Rev Left Radio - Practical Dialectics: The Dialectics of Everyday Life

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

Chris Alfonso joins Breht to have a wide ranging discussion on the dialectics of our personal and political lives. In the process, they discuss Marxist philosophy, Dialectial materialism, the mass line and its development, Chris's oragnizing and education work in prisons, the profound radicalism of Buddhism, Hegelian Freedom and its unfolding through history, thoughts on pedogogy and organizing, how we can contribute to and participate in human evolution, the importance of putting love and compassion at the center of our lives and work, responding to egoism in ourselves and others, ego/insecurity vs. confidence/humility, and so much more!   Follow Chris and his work on IG HERE No Casino in Queens HERE No Brooklyn Jail HERE ------------- Buy tickets to the Socialism Conference HERE Learn more and support the show at https://revleftradio.com/ Check out Unlearning Capitalism for more political educational resources

Hello everybody. Welcome back to Rev. Left Radio. All right. On today's episode, we have on Christian Alfonso, aka on Instagram, John Paul Fartre, which is how I discovered him, very funny name and also great page overall. And we interacted through Instagram originally and then, you know, exchange contact information and talked about having him on the show to discuss a bunch of different things. but what really emerged in this two-hour conversation organically is this sort of fascinating discussion that I will label practical dialectics. The application of dialectics to not just politics, but to our personal lives, our interpersonal

lives, the sort of our own subjectivities, how we behave in the world, how we role model our politics. We also talk about base building and mass line, his experiences, organizing and doing political education within San Quentin Prison and just a wide ranging deep conversation on what it means to be a human being engaged in trying to make the world a better place. It was a fascinating, insightful conversation and I'm really happy to share it with you. Towards the end of the conversation, we also spend some time talking about the Prairie Land Nine, the folks in northern Texas that just got barbaric, cruel and unjust punishment.

for 30, 50, 70, 100-year sentences for protesting outside of an ice concentration camp as an attempt for the fascist police state government to make an example of the left and finally in a lot of ways leveraging that earlier pronouncement that Antifa are terrorists to try to lay the groundwork legally for this sort of judicial warfare against protesters who are are standing up for the dignity and the humanity of other human beings. So, you know, I just wanted to make that a point up front, let you know we have an extended discussion of that later in the conversation and encourage people, whatever your platform, if you're in an organizing space,

if you have an Instagram page, whatever you have, whatever ways you have to talk to other people, continue talking about this because it could be any one of us. I mean, one of the people got locked up for 30 years because they had left-wing, reading material at their house, which all of us do. Just a blatant violation of basic human rights, disgusting to the core, and we have to fight for them. We can't forget about them. We can't stop talking about them.

We can't move on. So that's part of the discussion as well. I'm very happy with this conversation. I know you will be as well. It's deeply engaging. I also want to mention, too, that I got accepted to speak at the Socialism Conference. So in Chicago this year, September 4th through the 7th, the sort of four days leading up to Labor Day, there's a yearly conference called the Socialism Conference. Lots of different people will be there.

And I, you know, submitted a proposal to give a talk on, you know, Che's concept in socialism and man in Cuba about the new sort of socialist man and woman. Right. the development of our subjective sides to be more capable of producing and fighting for and defending socialism in the world. So my talk's going to revolve around that and I'm going to extend that concept, hopefully in unique and interesting and worthwhile ways. So if you're at all interested, if you're in Chicago, if you're going to the conference, I'm looking forward to meeting everybody there. People who are on our Patreon, patreon. patreon.com forward slash Revileft Radio. I'm doing a meetup with patrons.

Not opening it up to the public, but after my talk at the conference, I'm going to find a place in Chicago, and I'm just going to invite anybody that attended the conference that is on our Patreon at any tier. We'll do a little meetup. We'll hang out. We'll have some drinks, have some food, and meet some comrades in real time, and just hang out. So it's a really cool opportunity to do that in particular. So if you want to support the show, if you want to possibly be invited.

to that situation at all, because if you're going to be there, you will be invited. Join the Patreon and support the show where 100% listener funded always have been, always will be. All right, without further ado, here's my conversation with Christian Alfonso on practical dialectics. Enjoy. Hey, everyone. I'm Jean-Paul Fartre from Instagram.

Also, Chris Alfonso. I've been an organizer, researcher, in some ways, academic, but really just a person that's trying to be a part of this massive lineage, as history that we are so blessed to be a part of, and trying to show people that if we take on the responsibility of building a future together that's founded on collective freedom, not only is it possible, but we'll win. And when you think about the stakes, it's socialism or it's bar. So we either win and we're alive or we all lose and we're dead. So I think it's a really beautiful

mission to be a part of. It's given me so much purpose. So I think I'm just like really happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. It's an honor to have you on. One of the things I love about this show is that you know, I've never chased big guests. I always just have communication and I build relationships with regular people. Oftentimes they start off as listeners and then they become guests. And I think this is a version of exactly that because I truly believe that regular people living regular lives have plenty to offer when it comes to political education. And I think this is another example of that. So it's a pleasure to have you on, my friend. And I came to know you through your hilariously named, silly, sillily named Instagram page. But actually, that's how I started following

you and became aware of you. That's how we connected. So it's really cool to finally be able to have a full-on conversation with you like this. I guess maybe we're going to talk about a lot of stuff today. We're going to talk about, you know, dialectics, education, base building, different types of maybe Marxism, right? The organizing on the streets Marxism versus the more academic Marxism and perhaps the roles that they play. But before I get into any of that, can you kind of talk about how you personally came to these politics and how your personal political evolution kind of took place and how you ended up at Marxism? Yeah, no, absolutely. It's like a long story. I'll try to make it as concise as possible. But I'm from the Bay Area, Richmond, California. I think when we move there from San Francisco, it might have been the murder capital of the world in like 1997.

largely a black community, but a lot of diversity. And I think before I knew anything, I knew about the Black Panthers just being so close to Oakland, California. I had known about San Quentin State Prison because it was 15 minutes from my home. Obviously, the prison where the Black Panther, the Dragon intellectual George Jackson, was assassinated. by the state. But I had been reading and hearing about both the Black Panthers, Huey Newton, and then also I'd read the autobiography of Malcolm X. And I don't really know why I read that book,

but I read it really, really early, like maybe 13 or 14. So I'd always kind of been like loosely interested in a radical politics just because my environment was saturated in it. But because I had grown up in many ways in the, black community, it was just like a standard of, you know, freedom means black liberation. So when I finally started putting not just like my lived experience and my feelings about my friends, my family, people I just grew up with into like technical words, the idea of solidarity just came so naturally. And in many ways, I'm very grateful because, you know, there's

been trials and tribulations of being so pro-black and not a black person. I don't want to, I don't know if that makes sense, but it's just like, you know, obviously there's like an otherness that just happens, which is totally understandable. But in many ways it taught me maybe one of the biggest lessons that has been persistent throughout my life, which is humility. The idea of Sometimes and maybe most times, we have to fight fights that are for us, but not on the surface maybe, right? What it means to fight for third world struggles, what it means to fight for black liberation, what it means to fight for freedom for women, for queer people. Sometimes, like, on the surface, you're not going to feel like, oh, that's helping me right now in this moment. But that's actually a really powerful and I think fundamental anchor for all of the work that we do.

Yeah. No, absolutely. I think that lineage is wonderful and potent. And I myself, deeply influenced by Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party when it came to my own political development. And it's actually a beautiful thing that these revolutionaries, these revolutionary movements who, you know, were dismantled in the case of the Black Panther parties severely. in the 60s, 70s, and no longer really existed in anything like their original form by the time I was born, and Malcolm X, obviously assassinated decades before I was born. And yet their legacy still lives on, yet they still provide not just inspiration, not just radical aesthetics, but political education by their very being. Once you start reading Malcolm X, once you start reading the Black Panthers, studying the life of figures like Fred Hampton, you are also at the exact same time being radically politically educated. And so I think it's a testament to the potency of their revolutionary seriousness and impact that, you know, generations later, not only are we

being influenced by it, but hopefully through our work, we're turning around and helping the generations behind us become aware of them and be influenced by them, be inspired by them, and be educated them in the same way. So I think there's something absolutely beautiful about that. Hell yeah, brother. Yeah. No, I, it's funny because I think, and we're going to get into this, so I don't want to take us on a tangent. But when you think about the dialectic inaction, when you think about this evolving change, this philosophy of change, the reactions that we have personally to change, I just think about all these early moments and then how they grew, right, the seeds that just blossomed over time.

So, you know, it was like Black Panthers and then I'm like learning about Marx. And I think, and it's so funny because your podcast really does symbolize like a huge moment in my trajectory because it was the first time ever that I could just like listen to someone. And this is a long time now. Thank the Lord. But I could just listen to someone and take in what they were. saying, right? I didn't have to be a person in front of me with accolades. Not to say that you don't have them, but it was, I would hear people that just like would speak and I'd be so bitter and I don't know, like, you know, crushed by capitalism, competitive, wanting, wanting people to think that I was

smart or good or whatever it was, uh, included that it became really difficult to learn. So when I really became invested in RevLeft, it was a moment of like, whoa, like everyone has something to give. And if you really take the time to pay attention, like, it's not just something. It's like the whole world. It's a whole universe. That means a lot. Thank you. Thank you very much for that. But yeah, let's go ahead and move forward into dialectics. You mentioned it. You put it on the table. It's obviously a huge part of the show. And I think there's a deep, just personal interest in it, a fascination with it, the extrapolation and the understanding of phenomena writ large through the dialectical and materialist lens has been incredibly helpful in so many ways. My spiritual practices within Buddhism sort of resonated with dialectics in such a fascinating way

that it really strengthened my commitment to both of those seemingly totally disparate traditions. But I remember as a youth when I started studying Marx and Marxism, I got the class warfare shit. You know, I grew up in working class context still to this day. Co-workers, family, friends, everybody, they are just working class people from Omaha. And that's my whole world. And I saw the trials and tribulations, the financial struggles they went through despite

working all the damn time. And just from a very young age, I was highly sensitive to that. So when I stumbled across Marxism, it was like, oh, of course. Like, this makes total sense. but it was hard for me as the, you know, 19, whatever, when I first started on my political path, I'm approaching 40 now, you know, but it was difficult to wrap my head around historical

and dialectical materialism. That was kind of the last thing that clicked, and I really tried. And this is kind of before, certainly before any, like, accessible podcasts were out there. You know, this was way, way, way before Rev left. But I'm trying to, I'm in philosophy program as an undergrad, I'm struggling with these concepts, trying to understand them.

And I was living in the basement bedroom of a friend's house at the time. And he had, for one reason or another, one of the walls were just a whiteboard that he had installed. So a full wall of just a whiteboard. And I remember writing all these Marxist concepts, writing definitions I would find every day waking up, reading the definition of dialectical materialism, trying to understand what it meant. And as time went on, of course, my grasp deepened and deepened and deep. and educational material became more and more accessible through the internet, social media, etc. And I found my people, my community, and I found resources through that and deepen my understanding.

