Rev Left Radio - Existentialism, Socialism, Buddhism and The Modern Revolutionary Spirit (Ft. The Deprogram)

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

Breht went on The Deprogram to discuss the philosophical strains and core arguments of his upcoming book from Iskra Books titled "A Letter to Young Revolutionaries" as well as his recent speech at the Socialism Conference (and the subsequent controversy around it). This is the first show Breht has gone on to discuss his upcoming book at length! Enjoy! Check out more from The Deprogram: PODCAST: https://open.spotify.com/show/7tk1sTZDeE8p9lnxYLy4Ky PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheDeprogram YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@thedeprogram9999 Learn more about Rev Left Radio at RevLeftRadio.com

Okay, JT, you got any banter shit, or we jump into the episode? You just had friends over something. Yeah, just had friends over, got incredibly fried at the beach. Other than that, not much to report. How, like, do you wear sunscreen every time, or do you, or are you a real man? Here's the funny thing. Here's the funny thing. You know, I'm a good boy.

I put on sunscreen every single time I go out in the sun. This time, however, I don't know if it was expired or if I just did a really bad job with the, you know, like the rattle can sunscreen. And I should have put on the thick Zuck cream style sunscreen. But I look like an absolute lobster. Dear listeners, there's a reason we don't have cams on. I'm glowing. I'm irradiated. I'm in so much pain just sitting here.

It was a big mistake. My children have laughed at me. I feel thoroughly humiliated, but, you know, wear your sunscreen and make sure it's the proper kind, friends, because this is very unpleasant. I refuse to do it. I just sit there in my, like, half-unbuttoned shirt trying to look all elegant or whatever,

under the umbrella for like five hours, and they're just chug cocktails. Like, that's my beach experience. Sure, I actually go into the water, like at least two, three times to cool off, and I only stand in front of the sun while I dry off. Like just dry off in the sun

and I go back in. And I never, almost never get, almost never get burned. But then again, I never get the tan, which is like, still, by the way,

a very, very big thing in Eastern Europe. I don't know about Western Europe. But don't imagine, don't imagine like British tanning. Like, you know, when they literally, I don't know,

blackface themselves. Like, holy fucking kid. When they live in the tanning salon. But people like, whenever you go for summer, vacation. You usually go seven to 12 days. That's a very strong thing that's left over actually from the socialist era, right? Absolutely everybody would go to the seaside to rest for 10 to 15 days, very often paid by the enterprise that they would be working for, right? So whenever you go and you

come back, everybody kind of looks at you and either compliments you and having gotten a tan or not really having a tan. So, yes, tanning is still very much so a thing. But, uh, But I don't do it. I don't do it. But I don't also put on the lotion. The incredibly riveting conversation. Brett, what do you do? You're based and you just don't go to the beach because beaches.

No, well, I do work outside. So I have to take, you know, skin care seriously. But then I've also also in my mid-30s now adopted a facial moisturizing routine. So I'm trying to keep up with that. You know, take care of my skin. Yeah, you know. Come on. It takes like 60 seconds, brother.

Come on. You will make us all look like shit. I'm going to age next to you people. And when we're 55, you're going to look like Jason Statham. And I'm going to look like the fucking straight out of the Muppet show. That is the goal. That is the goal. Come on.

But we're not competing about anything at this. Oh, God. You see beauty standards. You like you fucking freaks, like women have been complaining for for centuries at this point that we standardized them having to use like 500 commodities on their face. every single morning, the one thing that we had was not to have to do that. And now you're buying into this fat. Like, come on. It's not a fad.

It's just taking care of your body. Yeah, yeah. That's what the man wants you to think. You're like, but yes, no, take care of yourselves, dear listeners. It's okay, even though it's making Jeff Bezos' seventh trillion, okay? And remember, a lotion is bourgeois decadence. Look, yes, yes. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to yet another episode of the D program.

Today we have an absolute titan joining us. Our original, by the way, first ever guest, a man who needs no introduction, absolute legend in the space, dear friend of the show. And now, very, very soon, a best-selling author, if I have anything, to say about it. Welcome back. It's been a second. I love being back. It blows my mind that I was the first official guest on the D program. Love that you comrades are still doing your thing. I'm still doing my thing. We operate in the same sort of political milieu, and it's just really cool every time I get a

chance to come on here and talk with you guys. I've had each of you on, including Hakeem, on independently on Rev Left. I've been on here now twice, and I just, I love our collab, so I'm looking forward to this one. Likewise. Likewise. Thank you. And I have to say, I do have to say, I've been. following JT's a YouTube you know is his analog style pivot like it's it is genuinely inspiring

your writing stuff trying to inspire your your listeners to live a more analog embodied life and and pursue creative outlets really I think is crucial and it dovetails well with some of the stuff that you know I've been trying to tell people as we're under an increasing

onslaught from the algorithms and the screens and the bullshit so I really appreciate what you're doing over there absolutely well thank you man yeah it's been that's just been a pet project of mine for a while now because I realized I was just getting so fried like my brain was just like buzzing all the time like man this is not healthy this is gross this is the doom scrolling stuff needs to stop like it hasn't been that long since this really became a thing like even like the 24 hour news cycle is so recent in the grand scheme of things and we need to remember that totally absolutely and it dovetails with some

of the stuff I'm talking about perhaps in my book and in the speech more broadly and about subjectivity. So hopefully we can get into some of that, but certainly we have to beware and kind of guard our attention and our ability to concentrate and focus as the corporations try to colonize our attention spans in our minds itself. 100%. Beautifully put. Welcome to your listeners. Before we begin, I would like to read out a kind of synopsis of a very exciting new book coming to us from breadth so that we're all on the same page and we know exactly what we're talking about. So sit down and listen, kids.

Quote, A letter to young revolutionaries is a philosophical, political and spiritual book about how to live a meaningful life in the 21st century. Written, especially for younger people developing a political consciousness, the book asks a set of basic existential question. Given the extraordinary fact that we exist at all, the inevitability of death and the historical world into which we have been thrown, what should we do with our limited time? What responsibilities do we have to other people? What kind of person should we try to become? The book's central argument is that a genuinely meaningful and revolutionary life requires three interconnected forms of development.

political engagement, spiritual or psychological depth, and the conscious cultivation of virtue. These correspond to the book's three main sections, being depth and virtue. Marxism provides the primary framework for understanding and transforming the social world. Buddhism provides a practical and philosophical framework for examining and transforming consciousness. existentialism establishes the relationship between freedom, responsibility, authenticity, and historical action. In virtue ethics asks what kind of character must be consciously cultivated in order to sustain the political and spiritual projects.

The book attempts to hold these traditions together dialectically rather than simply placing them beside one another. Its broader contention is that the transformation of society and the transformation of human subjectivity are inseparable processes. We cannot build a liberated society while remaining psychologically and ethically unchanged by the social relations of the old world. But neither can individual spiritual transformation substitute for collective political struggle, inner and outer liberation must develop together. Wow, wow, wow, that is a project and that is an undertaking. There is so much that we can unpack here and so much that we can talk about, but of course, we're not going to do it for 15 hours because people actually need to read the

book, of course. But let's start out by, actually no, let's start out with before the questions about the actual content of the book and your thesis and so on. How did you come to the idea of writing it? What pushed you to start this monumental task? Great introduction. Appreciate it. Yeah, and I just want to make it clear that the book obviously is not out yet. We're on the very last legs, finishing up the edits. We already have the design for the book cover. It's being put out by Iskra books. Huge shout out to Iskra. I'm under contract with them for two books. So after this one, my next one is going to be, I'll talk about that later. I'm not going to drop that yet. But just all that to say is the book should be coming out in the next few months,

ideally perhaps around holidays or on the later end, perhaps around February, which is the 10-year anniversary of Rev Left being on the air. So that would be a cool little synchronicity there. So, yeah, check out Escrow Books, follow them if you want to keep updated on when the book will come out. But, yeah, fundamentally what inspired me is kind of like the broader project I've always been doing at Rev. which is, you know, I'm interested not just in politics. I'm interested in a well-rounded life. I'm interested in existential questions. I'm interested in, yeah, spiritual and psychological depth. And I'm increasingly, as I age, I'm in my late 30s now, I look at young people

coming up. And I, you know, garnered experience in political education in the Marxist sort of cultural milieu, as well as in many organizing spaces. And that experience combined with a genuine desire to want to reach out to younger people coming up who are, you know, entering a really uncertain world. They're entering, you know, uncertainty about the job market, about what to even go to school for, about the disastrous effects of climate change by the time they get older, whether or not they'll ever be able to establish themselves financially. And a lot of people will be radicalized politically by that situation. And that radicalization itself can lead to many different outcomes, including burnout, including nihilis,

including despair, if it's not embedded within an embodied and a rooted life. And that life is more than just politics. So in order for our politics to be more effective, in order for us to affect political change, we ourselves have to change in the process. And so what I hope the book does is bring these seemingly disparate philosophical traditions, Buddhism, existentialism, Marxism, virtue ethics, and not just, you know, get into this, but not just weld them together, not just saying, hey, here's a bunch of ideas I like, but actually put them into dialectical interplay to show what they offer one another. And, you know,

one of the things that I see happens often in any political space, especially, you know, and I talk about Nietzsche's death of God and his prediction of various forms of nihilism erupting in the wake of the death of God. And, you know, it's clear to me that politics can become an outlet that people try to use for questions that politics can't answer. You can't find all your meaning in life, you know, through a political formation. When you try to do that, the politics itself suffers. People become, you know, if they really cling on to a political identity incredibly closely, it becomes fused with their sense of self in an unhelpful way. People can become very sectarian, very dogmatic. But more than that, I've, in my experience with organizing, which I think will also

get into a little bit more of, just to sort of presage that answer, is just this idea that time and time again in organizations, I've seen that even when the politics are really good, a lot of times people are limited by their ability to navigate conflict, by their inability to understand their real motivations, to project interpersonal conflict as if it were principled theoretical disagreement, you know, splits and abuse and narcissists. And these things, it's not unique to the left. You go to any political formation and you will see these neuroticisms and pathologies emerge. But as somebody on the left, I've seen those exact things weaken and limit what a community organization is capable of doing or in some cases even destroy those organizations. So I'm interested in not in trying to offer young people a well-rounded path that eschews what our capitalist liberal society tells you as a meaningful life, which is success. and status and worshipping the self and chasing fame and money. That's ultimately, I truly believe, an empty life, even if you were to succeed.

