevant to today's labor movement? Well, thanks again. You know, summing up your work is so hard. You know, I'm working again on these chapters of the book. And I was there. I was playing a leading role. But how do you

reconstruct the story? How do you truly understand what happened? The fact that you were there does not guarantee that you understand what you did. What was true, it gives you a better chance. But my wife, Leanne and I, and another Leonhurst man, another editor, Jesse Coleman, we've been working on these chapters over and over again to try to get it right, which means you study it. So having said that, I have summed this up, and luckily I wrote a book called Taking on General Motors, which I wrote in 1987, which also has to be republished, but a lot of it is going to be in the book. So let me go back to what the theory was, what I learned, and Brett, in this case, do keep asking me questions within it, okay, because I want to make sure that the theory is following the line of argument you want. The first thing is that how did I get, how did I become an assembly line work?

And by the way, Brett, I really appreciate you giving me the so-called long form. Because a lot of the things I warrant the people listening to understand is these things are very complicated, understanding what you're doing, looking in the mirror, working with other people. It's very hard to understand, and it's hard to explain what you do understand. So the first thing is that I already been in the working class. It's a long story, but I won't tell it long, but I had already been, of my own reasons, had become a nurse's aide. And then after that, on operating orderly, that's before I became communist.

deal what is something about my own struggle with celebrity that I was very self-critical of in some way and I want to ground myself and I really love being a nurse to say and I really like being an operating orderly and I guess you're going to like you know working in a factory work in the workplace is great so when I got to Berkeley I met my wife Leanne who Hearst, we fell in love. I moved to Berkeley to be with her. I lived in Boston.

And the first thing she talked to me about is that we should join a new communist organization. And I had been very resistant to that. And, Brett, I haven't told this story yet, have I? No, no, no.

Okay. Both aging and even normal, you also have to ask if you told the story already. And I was resistant to it because actually I had a very good experience with the Communist Party. But the Communist Party back then was, back then being in the early 60s, was very careful about sectarianism in the United Party. Plus, of course, then later Angela Davis and so many other people built the Che Ramuma Clubs. inside the communist party.

But my experience had been with progressive labor. And even with REM that said they were a communist group. So I thought, I don't want to be communism. He represents sectarianism. Communism represents thinking you're better than other people and think you know how to lead this struggle. In fact, you'll tell them that I'm a revolutionary, youth movement. I'm aggressive labor.

leading proletarian this and that. I came out of a different tradition, right, which is and this is important, I'm working around the fear of internal cadre or organic cadre versus external cadre.

Organic cadre means you join an organization and you work very hard. You put in the most time, you take the most risks. You're most committed to building the organization. You come in early, you leave late, you think about the organization. That makes you catch.

And the people who all share that become the leaders of the organization because everybody recognizes their commitment, says, I don't work as hard as now. I don't take the risks that they do. But over time, more and more people work as hard. You get more people work. You looked at SNCC, student nonviolent-conning. Of course.

I mean there were at least a thousand cadre in each group. I mean, we're talking about, here's a definition. You have a job, and you have a paying job if you're black in the post office or whatever. You come home and you work three hours every night, of course. Every Saturday, every Sunday, you go out and get arrested. You're a cadre. Now, I disagree with. with groups and I'll get to this later

when I know more what I'll talk about. There are some groups today and I want to reconstitute themselves as a cadre group. I disagree with that because nobody asked you. Nobody asked you to be cadre. You're not a cadre of an organization.

You're cadre external to an organization. Thinking, God forbid, you're going to go in and make it back. But you're going to have your own meetings to discuss the organization, which means you're not really in it, in my opinion. Now, in Snick, the cadre were in Scrant. In SDS,

I was cadre, but I worked with the members of SDS, and there were about 20 of us who were cadre. And they were simply the most dedicated, those who were willing to lead and build the institution.

Other people would say, no, I want to be active, but thank God you guys, you know, when I come to the meeting, somebody has the agenda. somebody knows what to do and I can plug in so having had all those bad experiences with both the revolution

youth movement now and I want to say again I don't have the same reaction to weatherman even though I'll say I will get again I agreed with weatherman when I joined it we did what we had to do we took the risks we had to take in retrospect

I do not think it was a good tactical choice but I'm very critical of the Revolutionary Youth Movement. I'm not that critical of Weatherman, except historically, we should tell people don't do that again. That's not a good idea, okay? Do not form a self-ded group, mainly white people, and run out and break windows and do all kinds of stuff

that's going to get you arrested and put you in jail for a long time. But I have a different emotional reaction to Weatherman, because I joined it, Bill and Bernadine recruited me. I never have any criticism of them because they were good recruiters, and I joined with full enthusiasm. Okay, so we're getting to this. So when Leon tells me to join a new communist group, I'm thinking I do not want to be part of a sectarian organization of self-proclaimed vanguard.

But we go to these meetings, and but there's one thing that she has persuasive. Besides, I was madly in love with it, which didn't hurt. She was in a group called the Berkeley Oakland Women's Union, and they had built the first truly anti-imperialist tenancy inside the Berkeley Oakland Women's Union, and they challenged the concept of socialist feminism. and they came up with the idea that socialist feminism is bourgeois feminist.

Now, again, remember these were the times of drawing lines, drawing lines. And they were trying to say that as much as we try, we're still white women. And we have issues or abuse of socialism are often social democratic. And we're not sufficiently anti-imperialists. And they went through hell. They were treated very badly by a lot of the other women in the group. And, you know, they were told, where you're not really a feminist, you're male-identified. Communism is a male concept.