But it was one of the harder things to wrap around. And so knowing that, I've really gone out of my way on the show to try and help other people understand this aspect, because it is truly enlightening when you grasp it. Like, things make sense when you grasp it. And even you were just mentioning this sort of dialectical, buildup of time. Like, you know, the Malcolm X and the Black Panthers are not actually separate from us today. They made these monumental contributions that inspired us and kept the flame alive. And then we take what we can and we do our part. And nobody has to do everything, as I always say,

but everybody can do something. Everybody has a talent or a skill or a pension for something that you can put to use towards revolutionary ends. So that's how I kind of came across dialectics and that's my reaction to it. How did you come across it? Why are you inspired by it? And maybe if you could like, how do you explain it to others when you're trying to educate them on it? Brother, that story, you are my people. You don't have to claim me yet. Maybe by the end, but I claim you for sure. Very similarly, you know, like I said, I grew up. I was reading Black liberation theory and history. And in a lot of ways, just because I felt like it was a part of my own life, But I think when I was first exposed to Marx, I'd heard the name, but maybe in like an intro to sociology class in undergrad, I remember the first thing I ever heard about dialectics was it might have been literally class two where I read the term dialectical materialism and was just like, whoa, what's that?

and the teacher immediately said, oh, you don't have to worry about that. That's been proven as false. Absolutely. And I think, unfortunately, I love to see that proof. Fortunately for me, one of my, the cornerstones to my personality is that I'm just defiant. I'm trying to work on it and be kind and use it for good, but just defiant. So I think really that moment of thinking that the words sounded cool and then the teacher saying,

don't even look at it like it was forbidden knowledge or something. I was just like I'm going to dig into it. But in the same way that you just expressed, I really had no idea what I was talking about. I mean, and even when reading, I was like, okay, contradiction, whatever. And I think it was years. It was years of studying and really like being able to in some ways talk to talk. Like I could say all the words and I could put them in the right orders.

But I don't think I really knew. what it meant until, you know, deep into studying because I was just kind of parroting, um, abstract language. And it was only until I started really writing about like really kind of journaling, writing about love, writing about my relationships, my, my desires, my goals, my fears, um, that dialectics really came to life. And now, that I, you know, teach workshops and try to introduce people to the concept, to the philosophy, it's funny because if people are coming in fresh, what I've noticed is if you spend too much time or emphasize the rhetoric, the language, the technical jargon too much, people have

no idea what you're saying, but they think you sound smart. But if you really emphasize ways in which maybe in like a Ferrarian education, how people already know what dialectical thinking is, what dialectical action and advancement is, I've seen, and I'd love to hear if you've had similar experiences, people will be like, yeah, no, no, duh. Obviously, what are you talking about? And I guess, like, the biggest lesson that I got,

And this is the now the starting point whenever I try to teach it to anyone is you might know or experience moments of like dialectical thought. I think CLR James says all correct thought is dialectical. Most incorrect thought is like Hegelian understanding, right? So all correct thought is dynamic, whether you know it or not. But the point here for Marxism, for Marxists, for people invested in a dialectical, intellectual philosophy is that it's always happening. There is never a moment. Even if you don't see it, you don't feel it, things feel like you're stuck or they're static

or concrete or like, I shouldn't say concrete, but like everything feels really rigid. Things are constantly changing just sometimes in imperceptible ways. So the real secret to dialectics, I think, is not only knowing in many ways the fundamentals of the philosophy of change, but really. committing to the understanding that it is always happening without escape. Yeah, and there can be something kind of scary about that, perhaps, because, you know, that there is a certain human urge to want solidity and stability, particularly within themselves.

And, you know, Buddhism is so radical because it says this even applies to the very notion of your own self, this psychological structure inside of you that you think is you, looking out of your eyes somewhere up in your head, you know, that, that's permanently there. Even though your opinions change and, you know, your tastes change and your relationships and all these things change, there's a sense that there's still a me in there. And like, Buddhism says not even that. Even that is actually, there's no stable static thing there. It is in constant unfolding radical relationship with everything else. And that non-separation is really essential to think critically and think clearly politically.

One of the biggest things you'll hear, just to pick one example out of a million, in American context, is like, you know, racism is a thing in the past. Like, yeah, we had slavery. That was unfortunate. But Barack Obama was elected. And, you know, racism is. But when you think dialectically, you understand there's no separation between the past and the present. The present is just the expression of the compounding effect of these past sort of

instances building on one another. And you cannot have modern day American society in all of its ugliness and grotesqueries if it wasn't for that deep history of settler colonial, genocidal, slave-oriented foundations, right? If you have a rotten foundation in a building, even by the time you get up to the sixth or seventh or eighth floor, those are still inherently compromised by the compromised foundation. And so thinking in those ways and thinking that capitalism itself is not an eternal system that capitalism is not we've arrived like you know that's actually implicit in liberalism all conservatism libertarianism liberalism there's an implicit sort of assumption yeah yeah capitalism has some flaws and certainly we're going to have to tweak some things and

reform some things but more or less we've arrived at the final system because liberalism and conservatism and libertarianism are manifestations of that system when you can stand outside of it and look at it critically, you can see just like slavery, just like feudalism, this capitalism, too, is an ephemeral, ever-changing, driven forward by contradictions process that will play itself out and will be transcended one way or another. And that's liberatory because that means things are open-ended. So if you can embrace that change, that constant cascade of never-ending change that is implicit in dialectics. There is, at first, a little dizziness that comes with it, but then, like, a sense of, like,

oh, there's an open-endedness. I can actually, I can contribute to this process that can push things in this direction or that, and that actually kind of gives you a sense of agency in a weird way. I got a perfect story to that, because I absolutely agree. Really early on in maybe my, like, educational career, I think I had just started teaching San Quentin State Prison at this time. But I was doing, you know, Pollyette, I guess, with some friends, the small little book clubs, maybe five, six, seven people.

But we're talking about the text. I forget what we were reading. Maybe Revolution and Evolution by Grace Lee Boggs, Jimmy Boggs. But a friend of mine, really close friends still to this day, he's like, what happens when we get to communism, you know? And I'm like, well, when we get to communism, there will be problems that arise out of that and we'll have to fight those too. But it'll be better than now. And his reaction, just like you said, this confusing, really frustrating experience of recognizing that there is no finish line.

You're not going to be done. You just are better. There's no end. It's just better than yesterday, you know? Yeah, yep. At first, you're like, wait, you're saying I have to do this forever, right? That's, I think, the first experience, this initial, like, are you kidding me? My life is so hard now.

And I'm just going to have to keep doing it once we achieve this thing that seems even in its own right so far away. But just like you said, when you embrace that, you realize, yeah, of course we're going to have to do this forever because that's what, like, human flourishing is. every solution incubates its own set of specific historical problems, which then elicit, motivate its own specific solution, which then goes back and forth and back and forth, and hopefully the entire time as we're developing as a human species or a society or, I don't know, our place in the universe, right? We're talking about Buddhism.

I don't know existentially. as we're advancing, things are getting better. If there's anything I've kept from from Hegel, and obviously I know, right, Mark's Turned him on his head or whatever, but I'm a big Hegel head. And it's just like, I really do believe deep in my core

that we're moving towards freedom. We're moving towards this like absolute, absolute bliss. I don't know if we get there, but as a human species, there's something in us that drives us towards liberating not only ourselves and really, really specifically not only ourselves, but everyone. And we just got to choose to do it. Yeah.

No, it's fascinating. There's a, you know, there's a dialectic within class society. As you move from ancient slave societies to feudal societies to modern capitalist societies, there's unfreedom implicit in class society. So it's master slave. It's, you know, king and serf or landlord and peasant. And then it is boss and worker. however you want to argue that bourgeoisie and proletariat.

At each instance of moving forward, there is a sort of an abstraction away from brute oppression. So when you're a slave, your master says, I literally own you. Like, I own your whole being. I own your body. I own your time. I own you.

When you move to feudalism, they start saying, okay, I don't own you. I own the land you have to work in order to live and survive. there's a little bit more of a degree of autonomy here. The ownership gets abstracted one level away from actually owning you. And when you get into capitalism, it's abstracted even further. I don't own you. I don't even own the land that you're standing on.

I own this business, this productive asset. And if you come and work for me, I'll give you some money in exchange for producing a successful profiting business that I can then accumulate capital, et cetera, et cetera. And so, you know, when you ask a modern person in the 21st century, would you rather be a worker as much as it sucks or would you rather be a serf in medieval Europe? There's actually an interesting argument that there's some more free time and community and stuff under feudal strictures in some interesting way. But overall, people would say, yeah, I'd rather be a worker than a serf. And certainly, I'd rather be a serf or a worker than a slave. And so that speaks to your sort of Higalian point that there is a frustratingly slow movement to towards freedom that actually can only be propelled forward by class struggle, right?

Slavery didn't turn into feudalism because the slave masters decided to become landlords. They turned into it because there was constant revolt from the slaves over and over and over again. and at the same time, there are these machinating changes within the mode of production that necessitate that shift forward. And we're living through that period of time where capitalism itself is coming up against its own limits. It is hitting its own sort of dead end as both a mode of production, the contradiction between the forces of production and social relations. And along with that, there's an increasing subjectivity among people that it fucking sucks to go in and wear some shitty uniform. and let your boss let you know when you can take a break and when you can fucking piss and yell at you for being two minutes late. There's something that is like assaulted in our being, some indignity that we have to face just to fucking make a living.

And so that subjective side of that consciousness sort of arises alongside the objective decay of the mode of production itself, driven forward by contradiction, which is just fascinating to kind of think about and see that we're in that, you know? No, totally. I mean, and to your exact point, it's frustrating. It's hard to think about the quote unquote good things. And I shouldn't even say good, but the silver linings of serfdom, right? It's so, it's so intuitive to believe in this like liberal and sometimes people attribute it to Hegel as well, but this like automatic forward progress. I do think there's elements of that that makes sense.

but obviously the thing that you're in, right, that you're experiencing, you're going to understand with so much nuance because you're literally in it. True. One of my favorite moments in Capital Volume 1 that I'm constantly talking to people about, and sometimes people think it's interesting and sometimes they're kind of like whatever. But this idea of post-festum, have you ever heard of this? Vaguely, vaguely, but yeah, no. So basically Mark says, we come to know things post festum, right, after the feast.