And so I'm trying to lay out an alternative way of going about and living your life that is embedded and inseparable from the struggle in the 21st century for political transformation. And the final thing I'll say is a big inspiration comes from, you know, Che Guevara's text, socialism and man in Cuba, which I'd recently did a speech. speech at the Socialism Conference on. And in that text, Che, six years after the Cuban Revolution, you know, he fought in and won a successful revolution and is now operating in the, you know, mess of contradictions in the wake of a successful revolution, fending off, you know,

U.S. imperialism, working with the Cubans who have, you know, been conditioned in a pre-revolutionary society and all the things that come with that. And in that text, Che is really trying to wrestle with the subjective component of revolution. He's like it's both objective and subjective. We seek to transform the world and in the process, we ourselves are changed and must change. And we must take that subjective change as a sort of conscious responsibility. And so I'm taking the arguments in that text and I'm really kind of, you know, developing them through other philosophical traditions. And so that's the goal of the book. And that's the reason I try to do it. Fantastic. So let's start out by talking about what you actually want to do with the book. You say you want to, for example, hold the traditions I just read out together dialectically rather than simply juxtapose them, which to say at the very least makes me very excited. But I have to ask the somewhat cliche question every Marxist poses in this scenario. And I'm sure a lot of listeners already are.

How? Can we walk through one example in the book where a real contradiction between two of these traditions is resolved through synthesis rather than one tradition simply being asked to, let's say, yield to another? Absolutely. And because this is so crucial, I did, I spent some time in preparation for this interview writing notes on just this question. So the rest of the stuff will be much more free-flowing and even this will be, you know, back and forth and free-flowing. But I wanted to kind of write out specific examples because I think the question is so good and it cuts to the the heart of the book. And if I can't, you know, come up with multiple examples of this, then the core thesis, you know, is sort of shaking to the core. So, you know, I really want to emphasize that I'm not

just doing this eclectic fusion, that I'm trying to put them dialectically into relation with one another. So instead of just one example, let me give you a few. And then you can pick whichever one you want to dig down on. So there's the first one is like this Marxism and Buddhism stuff. more broadly. Now there's a million things within Marxism and Buddhism that could be contradictory or that we could explore. But one of them is like this this concern with subjectivity and how it's constituted and how it's even undermined in Buddhism. So Marxism will say that consciousness and our subjectivity, our inner lives, our ways of thinking and relating and being in the world emerge ultimately from concrete, material and social relations. And so you can't just extract

yourself from your historical and material conditions and invent your own consciousness or your own subjectivity we all understand if you're listening to a show like this basic base and superstructure analysis right that the culture and the values and the ideas of a society are ultimately rooted in how that society produces and reproduces the necessities of existence so so that's an interesting claim in seeming contradiction with what Buddhism says says which is sort of even undermining that the self has a sort of independent and fixed essence at all, right? That in the Buddhist idea that the individual self, the feeling

that we are self-contained, you know, more or less semi-permanent beings, like there's a me somewhere in here. You know, I always say like behind my eyes and between my ears, looking out at a world that is not me, that visceral felt sense of a separate self is itself targeted in Buddhism. So those aren't identical claims. Those are different claims about how consciousness and subjectivity are constituted, but I believe they can deepen one another. So if the self is dependently constituted rather than a sort of fixed metaphysical static thing, then historical and material transformation of subjectivity becomes more intelligible. So the Buddhist sort of undermining or destabilizing of the very idea of a fixed subjectivity opens up in an interesting

way the transformation of subjectivity through material and historical transformation a la Marxism. So Marxism kind of keeps the emptiness in Buddhism, the lack of a static metaphysical permanent self-hood and really fixed essences altogether, keeps them from floating into idealism, which you can often find in spiritual and even Buddhist communities, sort of an a priori idealism or sort of assumed idealism, by grounding that stuff in bodies and labor and institution and history and class. And then Buddhism pushes Marxism beyond any like residual picture of the individual as a self-contained entity. And so in this way the synthesis is sort of a relational, historically produced, and therefore

a transformable human subject. And that ability to make the human being transformable, I think, is important in many ways. One of the ways is that one of the harshest, or not the harshest, but one of the more common critiques of Marxism is like this silly human nature argument. And when you look back over 6,000 years of class society, you know, it's sometimes that argument can actually be steel manned to be kind of interesting. Like all through since the agricultural revolution, you've had class society and human beings operating in ways that are compatible with hoarding for myself, having an in-group and an out-group that's excluded, fear-based attempts to dominate and control resources, the division of labor wherein a parasitic upper class profits from the toil of the lower classes, etc. If we want communism to be possible, right, if we want the transcendence of class society to be possible,

what is required is that the human being and human nature itself is actually open to transformation. And so I think Buddhism deepens that claim, but only when put into conversation with the historical materialism of Marxism. Because then you kind of lose the anchor in pure Buddhism of like, what's the relationship between subjectivity and society and material production at large? So that's one. I have a few others if you want me to go into them right now. If you have any thoughts on that, we can stop. Please do. Please do. So one of the dialectical sort of synthesis is I'm trying to create is this, you know, the Marxism and ethics. Like we, you know, there's like these ideas of do structures make people? Do people make structures? And there's an old tension between like the Marxist insistence that human beings are produced again by material and social conditions. And this sort of often liberal ethical insistence that we have some responsibility for the, the sort of people we can that we should become and in liberalism you'll hear stuff like be the

change you want you want to be in the see in the world like there's a hyper individualism within liberalism that kind of that kind of assumes that it's not the structures that are the problem if we had good CEOs and if we had good government and if everybody was like less greedy then like capitalism could really actually be a nice thing you know and we have we have to do away with that we have to understand that ethics themselves are socially and materially produced but that doesn't give us an out, right? That doesn't become an excuse for, like, kind of saying, well, we have, some Marxists will be overly deterministic and say, well, all that stuff will come along once we change

the structures, right? If we just go out and transform the material and social relations of society, then naturally, somehow more or less, not magically, but determinatively, human subjectivity will come along. So the synthesis for me there is that subjective and structural transformation, have to develop dialectically together. So through the process of trying to transform the world, we ourselves are transformed, and through the process of trying to become better people

while we're engaged in transforming the world, our ability to impact the world and transform it becomes, you know, the ceiling on it gets higher and higher. They feed off of each other. Exactly, exactly. And one more, you know, I have a few in here, but I'll just stop with this one and we can go back and forth. There's a really interesting contradiction

if you know about Buddhism, and, you know, perhaps spirituality, more broadly, and revolutionary politics, which is this seeming contradiction between acceptance and the revolutionary need to negate, right? So this is like almost seemingly like a perfect contradiction. Buddhism will teach that radical acceptance is necessary. You have to see reality clearly. We have to like let go of our neurotic resistance to what actually is. And revolutionary politics will say, hold on, you know, the world as it presently exists is intolerable and it must be change. So how can we accept things as they are while also maintaining a revolutionary commitment

to radical transformation of things as they are? And I think the synthesis here is that acceptance in this sense is not, okay, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, just is the way it is. Okay, I just accept that. No, it just means refusing to like kind of lie to yourself about what actually exist. It means like taking stock of the concrete situation you find yourself in historically, politically, economically. And I think you really do have to fully understand and accept reality as it is before you can go about genuinely challenging it, transforming it, or negating it in the dialectical sense. So Buddhist acceptance and revolutionary transformation in this dialectical relationship, they kind of stop being opposites. It's like, this is what exists. These are the

real conditions that produced it. These are the actual concrete contradictions within it. And therefore, these are the possibilities that we can play with for becoming or pushing it to be something else. And so that's just another example of a seeming contradiction that is not just put together and be like, oh, this is what Buddhism says, this is what Marxism says, but is actually dialectically brought together to create a synthesis that shows that both are actually deepened by being in, you know, working relation with the other tradition. There's this very strong Marxist tendency that might be a overgeneralization or even if you would allow me even a stereotype, but a stereotype that happens a little bit too often,

which is the idea that delving deeper into, let's say, more metaphysical questions or spiritual questions, et cetera, et cetera, that is for the 10 generations down the line who will have the privileges and time and ability to all turn themselves into some kind of like, philosophies, for King after, you know, the contradictions of class society and maybe even hierarchy as a whole are addressed, which is often used as, I'll say it openly, as an excuse for people during their, let's say, revolutionary life even before their revolution quota comes as an excuse to not partake in very, very, very real and very important modes of self-development, not. only as a human being or as, you know, a, what did you do today to increase shareholder value type of individual,

but genuinely, do genuinely, genuinely, genuinely deepen yourself? Because, like, isn't at the end of the day one of the main goals of everything that we're trying to achieve here to create a society in which dealing with a totally absurd, menial, concepts like, you know, having to make sure that your material conditions are well, are taking care of, that nobody wants to kill you, murder you, et cetera, et cetera. Isn't the reason why we are trying to create a society with less contradictions so that we can have more time and not only more time so that set society can then proactively influence some deeper self-exploration for us as a speech.

at the at the end of the conversation so the the synthesis that you give are fantastic in my opinion because they address like this is how I'm reading it very subjectively they address this elephant in the room that uses the fact that they are the electrical materialists as an excuse to not explore both who they really are what they really want out of this life, how to be, as you say yourself, the person that you want the outside world in the system they find themselves in to kind of mirror. And by engaging in conversations like this

and writing stuff like this, of course, that call out can make a lot more, not just a lot more, a larger number of, let's say, I mean, this is a massive oversimplification, well, I'll still say it, a lot more happy Marxists. This will also make a lot more good Marxists, productive Marxists, Marxists that can actually put pen to paper, that can actually do something in the material world inside of their organizations. Exactly. And to build on that exact idea, you know, Che talks about exactly that, that, you know, and the post-revolutionary situation in Cuba, people that were brought up under

pre-revolutionary conditions still had the competitiveness, the acquisitiveness, the alienation, the egoism, the sense of like being motivated by material incentives. One of the thing that Che really highlights is like, you know, I know that in the transition to socialism will have to use material incentives to, you know, provoke the sort of social behavior that we want to see. But ultimately, we have to get away from the very idea that people as individuals are materially rewarded for their contributions in the sense that that. material acquisitiveness is a product of capitalist subjectivity.

