Rev Left Radio - Progress of the Storm: A Collaboration with Cosmonaut Magazine

Episode Date: April 29, 2020

Remi, Donald, and Parker from Cosmonaut Magazine and its associated podcast Cosmopod join Breht to have a wide-ranging discussion on numerous topics including eco-socialism, the Covid Crisis, building a communist party, Climate Change, the importance of labor organizing, and much, much more!  Check out Cosmonaut Magazine here: https://cosmonaut.blog/ Check out Cosmopod here: http://cosmopod.libsyn.com/ Outro music 'Keep Time' by Gauntlet Hair ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective: @Barbaradical Intro music by DJ Captain Planet. --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, FORGE, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. For today's episode, we actually have a collaboration with Cosmapod, which is the podcast associated with Cosmonaut Magazine. These are really good comrades, friends of mine, and we just wanted to do something with our two shows together. So this is sort of being released on both of our feeds, and this is just the first of hopefully many collaborations between our project and Cosmonauts. project overall. So we hope you enjoy. Without further ado, let's get into this episode with Remy, Donald, and Parker from Cosmonaut Magazine. Live from the end of the end of history, welcome Cosmo Comrades to a very special episode of Cosmopod. This episode is a collaboration with our excellent friend and comrade, Brett O'Shea, from Rev Left Radio. And it's first in what we

hope will be a series of such collaborations as the terminal crisis of capitalism intensifies. Little bones thrown to our left com combat. So I guess before we get into the thick of things, we ought to introduce who all is here. I am irrelevant and ubiquitous on this podcast, so I don't need to introduce me. And I probably don't need to introduce Brett either, given the level of celebrity he's attained. But I'll throw it over to you anyway, Brett. I hate that. But yeah, my name is Brett.

I'm the host of Revolutionary Left Radio and the co-host of Red Menace. I'm incredibly happy to be on. As I was saying before the recording, I've met Donald and Parker in real life. They're great comrades and have become friends over the years. Hopefully one day I can meet Remi in real life. But a collaboration between your project and mine is natural and seamless. So I'm happy to be here. Well, Brett, I can speak for all of us unequivocally that we're thrilled to have you here.

And if anybody isn't, they're soon to be purred. Also with us, as Brett alluded to, we have Donald and Parker. What's up? So there's plenty of stuff to discuss today, some of it we touched on before the recording. But I think that the general thrust of this just sort of shooting the shit session that we're about to embark on is the way that the current many-sided crisis between the ecological aspect of the pandemic of COVID-19. that we have right now, the economic aspect of 20-something million jobs evaporating overnight. All of this kind of brings into view more starkly than I think anybody listening has ever been alive for.

The choice that we have, we really have laid down the gauntlet between socialism and barbarism. And it's increasingly clear as well that a sort of productivist, crude, materialist communism is not going to be sufficient, a sufficient vision to carry us through what will be the long 21st century. So to that end, we want to talk a little bit about how we fight for an ecologically-minded revolutionary socialism in the 21st century and what that might look like. Any opening thoughts, folks? Well, I just kind of want to say that in the modern day left regarding ecology, there seems to be two general positions that, you know, are kind of at two antagonistic endpoints. And you have, you know, like the eco-modernist kind of perspective, which is probably best represented by, like, Lay Phillips.

And his whole thing is, I know, he's the guy who wrote that book, People's Republic of Walmart. And his whole idea is, you know, kind of what people call eco-modernism. It's this idea that, like, developing more advanced productive forces is really how we'll deal with the ecological crisis. Any kind of, like, approached ecology that will, like, change. the Western consumer lifestyle rather being like universalize it to the world is not really an option and we need to focus on like developing new technology that will be able to be more ecologically sustainable maybe it will be necessary to end capitalism to do this maybe it won't be then on the other end you kind of have the the degrowth perspective which is that we need a rapid

like reduction of the productive forces and you know we kind of need to go back to more substance types of agriculture we need to kind of um I don't want to you know I'm trying to give them a fair shot because I think some of these ideas do have some merit but they kind of want to um

turn back on industrialization to some degree not necessarily in like a reactionary way but they basically think that like a solution is going to be degrowth rather than growth of new productive forces and so I guess my point here is kind of like I feel like we kind of need an approach that doesn't fall into either of these traps. I guess that's what I'll start with.