And the whole point that he's saying is like, and he's talking about it in the section on commodity fetishism. He's like, these things appear natural because you've been thrown to use like a Heidegarian phrase or something. Like you've been thrown into this world where things are already normalized. And in that way, we have a tendency to believe these things are normalized, right? whether it's capitalism or feudalism or slavery, we have a tendency to believe that we've been throwing this society, and this is like a natural state of being, as opposed to the product of a historical movement

that both has its own momentum and also is the culmination of all the different people, whether they're fighting for it or against it. So this concept of post festum is just like recognizing that when something is currently developing, Like when you were living through the development, and this is on my mind because we just taught a class, gave a workshop on on violence and Ritch of the Earth with Franz Phen. But he talks about, he compares serfdom to the colonial situation, right? And obviously the entire book, Wretched of the Earth, is about decolonization, fighting against colonial oppressors and masters, imperial overlords.

it's one of my favorite texts but then he compares it to serfdom where he's like well the serfs were kind of like this and it was like a paragraph right and and he's like when he's speaking backwards in time and this is not a criticism of phenon this is all of us right this is the whole point of why we need to understand

post festum but it's like when we're speaking backwards about a thing that happened it's so easy to say oh one then two then three right slavery then feudalism than capitalism, then communism, right? This Marxist stagism or something. But when we are actively experiencing something,

whether that's capitalism, late-stage capitalism, neoliberalism, Arab imperialism, whatever, the nuances are hitting us over the head. You get what I mean? Oh, yeah. And I just feel like this recognition that you need both, you need to be able to talk about certain concepts, like very quickly just to say, hey, look, we're thinking about this.

This is a placeholder for a much larger conversation, but this is the concern that we're in. You need to be aware that you're doing that, but often we're not. And like a dialectical attitude or framework is like one of the best tools to be able to juggle all of those different needs when we're thinking about not only our political movements, but history. Yeah, no, absolutely. And even when I teach courses in Socialist Night School and obviously on the podcast about historical materialism. And there's, you know, if I have enough time, if you give me two hours, I can go, you know, I can go into like a lot of the nuances and the complexities. It's not, these are not actually nice, clean stages. It's not a linear model whatsoever.

But for a shorthand, rough approximation, especially when you're talking to somebody who only has kind of a, you know, regular people might just have like a thin outline of like the last 10,000 years of here. human history. So you can't, you know, so there's a certain level of just like short-handedness that is, you know, needed for clarity when you're talking to people are trying to teach them a concept. But I'm always also at the same time, like in those classes, I'll have a whole section where I complicate the situation, you know, where I add nuance and I expand out to the rest of the world where we talk about feudal Europe because Marx and Hegel and stuff are writing in Europe. You know, what was happening in Southeast Asia during, you know, the, you know, ostensible feudal time. What was happening

in Africa? How are these modes of production globalized? And what are the nuances and caveats within them and their uniqueness and their own histories and their own sort of cultures in a lot of ways? So I totally take that point. And then your post-Festim

harkens back to a couple other philosophical sort of ideas. I think, you know, Kierkegaard said life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward. Which is good. And then Hegel, I think, has this really great line, which I never understood when I first heard it, but the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk. And that's kind of getting at this idea that

philosophical understanding, wisdom kind of only comes in hindsight. When you can look back with 2020 clarity and see it for what it was, when you're living through it, you're in a sort of fog of the present, which is kind of counterintuitive because you think, well, I'm in the present, I can understand what's happening here. The past and the future are foggy. And that's true too. But to be able to stand outside of your historical moment is exceedingly impossible for a lot of people and very, very difficult. Marxism is very interesting because it gives us this meta perspective on our own system.

So if you're locked within some version of liberal philosophy, if you're locked within the confines of capitalist realism, you can't think outside it. You have no intellectual resources. to stand outside the system and look at it, you can only look at it from within it. You're trapped within it and its premises and its logics. Marxism offers you this ability to stand outside of capitalism and outside of liberalism, to see it as a historically contingent phenomena that is in itself ephemeral, and then to be able to critique that object from the outside,

which is the only way you can really sort of critique something. So I don't know That just made me think of those different things And I had this note earlier When you're talking about teaching dialectics And I totally agree with you The first thing I do Like at Socialist Night School when I'm teaching

Which I just did a couple months ago I say Here's the term And you know this is annoying Like this term You're looking at it And you're like what the fuck does that mean I totally get it

I promise you you already understand what it means You actually already understand what it means This is just like jargon. If I try to teach you physics or something, not that I could, but if I was able to, I would use words that you wouldn't maybe understand. But if you just gave me five seconds or maybe for more complicated stuff a couple minutes, I could explain the basic idea to you. It's not that you can't understand the idea. But within any specialty, within any sort of specialization, jargon is sort of unavoidable because you have this sort of historical, philosophical, traditional baggage that you're working with. and dialectical materialism does mean something.

Like, it's a good word once you understand why that word exists. But when you're teaching somebody to like, yes, here are the words. First of all, we're going to talk about these words. But don't be intimidated by that. They're just big words, lots of syllables. The meaning behind them is something you already know. And then I go into some sort of example, and that example can change based on the context, but go into some sort of example that immediately drives home the point that you

already understand this process and then we can start working from from that and uh i've found that that's uh i have a lot of a lot of success doing that and the last time i taught a class i had this like you know elderly lady probably in her i would say maybe upper 60s early 70s and uh she came up to me and she was like uh can you please email me the script for that because i really want to learn about i want to i want to re-read that script and kind of like entrench my understanding of dialectical materialism and it was uh it was really, really rewarding to have that interaction with somebody that, you know, even as the other 60,

70 years old, are still radically curious and willing and open enough to try to learn these new concepts. And I just found that really cool. We are locked in. No, I'm telling you.

Because that is, I don't want to say it's the main thing. The main thing is obviously that we win, we get revolution, everyone's free. But that experience that you just described is one of the main things that keeps pulling me back into this type of educational practice, when you see someone really get it, you can, I feel like it's almost visual. You can see a click in their heads where they're like, oh my God, and it's like the meme of the woman with all the math problems around her thing. But you can see them get

it where they're like, holy crap, everything now is fitting into place. And even if I don't know how it fits in the place, I know that it will if I find out enough. And you can really, I mean, you can really, really feel people start to see it everywhere, which is just such as a teacher, instructor, a fellow student, colleague, whatever you want to say, a comrade, it is one of the most rewarding experiences. I also want to touch on earlier. I just want to give you your flowers.

I mean, saying that Marxism allows for a meta perspective, I think is so important here. Like it's one of the brief moments that we can kind of step outside of society to the best of our ability and then look back at it. Because I think people that, don't like dialectics will often kind of, and probably on purpose, make the claim that it's

fortune telling or something, you know? And it's like, no, no one is trying to say that we'll be able to predict the future. We're making suggestions to the best of our abilities, which is totally in alignment with scientific method. We're experimenting. We're fucking around. We're finding out, you know. but like this idea that Marxism or Marx is a prophet, I think is somehow wrapped up in the mysticism that comes with the word dialectical materialism. But when you grounded in concrete experience like we're talking about when you, because I'm sure when you're giving your examples, right, when you just mentioned, if you gave me 30 seconds,

give me a couple of minutes, I can talk to you about it. I feel like I already know I can hear that conversation. You're like, well, what's going on in your day-to-day life? Right? And it's like from this we can, you already are practicing this dialectical method. I mean, the thing that I always say is whether you know it or not, you just need to get in an argument with your romantic partner and you will be dialectical. You get what I'm saying? 100%.

Yeah. Someone accuses you of something. and you're like, well, wait, actually, this thing and then this thing and then this thing and then this thing. So just like attribute that that same feeling you have when someone accuses you of like, I don't know, not taking the trash out. All of the limitless reasons, excuses, whatever, like that's how everything's working. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Relationships are one of those areas where dialectics really started making personal sense for me because it is. It's just so obvious. It's so, you know, out there. Like I'm saying front. and center, like to be able to understand, like, how one's relationship with somebody over time

matures and develops through contradiction. And even, like, when I'm teaching these classes and I get into, you know, the inner aspects of dialectics and you eventually, obviously, quickly bump up against contradiction. One of the ways I'll ease people into it is kind of pointing out is, like, think of the, think of the times in your own personal life where you've had the most personal growth, right where you've expanded the most personally and i can almost guarantee you that what preceded that was some sort of uncomfortable um difficult tension filled situation that you had to overcome to get there there was a contradiction you hit a sort of dead end there had to be some sort of qualitative change in the way things were and it was precisely through those difficulties that the

contradictions was heightened enough and to enable that next stage of development to begin to unfold. And that is absolutely kind of everybody immediately like, oh, yeah, and they start nodding along. And then you can kind of deepen it and you can apply it to society and all of these things. But yeah, I think that's very helpful. And earlier you said something that I wanted to circle back to. You said that there is no endpoint, you know, that like, you know, dialectics insists, as does, I think, you know, the dialectics of Buddhism insist that change is the only

constant, that things never stop. And there is a weird psychological temptation in the human mind to project some vague point in the future where things will finally be okay. And I don't even mean society-wise and motive production-wise. I mean personally. We think like, yeah, life is stressful now. I have to do this and this and this. I'm trying to obtain that. I want some stability over here. I'm pursuing this new relationship or this new new job. When I get all these things in order, at some point, and this is never even really articulated explicitly, it's sort of like an implicit assumption operating in the background, some point in the future I'll finally arrive.

I'll have all my ducks in a row. Everything will be organized in such a way that I'll finally be blank, happy, content, you know, no longer insecure, no longer anxious, no longer stressed, whatever it is, our own little personal heaven that we can reach in this life. and that also has applications to politics because one of the hard truths you have to face and both ends of that spectrum is that no, you never actually fully arrive.

I have an elderly grandfather I'm very close to he's in his 80s and he'll articulate that sometimes. He's like, I was always told like, this is, you know, the golden age of your life is when you're retired, you can rest on your laurels, you did all the work and he's like, but the anxieties are still there the stresses are still there. The fears are still there. Now I have new medical issues. Now my wife has

medical issues. We're going to get cancer treatments. He's like, it never stops. There is no point when life just calms down and is totally okay finally or when you have maximum control and certainty. So to disabuse yourself of that as early in your life as you possibly can, to accept the fact that to live is to struggle and that the struggle doesn't end, that means both personally, although you can you can elevate to higher problems. There's lower problems and higher problems. And growth and development is really changing shittier problems for better problems. But there's still problems.

And socially. Like we're socialists. We're communists. We're not going to see this whole game play out. We're honestly, we're just not going to be alive where global communism has totally won. And we're entering a new era of human history, leaving class society in our wake.

Those, those transformations happen on. historical time scales. And that's okay. Like, you know, as France Fanon sort of said, like every generation, you have certain obligations. You can rise to the challenge and meet those obligations. You can fail to meet them and fall into relative obscurity. But like that is kind of, that's the thing here.