And so I think people that really want to like, if they're still like questioning whether this is a serious issue, reading Chase socialism and man in Cuba, I think really drives home the point that this is an important issue. And we've seen not only organizations, but even socialist experiments, sometimes be very limited by the subjectivities of the people involved. And if you think, like look at your average American. I use this example in my speech. I love my, I'm an American. I'm born in Omaha, Nebraska, my family, my friends, the people I work with, people I love. They're all Americans. I'm not shitting on Americans, but I'm just saying, look at the baseline subjectivity and political ideology, as confused as it can sometimes be, of the average American. And then ask yourself, if we had, you know, God willing, a socialist revolution tomorrow, how would the people brought up, not the elites and the privilege, you know, they'd freak out as they should, but the regular working class Americans, how would being brought up with decades of anti-communist propaganda, of don't tread on me, flags flying in their

face, of the hyper individualist of liberalism and libertarianism, how would that manifest in even people who are ostensibly on the side of the revolution and trying to create a better world? So this is a real issue. And insofar as you admit, okay, this is an issue. I see why this is an issue. Then the next question is, well, if we can take conscious steps to go out and transform the world through political organization and.

education and the attempts to build socialism, we can also take conscious steps to cultivate subjectivities that are more aligned with and that perhaps prefigure the sort of societies that we want to create. And that transformation can't come isolated from political struggle. It has to be married to it. But once you understand that, then you say, okay, I have to consciously take responsibility for how I behave in the world, how I treat other people, for my own mind and how it operates. And that, I think, is a really crucial thing. And let me make one more point here, because I think this is interesting. In the same way, Buddhism and Marxism have this fascinating sort of approach that is very similar,

although they're aimed at different objects. Marxism gives us a meta-prospective on the system we are in, right? Marxism steps outside of liberalism, outside of capitalism, and critiques it. And by that distance that Marxism gives us to the system, we can see it as a system. we can see it as historically contingent and ultimately ephemeral. A liberal, a conservative, a libertarian, they might be very smart, they might have very sophisticated arguments. They are fundamentally thinking within the system.

They do not have an ability to step outside of it and see it for what it is. In the same exact way, Buddhism and specifically the practices, I'm not talking about the metaphysical beliefs of Buddhism. I'm talking about specifically the practices around meditation takes a metacognitive perspective on the machinations of the mind. So when you have a thought in your head, we all talk to ourselves in our heads all day long, we don't ever question it.

When you have a thought in your head, you immediately identify with that thought. That's my thought. It's almost like you authored it. But there's the thought talking to you, and then there's you listening, and sometimes the thought is very discordant. You don't like the thought.

Insecurity is just one example of, like, a thought happens, you identify it with it, you know, you're fat or your nose is big or you're ugly. That's just a thought. You automatically identify with it. You can't stand outside of that thought and look at it passively. You just see it as like, yeah, that's me thinking. And then you feel the cascade of emotions and sensations of shame and guilt and insecurity that follow.

Imagine if you could, which Buddhist meditation allows you to practice, develop the metacognitive ability to stand outside that thought and to watch it dispassionately. There is an unskilful thought. It's this old pattern from childhood where whatever, my mind. My mom said, you know, I was fat when I was such and such, and it's always been an insecurity all through high school, et cetera. I understand the causes and conditions that allowed that thought to continue deep into my 30s, 40s, or whatever. Instead of automatically identifying with it, I'm going to watch it.

And that exact process of watching is this thing that Marxism does with liberalism and capitalism, which is it creates distance from the thing so that you can see it from a broader perspective. It is literally a higher perspective from what. which you're looking at the object. And that allows a certain sort of transcendence that being locked in those systems or automatically identified with those mind machinations fundamentally does not allow. And so that is another, I think, really important part of the book and the overall argument. Now for a more, let's say, challenging question whose thesis I honestly don't even agree with, but we'd love to see how you personally resolve it. So the book is aimed at

young people developing political consciousness for the first time, right? Is there kind of a risk that introducing stuff like Buddhist non-attachment principles at the same developmental moment as political radicalization? And could it at a little bit maybe dampen the very anger and urgency that, you know, historically drives people into sustained activism? I think it's a great question and it's worth being worried about it. And I'm really actually happy that I have the opportunity to address it because I think fundamentally there's some confusion around what Buddhist non-attachment means. And the confusion is perpetuated by practitioners of Buddhism and various other spiritual, so-called spiritual communities where there's an overarching desire to recoil from the political, to sort of quietism, right? The looking at the messiness of politics and saying, that's not for me.

And then you actually start using spirituality as an escape from your moral responsibility to the social, as well as perhaps in many instances, as an escape from your own inner turmoils. It's a way to kind of people can use it to numb out or bliss out. But not attachment. Also, but also contrastingly, sorry for interrupting you because that's super interesting. Yeah. But in conscience, there's also Marxists that refuse to do, let's say, spiritual introspection because of the same reasons that maybe, I don't know, a Buddhist would abstain from politics. Oh, the spiritual stuff is icky, just like for the Buddhist, the political stuff is icky. And yet, as you said earlier, both give you a standing outside of the park looking in perspective that can just literally completely. transform your life in both categories of let's say of existence right so it's exactly i just wanted

to throw a bit of shade to our to our comrades as well because they they they know you they often view people that partake in self-exploration to a very deep level let's call it that even though that for some reason sounded kinky uh and they're like okay these people these people just live in their own heads and they don't care about real quote unquote material issues outside. And that can be very fair criticism. But you also do the same thing sometimes, but in reverse when you completely shut yourself away from potential self-exploration. But yes, please. Sorry. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And I believe, again, you limit, you can often limit yourself. We've all met people on the, on the revolutionary left that are ego freaks,

that are that are dogmatist weirdos, that are fundamentally driven. You can tell that they're driven, not by love of others or genuine desire to change the world, but like by hate and vengeance and bitterness. And that is actually counterproductive to our stated goals. We want to become like better people, like more compassionate, more wise, more ethical human beings. For many reasons, as I've talked about some of them, but also just to be like taken seriously. Like we want to be well-rounded deep human beings that can relate to other human beings. And I understand the Marxist suspicion of this entire discussion. I know I perhaps identified with that suspicion at some point.

But the other thing that I think is important is that human beings, we do have a spiritual or religious or existential, however you want to conceptualize it. We have that aspect to our being. Like we are born into the mystery and majesty of the cosmos, this insane flowing out of energy. We find ourselves historically, materially instantiated as human beings on this one planet. Our fundamental orientation, we'll get to death in a bit. But the human life, as Buddha said, is suffering. It's not only permeated by this low level of constant dissatisfaction, of never feeling quite complete,

of always having to try to find happiness. And if I just get that and I just do this, and no matter what you do and how many things you get, there's still this aching sense of like, I'm not quite there. I'm still dissatisfied. I'm still not happy. But even bigger than that, just the tragedy of the human life is that we are born into a life. We watch everybody older than us that we love, our parents, our grandparents, older siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts, friends. We watch every single one of them die until it is our turn.

And you cannot tell me that we can just askew that whole dimension of our being, that we can just focus on politics and not worry about the human existential component of being or worse, be diluted into thinking that you can actually. come to some resolution of that human condition through mere political struggle. So refusing to make that category error, I think, is an important thing. And just recognizing the existential dimension of our being, I think, is a really crucial thing that young people, I think, do want to hear, that politics itself is never going to solve those issues and that we do have to kind of take them seriously. And once you take them seriously, then we can talk about this other stuff. But the last point I wanted to make about non-attachment in the Buddhist sense, you know, because when you, when you sort of have a surface level understanding of Buddhism is like, and even Zhizek has this argument, you can find it online where like Buddhism is nihilism. That Buddhism is like, don't be attached to anything.

Like some people take it so are so confused about it that it means like, oh, I don't want to be attached to my kids. I don't want to be attached to a better world in the future. I don't want to be attached to anything. That's not what non-attachment means. Non-attachment is a subtler claim about the way human beings grasp and cling at things in an attempt to try to, you know, in colloquial terms, fill the hole in our soul. This sense of lack, this sense of not having enough, of not being happy, of never quite arriving. And non-attachment says the more we cling and grasp and try to grab things in pursuit of that delusional belief that we can obtain happiness through things, the more we actually suffer because the more we always end up coming up short. So non-attachment is not passivity.

It's not indifference. It's not some sort of numbness. It is a higher and wiser relationship to, let's say you mentioned anger. There's an egoic way anger can take you over. You can be possessed by anger. You know, anger could be a very important feeling. We all feel it when we look at the injustices of the world. Anger is evolutionarily there for a reason.