Yeah, there are these two sort of, this is kind of false dichotomy that's propped up between a continuation of growth and a sort of hyper-degrowth. And it really, I think the project of our times is trying to find possibly a way to shift down when it comes to growth. Obviously, we'll get more into the idea of superfluous overproduction of commodities we don't need and use value right but overall i think we can't go to either extreme we have to find a middle route but also we have to take into consideration um and i i want to get into this maybe more later but just just to set it on the table for now a consideration of how the global north and

the global south dynamics can be balanced out during a transition towards an eco-socialist future um so those are just some initial thoughts to set on the table we'll get back to those i think though. I would definitely echo Brett in that it's kind of a false dichotomy. Like once we do have a transition to socialism, we're going to need a democratically planned society. And part of that is going to be cutting out the option to have 150 different brands of shampoo. You don't fucking need that. And that can be seen as sort of a degrowth perspective. But at the same time, like we're going to have to advance the product like as people who live in the imperialist core like we're going to have to spend some of our resources like helping the purposefully underdeveloped and and countries that have been victims of imperialism those kind of places to actually help develop their productive forces so it's going to need a little bit of both but i think part of that is like brett said like undercutting exchange value as the dominant touchstone to how society produces goods and make it more about use value.

It sounds like everybody in this discussion is on the same page. We sort of, we can't, we have to, the project of socialists in this era, which is unprecedented in human history, I would argue, and certainly in the history of capitalism, is to thread the needle between the sort of like fully automated luxury communism type faith in like a techno futurist, you know, we're going to invent our way around having to change anything about the way we structure society. We have to thread the needle between that and a sort of like romanticist retreat from the Promethean project of humanity, where we make our own world in advance in that way, and that we need to take over that sort of a process, right, in an intentionally and proposive

guided way, right? So that instead of these things happening by random accidents of history and the needs of capitalist accumulation, that we take conscious control and realize the human project in history, that's definitely central to why all of us here are communists and do keep the faith in the hypothesis. And I think, you know, the last thing I'll say on that for now is that one thing that's coming clear just through even the barest outline of the challenges that we face is that whether you want to call it a socialist project or not, and whether it's led by a vanguard party or not, the types of transformations that we need in order to even minimally address this ecological crisis barreling down on us. They're all the classical socialist goals of internationalism,

right, of egalitarianism, of thoroughgoing political and economic democracy. All of those things are going to be required. So I feel like the challenge, the gauntlet that's thrown down on us as people living through the 21st century is to realize those sort of historic, world historic transformations that we've been, our tradition has been fighting for for a few hundred years. To get into it a little more broadly, we, you know, we do want to sketch out possibly, you know, a sort of more future-oriented vision, strategy, right, an idea for what it is that we're aiming to do. But we also want to talk about how we're going to get there. And I think one thing that's interesting, you know, in this sort of like prefatory, this sort of signal crisis moment that

we're in right now that sort of hints at a lot of what we're in for in the future is that we're seeing an uptick in insurgent labor struggle. We're seeing sort of organic rising throughout the economy, and we're even seeing a reemergence of solidarity struggle. So like one example that comes to mind is at the General Motors plant a few weeks ago. There was a walkout because the people working there didn't want to be making jet engines probably that go on to military planes. Instead, they wanted to be making ventilators. And I wonder if we have any perspective on this. and what all is emerging. I think just broadly speaking, what's happening right now with the coronavirus and the sort of crisis it's bringing about for capitalism is a sort of tragic

catastrophe in its own right, just on the peer basis of the disproportionate sort of outcomes of who's struggling, who's dying the most, who's on the front lines, who can sit at home and self-distance. We're seeing all of the contradictions, the inequalities, the depravities, and cruelties of modern American capitalism be laid bare. And, you know, I don't want to think of these things as sort of teleological in an over-mysticalized or idealist way. But it's interesting to think that a lot of the contradictions that this coronavirus is revealing, a lot of the pressures that's putting on existing symptoms can really be seen as a dress rehearsal for the coming bigger crisis or perhaps multiple sets of crises that will be a result.