We're contributing to a process that is much, much, much bigger than us. And your entire, if you're listening to this right now, your entire life will be defined by political struggle. and there will never be a point in the future where everything is finally okay and everything's in place and we've got socialism or we've got communism and we can just rest. I'm sorry, that is a hard truth we all have to swallow personally and politically, but I do think it's true and I think it actually is beneficial to us if we fully face up to that and internalize that fact. I would love to hear what you think about this. I imagine we're probably going to agree, but I think there's a lot of relief and ease. to making that, to finally embracing that life is struggle, just like you so beautifully put. Because now I don't have to be Vladimir Lennon. I don't have to be Neo from the Matrix.

I don't have to be, I just have to do the best I can and try to be a moment in this rushing river moving forward. And that's the best thing that I can do. And whatever's going to happen is going to happen. And obviously we're trying. We're aiming for a particular goal. But it's not, we're not relying on some Messiah, right? Where this is a gigantic project where we all just try to be better than yesterday. I mean, sometimes it could sound hokey, but it's just like, for me, when I finally embrace that this constant change, this dialectical struggle, this commitment, it was really relieving because I didn't feel like I had to save the world anymore.

I just have to participate in the world being saved. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Nietzsche famously said that man is a creature in transition, that we always feel this contradiction, that we are somewhere between primates in the past and some unrealized potential in the future. But that's a product of evolution. It's really a product of dialectics.

Nothing is static, nothing ever arrives. You're in this constant sort of process of change, this rushing river, metaphor to think about. And what we can do is we can accept it that there's never-ending process, never-ending cascade of change. And then we can find ways to contribute personally through high ethical standards, through spiritual practices that deepen or elevate our own consciousness. And then politically and socially, through political organizing, political education, if we can engage in those activities, if we can say that these activities are actually

consciously how I want to spend my life. These are the most meaningful ways I can spend my hopefully 70, 80, 90 years on this planet. And what I'm doing when I engage in those activities, I am humbly without ego, without narcissistic self-aggrandizement, the opposite of that, I am humbly contributing what I can to human evolution, right? Subjectively through human evolution, I believe like processes like meditation, they, really do help you mature and grow beyond automatic identification with your little trembling insecure ego. And that allows you to elevate and mature as a human being. In fact, I would argue

that all personal maturity is really maturing out of narcissism. Nothing is more narcissistic than a toddler or an adolescent. And as you get older and older, the move towards wisdom and compassion is simultaneously a move away from narcissistic self-obsession. And the sort of ruptures, the revolutionary ruptures that are gestured towards in things like Buddhism are really pointing to the fact that you can completely sort of transcend your identification with that ego. And perhaps there will be a period of time in the future where humans, more and more humans naturally begin to mature within a single lifespan to that point.

and sort of elevate humanity in that subjective way. But that is also inseparable from and can never be separated from the outward political transformation that must happen dialectically and in unison with that subjective evolution. And so you really have a responsibility. I believe, as we were talking about before we started recording, an existential responsibility to do what you can to contribute to both ends of that human evolutionary spectrum. And, you know, the more people that do that, the more likely, right, quantity into quality, the more people that are engaged in that sort of behavior consciously, the more we are contributing quantitatively to a process that will eventually have a qualitative phase shift. How that looks, when that happens, you know, those are all things beyond our control or comprehension.

But we are and we can actively and consciously sort of contribute to that in a meaning, in a genuinely meaningful way. no absolutely i mean brett you said earlier just now nothing's more narcissistic than a toddler i don't think you met me in my 20s but but i really mean i mean i think that you do this so beautifully through all of your work and it sounds like through your educational practice at night school i try to do this both online and definitely in person um but this idea of letting people know right and this is really the dialectic inaction this is practical dialectics that like we were not now says where do correct ideas come from do they fall from the sky you know uh no they do not

we didn't fall from the sky either we are the process of development and i think sometimes especially in the internet era in the content era um there's like an implicit pressure sometimes explicit, that people have to be perfect. And they have to be perfect right now or they don't deserve to speak. I will say, and I really try to make this explicit and apparent, I was not perfect. I developed a lot. I have a lot of people to be grateful to. Most people, and I think maybe all of them that I needed to apologize to. I've apologized to. And my assumption is that's every single person that deeply reflects on their own life. So, and I hope I'm not like turning the conversation, but I really like to know because you've been doing this for so long.

Some of the vitriol, right, this like, this like viciousness that's on the internet, I have never seen on Rev Left, which I is a big reason why I adore it. It's something that I try to imitate in my own work, propaganda, adjut prop work online, is that like, and I've seen it in the workshops we've been able to do. People have really said this is a safe place to learn. Like, it's okay to not be perfect. You never will be, just as we're saying, there's no final point where you're now cadre, right?

We're always in the mode of becoming. what led you to make that such a big part of your project? Because I'll tell you, as a fan, a longtime listener, it hits you over the head. What would you say it hits you over the head exactly? This feeling that it's okay to not be perfect, that things are in development, that this is a safe space for new learners that are listening to you to like, develop both in their like political understanding, but their relationship with self and what it means to commit themselves to the movement.

I mean, like, again, like when I listen to Rev Left, I feel like, and I'm so sorry, I don't mean to get hokey, but I feel like I have a very intelligent friend, informed friend, committed friend, who's teaching me about some stuff that I need to know. And the way that you present it, I'm like, whoa, like, I don't know anything about this.

subject. And I both feel smart listening, but also feel excited to try to learn more. Yeah, no, that's, and that's beautiful. That's, that's incredibly high praise. And more than anything, I want to kind of spread this sense of curiosity to people and this love of learning. And, you know, from early on, I saw the internet and how it operates and everybody with a platform or anybody speaking about politics publicly online. It's, it's a heated environment. So at first, when you know I would get I would be the object of derision or you know mean comments or whatever it would it would wound me because I wasn't used to being that exposed this is early on in rev left right you you start talking about politics publicly people will hate you yeah you will

immediately and automatically earn enemies no matter how you behave and at first it was I was sensitive to that and it kind of hurt and I would like oh I don't like that at all but eventually I came to that realization that's like hey what the fuck do you expect you take a stand on any of these issues, you know, you're going to make the person that took the opposite stand sort of not like you. And social media validates, incentivizes narcissistic and egoic behavior. And I learned very early on dogmatism and sectarianism. These are products of an ego that needs to be right, that needs to be in control, that needs to see itself as above other people.

And the dismissiveness with which you treat everybody else who isn't where you. you are or doesn't believe what you believe is a product of a narcissistic sort of ego. And when you can see your own ego operating, when you can face your own ego when it gets insecure, when it gets wounded, when it gets vulnerable, when it gets scared, when it wants to puff itself up, when it wants to fight back and say something mean, the more you watch it, the more just kind of laughable it is. It's like, you know, your four-year-old having a meltdown because you got the wrong flavor slushy or something. It's like, you know, you don't hate the kid for it. It's like, you know, you don't hate the kid for it. It's like, it's just a kid. And what you actually feel is kind of in your best moments,

a sort of gentle amusement and love and compassion, and you go in and you try to settle that down. And so I have seen my own ego get flared up whenever I have a moment where, you know, like, let's say you go online and you read like a really harsh comment about you or your work or something. What happens automatically is I will feel it in my body. Like, you know, your heart starts beating faster. You get this hot flash through your sternum and chest area. Your stomach kind of gets in knots a little bit. We've kind of all been there one way or another. And your ego wants to do something about it. It wants to defend your honor or lash out or say something mean back or just spiral into like insecurity and self-pity or whatever. But if you can just set that aside,

feel those feelings, watch them play themselves out. You start to understand yourself. You start to understand others. So when I see people behaving like, that, I don't actually have harsh condemnation or judgment. Oh, you're lost in your ego. You're narcissistic. No, I feel love and compassion. I say, I understand where this is coming from. I have it in me too. But one thing I'm going to make Rev Left is I'm going to elevate it above that. Not because I'm better than that, not because I'm personally more evolved and I don't ever have those feelings, but because if I want Rev. Left to be welcoming, I have to lead with love. I want my politics to be welcoming. It has to lead with love. And I'm going to

keep what I do my work above the fracas. I'm not going to be sucked into it. And I accept from the get-go that having a position on politics publicly invites all sorts of hatred, that being any sort of figure at all, even a tiny niche internet figure like myself, I have, it attracts certain sorts of people with perhaps certain issues they're working out and they're dealing with in their own life. I've had people get very obsessive with me in various weird ways. People cross boundaries with me. People fixate on me and really unhealthy and negative ways. Not like fixate like I love him, but fixate like I hate him. Like his politics are 2% off of mine. I'm going to spend the next six months posting incessantly about how he's not a real communist

and he's terrible and all these things, right? And, you know, I just try to process that in myself and not replicate the woundedness and play out the egoic hurt. So I don't really know. I, I, I, I, want to be honest about my own flaws and foibles and deficiencies and weaknesses. And, you know, I've never pretended that I'm an expert in anything or that, you know, I've achieved some higher, you know, reified state or anything like that. I'm just a fucking human being. I have my problems. You know, me and my wife, we get no arguments. Uh, sometimes I lose my temper. I yell at my kids. Like, I am not by any means a perfect person, but I'm trying to, to be better all the time. And I lead with love and compassion for others.

I try not to judge other people. I don't know where they are. I don't know what they've been through. And when I see eruptions of ego, my first instinct now as I get older and more mature in this realm is to have understanding and compassion, not harsh judgment and striking back, right?

So I don't know if that answers your question, but that's kind of how I think about that. No, it really does. I'll say one, for me, but I know for a fact so many people. You are a beacon of light. You've accomplished that in many, many ways and continue to. Like I said, it's definitely a model that I try to put in my own work.

And for the listeners, people tuning in, like, this is not just a thing that you do if you have a platform on the internet. This is a thing that we need to be doing in our organizing spaces when we're having discussions about these ideas. because and and feel free to push back on this if you think that I'm missing something. But the reality is if you really believe in your ideas, right? If you really believe and like when I say believe, I mean, you want them to come into the world to be real. You got to convince people. It's not like there's some figure above us that says, oh, this is the most right belief, right? It has to happen in material reality.

Otherwise, it's worthless. And so I tell people all the time, I go, do you want to be right or do you want to be helpful? Yes. And sometimes being helpful just means like, look, you got to explain it to someone. Just like we said, people usually already know this stuff. But you got to explain it to them to get them one step further so they can make that next step tomorrow or a bunch of steps tomorrow. or a bunch of steps tomorrow or whatever it is. But like if you try to condemn someone or you come with just like you said, like this narcissistic egoism,

like it's not, we all have to have the responsibility to not allow a single moment or a series of moments to deter us from fighting for liberation. But at the same time, our personal goals cannot be to create barriers. to that. We want to, I always say, and maybe I'm appropriating, but when it comes to like some gang cultures, I've worked in prisons and jails for a long, long time, when they initiate people, they say, we're going to bring them home, right? That's how I imagine bringing people over to radical politics, to Marxism, communism, socialism, whatever, anti-imperialism, I want to bring people home. I want them to have that feeling that we were talking about earlier when it comes to dialectics, see them envision the world, and now want to give that feeling to other people.