It got pretty brutal. And in Leanne's article, which is in our war now, I think on the 20th is the 25th anniversary of, oh, there's a wonderful quote from a woman who said, I've never agreed with that Thursday Night group, which is the group that we had in and Lori and Dana and Dina and Vow and Pat were in. But they came in a very principal way to talk to us and we've treated them terribly. And as a result, I must support them despite their own arrogance, perhaps their own sectarianism, because they came in as sisters and we have treated them terribly. So I was with Leanne when she went through that experience.

I was very proud of her. Those five women met at our house. And that gave Leanne a lot of crowdability with me. And also I had to be right, I said, look, I'm not in any organization. I'm normally, I've always been in an organization. So what am I criticizing if I'm, I don't like standing on an outside of history. So we went to these Forum of the communist groups

You know the workers' viewpoints And the October League And the Marxist Women's Organizing Committee And October League I didn't like any of them But then this woman got up from the August 29th movement And she was a Latina She was in something like the Bay Area

Labor organizing collective and was she talking about being a communist with the Farah strike at the time being a communist in the I forget the name but a sweatshop in L.A. In the Bay Area, I'm sorry.

And to me she was a great organizer a communist organizer she talked about the masses, she talked about the people, talked about working in the factory and I was won over. I said, okay, This is not sectarian. They have their politics,

but they're trying to build the actual movement of the working class. So I'll tell you more, but I joined the August 29th. Based on that, Leanne joined the August 29th, but we both joined the same time. Leanne got into the Ford factory. I tell I'm an artwork in Alta Bates as a nurse as an operating quarterly. And Ford had this kind of family situation they liked.

they were bringing some women in, the wives of us. But they also, especially for women, who would probably be threatened if their husband didn't get a job, she was able to convince them to hire me. So she said, just sit by the phone and wait. And they called me. And they said, you want to come in for an interview? You know, basically.

So I got into the oil factory because of Leanne. I got into the August 29th movement, a lot because now once I got into the auto factory, I loved it. I just loved it. It was noisy. I love noise.

You know, it was, the workers are so confident and so noise again, you know, you have to be very outspoken kind of culture like treasoners. The jobs are hard, you're on an assembly line that's moving at 60 cars an hour, which would you have one minute

to do the job that's right. You don't move the assembly line moves, but you've got to move in that one minute to get the job done. If you don't, it's called going in the hole, which is you've got to keep trying to finish that job, but now you're in the next person's station. And they're saying, get the hell out of the station,

why do you keep going in the hole? You can't do the job. So you become very good at that one-minute drill, or you can't make it as an hour. worker. I'll tell you more about that. But I love being an auto worker. And I loved order workers. There's just something humbling about that that assembly line keeps going back and you've got to be good at it. I got good at it. So I was at Ford Nelpedus in San Jose. We were very active in building a rank and far caucus there. And then they laid us off,

which was devastated. They said, don't worry, we'll call you back. You know, they lay you off, but don't worry. Each time you come back with better seniority, but they ended up closing the plant. So we never got called back. And as one guy said, the only way they're going to lay me off is if they close this place, and they closed the place.

So this was the age of plant closings. This was the age of where the U.S. auto industry, had taken advantage of the post-war defeated Japan and Germany and the ascendancy of U.S. imperialism, but now Japan and Germany were being rebuilt by U.S. imperialism and the auto industries were doing great, especially Japan. So there was competition for the first time for the U.S. market,

and that led to, in terms of political economy, that for the first time, GEP could not pass on the cost to the consumer Because the consumer historically loved GM Or whatever price they set within reason They would pick But now the Japanese were coming in with better cars Much more fewer economy

And people were buying Gothans back then Which are now Nissan's And Toyota's And so they started GM had to raise its profit level And start closing all the auto factories We're closing plans closing steel mills.

So through a long process, I ended up with the Ian and I decided to move to L.A. to be with her family. It turned out to be a great move. And out of that, I got into the GM Southgate plants. So excited. And then I was laid off after three months, and they closed that plant one in a year.

So it's almost like jumping from sinking ships. And I got over to GM Van Nuys. GM Benaz was the best plant. We were making the Chevrolet Camaro and the Pontiac Firebirds. And one thing, Brett, I was thinking about a lot. We weren't talking about trade unionism. It's one of the limits of trade unionism, and it's not a limit as a criticism. It's workers love their company.

They just do. I work for Starbucks, and how dare they treat me so bad, I'd give her how well I am to Starbucks. and I work for Amazon. And yeah, I hate it and I know it, but I'm happy I work for Amazon and making a good living, except that they're running my life into the ground. They're running me at a pace that's just outrageous. You know, they used to have two-day delivery on Monday.

I'll have it to say. Now they've got four-hour delivery. But who's delivering it? So, nonetheless, if you listen to three years speaking. They always say I love the company. I just don't love how their company treats me. And so that's, again, not a career system.

I was happy to work with GM. I was, you know, hey, I work for GL. I'm in a UAW. Oh, damn, you're at the GM Bin Adler. Yeah. I'm making $10 an hour. I'm $15 an hour overtime. And I make the Chevrolet Camaro, which is cool.

and I make the, damn, you make the firebird, yeah. So you tend to identify with the product, identify with the company, identify with the union. But the only thing that happened was when the plants got closed, most of the workers went back to the company, the union would say, what can we give you? We need, GM would say, I can't compete with the Japanese. you guys have paid too much look the Japanese they may be paid well but they turn out more cars

per hour than you they turn out better quality than you I need you to help me I've always taking good care of you guys but all your benefits paid leave and this and that and I can't keep the plan open if you don't give me something back now the more militant work is that I'm not giving shit back. We want it. But those are often workers who did not think they weren't getting laid off. But as you're working in a plant that is in danger of being clothed, and this is an example, Brad,

you've got to really have feelings with people who you work with, an empathy for what they're going to. You don't judge people. The workers would say, this is my job. This is, I put my kid through community college. I got a nice house. Small house. I own a house.