of climate change more broadly. It's like there are certain types of crises that capitalism faces, some of which it's much better to equip to deal with and some that it's not at all well equipped to deal with. And just the global dimensions of the coronavirus, the exact sort of places in our society, in our economy, in our political system that it puts pressure on are very much precursors to the exact sort of contradictions and problems and failures will have to address and solve in a meaningful way if we ever. hope to navigate the coming climate crisis effectively. And a big part of all of this,

and I'm sure this is going to be a big part of this conversation, but is the need for planning, right? We all are sort of aware of what angles and Marx would call the, the anarchy of production in capitalist society. I think Parker referenced it earlier, you know, a bunch of different commodities being made not for human need or the satisfaction of basic human necessity, but rather for the generation of profit in its own right. And in order to deal with this mini-crisis, but really the bigger crisis of climate change that's coming, there will have to be some sort of rational economic planning, not only just on the national level, but perhaps even on the international and global level. What form that planning will take? What was that, Donald?

I was saying, oh, definitely. We'll have to be like international, I think. Like, there's just no other way. I think the question then arises, though, is sort of thinking about the ways that planning has manifested in past socialist experiments and the differences in the way that planning might have to be carried out in the future. I'm not sure I have the complete coherent idea of how to do that. You don't want it to be overly centralized, I think, but at the same time, you don't want it to be overly decentralized, right? Because it needs to be global in scope. It needs to be able to communicate and collaborate across space and time, across the entire globe. So I guess what are your sort of thoughts on planning and the form it might have to take in the future. And how is that

different perhaps than the ways it's taken in the past? I'm actually reading a book right now called Cybernetic Revolutionaries by Eden Medina. And it's basically, it's kind of like a social history of a Cybersyn project in the Chilean attempted revolution in 1973, where you know, Salvador Allende, as we all know, was elected and attempted to have a, democratic transition to socialism through the confines of the Chilean democratic constitution and they got this guy Stafford Beer to come and help them basically build the whole

computer network using technology that was actually behind the rest of the world because in Chile they had all these issues of actually getting even the most modern day computers at that time and so they were using like telex machines these kind of like messager machines that would like typewriters that kind of like operated

through a long distance phone cable type thing. It was even like probably less advanced than a telephone because they didn't even really have like a full national telephone system there. And the whole idea was basically to not just use the model of planning that existed

in the Soviet Union. Because I think the problem the Soviet Union's planning system is that it did not have like lateral communication from all levels. You basically had a bureau that would, you know,

set targets for the economy and try to plan everything out and then, you know, these targets would be sent to the managers and they would be forced to, like, meet these targets. The thing is, is that you didn't really have like a real communication on all levels.

And so the central like planning bureaus didn't really know what was going. going on on all these different levels. They didn't have like complete access to information. And so you kind of had like a reproduction of anarchy, not anarchy of the market, but kind of like, um, like you had black markets kind of pop up because there was, uh, you know, just incorrect flows of information and gluts in production. And so Cyberson was, it wasn't just trying to apply computers to planning, but they were

trying to apply a whole new like way of looking at systems using cybernet. theory, which was developed by Norbert Wiener after World War II based on his kind of experiments developing like an anti-aircraft gun. And so I think that these experiments, as incomplete as they were, are really important for us to study if we want to understand how to develop a more modern day form of central planning. Because, you know, there's all these critiques of planning from people like Friedrich Hayek that, you know, it's just impossible for if a central, central authority to, like, know all the information. And so you, like, need markets as, like, this information processing machine.

And so I think that if we really wanted to make, like, you know, planning viable today, I think we have to actually consider how do we make a system that can actually communicate on all levels and keep everybody on the same page? You know, I think it's important to maybe expand on that because I think, first of all, you know, most of us here, I think, are really influenced by, like systems thinking and cybernetics and stuff, but I think it's like really understudied and under advertised on the left.