Yes. Right? I always say, I don't want to be Neo. I want to be Morpheus. I don't want to be Lenin. I want to find him, you know? Beautiful. Yeah.

No, I absolutely love that. And that's the huge thing. Yeah, do you want to be right? Or do you want to serve others or do you want to serve yourself? And the being right thing that the need to be right is, you know, in the final instance. and we all feel it, and I still feel it too. It is a need to, it's like you've tied your ideas up with yourself so much that an attack on the ideas or the very idea that those ideas could be wrong or even subject to criticism feels like an assault on the self, on your very being. And that's an unhealthy place to operate from.

And if we are going to be the purveyors and the advocates of our politics, I think more than any other political part of the spectrum, right, certainly fascists don't have any. sort of moral standards they need to live up to, liberals, conservatives, et cetera. We have, if we want to be genuine and worthwhile, useful advocates for this beautiful tradition that we find ourselves in, we also have to hold ourselves to such a standard that we become in our personal and our interpersonal life expressions of our politics, expressions of the best part of our politics. We actually have a responsibility to our movement, to our tradition to be that. And that is a non-Lindict. your process and nobody's ever perfect and you will always fail and you will always make mistakes and you'll always fuck up and you know you'll be doing really well and then one night you'll get five

hours of sleep and eat something shitty and have a bad be in a bad mood and lash out at somebody you love but you know we have to constantly be trying to do that and i also have this responsibility as i grow older i realized when i started rev left i was talking a lot to peers and in a lot of ways i still am but as i get older younger people are coming up they're blossoming and into political consciousness. They're finding shows like Rev Left. And so increasingly I feel this sort of responsibility to also role model ways of being in the world, ways of thinking, ways of talking to other people, treating other people, caring myself, that younger people can look at and say, you know, that is actually a healthy model, not just of a guy who knows

some things about political theory, but actually that's a healthy way to kind of like live my life. And that's also, I think, why Rev. Left has never just been confined. to political theory. It's always bumping up against the rest of life, right? Because I want our politics to be embedded in a broader, more well-rounded life altogether. Our life can't just be politics or our politics suffer. And the thing you said about, you know, not just on the internet thing, that's the most crucial thing. You'll see online and not just on the left, but all across, like, you know, public figures on YouTube and all these things, time and time again, they find themselves in controversies.

You know, their skeletons in their closet get revealed. They pretend to be one thing and are revealed to be another. And that's because a lot of people put on a facade. And who they are in a public-facing manner is in some ways in direct opposition or contradictory to how they actually are in their personal life and behind the scenes. And I think there should be no gap. You know, I think there should be no gap between, you know,

how you present yourself publicly and how you deal with yourself privately. And that may be somewhat impossible, right? Like when I'm talking on a mic for an hour and a half, there's just a different me than you're going to get if you're my wife going on a stressful vacation with me for five days in a row and the kids are screaming in the back seat. And, you know, she's annoyed at me and I'm annoyed. Like, okay, you know, that's the personal foibles and just being a human being is always going to be there. But to increasingly try to live your life in such a way that it actually cashes out in your personal life. Like when you're engaged in spiritual practices or whatever, you know, I don't really care how long you've sat and retreat, how many hours you've meditated, how many

times you go to church? What really shows me, if you are engaged in transformative inner work, how do you treat your waitress? How do you treat the person walking in behind you? Do you keep the door open? Are you thinking about other people? Do you apologize to your wife or your spouse when you're, when you're an asshole and you do something fucked up and you go and you really humble yourself and you apologize. Can you take accountability? Can you actually be honest with yourself about your own mistakes and flaws and the own fucked up things that you've done? Can you take responsibility for behavioral patterns you picked up as an adolescent or as a response to your trauma earlier in life when you didn't have the emotional tools? Take responsibility for that and actively try to work through

that, not for the benefit of you primarily, but for the, the benefit of the people around you. When you do scream at your kid because you're fucking angry and you just got off work and you're annoyed and they did something, can you go in five minutes later, hug them, tell them you're sorry for getting angry, explain your side of things, listen to them. That's actually where it cashes out. It doesn't cash out in being perfect, you know, and it doesn't cash out in statistics of how many hours you've done this or how many times you've done that, but it cashes out in how you treat the people in your daily life, even when you don't feel like it, and when nobody's watching, you know, that's when morality and being a good person and being a role

model and being an expression of our politics, I think, actually cashes out. And we really do have a responsibility to not be perfect, but to do our best to constantly be better. I cannot express how much I agree. I mean, one of my favorite things about what's happening literally right now in this conversation is that we're never moving away from dialectics. We said earlier, right, like, dialectics is not fortune-telling, but instead like a meta-perspective. I think another way to say that exact same thing is like dialectics allows us to shorten the amount of time that we're stuck in obsolete beliefs. So just like what you said, we have interpersonal problems. You yell at your lady or your partner or your kid or whatever.

And then you have this dialectical moment of like, oh, I got to reflect. Oh, I got to be self-aware because we are all flawed human beings. Those types of like visceral expressions, they're bound to happen. Whether it's interpersonal or maybe it's theoretical, maybe it's professional. You are going to have wrong beliefs or really you're going to do wrong actions. And the thing that is going to cause the biggest problem is how long you commit to those wrong actions. and a practical dialectical attitude individually, organizationally, nationally,

existentially, right, as a human species, that shortens that window where we're stuck doing a thing that we should know is bad. And it allows us to get to that very historically specific solution that will inevitably lead to another problem. It makes the process of development more efficient, you know. And I hear every time I hear you tell these stories, I'm seeing myself because I have exactly the same position, right? You get into an argument and you say, oh, man, you're never like this or whatever, right?

And then you have to have a deep breath. You take a moment. You assess. You feel where it is in your body. I love that you keep bringing up these spiritual practices because it does feel spiritual. I think, and I used to have more, now, you know, less. I had some liberal friends that are wondering, like, how do I find purpose? I feel so, like, such a robot at work, you know, I feel I can't figure out why am I here.

What's, you know, and we've heard about, we're both into philosophy, like, what's the meaning of life or whatever? I have not questioned what the meaning of life is in so long. The entire time I've been committed to this political project. And in many ways, just like we said, lead with love, committed to love for my people, the human species, myself, right? My relations. I have not questioned what the meaning of life is for so long. And it's because now of a sudden, every moment of my life, I am extending my politic. right there is not separations um and so i i guess i don't know i just i just want to show or illustrate to the

to the listeners like as we are talking about all of these different topics that seem in some ways unrelated dialectics is the framework that shows us how it's just this one gigantic tapestry and and and my father you still always say wherever you go there you are you know you know Whether you're at your job or you're with your partner or your friends or you're by yourself, like how you choose to live your life will inform how you act in other areas. And if you decide that actually there are these hard divisions where I'm this way in front of the camera, but I'm this way behind the scenes, or I'm this way at work, but I'm this way with my partner, you're never going to be able to accomplish it.

Right. So it's just you might as well just start recognizing wherever you go there you are and trying to be the best person every time. And I just want to reiterate from my own experience, it is actually a very relieving practice. It is not like this overwhelming weight that you have to carry around. It's the exact opposite. Yeah.

Yeah, there's a real lightness. There's a real lightness to it. And the way that you were talking there is like harkens back to the conversation about post festum about looking back. You know, you'll have a moment where you do say something mean or do something shitty. And then you can immediately kind of reflect on that, look back on that, be honest with yourself about that. Often I'll ask myself, why did I react that way? You know, why does this get this response out of me? And what that does is it takes the onus off the other person. Because when you're angry, when you're upset, the mind will start telling you why you're justified, you know, fuck that person. They don't understand. They did this. They don't fucking give a fuck about me, blah, blah, blah. If you can invert that and start saying, why does that behavior provoke this reaction in me? What about that is triggering this response? Why do I repeat this behavioral pattern? One of the biggest things, also one of the hardest things, is like looking at your own insecurities, honestly. because, you know, a lot of times we'll tell ourselves like, oh, I don't really have insecurity.

I'm pretty happy with myself. Everybody has insecurities no matter what the fuck, you know, there's no way around it. And we'll often repress it, repress it, we'll not look at it, we'll ignore it, we'll try to hide away from it. But to really go for, go wholly into it and to look at that insecurity deeply, to not run from it, to try to figure out where it comes from. And ultimately, not even try to eradicate it, but to be okay with it being there without needing a reaction from you, without needing to hide from it, without needing to be ashamed of it,

that is just one of the many ways that you can kind of, you know, practically reflect on and look at yourself in an honest way. And that process of being very honest with yourself and facing your fears and facing your insecurities and examining why you behave in certain ways and what really gets you reactive and what wounds that they're pressing against when you get that reaction from you, I think that's a very constructive way to go about it. And the whole time, I think you do have to have compassion for yourself. Like, you know, you're not perfect. You don't need to be a perfectionist.

And sometimes self-loathing and self-hatred can be just as narcissistic as self-aggrandizement because there's still fundamentally an obsessive fixation on you. It's about you. I'm not good enough or I'm the best ever. They ultimately amount to the same thing. Kind of take that spotlight off of the self so much. Be compassionate that you're just. just a human being along with other human beings. Think about how you impact others and think about

what you can do to be a better friend, lover, spouse, comrade, coworker, etc. And to shift that, shift that perspective from me, me, me, me, me to, yes, I have to work on me, but I'm doing it in the service of trying to serve others better with my life, that I want to be somebody that is a good partner to my wife, that is a good dad to my children, that is a good loyal friend, right, that does the right thing even when nobody's looking. And to do that consistently over and over and over again, I think is really important. And again, it's not separate from politics. I think it's very convenient when people insist that this stuff isn't political.

It's like, no, like if you're, if you are an asshole, if you treat other people dismissively, if you're a sectarian weirdo, if you're unable to listen to another person's point of view without flipping the fuck out, people do not like or respect you. And therefore, your politics don't have a vehicle to transmit themselves. If you're dependable, if you're moral, if you're a person of your word, if you're honest, if you're self-deprecating, you can be honest about your own flaws, you don't have a huge ego, you serve other people, you care about other people. People will automatically like and respect you, and therefore they will be infinitely more open

to your ideas. Have you found that to be true? And also it's going to take, we want to get it done as quickly as possible, but it's going to take as long as it takes. You know? True. But absolutely, I have found that to be true. I mean, in my organizing life, like I said, I've been working in prisons, jails, the criminal courts, underprivileged neighborhoods, you know, now going on a little over a decade. and in many ways, you know, I've worked with gang members and killers and all kinds of wild individuals.

Many, many, many of them have been my own mentors, very, very brilliant. I mean, my audience obviously knows what I look like everyone is on Instagram that probably is listening to this episode. I don't look like I belong in those areas, right? That's like a natural thing. But this is what's so funny is I've never had any problems. And it's because of a commitment to respect, a commitment to the project, the reason why I'm there, right? A desire to both inform but also learn. Exactly what you said when you come in and you're humble, but also confident enough that you have something to give.