And socially, it's productive. When I look at the genocide of Palestinians, when I look at injustices writ large, I, as Che said, tremble with indignation. That means I feel fucking anger and sometimes hate and despair even, often accompanied by helplessness in the case of the Palestinian genocide or other injustices. But would it be better for us to be utterly taken over by that anger? Or would it be better for us to have a metacognitive perspective on that anger, where we understand where it's coming from, we understand the causes and conditions that give rise to it and instead of being totally taken over automatically identified with it,

we can use it in its proper place. We can use it instead of it using us. Because anger that is not controlled kind of turns into like this reactivity. And ultimately like our politics, as Che said himself, has to be guided by love. Like fundamentally we're, yes, we're angry. Yes, we feel hate. When I look at Pete Hegseth, for example, one of many, I feel like hatred and disgust and rage. But is that productive if we want to create a better world? That has its place, but that has to be a tool for me to use. It can't be something that overwhelms me and uses me. And the Buddhist relationship to your own mind and emotions and thoughts and sensations allows you distance to be able to fully feel your emotions. This is nothing to do with

numbing or escaping. In fact, a lot of these spiritual paths, in particular, consistent meditation practice will bring up shit you've been trying to escape from. It is a very uncomfortable process at times. The things about you that you try to run from and conceal and repress, they do bubble up. And you do have to confront them. You do have to process them. And you do have to ultimately, if that's done healthily and correctly, transcend them so that they no longer have a grip over you. And that puts us just in an overall better position to operate from a wiser, a more stable place as opposed to being tossed around by negative emotions like anger, which again has its place but can't become dominating over us in our lives. How like speaking of let's say

feelings that sometimes dominate our lives and drive us in the direction that without you know doing introspection you don't even know why you're following? How do you resolve? How do you resolve the almost, let's say, reactionary drive many of us have that pushes us to want to see the contradictions finally break the Campbell's back with genuinely wanting to improve people's current conditions. Basically, how does somebody with imbued revolutionary spirit just chill the hell out? Yeah, it's really a great question because I feel this too. And if you're listening to a program like this or a D program like this, you will, you will, you will understand, you will understand this emotion, which is like, and it actually gets manifest in that meme that nothing ever happens, right,

which is not a left mean, but it's a political meme of this feeling is like, okay, I would actually just, I just want to push the fast forward button and let this whole fucking system collapse so that we can finally have the way cleared to build something. And it's very frustrating to live in history as opposed to study it. Because when you go back and you read, you know, you go back and you read the history of any revolution, you know, chapter by chapter, it gives you this sense that it all happened pretty quick. And you feel like, especially if you're a Marxist and you've understood these things for many years, it's like, holy fuck, how long does this process take?

We are stuck in this historical process of neoliberalism and fascism and the rise of the techno oligarch surveillance state and imperialism and colonialism, specifically in like the neoliberal era. And it's like, we want, there's almost a part of you that's an accelerationist. that wants this whole thing to slam against the wall so that we can begin to actually figure out ways to make changes. But I think the hidden thing in there is that, one, you don't get to control that. And also, we're motivated by love, so we're not actually trying to be accelerationists. We don't want to instrumentalize people's suffering. People's suffering is an end in and of itself.

It's not a means to some other political end. And so we have to be wary of that almost acceleration is death drive within ourselves, that we just kind of want to get to the end of it. Sometimes I even feel this about life. It's almost like it's a very interesting feeling. I don't know if I'll be able to articulate it in a way that resonates with people, but you ever get this feeling as like life is full of so many uncertainties. You don't know how things are going to play out.

You're scared about how you're going to retire. You're scared about what's going to happen in the next economic downturn. You're scared about your kids if you have them and what their lives are going to to be and you almost want to skip to the end to see how it all plays out so you can relieve yourself cathartically and this is a delusion obviously it can't happen but this cathartic relieving yourself of the anxiety of uncertainty and and so that that wanting to just be at the end to just skip the messy parts and just get to the end and see what the conclusion is I think that's an interesting human drive and we have to be I think ultimately wary of it because one again we don't control it

So sitting back and saying, I hope everything breaks and crashes and I hope we get World War III so that we can move. Like, you saying that has no impact on history. Nothing actually changes out there. Only thing that changes is kind of your internal desperation and your internal sort of approach to your day-to-day life. And so I fundamentally think that that is kind of unhelpful. And the first step is to kind of become aware of that within ourselves, that we are in history. This historical process plays out. frustratingly slowly, we have to be operating every step of the way. And when you go back and

actually study revolutions and you understand the time involved, just the Bolshevik revolution itself is the culmination of decades and decades of not only concerted, theoretically coherent political activity on the part of the Bolsheviks, but also of the historical processes that they had no control over. They didn't control World War I. They didn't control the state of Tsarist Russia at that time, the economic situation, the horrific impacts of war on society that allowed, that opened up the gate for people to look towards alternatives. So they controlled their political activity, but they actually had to wait for the material conditions more broadly to open up, to allow them to even be able to move in the direction

they ultimately did. So our goal then is to get away the fantasy of everything's going to happen tomorrow. We don't know. It could happen tomorrow. It could happen in 10 years. It could be the rest of our lives, control what we can control, which is we have a moral, ethical, and political responsibility to ourselves, to others, and to future generations, to organize politically in pursuit of what we truly believe is a better world that we call socialism on the way to communism. And we have to keep doing that so that when things inevitably do break, because this system is fundamentally unsustainable, that we have a base of support in the masses, that we have

the political coherency and the ideological struggle. that have taken place to elevate our movement to a mature level wherein it is able to actually take meaningful steps in the direction of wrestling for political power. So it goes back to that old stoic idea of like let go of what you can't control and only focus on what you actually have influence over. You actually do have influence over a lot, but not everything. And we don't we don't get to choose how things happen in the world. We do get to choose our responses to it. And there's something deeply dialectical about that in and of itself that I think is helpful.

And the very last point here is just to point towards what we're seeing with Trump and the techno oligarchs and, you know, Nick Landian philosophy and Peter Thiel, which, I mean, Nick Land calls himself an accelerationist, a reactionary, neo-reactionary accelerationist, there is in fascism, and it's in every fascism. You know, Nazis, the Italian fascist, the American fascist, this sort of unsustainable death drive accelerationism. They want to get to some bloody crescendo.

Trump and the AI oligarchs, they want to kind of just build, like, yes, all these dangers, who knows where it's going to go, let's just fucking build the thing anyway, strip all regulations away, put the pedal to the fucking floor, and if it ends in human extinction,

we accept that too. And, you know, they'll talk about that. Like, you know, Peter Thiel being asked, do you want the human species to continue? Well, you know, And Trump himself, as an egomaniac narcissist, Trump, I guarantee there's a part of Trump's psychology that even he can't see that wants the world to end with him. When you have such a narcissistic ego-dominated personality, you can't imagine, it's actually an affront to your sense of dignity that human lives can continue after you're gone. And that makes Trump a particularly noxious and dangerous figure because he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he.

You know, if he thinks like he's on some ego project and it ends up destroying the world, like he would go into his grave, I think, being happy with that. He will go into his grave upset if things are better and people will live better lives after him, you know. And that is, I think, the product of his particular narcissism, but I think is also a string and fascism. I did it. Nobody ended the world better than me. I didn't even leave a Noah with an arc. All the elephants died. Let me ask you this real quick. And I don't want to get in a generational analysis because it's obviously an aberration. anathema to class analysis.

But there's something in the boomers that is kind of like that. Which is like, you know, fuck it. Burn the world. Not all boomers, you know, but the certain, like the reactionary well-off, white boomers in the imperial core, there is a sense of like, fuck it. Like, you know, we got everything we got out of this thing. I'm not even going to give my kid in my house. I'm going to sell it for a million dollars and I bought it for 80 grand, you know, 40 years

ago. And again, this is a hyper generalization. There are many amazing, beautiful, wonderful boomers. of our political elders and heroes are boomers or were boomers. But Trump is, like, at the same time, a crescendo of the neoliberal period, an emergence of acute American fascism, and a sort of instantiation of egoic, boomer-esque death drive accelerationism. And it's fascinating.

It is, like, very often, like, the generation, like conversation about, like, generational differences and especially the hyper focus on boomers is often, almost all the time, just co-opted by liberals to like talk about another category instead of class that we should focus on. And, you know, let's all hope that after the, all the boomers die out, the society somehow going to fix itself because all of a sudden there's going to be so many empty houses. And then we're going to take care of all the homeless people. But there is, but as I say that, you also have a great point. I mean, there is a very real, there are very real concrete material conditions in which, uh,

specifically, especially American boomers were raised in that has created this kind of on average, I'm going to call it psychosis, that informs both their political life, but also just the way they treat a lot of their loved ones and people in their direct communities. That is very strange and almost alien to younger people, especially much, much younger people, who because of the massive contrast of conditions in which they were raised as compared to that of boomers, they are alien, right? Like if we, I make this claim all the time and this is not an anti-human claim or it does not like in any way undermine the value of life of, I don't know, a 11th century peasant farmer from rural England.

like if the 21st century, I don't know, human being interacted with him, both of you would view each other as almost inhuman alien sphere. They're like just incredibly weird specimens that it is profoundly difficult. And yet, you know, in the beauty of the human experiment, also profoundly easy to connect to. But the difference would be in the air, literally because it would probably smell. really, but probably this is, but, but, but the

difference would genuinely, genuinely, genuinely, genuinely, be felt. Obviously, this is just I don't know, empty, empty theory thought because we will, we cannot test that without, you know, doing some very immoral shit with like, native communities that still live separate from,

from so-called civilization. But in that same, in that same, in that same, let's say vibe, the contrast between the life that boomers had and the future that they wanted to see and what they got to do versus the future that the younger Americans want to see and that they grew up in is so big that sure it's not as big as 11th century surf and 21st century zoomer but it's still pretty pretty fucking big and that's why they look like psychos to us very often of course not

all of them, but vice versa. That's why we look so incredibly, incredibly silly. And just to drive the point home, because I don't live in the States, right? And here the conditions were very different for that very boomer generation. In my case, like living under their version of socialism, et cetera, et cetera. Then they also had to live through the absolute chaos of the 90s. So there is no boomer here ever that will. call a young person ungrateful or say shit like,

hey, you don't know how good you have it, etc, et cetera, et cetera, hell, there is a very strong intergenerational ability to kind of camaraderie in suffering, right? So it doesn't feel like a competition, right? It doesn't feel like a competition. Well, I have a sense, you guys with your proverbial dads, I don't mean your literal dads, but your generational dad. It's very different and it's a bit weird when I look at from the out.