And just to that end, I don't really know much about it. So I wouldn't put myself as like, I don't know. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not all that well informed either. But I find like some of the principles to be extremely instructive

when you have like a global system of production that is as complicated as this one. Like for instance, you know, one of the central ideas there is this idea of that a system in order to continue to be viable has to have what they call requisite varieties. It just basically has to be adaptive enough to respond to unexpected situations when they come. And that the only way you can do that is by having like the systems of control to be bottom up where the bottom in, you know, delivers information inputs to the next level in like a nested

way and like a nested system. And then eventually that info gets to the top and, you know, certain decisions and accommodations can be made there. filtered back down. And I feel like that is like a perfect recipe for economic democracy if it's executed right. I kind of wonder if part of the problem with planning in the Soviet Union came from the actual political forms that, you know, the Soviet Union took. You know, for example, like the targets were somewhat arbitrary and the people setting these targets where people that had then installed because they were loyal to the Politburo or something like that. And I wonder that I wonder if we can actually set up a true, what I would call like a true dictatorship of the proletariat where, you know, there's actual representation of the entire working class within the political forms that the socialist state takes.

I wonder how much that would actually solve our problems going towards planning. Well, to touch on that, like, there's a really good book by Masha Lewin called Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates. And it kind of talks about how you did have people in the Soviet. Union and that we're trying to like kind of talk about these issues of you know how do we develop a more evenly distributed and an active planning system but the problem is is that like there was just a kind of bureaucratic culture that prevented these problems from being openly discussed and so I think that's one of the issues is that you have to have a system that allows for more democratic input and more open discussion about these problems and that's kind of a

big problem, a big sort of contradiction in the entire idea of trying to build up to a point where we could have national or international economic planning is, you know, how do we disentangle any effort to plan an economy from a bureaucracy? It's never obviously been done before. Perhaps the technological development of the time just wasn't there to facilitate something like it. And so in lieu of being able to really democratize planning, it built up this bureaucracy and you have this central leadership. And then that becomes its own sort of mechanism with its own incentive systems to climb the bureaucratic ladder and everything, which really work against not only effective, perhaps planning, but also I think there's going to have to be

a question of consensus, a question of people really feeling that this is a legitimate project and that they have a say in it so as not to create, if not economic, then political rifts, which could destabilize the society more broadly. It's a very difficult question, but I think that's sort of the task of our time is if we take for granted this idea that economic planning will be absolutely crucial to overcoming the problems of climate change, we also have to think about how we can democratize that process and at the same time how we can ensure that it has leadership and a future vision. I think of in just a small maybe microcosmic way.

The difference is whatever your feelings are about China, the differences between the Chinese government's ability to plan long term and carry out five, 10-year plans and America's inability to do that precisely because of this two-party, quote-unquote, democratic structure where every few years you put in a new president, a new set of leaders with new partisan agendas and incentives, and that disallows, that prohibits the ability for the Americans, society to plan long term and to effectively tackle a goal like climate change. But at the same

time, China also has its deficiencies because when it is over centralized, you have the problem of, you know, the rising surveillance state of a sort of a state that will seek to punish people that fall outside of its, of its dictates or whatever. And that's a concern, you know, regardless of your feelings on whether or not China's socialist or whatever, there are certain things we can learn about the dynamic between being able to plan long term without necessarily having the bureaucratic mechanism that can oftentimes stifle the ability for development and work against people's needs and perhaps, you know, breed its own incentive system and whatnot. I think it's interesting. I'm of the opinion and I've kind of changed on this question

over the course of a couple of years, but like I don't think that China is socialist in any kind of way that we should actively aim to emulate. And the reason for that is partly in this, where I view it as like the Chinese model and the American model are two poles of how to do capitalism in the 21st century where they are becoming increasingly globalized but also increasingly unstable.

And I feel like what we're seeing in China, which is I think inevitably going to come out on the top of the world economic and political system, is you're seeing there, the capitalists don't have their hands directly on the levers of political and economic power in quite the same way that they do in the U.S. And so what happens is that you really can have what like Marx and Engels would have like,

you know, a committee for the affairs of the ruling class in general in the state to manage some of the sharpest like contradictions and sharpest disadvantages that come from having individual capitalists or groups of capitalists be able to sort of tweak things in their favor. So, like, you have a more stable setup there if you, you know, try to expand in a planned way, right, like social provision or direct production from a central kind of way. I just, I just think that that's, you know, that Chinese model is probably going to prove to be more resilient. We've already seen it with economic crises, like how they handled the 2007-2008 crisis. And I think we're going to see it increasingly with ecological shakeups that threaten the stipend the stability. of like a productive regime but i do you know but that's not done in the current chinese model as far as