I got two cars. And these were working class people. They were called the overpaid working class. Ridiculous. They had a car in a house. A big fucking deal. And they said their kids, most like the community college. But they said, if I lose this job, my whole family is destroyed.

And very frankly, if I, if I'm not a little family is destroyed. And very frankly, if I'm not. I'm making 10, I can make 9. If I have all these medical, I won't give away my medical benefit, but maybe I have to do a copay. Because when you talk to them, you're a real worker and you're next to them. They said, Eric, GM's giving me everything I got. They don't say the UAW.

GM has given me everything I got. And if I can help GM fight against those damn Japanese, I'm going to do so. See, now you have identification with the oppressor. You also have a mature interest that you're interested in GM, contrary to the theory that the interest of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are inherently antagonistic. They are in the third world. But inside the U.S. and white and the settlest state oppression, they're not.

The interest of the proletariat and the interest of the bourgeoisie are often more, in a line than different. That's what I believe. Especially if you ask the workers, do you support the war in jetty bomb? Yes. Do you support Israel? Yes. Do you support overthrowing Vaswell?

Yes. A lot of those workers are pro-imperialists and their militancy is limited to, I need more. I deserve more. And so now I'm in a factory. And luckily, it's 50% Chicano, 15% black, 15% wear it, was an amazing, oh, I get over to GM Van Nuys from Southgate, which is a miracle. GM Van Nuys is the coolest place to work.

It's got 5,000 workers. Imagine that? 2,500 per shift. And Brett, you know, large-scale production, which Marx talks about, I agree. There's nothing like large-scale production to at least create some sense of class consciousness. And we knew we built the damn car. GM didn't build that car. GM designed it.

GM even organized production. But there was a sense that we were proud of the cars we made. And we looked around, this is 2,500 of us. And we knew we built that car from beginning to end. So we also believed, not as the August 29th movement, that Chicanos were an oppressed nation inside the United States with the right of self-determination. Black people were in a press nation inside the United States with the right of self-determination. There were oppressed nations, by the way, oppressor nation,

which meant we give a lot of attention to race. It's not like most of the workers believed that there was a black nation or a Chicano nation, but they believed something about black people being oppressed, very much so. They believed a lot of the Chicano's. But the Chicano's were coming out of a different culture, a lot of them. Now, some of them came out of the radical Chicano movement, but a lot of them were very conservative in the sense that I work at GM, I work hard, and I got good stuff.

And I love the stuff I have, and I don't have time, stare at a lot of the causes because I go home every Saturday and wash my car. But then the issue of clan closing start come up. And I initiated this idea of the UAW campaign to keep their eyes open. And to a long story, I'll tell you some other time, I initiated the idea of a boycott against General Motors, if they ever closed down the planet. the key thing there is you have to have some leverage when you have a strategy.

You have to believe, is there anything I can do to hurt my episode? What do I have that they don't have? What leverage do I have? And most of the time now in the United States, we have no leverage. That's the problem. They've closed down virtually every form of leverage, which will come back to. But if you're an organizer, you still have to have some vision of what victory looks like. Even if it's a long shot, it has to be historically believable, at least to yourself.

Now, I knew that GM could be boycotted because L.A. was the largest new car market in the United States. That meant that a boycott in L.A. alone could hurt GM. Whereas a boycott in Detroit could hurt GM, but it would be very hard to do that because there'd be a lot of other plans to open. But if you're in a small town and GM's closing your plant, you have no leverage on it. So the first thing honestly is we had leverage. But the most important thing is we had the Chicano and Black national question. If that plant was 80% in white, now campaign never gets off the ground. Because it was the Chicano and Black workers who both loyal to the company,

but knew they had some oppression in the system. and they were going to fight for the Chicano people and they were going to fight for black. So I went to Pete Beauchon, the president of union, a great man who was Indio, Chicano, come from Mexico, handsome as hell, charismatic, and to another long story I won't tell, I go to Pete and say this idea of building a preemptive movement

against GM to keep the planet open. Now, Pete knows me from some other contexts. Luckily, I worked on his campaign. I said, Eric, and he knows I'm a communist. And he says, I don't agree with you. The plant is in very good shape. We're not like the other plants. Our cars are the best selling cars in the United States.

We're the last auto factory in L.A. They've got to keep one open. You give me about 10 reasons why GM wouldn't cause the plant. I said, well, Pete. So I guess you don't buy auto insurance, right? Because you never can get into an accident. I said, listen, I do believe they're going to close the plants. I do believe they don't want to be in California.

And I agree we have leverage. This is a great plant, and we are making a best selling card. But the key thing we have, feed, is 2,500 youngs. And 750 black people and 7,450 women. And if they move to close the plant, I know which he organized the women's movement, the black move, the Chicana movement, and yes, the workers moving. Because this is, as you said, Pete, the last plant. If we were the next to last plant, I don't know. But it's pretty clear.

They closed down GMV&I. They already closed down Southgate. They closed out Goodyear tires. They closed down Bethlehem steel. They closed down all the good-paying industrial jobs. jobs in the deindustrialization of America, and we're the last decent paying job for black people in Chicano's in the whole damn city. So Pete went, all right, you're very persuasive. I don't think it's going to happen, but you're right, you should start this campaign,

but be very careful to not tell people you're starting the campaign. he said if you go around and say they may close the plant if they do close the plan or threaten to people and say well that's good the union told me and the union planted the idea so one of the things you have to understand are organizing is it's so complicated at the level of cognition consciousness

so I had the idea of stopping the plan from being closed but Nate Braskey was one of the workers a Jewish man It converted to Christianity and sang in its choir, but he's still a Jew. He said, we can't say stop closing the plant. We have to say the campaigns and keep GMVAS, bad eyes open. Because now you're saying the word open,

and you're saying keep it open is different from don't close it. I said, Nate, that's brilliant. That's fucking gruel. You're absolutely right. It totally changes the discourse. Because we're saying we are, we are open. You're the one who are going to close it. Don't you even dare close it because we're open.