But yeah, yeah, sorry for the spiral, but it is an interesting question. It's a great point because, yeah, I am fundamentally talking about American boomers because they had a specific material experience that shaped their, again, subjectivity. And speaking of boomers, let's talk about death because you're going to die. I'm kidding. You're okay. Death and, and, you know, the Finnish finitude and so on like, or maybe it's not, seem to be central existentialist points of the book.

How does confronting mortality, as you frame it, influence a curious and willing revolutionary life? Many find great pleasure and glory in perpetually postponing thinking about death through adventure, others through consumerism, some find solace in faith, others in a very limited group of people in their direct life, they often call family.

How do you think all of them, these very natural responses to death interplay with revolutionary life. How should it maybe, in your opinion? Yeah. I think it's a great question. And again, it's one of those things that I bring in at the very beginning of the book, because I'm trying to situate people in their, you know, and this is where existentialism comes in, in their existential situation, that we find ourselves as these temporary self-aware beings in the mystery of the cosmos. We truly, no matter what you believe about what happens when we die or believe about the nature of the universe. None of us fucking know.

If we're going to be epistemically serious, we all have to admit that we are radically agnostic about what the fuck any of this is. Like the fact that we're even here talking that the whole history of the cosmos has led to this precise moment. It is, I mean, and I say this in the book, it is in, if you really think about the enormity

of the mystery of the cosmos and our ability to be conscious within it, it is basically virtually a miracle that all this comes from ostensibly nothing, and physics and philosophy wrestles with this question. It's at the core of our experience. And a lot of people, for obvious reasons, including myself at a previous part of my development, we don't want to think about it. It's uncomfortable.

We basically fundamentally psychologically repress the fact that we're going to die. And when we're told we're going to die, we know it. We acknowledge it explicitly. Yeah, of course, everybody dies. In our day-to-day ways of going about life, we often see. submerge it, repress it. And when you repress anything, it comes out in other ways, other much less healthy ways. In fact, I think one of the ways that capitalism attempts to, and this is all subconscious, of course, but the structural logic of capitalism is attempting to create the

escape from death through consumption, through the idea that, that, you know, we can take our low level and often semi or subconscious fear of death, filter it into consuming. or filter it into work, and it takes kind of advantage of that. It itself is not aware that is doing that, and the leaders of capitalism aren't thinking about this stuff, but there's a way in which it happens. And if people want to kind of understand the psychology of human wrestling with death and its consequences culturally, I would recommend a great book that I read early on, which is the denial of death by Ernest Becker. And he was actually a philosophy professor that got terminal cancer. And as he was on his way,

way out as he was laying there dying, he wrote this philosophical investigation of death. And his core analysis in that book is that culture itself, the ways in which societies produce cultures is oftentimes sort of these death projects, these attempts for our whole cultures to live beyond mortality. And then individuals within those cultures have certain guidelines by which they try to outlive their own death, whether that is through fame, whether that is through fame, whether that is through the, you know, desperate hoarding of money in some way that that's going to protect you from things, whether that is writing books and creating a name for yourself or whether that's having

family and kids. There's this subconscious desire to perpetuate ourselves in some way. That can come out in very nasty ways. I think repressing the fear of death often gives rise to forms of neuroticism, fanaticism, and fear-based behavior, where you're operating in ways that are fundamentally fear-based. And I want to just tell a quick little anecdote about myself. I have, and I always have had obsessive-compulsive disorder. I'm not going to go into it too much. But the point is that in my early 20s, I started realizing,

and this is my atheist phase, right? My new atheist phase many, many years ago. I was wrestling, you know, kind of becoming a staunch atheist and letting go of my childhood religion and all of that. And I started noticing that when death was brought up in a conversation, and it would be brought up because I'm, I'm in philosophy and I'm thinking about atheism, so I'd get in these conversations quite often. I started noticing that I would sometimes have panic attacks.

Like in the middle of a conversation talking about death with somebody, even a casual conversation, it would just, I started getting real hot, my heart would start beating, I'd have to excuse myself, and I would just go and kind of like stare into the abyss of my own annihilation and be very scared by it. And my natural move here, which is everybody's natural move, is like, just go to bed and don't think about it. Just stop it. tomorrow you got this thing. I just need a good sleep and I'll wake up tomorrow and I'll go to work and I'll focus on other shit and I won't have to think about it. And, you know, we do that in a million different ways. It eventually culminated, I did this over and over again. It culminated in

this intermixing with my obsessive compulsive disorder, which if you're familiar with it, basically the mechanism of it is just that you become obsessively fixated on some fear thought. And that could take so many different forms, go look up all the different OCD themes. But often what OCD tries to do is latch on to things that you care most about. So I care about my own existence. You know, I was a young father. And all of a sudden, I started having these intrusive daily thoughts from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed for months on end about the inevitability of my death and the death of everybody I love. Driving down the street, I would envision the trees as dead in the future, holding my at that time, like my two-year-old child thinking about their death, it fucked me up.

I've spiraled into the deep anxiety and then eventually deep depression. I couldn't talk to anybody about this, really. It made people uncomfortable. Nobody knew how to handle it. I remember thinking to myself, I can't go see a therapist and get a pill that makes me stop being scared of death, you know, because I thought I was going fucking insane. I thought I was going crazy. I'm like, other people die and nobody is obsessed about it like me.

And it weren't on and on and on. And I started, I meditated through it, meditated through it, faced it, accepted it. after months and months of this deep suffering around this existential anxious fear of death. I was driving down the car one day just beaten up by my suffering, you know, just haggard inwardly just dealing with this for months and months and months. And all of a sudden I felt this basically, you know, to use a metaphor, like my heart opening up, I started weeping tears of love and compassion for every human being because it finally dawned on me in a visceral felt way that this fear is not mine.

It's the human fucking condition. That in that moment, I generalized it, that this is what every human being past, present, and future has to fucking face. And all of a sudden I felt this aching love for every self-aware creature in the cosmos that has to face their own mortality. And at that point, the neuroticism around it, it started fading immediately. It was replaced by this sense of love and shared connection with every other human being. I started like just seeing the life and other people around me instead of the death in them. And that fear has never come back. Like I don't, if somebody came in with a gun to my head right now, obviously I would be scared.

I wouldn't want it to happen. But my relationship with death has fundamentally transformed into this radical acceptance of it. And then the next step, which is, okay, if I'm going to die, if every person I love is going to die, that puts all the petty shit that we worry about. it puts it in its place, first of all. And then it asks us, which I say in the book, to make choices. Death is a limitation on what you can do in this life. Do you want to spend it scrolling your life away?

Do you want to spend it chasing clout online? Oh, my God. Do you want to spend it chasing money so you can have a billion dollars and then fall into the grave with a billion dollars in your account? Like are those things that you actually want to live your life by facing death, bringing it into dialectical relationship to your daily life? You actually have this existential choice to make and a sort of courage that comes out of it. At the end of this fucking thing, we all die.

So, you know, what am I going to, what am I going to spend my time doing on this planet? And if it is revolutionary struggle, which is inherently dangerous, death is a real possibility, I have to be ready to die for what I want to live for. That it actually, death casts a shadow back on life and it gives it meaning. It gives it urgency. You know, when you're watching a film and you cry, when you're at a funeral and you're tore up through grief, when you look at your partner and you love them, an image flashes of like, what about what we're going to look like when we're 70 years old, right? These are all like death manifesting in our lives, and it actually makes our lives richer and more beautiful and also more urgent. And so then that's where existentialism comes in and says, you don't get to choose that you're alive or now.

You don't get to choose that you're in this country at this time under these contradictions. you do get to choose how you respond to it politically, but also you get to choose how you respond to it existentially. You know, I could go right now. I could kill myself. Really, no matter what your material situation is, you have radical choices with how to respond. That's not some bootstrap shit. That's not saying, you know, hustle and grind. That's not saying if you're poor, it's your fault. That's simply saying that no matter what your situation is, even if you are in solitary confinement right now, you have a choice. And this is what Kierkegaard called the Dizzy of freedom, right? You have a choice in how you're going to respond to that situation. Albert

Camusse-en-en-the-stranger, Sartre explores it in Anazia in his philosophical work. And I think there's something rich in that tradition that is worth it for Marxists to engage with. And I encourage people to not become morbidly obsessed with death necessarily, but to work on your relationship with it so that it can inform and make more robust your life. And the last thing I'll say is every revolutionary, or most of the revolutionaries that we really look up, up to, Thomas Ancara, Malcolm X, Rosa Luxembourg, Che Guevara. I could go on and on and on. They knew that death was probable, if not inevitable. That they knew that, you know, when the Frye Corp smashed down Rosa's door, you know, when Malcolm X talked about walking around

as a dead man walking, you know, as Che Guevara flees into the jungles of Bolivia instead of sits comfortably at a Cuban government office, they know that they have faced what death means and that they have come to a choice that living their life in this authentic way is worth the possibility that they will die for it. And they did. And they live on because of it. Beautifully delivered. The only thing that I would add, which is not really an addition, just to repeat, what Marxism gives us is extrapolating. the fact that all of this ends, leading us to ask the very important question, how am I actually going to spend the 50 years of 60, the 100, if somebody is lucky enough,

that I have on planet Earth? Marxism helps us extrapolate that conversation onto the entirety of human civilization, where we dare to ask the question whether this giant, mega mall of a planet that we've turned it into is all there is to it. Is this really how billions upon billions of lives, half of them ending every other second, are supposed to in perpetuity spend their life experiencing? And Marxists simply say no. It is exactly by analyzing the contradictions that limit our ability to reach our true fullest human potential that we end up eventually smashing them and allowing greater choice. That's the key. Greater choice in every

man, woman, and child when it comes to answering the question, what do I do with my 50, 60, 100 years here. So it's incredibly important to tackle not only on a personal level but also as a revolutionary because at the end of the day, that is the kind of the primary question

you're trying to answer. You're trying to expand the scope of possibility and maybe even our great, great, grandchild if we're lucky enough and this all turns out relatively okay, might be able to answer the question of what do I do with my limited time here in ways that we, due to our conditions, have no ability to even fathom, right?