It's not like we are empty vessels when we come into new spaces. We should provide whatever project we're working on with all the gifts that we have been granted personally, but also the humility to recognize that we do not know all the answers. And it would be like a huge travesty to even come close to saying that we do. There is no, I taught a series on Paula Ferreari, but I'm a big believer of there is no teacher. there's no student. We're all student teachers. We're all teacher students. And when you have that attitude, at least in my own personal experience, that humility, but also that confidence, the contradiction, the tension together, you can develop an intimacy and a way of speaking with people that really will at least give you enough room to be hurt out. I'm not saying that it'll radicalize people or anything. But what I will say is no matter what, you come in, with a humility and also a confidence, not an arrogance,

people will listen and they'll take the time to just be like, all right, what do you want about? I really, really believe that. Absolutely, absolutely. I love that. And I wrote in my notes, humility and healthy confidence, they go together. The more humble you are, the more like not self-aggrandizing, the more willing you are to admit that I'm also in a perpetual state of learning.

that actually gives a sense of confidence because counterintuitively a big ego and insecurity go together. They are two sides of the same coin. When you see somebody perform, like all these right wingers online that want to perform this hyper masculinity, and police the boundaries of real man

and fuck feminism and slurs for gay people and all this shit, you see it all the time on the right. Every time I see that, I see little boys pretending to be men. that underneath all that machismo and egoic fucking performance necessarily is an insecurity they're trying to grapple with and cover up and compensate for. So ego and insecurity are two sides of the same coin and genuine humility and genuine

confidence are two sides of the same coin because when you're genuinely humble, you have nothing to prove. You're not performing anything. You're living life among equals. You're teaching and you're learning, as you said. And that's a beautiful thing. A little anecdote from my personal life, you know, I spent the last 10 years on Rev Left and even before that organizing. And I've built up a certain sort of like, you know, basic respect and people know, you know, in this niche, people know.

You're being humble right now. People know who I am. You know what I'm saying? So, so anyways, that's like a, it's a rewarding thing to be like, it's not kind of validating to be like, you know, people actually give a fuck what I have to say. And, you know, I can, I can do these things. and I have a certain sort of level of respect amongst people in this crowd. And then at age 36, I go into the trades, right? I need health care.

I need a pension. I need more money for my family. And so I shift hard into this whole new world where none of that applies. Nobody gives a fuck what my opinions on politics are. Nobody knows Rev left on the job site. And I find myself at, you know, my late 30s, having four men who are 10 years younger, than me having a dude that's like 25 teaching me how to use a certain tool for the first time. And there's there's a small part of me. My ego bristles. It's like it's almost like I found myself

early on wanting to tell people that, oh, I had this other thing that, you know, I had this other thing where I'm where I've kind of made progress and I've succeeded. So, you know, just keep, you know, I found my ego wanting to establish that. And quickly I saw that and I let that go. I don't need, I don't need to tell anybody anything. I need to humble myself to this process. I am now a total noob. I am a kindergartner. I'm starting over.

And is there a part of my ego that kind of like recoils when somebody 10 years younger than me has to teach me something or correct something I'm doing? Yeah. But I'm aware that that's there and I'm not going to play into it. I'm going to let that feeling pass and I'm going to embrace learning. I'm going to embrace being the student once again. And yeah, okay, then all of a sudden I humble myself and I take direction very well and I ask questions and like I embrace the fact that they're teaching me how to do something. I'm actually grateful that they're teaching me.

I think it's pretty cool that I still have so much to learn that somebody, you know, much, much younger than me with much less life experience still has something meaningful to teach me and show me about this world. And so it kind of reconnected me in a lot of ways with that student. and it had to come through the contradiction with my ego where, you know, I wanted to assert that I, I've done something with my life, right? I'm not, you know, but, but then also I had to let that go. And like, I don't need to assert anything. I'm here now. This is a different world. Let me fall into it. And, and yeah, through that humility, you know, people take to you, people like you. And you're working in a trench with another dude for eight hours. You do start talking about religion. You do start talking about politics. and people are way more likely to hear you

and then very quickly they're like oh Breton might not know shit about you know this type of stuff but he actually has some interesting thoughts on this or that you know and then all of a sudden you'll see somebody coming to you for advice like whoa isn't that weird that person just randomly comes to you and is vulnerable to you

out of nowhere and ask your advice on a thing well that's because on some level they trust you enough to be vulnerable they don't sense an ego with you so they can be vulnerable with you and I found that to be true throughout my life that people, even from left field, like people that I'm not even particularly close to, will go out of their way to reach out to me to ask me how to deal with

the difficult thing in their life. And it's not because we've talked about it before or I've said something to them about it before. It's simply because they can feel comfortable being vulnerable in front of me because they know they will be met with some degree of like love and compassion and understanding. And I think that's, you know, that's a beautiful thing. When you see that happening in your own life. I think that's a testament that you're on the right path. No, exactly. I mean, it's all about energy. A note that we keep hitting over and over throughout this whole conversation is that you're never, when I say you're, I mean me, I'm never going to get away from being flawed. I'm never going to get away from these moments

of feeling insecure or, you know, getting tight because someone knows something better than me, but it's about committing to a practice of getting through those moments so that we can we can learn and embrace all of the beauty that you just explained. I mean, one of my best friends, something, you know, if I ever call him, and by now you'll know I have a million sames. But if I ever call him on going through something, he'll just be like, yo, dude, you want to be a person you've never been. you got to do things you've never done. You know? And that's exactly what we're talking about. And in order to really do those and do them to the best of your ability, you've got to be humble and ready to learn.

And just like you said, that's the seed that you planted because we're all different. We're all good at different things. We're all bad at different things. And when you create that relationship and that trust, now of a sudden, you've started this, you've initiated this kind of reciprocal process where people are coming back to you and you're going to them. and it's growing both in intensity, but also consistency. I mean, I don't want to always, I don't want to make it so abstract, but I just feel like, I feel like we're really, really talking about what it means to be a political being in this world and particularly on the left.

no one is outside of critique, outside of being reprimanded. I mean, that's that unity struggle, unity that we talk about. And in many ways, I think we're also touching on what it means to commit to the mass line. Yeah. Right. Oh, absolutely. And in fact, let's kind of talk about that now, zoom out or back into politics proper because we have all these political things and it's an hour and a half and we're just talking

about this stuff. But again, it's inseparable. And I think people will resonate with that conversation. And I think that's a deeply meaningful conversation. I got a lot out of it. And I really appreciate you go in there with me. But let's talk about mass line development. Let's talk about base building as a model for dialectical theory. I know you said that you've, you know, you've been done a lot of different organizing work, but education within San Quentin Prison is particularly very interesting to me and maybe how you applied some of these ideas in that context, although it's not always necessarily organizing like labor or tenant organizing. It's political education, which does have its differences and isn't a one-to-one match. But I'm just putting all that on the table and I'm opening it up to you to take it in any direction you want. Totally. And I do not think that any of this was a distraction. We're talking, just like you said, we're zooming out and we're zooming in. because you can't understand any of this work and what I think,

what I'm constantly calling a practical dialectics without understanding, like this interpersonal way of like navigating our realities. To me, like what the mass line is is just a recognition that, and sometimes these words get all, you know, wonky. And I don't like to hold myself or really other people. so rigidly to them, but it's the difference between like a vanguard party and a proletarian party, right? The mass line is this belief that only with the support of the masses and not tricking them, right? It's developing the mass exploited and oppressed people, developing them into cadre that we will ever succeed.

And that's when people themselves come from not knowing anything. about politics outside of the kind of indirect experiential ways that they they face oppression and exploitation into a very sophisticated political analysis where now they're like, well, actually the world is operating in these ways. This is the way that I fit in. This is the way that the party fits in, the way that my organizing, my organization, whatever. So just this recognition that we are not in rhetoric, but instead we truly are in service of the people. And our goals are not only to improve their lives, but to educate them in a way where they recognize, I want to take up this mantle. So speaking to the prison work that have done, the work in the court as well as jails, God, when was this?

maybe it's 2017. We organized the first ever academic conference held inside a California prison with incarcerated students alongside outside academics. And my role outside of being like an event organizer was I taught classes and I prepped people for their presentations. So I was in some ways it was logistic, literally like printing out resources they could site and then like bringing handfuls of paper into the prison but then also just like coaching people through how do we develop a research question how do we think about this what am I

interested in and like how does that translate into an analysis as opposed to maybe just saying like an opinion or something um and in that process this is the first time I think ever I had like been inside a prison for sure uh and I'm not disparaging anyone in particular here, but here's what I'll say. No matter where you are, there are smart people, there are dumb people, there are hot heads, there are cool, calm, collected people. And that could be, you could be in your corporate office, or you could be in San Quentin State Prison, you could be outside in New York, or you could be in Omaha. Like, that is, everyone is like that. There's, there's just all different kinds of people. No one is a monolith. And even having, I think,

the abstract politics that I did when I went into the prison of like, you know, oppressed people are good and, you know, cops are bad or whatever. You don't realize how much stuff sticks with you, right? Even if you can say the words, even if you can say, I'm a prison abolitionist, you don't realize, like, in your body how much of those kind of preconceived notions like stick with you until you're thrown into that kind of situation and like realize all the literal unlearning you have to do and all the little nooks and crannies in your in your brain. And I just remember that was one of the first moments where I was really like in awe of how much I had to learn from people that were absolute experts in a thing that I didn't know.

And that could be all of the specific projects that they were working on, right? but it also, like what it meant to be incarcerated, to be sitting for 20, 30, 40 years, right? Like that is an expertise, that is a knowledge base that God willing, and I will never understand. And it really does provide its own set of wisdom. And so that was the first moment where it's like, I think I was reading Paul Ferreri's pedagogy of the oppressed at the time. And I'll just be really vulnerable here. I think I had it in my head that if people were already in prison, that meant that they were willing to engage in certain types of extreme acts.

So if they could be radicalized, we'd just be that much closer to revolution, which I want to just blame on youth, that kind of arrogance. But I was really blessed with being like, whoa, like I have so much to learn. And these are my mentors. Even though I might be teaching them how to do a research project, they're teaching me all about. life and what it means to struggle. Yeah. So that's just like kind of like the story. That's how I understand like the mass lines.

It's like everyone is an expert. If we're committed to, you know, Marxist, Leninist politics, our goal is to develop people into cadre and have them see the world through this, this lens. But the way that that lens will take shape. That will be specific to each different time and place. And that means that our mission requires that we convince the people of those times and places, those institutions, the particular identities, whatever, that this truly is the correct framework towards liberation. And they will be able to translate it in a way that meets their own specific historical needs. Does that match your understanding of mass line?