i can tell in a way that has direct you know workers democracy which is i think probably should be central of any kind of socialism that we build on the china question i do want to say that um i think that their ability to react so much better and effectively to the covid 19 crisis is because one is i think there is i kind of obviously like taking a very much a capitalist turn, but there still are a lot of the Mao-era-political institutions in China, and I think that it's kind of because of the remnants of China's socialist era when Mao was in charge. That is pretty much behind why that they were able to react so much better, so they still have this kind of, um, a skeleton of a command economy. I do kind of think that, like, as time goes on, like, China will become more

more market oriented and that these command economy type aspects of China will become weaker. But I do think that because they have that history of Maoism, they were better able to react to this. And aside from political or economic institutions that might have been remnants of the Maoist era, there's also just a cultural sense of solidarity, of, you know, of national identity that America doesn't have. We have a culture that, for whatever it actually is, a culture that proclaims to be, you know, about liberty. And we're already seeing how difficult it is, even to just have lockdown orders in the

middle of a pandemic between the two societies, because there's a more collectivist-minded culture in China that understands the collective implications of individual behavior, whereas in America, we see this hyper fetishization of individualism and the don't tread on me you know, sort of streak in American culture, the libertarian streak really, that manifest in different ways in both major political parties coming to the forefront and showing how American culture, American ideology, American sort of identity is really at odds with marshalling the collective responsibility and forces necessary to face something like a pandemic, but also to face something like climate change, both of which are collective and global problems overall.

So, you know, when I look into the future of the U.S., I don't see a United States solidified federal government lasting decades and decades. And I also don't see a wholesale takeover of the American state. I think the odds are statistically more on just a failure of the American society, government, economic system, and political system to meet the challenges of its time, which could result possibly in something like a breaking down of the state, something like balkanization or something even possibly worse like a like a full on civil war but i don't see it having the cultural ideological and sort of identity capacity to exist in a even slightly more collectivist

oriented way that is necessary to face these issues just just quickly i wanted to mention i we're seeing that already i i would say what you're you know we're seeing a retreat of the federal and central you know government from these various provinces that just basically make up what a state actually is at the everyday material level, right? The central government is retreating from that. And what we're seeing is, you know, coalitions of states form. We're seeing in states that, you know, can't manage it. We're seeing, you know, sort of extra state forces step in, like, you know, armed protests at the Capitol building or we're seeing, you know, individual people being like, oh, social distancing is communism, da-da-da. Because these people fundamentally mistake the ability to do

basically whatever the fuck you want to do in your individual self-interest for freedom. Whereas I think like a more affirmative and robust definition of freedom is achieving what we can through our collective like being and our collective structures, right? And I don't think, you know, there's a mistake that there's that libertarian idea of freedom that just means like, oh, I get to do whatever the fuck I want. So definitely the Balkanization thing. I 100% agree with you on that. Well, like Americans are just like so cocked by this like liberal idea of freedom.

where it's like freedom is like I can do whatever the fuck I want and no one can tell me what to do and that's what freedom means and the more I can just do whatever the fuck I want the more free I am and I don't have to be responsible to anyone else like what are you going to say Parker?

Freedom to be Jeffrey Epstein Yeah exactly like I can own a business and like rule over workers and I can just like you know be a complete like hedonistic prick and not have responsibility to anyone I actually do kind of worry, though, that as China becomes more capitalist and as markets become more prominent in China, that this idea of freedom is actually going to start growing there.

So I do have that concern, but I just think that, like, capitalism and the ideology of liberalism have just completely atomized Americans and create a vicious idea that, like, life is just all about doing whatever you want and not having to be responsible to anyone else. And that just does not work when you have a situation like this. Yeah, I know a Marxist economist who goes to all these, you know, conventions all around the world and China and shit, and he told me that when he was in China, he met a bunch of Communist Party economists who were actually, like, big fans of, like, neoclassical economics. So that's kind of disturbing. I do think China has been going in that direction, like, especially if you look at the, like, political stuff that's been going on in the last, like, 10 years, there was Bo Shilai, who was in. a governor of a big province. He was kind of like a neo-Maoist, like kind of left-wing member of the Communist Party, and he was kind of set to be the next president,