So it's another example of me. And any good organizers, you are a collective relationship with people. They have ideas better than you. You have to be a very good listener. And the collective begins to do, you know, you begin to develop, what I call the collective mind, the collective brain, where people are like in a jazz group. People start spinning off great ideas.

So, I'll take a break in a minute, but we initiate the campaign to keep my eyes open, and we are allowed to have one-on-one conversations with the top people in the union who would not be threatened by that idea. And, again, you're being very nice about the time. So we started talking to a lot of workers, and they would say things like, well, if Kim closes the plan, it's God's will. You know, I mean, I mean, or TDM's been very well to me. I don't know if it's a low to now.

You know, they own it, Eric, and if they want to close it, that you're right, and then I talk about the 7-Eleven complex, where a guy's man would say, look, what if I open up a 7-Eleven? And somebody comes and tells me what I could do. What's my damn business? I said, you are, what are you smoking? I mean, don't open a fucking 7-Eleven. You work around a assemblyman.

and if they kick your ass out into the street, the last thing you can be able to do is buy a seminar, whatever. You'll be lucky if you can get a beer at the 7th. So, all right, that's a good point. You know, you got me there. And then over time, I would say to them, and we would say, do you see, give me rights here? I even think, I even think G.

I didn't think GM has some rights. So we did not buy the complete surplus value theory. or didn't express it in that terms, we said, look, GM has some rights, they set it up, they managed the place, but don't you think you have some rights after 10 years here? Don't you think GM has an obligation to you

beyond their own profit system? What if they had less profit? What do we give it there? They said, what are you going to do about when we have this idea for a boycott? So overtime, of course, is very important. The civil rights movement, was based on the idea that black people had rights.

The Chicana movement was based on we had the right of self-determiners. White people don't think they have rights in the same way. They think they just benefit. But when we start to talk of black and Chicana workers and women, including white women, by the way, and white men, they started saying, you know, you're right. I never thought about that. I mean, I've given my best years to, I got a bad back.

I got compel tunnel syndrome. I said, where are you going to go with this body? Who wants your body right now? You gave GM your damn life. You got a slip disc. You have carpal tunnel. Don't you think you have so?

And the people, so it's learning the art of persuasion with a deep empathy for people. And they go, hey, that's a good point. I never thought about that. You're right. What am I?

They throw me out. This body ain't going anywhere. And I said, aren't you ready to even move to light duty because over time you could get that done? So we started developing the idea of rights. And there's a poster we made up and said, the future of GM Van Nuys is not just for GM to decide. Workers and communities demand a voice. So demand is very important. And if we demand a voice, what we are saying is it's not just for GM.

to decide. It's not your factory. We're no longer accepting it. It may not be our factory, but we, God damn, a part of this factory. We have some people began to understand extraction and surplus value a lot, not through the profit motive, but through the exhaustion of the assembly line as the worst exploitation of our labor, such as the Amazon workers at the You know, the phenomenal destruction of human body and mind. So then GM came along right on Q and brought everybody together and said, the plant is in trouble. I know you're profitable, but we need your help because your productivity is not as great.

some of the work rules prohibit us from you know you know you got a good guy and whatever but you're going to have to give us something back because the profit level is not great enough and if you don't give us something back

you will be closed now there are a piece that all right great now they're the one who says the word close you've been saying open you've been quiet a little bit, you know, maybe you've talked to 300 workers. Now you can initiate the campaign to keep that eyes on.

Okay. So maybe we'll take a break here and you'll tell me a lot of your great thoughts, really. And then I'll take the second level of what do we learn out of that stuff. Yeah, absolutely. So I just have some thoughts on, you know, organizing within a union and navigating some of the contradictions.

In my experience, talking to, you know, fellow workers so much that I've had it, you know, several months now in the union and, you know, on the shop floor, I mean, you know, industrial trade, trades context, that there is a, it's interesting because there's, unlike in your situation where there was so much tied to GM in particular to one company, we operate as a multi-contractor situation. So, you know, union workers can work for many different contractors. And if you get fired from one, you can get picked up on another. And so there's a, there's a little bit more. of open hostility towards the contractors and towards the bosses as such because there's not as

much one-to-one dependency on a given contractor or given company. So I think that's an interesting difference. But what I do see, and I think you kind of alluded to this among workers in this context, is compared to other working class people, they do have great benefits packages, they have a good pension, they have good health care coverage, they have high wages, they get overtime, time and a half, a hazard pay. They get a really good situation. financially and they do work incredibly hard. And so there is a sense in their own, like they really put their bodies on the line. There's a sense of pride in that.

And there's also like kind of a sense of kind of smugness a little bit. Like I work really hard. So when you get into a little political discussion, what I often hear sometimes, not from everybody, everybody's different. But I have heard this multiple times is like, you know, this is very popular in the U.S. A disdain for like handouts. This idea that I come into work every day before the sun rises. that I break my back and I, you know, that I do this hard, laborious work.

And yeah, I get paid well for it, but I sacrifice and I earn that pay. And there's like a disdain for people who are seen as not earning that pay. And I'm always trying to like flip their gaze upward towards like the billionaires and the, you know, the elites who actually steal our money and not scapegoat, you know, poor and powerless people. I'm always trying to kind of navigate that. So I think that's an interesting contradiction that I see a lot of I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. But another thing I think is really important is to have any credibility at all within these working class spaces and in these union context, the shop floor, you know, at a construction site, as you first have to establish yourself as a serious worker.