There is so much space for developing this little beautiful species of ours and remembering that it all ends, should not. be something that pushes us into panic quite to the contrary it should remind us just how important this whole fucking thing is and speaking of acting you know on the spot and actually giving your life to something you recently went to the socialism conference over in the u.s and that event has been clipped like crazy by reactionaries online to show our more let's say passionate Comrades talking about relatively niche social issues in an attempt to depict the wider movement as elitist and out of touch. I'm sure the majority of the conference was not as easily clippable and was probably very, very different, including your speech.

So tell us a little bit more about that and kind of wrap it into the grander context of what kind of like, because you went there just now and you hung out with a bunch of people. What kind of like revolutionary current do you feel is on the rise in the U.S. if there even is one? Yeah. So first thing I'll say is, and I said this publicly, is I totally agree with some of the critiques of the organizations perhaps behind the socialist conference. That's totally fine and valid. But I also believe that we have to have a presence there. And by us, I mean, you know, communist, Marxist Leninists, anti-revisionist, M.Ls, Maoists, you know, this sort of rough milieu that perhaps the D program or RevLeft would be counted as being representatives of or adjacent to in some way. So the critique is fine and also I believe we have to have a presence. And this goes back to

you know, Lenin's text, left-wing communism and infantile disorder where he's saying, you know, yes, the trade unions are reactionary. Electoralism is frustrating and run by the bourgeoisie. You know, these spaces and places are imperfect. The ultra-leftist in Lenin's telling, which again is the lesser concern compared to right-wing opportunism, which we can, you know, get into. I always want to state that that was what Lenin is saying is the worst thing is right-wing opportunism. But there's also this other thing called, you know, ultra-leftism, which seeks purity. So I'm not going to organize in the trade unions because they're all fucking compromised,

bureaucratic, conservative reactionary hellholes. I'm not going to ever involve on the electoral stage because obviously that's bourgeois. And I'm not going to go to something like the socialism conference. I'm just going to sit back and shit on it precisely because the organizations that are behind it, you know, differ from my ideological line and they're compromised in these various ways and all that, which, again, I understand. All those critiques of the trade unions, of electoralism, of the socialism conference are valid and true. And yet Lenin still says, get your ass out there. And, you know, you can make the argument that socialism conference is not the same as unions or electoral terrain. And we can have that argument.

But for me, I'm down to talk to anybody. I'll go fucking anywhere. You know, I'll talk to anybody at any time for any reason, any group of people, and I will advance our politics no matter what. And so I wanted to do that. And I wanted to go out there and see what it's like, see the sort of people that were there. And I met amazing fucking people, right? I didn't go to a lot of the talks.

I spent a lot of time like we only had very limited time because our kids were being watched here at home. So me and my wife went out there for one day, basically. We came in late Friday and left early Sunday. I meant people of every stripe, which is to be expected. And one thing I want to say, and we can even get into this with the DSA conversation if we get to it, but it's like one thing that confuses me about people on the left is like, as socialism broadly, whatever the fuck that means to you, as it is ascendant, every single slice of the socialist pie will also emerge. You will see the ACP. You will see Trotskyist. You will see anarchist. You will see the DSA. You'll see the

right-wing opportunists and tailists within the DSA who just want to kind of obliterate themselves inside of the Democratic Party in various ways. And you'll see Marxist and Leninist and Maoist. As the whole movement rises, every iteration of it gets louder and gets more people involved in it and gets a better voice. So it's not surprising to me that these divisions exist. I don't fall into a sectarianism where I automatically hate and distrust everybody who has a slightly different political line with me.

I see for the vast majority of people, they're well-intentioned, their hearts in the right place. I may disagree with them fundamentally on this or that issue, but if you are coming to me in good faith as somebody who, as Malcolm X says, wants to have a better situation on this earth, who wants to fix the wretched condition of this planet, I will work with you. I will maybe not organizing the same organization with you, but I will meet you as a human being. I will friendly, comradly struggle with you. I will argue and debate. And I will fundamentally respect you and say at the same time, we're also against fascism.

We also really do have a common enemy. Some of these contradictions between us, they're interesting and perhaps they're even relevant in some instances. But most of them are sort of materially irrelevant as long as our movement as a whole lacks anything like political power. I always see myself operating within an ecosystem. And it's never surprising to me, nor does it anger me that other things. in the ecosystem sort of exist. Having said that, the controversy around the socialism

conference I think is interesting. And I have people and comrades who I respect who fall on both sides of that particular debate. It is very clear to me that this was clipped by very cynical, bad faith actors on the reactionary right in an attempt not to just call out this or that speaker, this or that line, but to make a mockery of the idea of socialism as a whole. And so for that reason, I was very hesitant and in fact I did not publicly get involved in the discourse because I feel like we're kind of playing into something there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But at the same time, do I, you know, I work out. I play sports. I understand people that say that might have just saw that one little out of context clip and said, wait, they're saying that fitness is fascism. Hell no. We all have to be strong and healthy. Obviously, I agree with that. I do encourage people to go listen to that full, that full speech because I think the argument in there is much more nuanced. whether you agree or disagree with the overall argument,

it is worth engaging with if you have a very strong feeling on that clip because I think you have to take the whole argument in and see the nuances and complexities of that argument and then make your point. You know, I agree with this part, I disagree with this part, I'm confused what they mean by this part. That I think is much more constructive than the back and forth. But hey, it's social media, so I'm not particularly surprised by that.

What I do think is underlying these sorts of outbursts of discourse on the left, specifically surrounding these issues is an increasing awareness that as we grow in the political sort of imagination and on the political sphere, socialism, like we're scared of what our image is. We're scared of like, we're sort of like very uncomfortable with the way that the right especially tries to caricaturize us as we're all 19 year old blue-haired college kids with septum rings with no life experience who just want free shit. And, you know, we don't want to be identified with the Democrats, weak, feckless, bourgeois cowards and opportunists.

We're separating ourselves, separating ourselves. And then we see within our own movement, perhaps things that are pushed out to the popular consciousness that we think make us look weak or bad or feed into the worst caricatures of who we are. And we want to have a better image. We want a stronger image, a more resilient, more robust image. And one way we do that is to say, you know,

hey, there's those among us that we work out and we're fit and we can beat a fascist in a fist fight, and we train with guns, and we're not, you know, liberal cowards or whatever, you know, and I understand that sort of neuroticism and that fear. But at the same time, by virtue of being socialism, we're going to be a highly diverse group of people, and that really is our strength. You're going to find every sort of person in a properly socialist context, because our program is a universal program. Go to a libertarian conference, and you'll see flabby 30-to-40-year-old white guys, almost exclusively. That's to their detriment.

That's their disadvantage. So, you know, one clip taken out of context, I would just, you know, tell people, just beware of what they're trying to do. Don't necessarily fall into it. But at the same time, let these conversations unfold without the poisonous vitriol and the hatred of one another. Because I'm sure that lady who gave that particular speech that everybody's talking about, I'm sure she's like a really well-intentioned, good fucking person who agrees with us on most issues.

And if we sat down at a bar and had a drink and went through that, argument with her we would see the human side of her and we would see the nuances of her argument and she would respond to some of our criticisms in ways we might not anticipate and that's what we got to keep in mind and that's another reason why you know in real life organizing and meeting people and talking with people is always going to ultimately be superior to social media a discourse and so i went to the socialism conference precisely to see people in real life to talk to people in real life and my experience of it was absolutely wonderful overwhelming support for my talk in particular, people standing up in the back, people sitting in the aisles.

And then afterward, a few dozen Rev Left patrons and listeners met up at a bar, and I spent the next seven hours just chopping it up with listeners. And it was great. Yeah, it was amazing. So, and even people there that might disagree with our line or, you know, might disagree with Rev. Left's line, nobody there was hostile. Everybody is friendly and comradly and were approachable and friendly.

And so, you know, it's a very different image of the. the one being portrayed on social media, unfortunately. But, yeah, I enjoyed it. Would you say you walked out of there generally heartened by the experience? Both heartened and, you know, increasingly aware of the contradictions within the burgeoning socialist movement, that there are real line struggles to be had. There are real disagreements that actually do matter. And like it or not, unfortunately, in a hypercommodified spectacle, Guy Debordian society,

our image and the things that we project, they do matter. and that's something that we're going to have to continue to wrestle with. And we don't want to be pigeonholed as merely academics, as as cloistered, upper middle class, you know, kids that are totally detached from the working class. At the same time, we can't necessarily tail the worst reactionary subjectivities of the working class or immiserate ourselves into the unconscious and confused working class as such. And I say that is somebody, you know, that is a, that is a, that is a, tradesmen that works in construction, that works around regular working class people on blue-collar

job sites every single fucking day. This is not hypothetical or theoretical to me. I'm engaged in conversations. You know, I said this on Instagram. I go to the socialism conference. I give my speech. I spend hours talking with the comrades there. The very next day, I'm in a trench in 95-degree heat talking with blue-collar workers in a

deep red state. And, you know, working back and forth through our politics and contradictions and pointing things out about society. and listening to them and hearing their input. And so far from the caricature of being totally alienated and isolated from the actual working class, I'm in it, I'm of it, and I went to the conference and I had a great time, and we have a lot of work to do.