and the Xi Jinping wing, like, got him up for a murder of a British journalist, and, you know, who knows if this person actually was murdered by him or not. It very well may have been. But it kind of was a win for, or at least a defeat of the left wing of the Communist Party there. But it's weird because Xi Jinping is kind of like a mix of a bunch of different kind of factions. It's kind of hard to tell where he lies as far as the future goes. But, you know, this is all about China. But tying it back to the U.S., I mean, it's, you're right, that the Chinese,

the way that they have a stronger kind of centralized government, it makes them so much more able to, you know, deal with crises like the coronavirus. I mean, it's crazy to me how not one single U.S. U.S. politician has mentioned, like, we're just going to force GE to produce ventilators. We're going to force whatever company to start creating, like, protective gear. We're going to, like, no one has even suggested that, not even Bernie, because people have, like, such limited imaginations. Yeah, I mean, Trump did the Defense Production Act.

He basically said, like, that's on the table, but then he never uses it. And it's hard to think of any other reason other than those, those corporations, those CEOs, getting into his ear and saying, yeah, you might have that power. you know, don't you dare try to really exercise it in a way that takes away our ability to continue generating profits. And then I just wanted to say two things really quick. One about American culture and then one about China. The one about American culture is just this liberal hyper individualism taken to the absolute extreme. It actively undermines itself. And we can see that playing out right now. When somebody holds up a sign like we saw today saying social distancing is communism,

It just shows how, as Donald said, sort of cucked by a liberal ideology, they really are. But what they don't understand is this sort of seeing collectivism and individualism in a sort of dialectical whole in order for there to be healthy individuals that can go out and pursue, even in the liberal mind, you know, individual good to go out and operate in their own self-interest. they need to have a stable, relatively healthy, relatively educated, and safe collective context in which they exist. But because there is no balance there, because it is just so hyper individualistic, it's like these people going out fighting against this order that keeps all of us safe, both as a collective and as individuals. And so it actively starts to undermine itself and puts individuals in a state of crisis and in a state of more vulnerability to the problem in the first place,

which I think is just interesting and just shows how untenable liberal individualism really is, especially when it's taken to this level. But then the second point about China, I just want to sort of emphasize this fact is that whenever America, capitalism broadly, but just focus on America in China at the moment, whenever America goes through a sort of economic political crisis, one of the surefire ways that it starts to defend itself, is by finding a foreign enemy and turning it into an us-vers-them thing

and trying to make the case that, you know, something like the coronavirus and the deaths that it's reaping across America, it isn't the fault of American incompetence, of American government's failure to meet the public need, of the just total anarchy of capitalist production and the inability for society to come together and protect each other. But it's going to start, it already is, both parties blaming China article just came out that says that's one of Biden's main attacks on Trump in this next election cycle is going to show they're going to be arguing that Trump was too soft on China, that he rolled over on China, and then Trump is going to do the same thing back to Biden.

So I think what we see emerging in the face of capitalism and American capitalism, specifically in crisis, is this old urge to then say, instead of focusing your discontent and critiques on the government and the political and economic system, we're going to more and more, blame this on China, try to ramp up conflict and distrust among the American population towards the Chinese, and that could eventually then be leveraged into either a Cold War or, you know, possibly horrifically, a hot war. I still think there are too many economic ties for that war to go hot anytime soon, but it's certainly not stopping the development of like a new Cold War. And so whatever our position is on China, and I'm of the belief, you know, sort of on the Maoist side of things, that I do not think that China is actively a socialist right now. But whatever our feelings are on China,

I do think we have a sort of anti-imperialist obligation to at least point out and highlight how the U.S. government and its talking heads are moving towards conflict with China and actively fight against that because a cold or hot war with China is not in the working class's interest here or in China or anywhere else in the world, you know?

So this segues really well to another sort of topic that I wanted to get into. And I think what we're seeing, and so far the entire history of the 21st century has basically been a story of U.S.-led imperialism faltering, right? I mean, the U.S. couldn't even succeed in utterly destroying

and basically colonizing, indirectly colonizing Iraq, right? We're seeing, you know, all these systems that the U.S. depended on in the entire, like, post-World War II era and arguably, you know, before as well, they're falling apart. And part of like the domestic angle of that is I think we're definitely at the point of the death knell for neoliberalism. Because when the system can't even muster enough sort of concerted will and political will to implement some state control to mitigate an absolute crisis that's destroying the economy and the lives of people, right?