That, you know, you have to be taken seriously first and foremost as a fellow worker and a tradesman before you are taken seriously as an organizer or a political thinker, you know, with these people because talk is cheap. Everybody has ideas, but if you're not actually proving yourself as a worker first and foremost, you lose any credibility to then organize in a more serious way. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that as well. Well, you know, Brett, you and I love talking to each other. You know, both are great. I'm going to start with the last one first. The working class has a lot of respect for work, as they should. That is a basis for their respect of themselves. I come in, even if the company's not right, I come in to work, I come on in time, I work

my ass off. That gives me the moral authority, whatever demands I want to make of the company. And as you said, if you're, I have apt to be here or something, if you are, you're often a partner with somebody, if they don't think you're a great partner, if they, if you're seeing any way you slacking off, you don't even discuss somebody. anything, little on socialism. Because they always say you're a loser. We don't even

you should get fired. I mean, you should lose your job because if I'm getting up every day and working my ass off and you're not. So I completely agree and I've always been Leanne's been a great worker. I've been a, there's a story

well, I always have stories but one of the years tried to see if I could get perfect attendance because there was a big thing up there, the property attendance group, and in the factory of 5,000, maybe, I don't know, 200

would be on the list. And that meant you were never late and never missed the day of work. And I decided I wanted to do that because I was very popular, but I was also under tremendous pressure being in the Congress.

And with a lot of attacks on me, what you'll talk about. And I really respected the people I had property to have. So one day, I overslept. And I don't like driving my car fast. I don't know why. I threw my clothes on, got in the car, must be in four minutes,

poor-ass to the GM band ice plant. But because I was late, the goddamn parking lot was completely full, so I had to go to the end of the damn parking lot, run all the way back, and somehow I punched it at 629, 630 was the shift time. And I wasn't up at my station there, right? So by the time I get to my station with this, 635, and the relief man is there, has started your job

because they always have somebody, the assembly line must watch. Got to believe me when it was flying. You know, he said, okay, cool, glad you here. I thought you were not going to come in. You know, here are your tools. But if you did it a lot, the relief man would go to the foreman and say, what? Fuck this guy. This woman, she's always late.

She got some story. She's out. He's out. So absolutely, workers respect work as they should. We're making a product, but being paid to do something. And one of the reason the working class has some confidence in the good sense is because they do feel a sense of their own value. Now, I would challenge a little bit the second theory,

which is instead of asking the workers to look upward to the millionaires, I would say you better look in the mirror. Because you're arrogance. Do you really know what it's like to be black, a woman, but three kids? Do you have any clue what it's like to be beat by the police which you're not? You have any clue that

every member of your family is even going to be arrested or stopped by a cop and yet it's usually racial. And even if you're black, you're making a good living. But what about your sister? You don't care about her?

Well, I don't need any government programs. These government programs, white people love these programs regardless of what they say. And the way they took the word welfare, which was originally the welfare of all people. And they just turn into black. And as soon as you hear black, you don't want any part of them, including the black middle

class sometimes. So I'm always able to say, look, this is a country based on slave labor. The fact that you're not doing slave labor doesn't mean that other people aren't. It's based on genocide. And if you believe in the word genocide where there's Palestine and black people, how dare you talk about other people are working? Did you hear the chain gangs?

Even on black people, they were enslaved. And then they arrested for nothing and they put on a damn chain gang. So we should be nothing wrong that we get paid well. But nothing in this should allow you to be racist, sexist, arrogance, and think you better than other working people.

And that's all I talk about. deal. And I always say, you know, you know, this is the trick. The system does want you to come arrogant. And the system wants you, but I'm the, I'm the hardest, hardest pay. Until you get injured. But that's not the point. Your life may be working great. But do you care about anybody else but yourself or your own family? Do you care about the black child that has no food, the white kid in Appalachia? Do you care about people with carpal tunnel or black lung disease? Do you care about people in the third row? So I've never talked to workers. You want to call workerism. You know, Lenin said that the rule of the communists is to be what's called the

Tribune of the People. And the communism talked to workers about being workers. So the Revolutionary Union used to go, you work. worker, boss attack you, workers fight boss, boss steal your money, so, you know, no man, I mean, that's not the point. You have to look at the whole world as the proletariat, and the whole other side is the bourgeoisie. If you're not on the side of the third world, if you're not on the side of the black poor, a woman is part of the proletariat, whether she's working or not. A woman who's on AFDC, families with dependent children,

she's working. And what happened to you? And I can talk like that to people. I can be their friends. I don't just, you know, but they know me and I've talked to them, and I care about their life. I felt like I just thought with that. I may hear it the first time.

It doesn't mean that answer in France time. I know I have to have that conversation, right? I may choose to find some other point of unity with the person, but I know my job is to have that conversation, and I've been fairly good, and we have been fairly good, in persuasion. Because right below that surface is an empathy, and for a lot of workers, unfortunately, it's now. And that's the struggle inside the working class.

is are you a pro and peer list worker who's angry about some particular thing going on or are you an empathetic worker who sees your own experience in the larger country? Yeah. I absolutely love that. And also, Brett, because you are very persuasive, by the way, because of your empathy,

that discussion you have still with that Palestinian brother, you're able, you're the one who they're going to go out of, Brett, I know, here he goes. He's talking about women. So how about gay people. But they're going to like it. You're going to respect you.