But overall, there are a lot of really big-hearted, very intelligent people that are on our fucking side, and that is to our advantage. And I walked away feeling heartened in that sense. Absolutely. And alienating all of those big-hearted people would be a complete like voluntary shooting yourself in the foot because of this kind of misdirected idea of as an ex-marketing guy I can tell you this misdirected idea about how public image about any

particular thing be it a product or a or a political movement ends up manifesting especially in the online era everything can be clipped out of context even some which is not the case with this lady from this conference, but even some like exceptionally badly intentioned and sometimes even reactionary social people who call themselves socialist might sometimes be clipped, which sometimes leads to another type of kind of shadow being cast on the entirety of the movement. So this is kind of like the bird is older the out of the cage. It is very difficult to micromanage it. The only point I would make in that I've kind of made is particularly in organizations, there

needs to be like certain conversations are supposed to be in-house and other conversations are supposed to be for the public eye, especially in front of cameras, microphones on conferences, etc., etc., and especially when you are representing an organization. Like there are things that the regular everyday human being, and I'm not putting him down in any way, but there are conversations for which in order for you to participate in, let's say the learning curve is very, very, very high. They do not have the same context that you have when you are bringing up a particular thesis or a particular point. And because of the lack of said context that today there's no way they could ever have, right? because again of their lived experience you might sound elitist or like out of pocket or like

just fucking weird in the in the worst case worst case scenario and because of that the party line I mean how it sound like a larper but for real the party line when it comes to more complex conversations should remain inside inside of the structure itself I mean not only like even complex conversations, but conversations that can get you, quote, unquote, in trouble with the legal system of a particular country, et cetera, et cetera. It's not exactly fully legal to advocate for the revolutionary overthrow of the government, and that's why you don't, like, immediately go and talk about it on a public stage. So while we have all kind of indirectly accepted and kind of like did handshakes with each other that you should,

like it's not in the interest of a particular organization to openly say what's going to be done to Wall Street bankers when you're giving a speech. It should also apply to sometimes, in my modest opinion, that just my take is a marketing guy, right? Applying my reactionary past knowledge to this particular system. Also goes in the opposite of the way. direction of sometimes social theory that is that is not only the cutting edge uh it being

cutting edge uh should not uh should maybe not be at the front at the face of the of the movement instead of especially the the mass line because the mass line is the mass line for a fucking reason right so so you can't have the cake and eat it too what i'm saying is like choose where you're eating the cake okay like just choose where you're eating the cake That's the whole thing. Don't go to a funeral and take out a cake and start eating, you know? Well, let me add to that really quick because I just want to briefly make that point highlight it because it's so important.

And this is the benefit of organizational discipline. There are literally conversations that we have amongst comrades that are inward facing that need to remain that way for various reasons. And there are ways that we present ourselves publicly. And this is just, this is not deceit. This is not, you know, duplicitousness. This is just discipline. And, you know, even like something I was talking to some comrades there about Iran and this letter signed by these figures, some of whom were at the conference like Angela Davis and Ruth Gilmore Wilson and other figures from the socialism conference that had just recently signed this letter that went out in the Guardian, sort of like, you know, wagging their finger at American imperialism and at Iranian society, talking about the political prisoners in Iran, et cetera.

and this is a very interesting and I think a concrete example that drives this point home quite well, which is that, you know, the history of the Iranian revolution for Marxists is a complicated one. The left formations that were part and parcel of that revolution, which was absolutely necessary, those ultimately got defeated by more religious, fundamentalist factions within the revolutionary movement, and many of those people that we would openly call comrades were subjected to various forms, of imprisonment or other forms of assault that are just not acceptable. Now, when my government is stomping on the throat of Iranian children and bombing fucking weddings in Iran, what fucking good does it actually do for me to get up in front of a microphone

or go to the fucking guardian and start talking about Iranian civil society and all the things I disagree with about Iranian government? No, that is a conversation for comrades to go over that history, learn from the struggles, the failures, the mistakes, etc. to have honest and open, vulnerable conversations about the ways in which the left failed in that project or were defeated or treated. And then publicly facing, we just like, we oppose American imperialism straight up. I'm not going to participate in any conversation about why I don't like the Chinese government or I don't like the Iranian government publicly because that is just literally and objectively putting propagandistic fuel on a fire for an assault. That's the only purpose it solves.

It's the George Orwell paradox. George Orwell himself fought fascist. He was a socialist. What is his actual legacy in the superstructure as a vehement sort of anti-communist? That animal farm in 1984 are books weaponized immediately against the very idea that socialism and communism could ever be a thing, even though he himself was ostensibly a socialist and literally got shot in the throat fighting fascist in the Spanish Civil War. So was George Orwell sort of well-intentioned? I read his conditions of the working class when I was young. Great book. ideologically, what has he actually been used for? That's the George Orwell paradox, and I think that speaks to exactly what we're talking about when it comes to organizational discipline and being discerning about when outward and inward facing discussions are had. We talked a lot in the show about how reformist wins and momentum could be co-opted by socialist organizations in the country.

How do you yourself view all these DSA wins? Can this help drive revolutionary momentum and consciousness, or should you, we throw the baby out with the bathwater and not really engage in any of this shit? It's a great question. It's a pressing question. You know, I myself am, I guess you would call to the left of the DSA just because I'm, you know, Marxist-Leninist, something in that. I would say, yeah. So, you know, my line is not, you know, aligned with the DSAs. But importantly, the DSA, whether we like it or not, is a product of a rising socialist movement and a broader interest in socialism.

Their electoral victories, even though the candidates themselves could be very flawed or limited, is an attempt for a certain portion of American society to find an institutional outlet through which to express, at base, their class concerns, their class consciousness. It is a subjective feeling that is rising, especially among young people who have little to know future that they can see in this society, rising, trying to find an institutional outlet. And it is precisely the two-party system in America that is engineered and functions to prevent that energy from finding an institutional outlet. You know, the Democratic Party, as I always say, is not a vehicle for our politics. It is the last barrier that the ruling

class erects against our politics. And we're seeing that contradiction explode. Now, when I look at the Democratic Party and the DSA split within it, who am I voting for? 100 percent I'm rooting for the DSA side, the progressive side to beat the corporate centrists and the donor class and the Zionists. I think, you know, the rise of explicit anti-Zionists, of people who explicitly call themselves socialists, following more or less in the sort of wake of Bernie and picking up that mantle, that is a good thing, if flawed and imperfect. Mostly it manifests as a sort of tepid social democracy with some concerns about particularly disgusting aspects of American imperialism like the genocide in Palestine.

or even to some extent the Iranian war, there are people within that milieu that aren't as concerned about Cuba or African neo-colonialism or the ways in which America is operating in Latin America more broadly in Venezuela. There are people within that milieu who are susceptible, and even the Socialism Conference put out official documentation that was equalizing American and Russian imperialism, critiques of China abound, lots of confusion emerges in this milieu. So it is an imperfect attempt for a real energy and a real class consciousness to try to find some institutional voice. That institution itself, being as it is right now, the DSA, but more broadly the DSA's machinations within the Democratic Party is creating a very serious ideological split within the party.

And some of the old elites and the, yeah, the the, the, the, the Jeffries and the Schumers and the Carvilles are freaking out and trying their best to hold the line. to not let this contradiction explode within the party because it's going to have to be decisive. It's going to have to go one way or the other ultimately. You can't get a left-wing constituency if you are pro-Israel. Good. You can't get a left-wing constituency if you're taking millions of dollars from corporations. We see through you. We know who you actually serve.

So these developments, for those of us that are more Marxist or more theoretically informed, we find it frustrating. You know, we wish that we could just kind of speed this process up and let people mature to the point where they see that our politics actually has the sort of scientific approach and the critique of political economy. But the fact is this is what we're given with. This is the milieu that we actually have to operate in, not as actually the center at the moment, right?

Marxists of our stripes are not at the center of this rising socialist movement, but we're in it. We have influence over it. We can struggle in it. Even the DSA has caucuses that are Marxist Leninists, that are Maoists, that are much more to the left of the center of the DSA apparatus. itself, comrades that agree with 99.9% of the stuff that we would agree with that are struggling within the DSA. And there are others who realize that their time is best spent agitating and

organizing outside of the DSA, building community power through things like tenant organizing, which we have a robust movement here in Omaha with Omaha tenants United doing precisely that, coming from perhaps a more Maoist inflected tendency line. But they work with and are in tandem with, you know, certain DSA strains. And the PSA. organization locally. So I view it as an inevitable consequence of socialism trying to find its feet after decades of anti-communist propaganda with generational lines, with class lines, with ideological lines emerging and erupting all around us. And our goal is to see that as an opportunity. And we have to build political power both within the DSA to try to win over

the biggest socialist organization in the U.S. as well as outside. to be able to push it around and to influence it and to confront it when it needs confronting. So, you know, again, this is my approach to everything, is like we have to have a critique and a presence. And we have to operate within this rising milieu and struggle for our line and our arguments. And one of the things I've argued for on Rev Left is, you know, insofar as we can have influence in these electoral victories and these candidates that are emerging out of them. one of the things that we should really hold tight on is what I call the anti-imperialist red line that if you if you come into any sort of the socialist milieu, the DSA, you're running for office, whatever, and you have these good politics on class, universal health care, higher wages,

tax the billionaires, okay, all good and all good and fine, I can work with you. You're on the good side of the red line we have to draw. What will put you on that bad side, what will make you an enemy of me and of the people of the world in our socialist movement is if you're on the good, are willing to get goodies for people in the Imperial Corps, healthcare, higher wages, you know, better unions, better jobs, whatever, at the expense of or in perpetuation of U.S. imperialism. I will not accept a treat. I will not accept material betterment for me and my family if it comes at the expense of my brothers and sisters in the global south or anywhere in the planet. I will not accept a pile of cash here at home that pays for health care if it comes from a mountain of corpses over in Palestine or Iran.

or Cuba or Venezuela. And that internationalism, that is actually class politics. That's international proletarianism. But that's the anti-imperialist red line. So if you're on the good side of that line and you have broadly good socialist politics, even if I have ideological disagreements with you, I'll go out and cast a vote for you over whatever the psycho-republican or the fucking piece of shit Democrat, corporate Democrat is. Why not?