You're seeing a system that just the conditions in the world right now, the economic and political and everything else, are just not able. to host a U.S.-led neoliberal project at this point, I think. So the question for me then becomes what comes out of this? Because I'm of the opinion that even if there, you know, there obviously won't be like some one day, one event where like, oh, okay, neoliberalism is over. Obviously it'll be a process and a transition. But what comes out of this, right?

I mean, I think we can see some tendrils that are probably, you know, leading towards something like a more centralized, like state monopoly sort of. of situation where all there are are giant corporations like Amazon and that they're closely interlinked with state power that coordinates with that to make the process of accumulation more stable, although there are also counter trends that are coming out of that point in other directions, right, like a retreat of central power. So what do folks think is coming out of this? And I want to tie it back because the whole question of, you know, a sort of painting People's Republic of China as another like appellate.

civilizational foe, I think probably won't work because China is on the upswing of its geopolitical project. And the U.S. is not. And essentially, you know, China is the workshop for the value that ends up being realized and slushed around in the imperial core. So what do we think comes out of this politically? Or do we think it just stays the same and things go back to quote unquote normal? Historically, when you have a world hegemonic power in a state of relative decline, these powers tend to act more irrationally. And Mike McNair makes a point that the Iraq War was actually kind of a symptom of a relative decline of the U.S. empire.

And it was kind of like lashing out at the world that kind of like reestablish its hegemony. And I think what basically we have here is like a situation where the U.S. is still the most powerful military and economic power in the world. But it does not have hegemonic power. It's not legitimate as a power anymore. It's basically seen as just a big cartel for finance capital to loot the world. And I think what's going to happen here is the U.S. is going to become more and more ridiculous of its foreign policy to try to hold on the power. And my prediction is that we're going to see proxy wars between the U.S. and China over economic control of the African continent.

I think whatever comes out of this, like I do agree with you that neoliberalism might be on his deathbed and we could either get something worse or we can, you know, I don't see this happening, but we could get a reemergence of like a Keynesian consensus where the ruling class like accepts some sort of class piece or, you know, we could see a God willing socialist revolution around the whole world. Yay. But regardless of whatever happens, like it's going to be an outcome of class struggle. And so I think our task is less to kind of predict what's going to happen and more like engage with class struggle as much as possible and make sure the working class has like as good a hand as possible to deal with it when it does come. Yeah, absolutely. For my two cents on that, agreed with everything said so far about that topic, but I also think that what crises like this is revealing and what people like us have known for a long time is that the American ruling class in particular is not only fractured, but it's very myopic. It's very short-sighted. As we see the declining of the American Empire, we do see that lashing out, and it can take many forms.

Certainly, though, one of the forms it could take is war, right? We have this whole military industrial complex. There's profits to be made in war. War is often a good distraction from internal economic problems and internal division. We see that presidents routinely, at least in the past, do get boosts in support when there is a war, and we know that the U.S. media is completely complicit and able to cover up and excuse and make excuses for any future war that could happen. So given the myopic nature of the American ruling class and their inability to plan long term and their fractured nature,

I wouldn't be surprised if what we see and what form the lashing out takes is, you know, either proxy wars or full on explicit straight on wars between the U.S. and other countries as it struggles to patch up internal dissent and as it seeks to control and continue to control overseas areas and continue the extraction from the global south, et cetera, that seems to me far more likely than a more rational approach would be, which would be something like the capitalist class coming to the realization that something like social democracy is needed to patch up the dissenting splits in the population overall, right? Like it's sort of an irony that a Bernie Sanders presidency or Bernie Sanders style politics

would actually re-legitimize the state in the eyes of millions and millions of young people and would actually allow for the American ruling class to continue being the dominant class in power in a more stable fashion, but because they're not even willing to do these small concessions necessary to make social democracy happen, both parties. We saw how the Democratic Party responded and went apoplectic over the possibility that Bernie Sanders would lead the party. So, you know, that would be the rational change. choice for the American ruling classes to move in a more social democratic direction, maybe,

you know, redistribute wealth a little bit, but allow the basic class structure to maintain itself. That would be the more rational approach. But again, I don't believe in the rationality and the far-sightedness of the American ruling class. So what I think we're going to get instead is more lashings out in the form of violent wars, more urgent, necessary lashings out to protect its imperial interest abroad, and then just more state repression domestically, right? I think that's going to have to happen because this crisis is one part of it, but it's much bigger. I do see a larger disenfranchisement happening among the