But as he said, so he said, well, you got to admit he's a good worker. If you don't have that, everything falls on that last argument, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's what I'm really, I'm really dedicated myself to establishing that, first and foremost, and establishing basic relationships before I start, you know,

having those more difficult conversations because you're right when when you're a stranger with somebody they don't care and if you haven't proven yourself they don't care i love your point about finding points of unity with people and and realizing whether or not this conversation should go to this level or should i wait on this you know like that's a really interesting nuance of of these discussions um and uh your point about instead of getting them to look up making them look in the mirror i think is beautifully stated and really resonated with me as a powerful thing i actually have a little historical uh event that I'm curious about and that feeds into this conversation perfectly, which is the notorious hard hat riot.

There's a recent PBS documentary. I know you were active at this time. Can you kind of talk about that and the contradictions of, you know, working in the Imperial Corps and being pro-war in that way and just what that event was? One more thing about the working class that I want to say was. I don't know why, but people confide in me. They always do. they can, I don't know, within a minute.

And that same worker was down, Harry says, you know, the problem is, my wife and I, I'm going to fight over this, or I am worried about losing my house, or I'm, you know, I know how hard I work, but I'm worried, am I going to, how many years can I do this? There'll be a vulnerability that's real.

There'll be an empathy that's real. You can't change somebody. You know, Mao said the basis of change. is internal and the conditions to change your external. So if there's nothing going on with that person about empathy, then you can't create empathy. I can't. But if the person is an empathetic soul,

and maybe they're a little obsessed with themselves, and maybe not maybe racist and sex or homophobic attitude, I always say everybody's got a left wing. You can find the thing within them. that does align with our values and show them the contradiction within that and the rest of their values. And besides being a good worker is, I don't know, workers will always come to my station and want to talk to me. And one more story is that I'm in a bus and we're going to Sacramento. and

to stop the plant closing, this guy named Sam Rodriguez is sitting next to me. And he's going to do this whole thing about his marriage or what's going on. And the guy behind the Mike Gomez, who's in the communist workers' part, said, I never thought of that people would talk to you about their marriages.

I'm always talking about the proletariat, but I realize, that if people won't share with you what's going on with them, that we have no ability to relate to them. So I know that about you, Brad, particularly, I mean that, you're very empathetic soul. I think all the good organizers that I know are great with people. People like them.

They give a damn about the person to whom they're talking. And that's still got to be the baseline for any conversation. Absolutely. And at the core of that empathy and that ability to relate to people is just a genuine love. It's like, you know, that's the core emotion is love for other human beings and for your fellow worker and your fellow person on this planet. And once you lead with love, you really do open up. And I think what you're getting at when people feel comfortable coming to you, even though

they know you for very short periods of time, I have that as well as because they intuitively, and even subconsciously, feel that love that's emanating off of you and they feel that they're not going to be judged or condemned that you are a safe person that they can confide in. And people want to confide. I think about how many people who, you know, have a lot of difficulties in their lives, but have very little to no one to actually confide in or to have those conversations to all sometimes come across somebody where it's very clear they've been looking for somebody to confide in and might not have that. And to be that person for somebody else, I think, is a, it's a rewarding and meaningful experience, for sure. Word for work. Yeah.

Let's go the hard hats. Let's go to the hard hat. I would love your take on the hard hat, right. What we were looking at was the beginning of a class struggle between the university elite and the working class. The protest movement just probably got so much bigger. I'm a Marine, and you take that flag and throw it on a floor and step on it. You've just made it personal. I felt they had a beat in coming.

A bunch of construction worker attacked the students. And then one thing led to another, and then it started to be in a riot. My best recollection of May 8th was the usual routine. Coming out onto the street, but you could hear a lot of activity at seven. It was too much for seven o'clock in the morning. We were assigned to come in early to the precinct, and we were told we're going down to Wall Street. Several hundred college and high school students,

declared a war of disruption on New York City today. The demonstrators gather on Wall Street. Word came by word of mouth that there's going to be a demonstration down to lower Manhattan. There was hundreds and hundreds of construction workers at different location. So everybody that you've seen was in live with that.

They were energized. The place was full. The entire square was full. Stop south street tomorrow. We're going to start New York City on Monday. I'm going to bring the whole country down with this next week. And then Nixon's going to have the response. I don't know. Maybe it's going to come down with his fifth.

A lot of people probably think so. But let's find out now. To us, as a working stiff, let's put it all blue collar, you just have people go to college to beat the draft. And they had money, and they let the working class people fight the wars. I sort of fancied myself as a documentary filmmaker, so I had bought my super 8mm camera along and I was going to film. And I heard, in the distance, I heard chance of USA, USA. And then these hard hat workers, they were marched.

It was like a march. It was like a parade. They were marching on the street. As they approach closer, we saw two streets also having large groups of people walking towards us. I saw them disparaging the flag. That room would do the line with me. And then one thing pushed comes to shove, where it started back and forth, and that's where it started getting a little rousy. You know what's coming.

You know there's going to be a fight. And all of a sudden, boom. Everybody's swimming. I was in the middle of the pack. The adrenaline was rushing. I was part of a mob. We were in something big. The hard-haired riot and the tumult and the division that will overtake New York City

is a microcosm of the divides and the polarization that will come to define American life. Well, the first thing I think is bullshit is, um, be jordan. Marxist term, bullshit, but the point is that the hard ads did represent, sad, but the majority of white workers, they did. Obviously, the clan was worse than the hardhat. The majority of white people who you see that, I still see that picture of the kids trying to integrate Lillarok,

them schools, and the white people scream, and you want their faces. I don't have love from them, and I do not have empathy. I don't think I can find a common anything with them. I don't. They are the worst versions of the U.S. Interiorless White Cellars. They're the white cellars. They have the people who, every time the United States even trying to make a treaty with indigenous people,

which is always a bad treaty. It was always the white workers who would say, no, I'm going to go right. she's the next piece of him. I don't care what the treaty says. So in my effort to talk about empathy and Kieran, I have to remember that most of the people I talk to are black. And most

of the people I talk to are Latina and Latinx and you know, the white people as a group, and I'm glad you I got to clarify this, the imperialism does not just run by imperialists.