You know, the electoral terrain is a terrain of struggle. It's not our preferred one. We have critiques of it as such. But what's the other option is to alienate ourselves and isolate ourselves from a burgeoning and confused socialist movement out of ultra-leftism, out of the purity fetish that Lenin is talking about in ultra-leftism and infantile disorder. So wherever the people are, wherever the masses are, wherever the momentum is, as imperfect as they are, we enter, we critique, we have a presence, we struggle. That is, that's my approach to all. of this shit. And I think that's the, that is the principled approach insofar as I have a grasp on Marxism and the tradition and what it, what Marx or angles or Lenin would say, you know, if that's a helpful heuristic when it comes to a question like this. It absolutely is. And we're 100% on the same page. It's the, it's the most principled, but also the most efficient and pragmatic approach to a relatively new development inside of the United States. proper that you know everybody you know on the go is figuring out what to do with and uh that's an

opportunity if i've ever seen one uh but of course in that opportunity there is a chance for you know kind of uh swallowing uh the win a little bit too hard and uh softening ourselves up uh softening ourselves up in front of so many so many treats that have been promised to us. That is why a person really, really needs to make sure, not a person, a socialist really needs to make sure they draw the line, as you beautifully put, which contradiction is completely unacceptable, even from the perspective of sitting on the sidelines by saying,

okay, this is kind of nice. No, you will not even receive the, okay, this is kind of nice. if the continuation of American imperialism is anywhere even near, not even near 10,000 kilometers away from the party program of a particular politician or potential politician. But let's slowly round it off, my friend, finally the central wager of your book. And correct me if I'm wrong, is that we cannot build a liberated society, will remaining psychologically and ethically unchanged. But individual transformation also cannot substitute for collective struggle.

In your own life or research, what is the clearest example you have personally witnessed of this so-called inseparability actually failing, where either purely political or purely spiritual work stalled out because the other dimension was missing? It might help now finally. I'm pretty sure our listeners are smart, but I think they got to the crux of the point, but still, I think this might help them with getting even closer to understanding the argument. Absolutely, absolutely.

One thing I'll just quickly address the spiritual side of it. The overwhelming, as I think I said earlier, the overwhelming sort of effective posture of many spiritual communities is a withdrawal, is a quietism, is a recoil into your personal life and your personal mind and trying to calm down. It's basically a form of escapism dressed up as a form of spiritual depth. We can't go down that route. That is a dead end precisely because at the core of Buddhism is this idea of dependent origination

and non-duality, of inseparability, that you and I are not actually different, that our fates are not actually cleanly separated from one another. That we are truly and deeply in this together. We are expressions of an interconnected way. of life connected deeply to one another, to the animals on this planet, to the plants on this planet, to Earth itself. And we cannot separate the well-being of the earth from our own well-being. We cannot separate the suffering of a Palestinian parent from my suffering as a parent. These things have to be brought together. And that's fine to understand intellectually and

hypothetically what Buddhist meditation allows you to do is to dismantle the illusion of egoic separability from the ground up, from the root of your own mind and consciousness. And thus to elevate your consciousness in a way that isn't just intellectually assured of the fact that we're not separable, but is actually a felt, visceral in the marrow of your bones way that you go out and relate to the world. You know, what you'll find, what I find myself doing when this manifest is like, I just can't kill bugs anymore. Like, it's a small little tiny thing, but like I have such, now, because of my years of meditation, I have such a profound awareness of our inseparability, of our interconnectedness of the majesty and mystery of being,

that to kill a spider or to kill a bug, it's fucking insane. And, you know, I notice people that can, like, casually just kill things. Like, just step on a bug or you see an antihel somebody. Grown-ass adults, we'll see a bumblebee flying in front of them and will smack it with their hands and kill it. Like, that, that to me is a sort of pathology that comes from the idea that we are separate, that, you know, you are separate from this web of life from which you emerge.

And so on that side, that's like the spiritual aspect of the dialectic and a rejection of personal quietism and cowardly recoil into your personal life and the reification of separability by saying, I can meditate over here in this nice air-conditioned meditation hall while bombs that I pay for are dropping on the heads of little girls in Iran or in Palestine. That's fundamentally not only unacceptable morally. it actually is a bastardization and a refusal of the responsibility of your spiritual work. You know, on your own grounds, this is a failure of your spiritual project. So that's that side of it. The political side is quite obvious, right? I think anybody who's organized on the left, you've met amazing people, well-intentioned people, really good people. You've also encountered broken people, people who drag their traumas into organizational spaces,

people who are using politics as a vehicle for their own self-advancement, for their own egoic needs. to be seen and validated as smart or correct. You know, these sort of politics in general all across the spectrum attracts a certain sort of either psychologically destabilized person or ego monsters. You know what I'm saying? And I've seen time and time again, as I kind of referenced earlier, and I talk about in the speech I gave at Socialism Conference, organizational formations be undermined, limited, or utterly destroyed by people's inability to be aware of how they are projecting their traumas, being

aware of how their ego is operating, you know, something in their insecurities gets triggered, and then they response in an unhelpful way. The abuse itself, the ways that people can use political organizations or any organizations as a sort of context in which they can pursue their own sexual desires and get what they want sexually or egoically. These things are rotten to the core. they are products not only of a capitalist subjectivity but of a subjectivity of patriarchy, of class society writ large, of a me over you, of the delusion of separability, and they limit

what we can achieve politically. And so for me, the cleanest example is just the evidence in front of us. You can go on social media and see it. You can go into organizing spaces and see it, and we can see how this limits us. So if we believe that we have to transform our subjectivity, not only do we have to hold ourselves to high ethical standards, which in the book and through virtue ethics is a theory, praxis approach to ethics. It's not some Kantian moral law that I just apply to every situation or some utilitarian calculus. Virtue ethics is the embodiment of virtues through practice of those

virtues. You want to be a generous person. You don't need to apply some Kantian categorical imperative in a situation where you could be generous. You just give people shit. You know, you get, like, I always use the example. I'm eating dessert and I'm really hungry and I'm loving the dessert and my toddler comes up and says, can I have that last bite? Part of me is like, no, you already had yours. Let me, well, I'm going to practice generosity. Take it. I really want that last bite. Fuck it. I'm going to hand it to my toddler, let him enjoy it. And I'm actually going to have sympathetic enjoyment through vicariously through his enjoyment of that bite. I know what that bite feels like. And so seeing him light up and get the pleasure of it instead of me is in some ways more

pleasurable than me taking the bite. This is a tiny little example of how virtue ethics manifests in our practical daily life. And that's why I think I entrench it so much in the book. But beyond ethics, my core claim about meditation is that it is the most advanced and potent technology for the cultivation of a higher form of consciousness and a deeper subjectivity. That it is time tested. It's manifested in many different cultures. In and of itself, I mean, it's manifested under feudalism, under capitalism. Amazon has fucking Amazon Zen booths for God's sakes in their warehouses. You know, Western culture takes these things, these traditions, and bastardizes them and commodifies them. We can reject all of that and be very clear about what all that shit is,

while at the same time realizing that this 2,500-year-old technology for the transformation of your relationship to your own mind is very potent and is a very, very interesting tool for Marxists who are interested in the dialectical transformation of the outward and the inner. It is a tool for the conscious cultivation of a, of a, of a higher, more mature form of consciousness that then raises the ceilings on how we go out into the world, what our core motivations are for going out and being political, and for what we can do in organizational spaces, both in the attempt

to transform the world as well, as in the way in which we meet other regular people where they are, with open hearts, with the ability to listen, with the setting aside of ego and insecurity, which are two sides of the same coin, with setting aside the need to be right, setting aside the need to have some guarantee for victory, that ultimately we do all of this,

without any guarantee that history will deliver communism or that, you know, Mark says, this could all end in the common ruin of the contending classes. Rosa Luxembourg said socialism or barbarism. We're at a possibility where we could have a fascist AI-powered surveillance state or World War III, nuclear holocaust, out-of-control climate change. There's no fucking guarantees here. And still, we do it because we know it's right. do it because even if we fail, it's worth spending our lives trying. And that sort of disconnection

from our action to the ultimate outcomes and consequences, I think is really important because we have to come face to face with the fact that there is no guarantee. And we still do it despite that uncertainty because it's the right thing to do. So that is kind of, you know, how I would sort of answer that question. And of course, the book itself goes into much deeper detail on all of these points. So please tell us when you expect it to come out and any other projects or any place where a viewer who for some reason has been living in a cave, who doesn't know about you where they can find you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. To find everything I do on Rev Left and Red Menace, you can just go to RevLeft Radio.com. It has all the links and everything you need to know

about that. The book itself will, like I said, will hopefully come out maybe around the holidays, around February, maybe sooner. I'm not exactly, this is my first book, so I'm not sure how fast it goes from. We finished our editing to it actually comes out and it's purchasable, but of course I'll keep people updated on that front. Of course, me and Jake, we will know because we will get a free copy because we're colleagues. Without a doubt.

And the last thing I would just say is I just, my second book, I'm also under contract with Iskra, so I'm already thinking about what I want to do there. And this is not set in stone, but my idea for my next. The next book is, you know, in defense of communism, wherein I take core arguments against communism, arguments about freedom, arguments about democracy and authoritarianism, arguments about human nature, and from a rich philosophical perspective, I dialectically invert those critiques of communism to show how freedom and democracy and human nature actually can emerge and be more fully manifest and expressed through a communist politic and a communist world.

So I think there's an interesting thing that we can do here when it comes to political education and perhaps agitation and propaganda, which is taking the biggest criticisms against us and dialectically inverting them to weaponize them against our enemies and for our own project. And so that would be my next book that I would like to start working on as soon as I can. Brilliant. I don't know if your day is 72 hours or 100 hours, how you do it, but very impressive. With that being said, everybody, please go check out all the links below and be very excited as you could fucking establish from this episode, I hope, for the book when it comes out. Maybe we'll have Breton again when it does actually come out so we can re-hype it. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you to all our patrons without whom we would not be able to do any of this.

If you enjoy the conversations that we have here, do consider checking it out. Supporting us on there, you get a bunch of goodies, and we get to remain ourselves and as independent as possible. With all that being said, this has been the D-Program. I'm J-T. I'm Yugo. I'm Brett.

Thanks for having me on. Love you guys. Shout out to Hakeem. Follow the D-Program. Love and solidarity.