Absolutely. 100%. And yeah, when you zoom out globally and look at socialist experiments in different contexts, there's also the application of general universal theory to specific circumstances and it takes unique forms, you know, given those circumstances. And yeah, and I think, you know, increasingly, you know, you're in a very specific situation with prison work. But even more broadly, in society right now, we have this like opportunity we haven't had

in our entire lifetime to do this sort of work, right, to win people over in that way, to organize a struggle with them. And through that practical struggle and camaraderie and solidarity, we actually are more convincing than we ever could be writing books at them or even doing podcasts trying to convince them. It's through that dialectic of actually being with people,

struggling with people that those ideas often open up to people, which is not to say there aren't people that are already curious and come out and find stuff like this and learn. I mean, obviously that's why we do it. But I think that's the mass line in that way is actually more efficient at doing that to a broad base of people. And we're living at a time where people are looking for alternatives. It is increasingly clear to people across the entire spectrum and really across the, you know, not just the U.S., but across the world, that this system is failing to keep its end of the bargain up, right? It's failing even more to produce and sustain a middle class, if you believe in such a thing in the first place.

It's hitting its ecological limits. It's devastating our lives. It's our psychologies, alienation, the constant grinding precarity of having to live under a system that you know is dwindling your prospects of life and your children or the children you should care about in the world's prospects coming into this. They're seeing the open corruption. They're no longer trusting institutions. And that's not unique historically. it's unique over our lifetimes because this is the first sort of opening we've had in this way since really the post you know post world war two era in the united states in a lot of ways

the 60s and 70s were different um but you know people are opened up to it there's widespread critiques of capitalism as such socialism even if people only half understand it is gaining traction especially among young people like never before and the center is falling out of politics and in those moments, people go left or they go right. But it also opens them up to hearing stuff that you and I would say, where in a different material context, even 20 years ago, they would scoff and completely dismiss it. Now, after they've been laid off and they can't get benefits and, you know, unemployment's not coming through and all this other stuff that they've actually lived through, they're starting to see the flaws in the system. And while the right wing has an easier

job of convincing people because they just go with vibes and feelings and anger and fear and frustration and they build on that. We have to build on understanding and love and solidarity and compassion. It's a harder thing to do in a lot of ways. But I'm just saying all of that is to say that we have a unique historical opportunity that's not going away anytime soon because this system isn't going to magically become better tomorrow. It's going down. It's untenable. It's unsustainable. It literally can't function anymore. And so we have this opportunity. And I also wanted to say one other thing you were talking about traits, you know, and this is true. There are smarter people or dumber people or hot-headed people, cool and calm people. And it's also true, which you alluded to,

that we are all those things too. You know, there's areas of my life where I am, you know, just ignorant or dumb and have a lot to learn. I'm doing that with my job every day. There are elements of my life where I'm, you know, smart and have something meaningful to say. People would look up to me. There's moments in my life where I lose my fucking temper and there's moments in my life where I'm cool as a cucumber. And so that's true of them too. And so I think that's an interesting insight to see.

And once you really internalize that insight, I think, yeah, you lead with a lot more compassion and love and respect to other people just sort of automatically because you say, this person might be presenting in this one context as this or that, but I know that there's a whole universe within them. There's a whole world within them. And, you know, they're more than just this trait

or that reaction in that moment, et cetera. And that's why I think the mass line is so important because it really is the political embodiment of this politics of humility that we're talking about and also related, maybe a little bit different politics of empathy. I mean, I, and this, again, the mask line and base building go hand in hand, and I'll give you just a short little story to explain it, a good friend of mine that I met through the work. He was a big time heroin dealer. I won't say, here in New York, just broadly. And then he did time. He was in the feds for a long, long time. But we're talking about politics. We're just like always, always talking about politics. And I'm asking him, I'm like, hey, how do we convince people from your neighborhood to get involved in this stuff in a way that maybe they haven't been before? Is Marxism, Leninism, like a thing that you think could be, I don't know, persuasive to people?

And this is what he told me. He goes, look, it's not a joke that the drug dealers, the scammers, the hustlers, the gangsters are like the superstars and a lot of the, these neighborhoods. That's what I was growing up. That's how I became respected in many ways. But a thing was, you know, back in the 90s, a drug dealer used to be able to put 20 grand in someone's hand, right? Coming into the game, they used to be able to do things like that if they thought that it was going to be beneficial to them. And that 20 grand, I'm not in any way promoting drug dealing. What I'm saying is that that's a material difference. It's a way to convince someone that This project I'm a part of is real, right?

He's like, currently now in this day and age, it's not really like that anymore, but they can show you physically a hundred grand, right? And so when I think about base building, which is the process of politicizing very specific neighborhoods, geographic locations through maybe you would call it mutual aid, I don't necessarily associate it with that word, but like, because to me a base building is a type of mutual aid that is directed towards a larger political project. It's not an end to itself.

Like we're grasping on that same idea my friend told me, right? When you develop tenant unions or when you create institutions where people can meet and collectively solve the problems of their neighborhood, when people are learning about a political framework and analysis that sees the overlapping, oppressions and exploitations and argues implicitly and explicitly for why we need to link up so that we can fight the boss. What you're doing is the Marxist, Leninist equivalent of putting 20 grand in someone's hand, right? You are giving before you get it before you get. And that, I think, is one of the most persuasive methods that we can apply. I mean, we've been talking about it the entire time,

but I could yell till I'm blue in the face about dialectical materialism and the unity of contradictions and quantity and equality and the negation of the negation. I mean, I think Asada even makes fun of Huey Newton in her memoir about like his five-hour speeches on the negation of the negation, which I love. But I think she has a point, you know. It's like, no, dude, the reason why the Panthers were so politically relevant to people is because of their food program. Because of protecting their communities because of the obvious risk involved in their project. And it was visceral, right?

There's nothing that's going to be more persuasive than showing someone, showing, not telling. I'm going to, I'm going to bleed with you. You know? And so again, like I said, the mask line is the goal. Base building is how we build towards it. And when you have that kind of material project, I think that a lot of the things that characterize political discourse today, you know, like we're this like vitriol, this like viciousness of yelling at people, this narcissistic condemnations of each other, I think all of that for the most part, obviously. Obviously, like we said, people are always flawed. I'm always flawed. They melt away in a large regard because we're grounded in the project. Yeah. No, I absolutely love that. And I think that analogy to the lump in and putting 20K in somebody's hand, I think it's so good. And it speaks to material victories being much more convincing than rhetoric could ever be. And it's a part and parcel with the base building and the following the mass line strategies that.

are essential to our entire politic and to get them off the ground. And you're absolutely right. And, you know, when you get somebody's, when you're in a tenant union and you get somebody's deposit back that they never thought they'd get back, you're putting $1,000 in their hands, right? When you get their AC fixed, you're putting 20K in their hands in a metaphorical sense because you're giving them material victories. And that builds up a sense of solidarity.

That turns people themselves into organizers. it is politically educating in and of itself. And yeah, it builds up, it builds up a base and it incorporates the theory of mass line in the real world. You know, here in Omaha, we have the Omaha tenants United. They've, you know, they've spearheaded the first, several of the first tenant unions in our state's entire history. And they say that they see this time and time again, that a lot of the tenants,

they'll take the dove and they'll be great. and they'll go about their life, but a section of them will become organizers. They'll become sometimes the most engaged and, you know, the most vociferous organizers. And they keep the momentum going in the tenant union, even after the organization itself has moved on to go fight another fight. And it's a beautiful thing to see that. And that really is the way we can build towards political power. Because what we need more than anything is just, and it's basis. most crude sense, we need political power that we can impose on genuinely our enemies, which are the

enemies of the world, those that would harm and kill and participate in genocide and exploit and rob and slaughter the whole planet so they could rise their profit margins by 2%. These people really are the enemies of humanity. And the only way that we can stand up to them in any meaningful sense is by the construction of organized, disciplined, political power, rooted, in a mass base. Where you have... For the people in the back, baby. And it's really hard to do, though.

That's the thing. It's really fucking hard, but it's the only fucking way. So what you're doing and the experiences that you're articulating are so important and that 20 grand in your hand, imagery is just so visceral, so real. And I think it's incredibly helpful

for people to think in that way. And I do want to say one thing, too. It just popped into my head. I have to say this. I haven't been able to speak publicly. on this. I'd love to get your thoughts on this. But it's really crucial that right now we

do what we can to, I mean, there's so many fights, right? But the Prairie Land Nine, the people who are indistinguishable from you and I, who were protesting in ice concentration camp in Texas, who were

using tried and true tactics used all over the world of noise of, you know, shooting off fireworks and having, banging pots and hands, that sort of noise demonstration. That is one of many tactics when you're protesting. They're putting themselves in harm's way to stand up for the dignity and the humanity of immigrants that are in detention centers that most of the American society just completely dismisses, looks away from, not my problem. Half the country supports their torture and a miseration.

They went out there. They tried to do something about it. They participated in a protest that almost everybody listening has, you know, very similar to the things that we've all participated in. They're getting a hundred year sentences, 70 year sentences, 30 year sentences, not even being in the protest, but coming afterward and moving a box of zines, you know, reading material that any one of us could have in our homes. The cops went in, found that reading material, found a really basic printing press, just a little sort of printer you'd find in an office. And they use that to tie them to Antifa terrorism. And they're putting decades of prison time on their heads.

And I just want to say like that breaks my heart to think about those totally decent good people being locked in a cage. And what's worse than that is if they're comrades, people that think the way they think, that do what they do, that support their movement. If we just go about our lives and say at least it's not me. right there's we can't do that so i really wanted and i've wanted to for the last week and i've done it on social media but coming to the microphone and really putting this out there we have to organize and mobilize for them we have to not forget them we have to participate in whatever ways we can in the appeal process we have to do protest outside of possible future court dates where we show that these people have support um and you know if there's any

influence at all on any local or national politician. Now or in the future, we have to put all our pressure to pardon them, to get them out of prison, to have a retrial, anything to save them, because those people could be you, they could be me. They could be any one of us. And in these moments of fascist crackdown, we have to have each other's back. The hyper individualist in us just wants to say, hey, thank God that's not me, right? But the collective struggle in us, the solidarity in us, the higher version of our natures. We have to show up for these people. We have to keep talking about them.