It's a deep cultural reality in which large rooms of people majority are involved in the day-to-day running of imperialism. It's not just that abstractly they benefit but they're security guards. They're, I mean, prison guards. They're police.

I mean, the number of people who join the Marines, the army, go abroad to kill people. The whites who are 65% of whom voted for Trump, the white to hate GEI because they know. White people know they're inferior to black people. They do.

And they're frightened if you feel it. And if a black person does anything, it must be because in the racist mind, they were given something they don't deserve. Because the only thing worse than being a white is an unsuccessful white person. It's devastating to white people. How to hell?

You know, they love the white millionaire. And they hate the black work. So the first thing I'm saying is that our hard hats were elevated by the system. At a time when large numbers of white people were being great. The greatest breakthrough we've had, mainly white middle class, people, college students, but they were white working class students do who were violating, you know, who were choosing their Vietnam, went to Vietnam and fragged their offices. There was the biggest split inside the white world which has not existed.

And so the elevation of the hard hat was the system's elevation to say to the average white worker, your job is to beat up those anti-war. work against, especially the white kid. Because those white kids are anti-American, those white kids love black people. Those white kids love the communists in Vietnam. And we got to count on the majority of white people to beat them. And we're urging you to beat them.

So it's nitrists of police. So the whole elevation of those hard hats, was symbolic. I was in Boston, and I was approached by a guy named Chuck Turner, who you could look up, a very well-known black leader then, and they had built this movement of black people in the building trades. So Topeka University was building on pelvic,

with all white labor, and we had a demonstration. They had an demonstration to demand black people, be in the construction industry. And they were, you know, I don't know, 20 black people and 20 of us to the US Navy marching. And those white workers came up against us with wrenches through bold as that us. They were trying to kill us.

Wow. And the police came, and I had never seen anything like that. This is in the north. And the police came and half-heartedly tried to break things up. Just enough for we can get the hell out of there. But I saw white workers going to kill people to protect their white jobs. So my point is, it took me a while to figure out what is my lie on this. The system was scared it was losing white people,

who had been to the heart and soul of U.S. imperialists. And to see so many kids burning their draft card not going to do. You know, Gillette and you always let me go that, you know, the Powell Commission, right? The Justice Powell started this whole group of ruling class people who were saying, we're losing the country as becoming anti-corporate. The average person doesn't believe in big business saying, well, we have to have a 30-year campaign to win the argument. But they weren't that racist.

not to say they weren't, but it was mainly about private property and corporate. But the system runs on the mass support of white people, and sadly, substantial support, not majority, of black and Latinx and other people. They need a mass pro-imperialist move. And since Trump ran as imperialist and Kamala Harris ran as imperialist, General Harris said I'm going to have the most lethal if I'm elected, I'll be the mortgage stature of the military world. There was no anti-imperialist possibility in that election.

So I guess the point I'm getting to something in a while is the central role of good white people to stand up to the racist majority, which they are, the white racist white majority. to build structures of resistance, collectives. A lot of the kids, when I went to USC, there were, you know, many black and Latinx, but there was a lot of white kids there for the houseby. A lot of Jews from Palestine. So I guess what I'm saying is that

they went to make us look like we were jargon-juiced hippies and get a job. You know, we were spoiled children of the middle class. to get the angry, and this is interesting, to go back to the workers in the factory. You say, I'm a hard worker. And every time you march,

they say, get a job. And get a job is like the answer to you people, you students who don't have a job, don't understand. So I took a while to unravel this, but my main conclusion is one is the majority of white people

to not be approached by empathy. They can't. but a substantial minority can and we have to try it with everybody until proven otherwise. Secondly, we have to ask white people to stand up against white racism and white impuders.

That's the test of is there any real empathy. And yes, the hard hats were the well-paid construction workers who represented the heart of the white oppression. And the last thing I'll say is, the reason I don't agree with Bernie Sanders

and or the what you call the occupied people not the 99% against the 1% I wish it was the majority of people inside the United States are integrated into U.S. imperialism

or for U.S. imperialists and it's not the 99% against the 1% it is the majority of black people majority of Latinos, the majority of oppressed people, plus a substantial number of whites, that must be an alliance with the third world.

There is no ability for majority movements in the United States ever for socialism or anti-appeal. That's important. There's a minority movement that's so powerful that it causes contradictions inside the system. the allied with China and Venezuela and Cuba and Palestine, that's our obligation inside here, I speak. Could not agree more. And incredibly perfectly said, you're absolutely right. And breaking down that 99 versus 1%. I see the attempt is to try to make it all of us versus them,

but it really wrinkles over contradictions more than it clarifies what's actually real and the real forces at play here. So I think that's important. Well, I want to say this. We're coming up on two hours. I think we're going to have to have a part three, which I'm totally on board for if you are. Yeah. So actually, I just want to ask one more question to wrap up here.

And then when you come back on, we'll go back into your life story, the bus riders union, the fight for the soul of the cities. And we'll ask some other questions. And we'll do the reading that you had planned and everything like that. And we won't wait as long to record this. No, it's good, Brett. Okay. One thing I wanted to say before I forget. Please do.

It was the Chicano and black workers and the black community in the Van Nuys story who represented the ethical basis of class and race in the United States who did well beyond the self-interested struggle. It was the role of white women, black women, and a lot of good white guys and women. A lot of the white workers with Van Nuys because they were not the majority, because it was predominantly Chicano and black women. plant, they were anti-racist a lot because they were working a lot with thousands of, you know, so I think the GMMA story has a lot of very positive discussions of class race and gender. Absolutely. All right. So here's the last question for today.