We have to keep spreading their stories. We have to keep bringing light to this situation. Donate, protest, whatever we can do to have their backs. Because, again, that could be any one of us. They did no crimes. You know, most of them were just at a protest and the Trump regime and the fascist police state and the conservative circuit court that is in North Texas. wanted to make an example out of them

and found a perfect opportunity to do that. And can you imagine, I just want to like, you know, use the empathy pump a little bit. Can you imagine right now? You went to a protest, you moved a box of zines, you shot off a firework, you bang some pots and pans together, and you're sitting in a prison cell

for the rest of your foreseeable life. And nobody is coming to your defense. Nobody's even trying. people talk about it for a week and then they move on to new issues and you're just there forever like isn't that hell isn't that the worst possible thing to imagine and i know you chris you've worked in in prison systems and you know the degraded quality of life that exists within those prisons so i just wanted to use this opportunity to uh to speak on that issue and to publicly urge people to not forget keep talking about it do whatever we possibly can to have their backs

because it could have been any one of us. No, I absolutely agree. I mean, this is part of obviously, and people that have been paying attention, no, this is part of this very specific crackdown. We all know that poem, first they came for, and then they came for the communists or whatever, right? We're at that level where now the United States government is red-baiting,

red-tagging, I guess, I should say. I think the executive order last year, 2025 labeled Antifa a terrorist organization, and now we are beginning to see the material implementation of that. This has been the plan the entire time. And we're not, as Brett already said, we're not talking about abstract categories. We're talking about real people, our comrades. and we really need to identify with that. Like it's not a joke.

It's not those people over there. It's not going to happen to me. You have to understand that if you don't fight for these people, like they're your family, like they're your best friend, they're going to be able to pick us apart and do that forever until they win. we have to make a stand because we're beginning to see this all over, whether it's Palestine action in the UK or right here, the Prairie Land 9. The government is cracking down and it's on purpose because they know that we are growing relentless. Absolutely.

So for those comrades, please, everyone keep talking about it. go out. Let's try to figure out how we can organize, just like you mentioned, at courthouses, sending funds, sending letters. Because these people have made the ultimate sacrifice, which is fighting for our liberation in the beginning when they are most vulnerable. There will come a moment, I believe, and Brett, I feel like we're, like I said, we're locked in. I know you believe it too. But there will come a moment where we'll, win and we'll have this, this decades and weeks moment. But right now, our comrades that are that are being taken down, this is, this is the weeks and decades. And we have to show up for them.

Absolutely. And, you know, when when the state can crack down and be successful, they will only be emboldened. When they were doing the ice raids, what actually, and the ice raids are still going on, but at a much lower level and tempo, with a bunch more caveats. And that, was that was because there was such an outpouring of opposition to it. The opposition to it made it weakened it, made it much less popular. Two people, at least two people had to fucking die publicly in international news putting their own lives on the line in ways they didn't even think that they were having to do or even doing in that moment. Those lives were robbed from them. The rest of their lives were robbed from them. And they did that on behalf of

others and that process was slowed down because of all the politics that emerged from that opposition and from those sacrifices. And here we have a similar situation. If they are successful, if they can do this to them and nobody shows up for them, everybody moves on, nothing really happens, nobody with political power tries to intervene, then they will continue to do it over and over and over again until they're knocking on your or my door. If, however, appeal process happens, a pardon happens, protest and organizing happens, people that have law degrees, go pro bono work to do everything they can, throw in their efforts to get these people freed or get them new trials. And that is a popular thing that the news has to cover and they lose.

Well, they might then turn their fascist eyes to some other thing that's easier for them to do. same with Iran right if Iran turned over if the people rose up against their own government and everything like that the US would do what it did to Syria and to Libya and Israel would be very happy but actually the Iranian people came together Iran fought back they had plans and contingency plans for the decapitation strikes they were still able to keep their government together they beat back this war of aggression and now the US has to make you know unprecedented concessions to Iran in the wake of a military defeat. And that weakens the government.

It heightens the contradictions within Trump's base. It makes people turn against him. You know, it hurts the economy, all these things. It's an L. It's an L. And taking a big L like that genuinely weakens the presidency, the administration, and the fascist police state apparatus they're trying to employ to shut people up. So if they are successful in any of these trains, they will continue to be in Boland.

by it. When they are defeated, they shrink away. They are, as Mao said and as communists have said, reactionaries are ultimately paper tigers. They'll stomp on throats. They'll hurt people. They'll destroy lives until they get punched in the motherfucking face. And then they'll whimper, back down, throw their hands up in defeat. That's happened all through history. And it's happening right now. And that is one of many reasons why we have to stand up for these comrades who are really facing an injustice that is gut-wrenching. Absolutely. I mean, in many ways we're talking, and I don't want to distract. I just want to really hammer this point home because I totally agree with you. We're talking about games of power at scale. And just to harken back to the prison work, a thing that people might know from movies or TV shows, but it's real is prison and incarceration in general is a very violent place. In many ways, jails are actually more violent because, they're inherently like transitory.

But the point that I'm trying to make is that like people are constantly trying to run scams on each other. Like extortion is a big, big problem in prisons. And the ways that you solve that problem is by forcing the person that's trying to victimize you to run calculations on if you're worth it. Right? If you preemptively comply and you begin to pay people weekly, monthly, whatever, without causing a problem, you know, without testing your heart, then people will do it. You know, and that's a product of the system, oppression.

You know, I'm not, I'm not saying it's okay, but I'm just saying that's what's going to happen. And right now what we're talking about is a game of power at scale where if we do not say that there is a line, you cannot cross that, you cannot do that to one of ours without dealing with the consequences. Then just like you said, the government has already proven that they will take it all the way, right? If they are allowed to act with impunity, they will do it. and they'll do the worst things in the world all the while Elon Musk is becoming a trillionaire, right? All of them are stealing from our pockets. So the way you fix that problem is by becoming coordinated, becoming organized, being principled, and forcing them into a series of calculations where now all of a sudden they have to be like,

well, if I do this, then I have to deal with that. That's brilliant. And I totally agree. And basically what we're saying from two different angles is the logic of the bully. Right? The bully preys on the week. And the less you fight back, the more you capitulate, the more you get bullied. The more you're willing to stand up to make it a problem for them, to make it hard for them, the less likely they're willing to invest that time and energy into bullying you. And we've all had those experiences growing up of being bullied. And there have been times where I capitulated as a younger kid in certain, you know, stupid schoolyard bullshit. And there are times when I said, absolutely not. I'm going to fight you.

And I might lose, but you're going to walk away, you know, with a torn shirt and a bloody nose too. And you're going to think twice next time you come into school if it's worth it, you know, fucking with this kid. And that just is the bully logic is the logic of fascism. Fascists are bullies to their core, to their yellow bellies. They are bullies. And bullies are fundamentally cowards. And whether you say reactionaries are paper tigers or bullies are cowards. or bullies or cowards.

You're saying the same thing in the fucking end. And I think that in that prison game theory sort of argument that you laid out is exactly in line with that basic psychology. And Iran just proved it. Iran just proved it. They were being literally bullied on the international scale by these two psychoterrorist states. And they stood up and they fought back nobly. And they took a lot of fucking losses. And they got a bloody nose themselves.

And they lost a lot of their leadership. But they fought back. The Iranian people consolidated. around their government despite their disagreements with it because they knew that rule under you know Israeli balkanization or a puppet dictator for the U.S. is not going to be any better. It's going to be way worse. And they fought back the bully. And now the bully has to pay up.

And in that process, Israel is further and further isolated. And America has to offer these these unprecedented concessions to Iran. Now that's still a fluid situation. there were strikes today and last night. So who knows where we're going from here. But Iran is still fighting back and that's the thing. And so, yeah, I just, I don't know. It's just terrifying to think of the situation they're going through.

I know some of them have children and as a father to be ripped away from my child because I had left-wing books in my house. My God. It is unfathomable. So I just want to, I'm going to keep harping. I'm going to keep harping on this going forward. And if you're in the area, if you're in North Texas, Southern Oklahoma. If you're in Dallas, you know, you're in the epicenter of this particular

issue. It's, and you're in any organization at all, I think it would certainly be worth trying to form a united front, a popular front with other organizations, even liberal organizations, legal organizations in your, in your areas to try to team up, get as many people, as many organizations on the same page as possible and try to push in the direction of standing up for the Prairie Land 9. And of course, Rev. Left is here as a microphone and a platform for anybody who is engaged in that sort of organizing that would like to come on and talk about it and ramp up even more support for those folks that are paying an unacceptable price for just being good people and standing up for their fellow human beings. So, all right, my friend,

I don't know, this is two hours. We touched on maybe two things in our outline, but I think the discussion was totally worth it. The time flew by. It's really a pleasure and an honor to have this conversation with you. I would love to have you back on in the future to have more discussions. But before I let you go, any last words you want to say, and then if you want to let people know where they can find you, your work, or any other organizational thing you want to plug or promote, have at it. Yeah. I really just, the thing I want to say is I'm so grateful to have been on to discuss all this stuff with you. you're someone that I seek to imitate.

I admire and I'm really, really inspired by your project. So it's really meaningful to be here and talk to you today. The things that I want to promote, I just want to, I don't know, put an exclamation point, show up for your people, make it a problem, get gets organized. And if you've never done anything like this before and you're interested,

don't be ashamed of any of that. Today is the fastest you can ever get a part of something. So just follow that urge. And let's win this world together. Some projects that I think are important, you know, as you all know, Jean-Paul Fartre, that's J.E. A-N-P-A-U-L-U-L-F-R-T-R-E underscore on Instagram. There is no casino F-M-C-P.

It's a campaign to fight back against billionaire Steve Cohen that's trying, that bought the Mets basically so he can build a casino in Corona Queens and really just destroy not only that neighborhood, but New York in general, all at taxpayer money. I think it like costing, we had some really incredible people run the numbers on this, but it's like $20 million of corruption could lead to like $8 billion in profit. So it's just a scam on a massive scale. There's also no Brooklyn jail. They're building new jails. They say they're going to close Rikers.

I don't know if they will. They're building new jails in each of the boroughs. and one of them, I think it's a $3 billion jail in downtown Brooklyn. It's 13 stories. They're saying that it's the woke jail because it's built with humanitarian architecture, whatever the fuck that means. Let's make it anything else, a school, a hospital. The first two levels are going to be a community center that children can hang out with.

Let's make the whole thing a community center. That'd be really wonderful. We don't need any more jails. And then just like the educational work, tune in. We're trying to teach people dialectics, political theory, about our incredibly beautiful, resilient, and powerful militant history. We're trying to teach dense theory in an accessible way

so that you can take it further. And I guess I just want to end on saying, I never hope to be anyone's end. If anything, I really want to be your beginning. I would love that opportunity. I am not an expert. I am a person that's been committed to this for what I imagine is a long time. But I just want you to watch whatever, get excited, and then go deeper.

Because maybe you're going to teach me and us how the world should be in the right way to get it. So I'm just really, really grateful. Thank you so much. Oh yeah, absolutely. And I'll link to as much of that in the show notes, including the Instagram so people can go follow the page and even reach out to Chris if they're so inclined. All right, my friend, thank you so much. Genuine, I say this often, but I truly mean it. Open invite to come back on anytime you have my email. Maybe we can even exchange. I think we actually do have each other's phone numbers as well. So yeah, just keep in touch with me. I'd love to have you back on your natural on the mic. And we have a really great conversation.

so I appreciate you taking the time out today. Well, oh, man. Yeah. Peace be to you, brother.