Again, we'll have you back on to talk about so much more. But kind of connecting what you were just saying up to the contemporary moment and getting a little bit of your present analysis, you've argued that the United States is not drifting towards fascism, but that it already functions as a permanent fascist state with Trump and Biden representing two wings of the same counterinsurgency. I just want to kind of open the floor to you for the next 10 to 15 minutes and just kind of get your analysis on this and what you mean by the idea that the United States is a fascist,

a permanent fascist state. Well, Brian, I want to say again that I prepare a lot for our meetings, but you give me the chance by having the time, sometimes I'm getting clearer in my own mind in the process of trying to answer the crest. So the link is not simply because I do talk in long concepts, but I'm very appreciative. Now, let me make the basic argument. We start with what is the definition of fascism, that that's the argument. Fascism is any system in which one,

group of people generally based on race, oppress whole nations and people. That's the same imperialism is by its very nature fascist. Any group of settlers are by their nature of fascists. Any people carrying out genocide are by their nature of fascists. So it's like we call somebody a fascist instead of what is the structure on this day. My belief is way before 14. The creation of a Catholic, feudal, already capitalist Europe, led by Spain and the Catholic Church,

developed an ideology of genocide. And that was reflected in the cultural trilogy of the Spanish Inquisition against the Jews. the Spanish attack on the black moors and the Spanish invasion of the Americas. Each of them involved a genocidal approach to another group of people who are not white Christians. So if, in fact, genocide is integral

to the development of capitalism or terrorism. How can you say that in France, whether it has it free elections or not, is heroic? the former government of the genocidal state cannot be called bourgeois democracy. And I think certain Marxists by calling a bourgeois democracy are in fact supporting of populism because bourgeois as the adjective and democracy is the verb is the noun. So you're saying America is democratic, but it's a bourgeois democracy.

until we have a proletarian democracy, it can never be fully democratic. It's ridiculous. The United States is fascist by its very nature. Now, when black people fight for democratic rights, they are fighting for democratic rights under a specific form of fascists. They deserve the right to vote under fascists.

They deserve the right to sit in public accommodations. But how is it possible that 800,000 black people are in prison? How is it possible that virtually every black person has been arrested? Every black person has somebody in their family in prison or on the way or probation. So it's not even like, now, if you see black people as an oppressed nation, it still points out that the United States cannot possibly carry out democracy because its very nature is fascist. Now, fascist includes a police state.

We live in a police state. If you have 800 military bases, are we going to focus that are we going to have, take the money out of politics? If we have the CIA and the FBI in every country of the world, overthrowing every government in the world, that's by its very nature of fascist.

Now, does not negate certain struggles for democratic rights, but it has to be democratic rights under fascism. Because in the specific form of U.S. government, we have ostensibly free elections, which is a joke. And if I have to go to a whole critique of what's wrong with the electoral system, if there's two imperialist parties, blows the phone. are running on the subjugation of black people, including the Democratic Party. If you go into any city in the country, who's putting black people in jail? The Democrats.

So if, in fact, capitalist democracy was based on the theoretical exploitation of proletariat or the white European poitariat by the white bourgeoisie. and if in fact white people who are poor were not racially stigmatized which of course they weren't because they were white they would also be Christians the system focused on the exploitation of those people that would not be fascism

that was a mark said that the hypocrisy of capitalism was the steering of the workers and then the steering of their labor by the landlord and the merchant. But Marx did not say in 1793 that the French Revolution of 17 was at 89 went to Haiti to create genocide against the Haitian. So how can you tell about the French Revolution being bourgeois democracy even, when in fact both parties, the royalty, the nobility, the church, and the capitalists all agreed in racial genocide all over the world.

So I don't believe that you take a society based on genocide, like saying it's Israel a democracy. Right. That's a good one. Well, you know, we have to defend Israeli democracy when it has no right to even exist. Yeah. I think the United States has no right to exist in its present. the fact that we can may not overthrow it

we have to begin with the moral continuation that this is a white settlement state which means a white settler state is by nature fascism by nature illegitimate and has to be overthrown

whether we can or not it's our obligation to explain it needs to be overrule it has no moral legitimacy so if you go back to Marxism saying that the United States has bourgeois democracy, at the same time of committing genocide against black people, indigenous people, and Palestinian people,

you as a Marxist are coming up with a pro-imperialist whitewashing of U.S. imperialism by implying there is such a thing as democracy under genocide. Absolutely. Amen, amen. Could not agree more. And that's, I think, a great note to end. This part of our conversation on, because we will continue this. I have so many more questions to ask you. But I really love tapping not only your reservoir of life experience and the historical events you live through, but your keen, sharp, clear-sighted theoretical analysis, the ability for you to continue to have such sharp analysis of the present conditions. And having had that for decades and decades and decades, it's really, really, really impressive. And I think it's essential that, that, you know, people in my generation and younger learn from all the life experience of veterans in the class struggle like yourself. So again, thank you so much for coming on. This is only part two. We'll have a part three,

probably a part four. I just said. At the rate we're going. Part 10. And Eric Mann at voice, or Eric had voices from the plot lives, that more than more appreciation than I can express. Wonderful. Great, you. You too, as always. And I'll link to that in the show. Notts, people can reach out to you directly if they want to.

All right, my friend. We'll talk soon, and thank you so much. Take good care of this, brother. You're listening. RevLeft Radio is 100% listener funded. If you like what we do here, you can support us at patreon.com, forward slash revleft radio, or make a one-time donation at buy mea coffee.com

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