American population with the American government. It is not seen as legitimate in the way that it was even five or 10 years ago, but certainly 20, 30, 40 years ago. And I don't think that faith in the U.S. government and the legitimacy of the U.S. state is coming back. I only think is going to further deteriorate. Yeah, I think, you know, what we're going to end up seeing is that as, you know, the official political sphere continues to just bleed legitimacy, just like completely hemorrhage legitimacy in any like facade of popular democracy, probably, and you also see a putatively left party of capital, or I should say a more liberal party of capital, just utterly refuse an exile from their party, any, you know, pretense towards social provision. And I think we're going to

see the rhetoric of social provision and populism increasingly cement itself in the right and that you'll see, you know, identity liberalism, which kind of has won the culture war, by the way, but you're going to see that increasingly cemented itself and just retreat to sort of like cosseted coastal elites and they get to scream about culture issues while the actual project of sort of changing political allegiances is left completely to the right. So I don't know where that leads us, but I definitely think I see those seeds in there. But this this segues once again really perfectly to something else that I wanted to talk about, especially since we have Brett here and also, you know, the three of us who have really closely followed the whole burning

phenomenon, which I think is unequivocally completely dead with, and it kind of, you know, in my mind represented a culmination of this like some people call it, you know, like a left populist project that has spanned, you know, the last 15 years or so, right? And so it's, you know, now that we see that having completely ended in failure, my, you know, my question is, what comes next for the left? Where do we go from here? Because, you know, and we all on this podcast, you know, pretty aptly, I think, saw that the Bernie and Corbyn Labor and so on, these, all these projects were destined to failure. We just didn't know at what point it was going to happen, right? Was a politician like Bernie going to lose a general election or win a general election and be unable to institute

reforms because of the structural pressures that wouldn't allow that, like the rate of profit? We didn't know where this was going to fail. But now we do. And so it seems to me, just to kind of preemptively give my kind of strategic outlook on this, it seems to me like the thing that, we ought to be doing is recognize that trying to put the cart before the horse and skip straight to the competition for the executive seat of power when you don't have a movement and you don't have labor power and you don't have organic and solidified and disciplined working class power on the ground to back it up and cohere this project for reforms. You can't just skip ahead to the official political and try to think that once you win that, that'll create a movement.

So I think we need to kind of put the horse before the cart once again and really embed ourselves in the insurgent and organic labor militancy that we see building and a lot of the other social organizing that we're seeing taking hold, particularly in this crisis, but more broadly as well. And just forget about the high, you know, the bird's eyes, stratospheric electoral stuff until we have a disciplined and coherent working class movement that has power to force. through its program. What do you guys think? I think, you know, I've been seeing a lot of kind of weird takes from, you know, a lot of the pro-Bernie socialist people over the last, you know, a couple days, couple weeks since it was apparent that Bernie lost. A lot of like kind of nihilistic, like it owes all or nothing. And I think that's kind of a really harmful take because if you look at it that way, Bernie was always going to fail at some point, even if he became president and somehow pass like Medicare for all or something, that would be undone by capital or, you know, he would

fail to pass other things. Every single, you know, socialist who has won, you know, the executive in a liberal constitutional regime has failed at some point, whether it's Mitterrand in France or, you know, a lot of the pink tide people who were, you know, taken out. But, you know, I think we have to look at it like this, which is that Bernie Sanders was able to agitate and propagandize in an advance a vision of class struggle. And I think we should kind of take that as a win and as a model and that the goal shouldn't be to necessarily win the imperial presidency because that's going to inevitably fail at some point. And you're going to have put yourself in a position where there's a so-called socialist who ends up betraying the socialist movement at some point.

But I do think we can contest legislative seats because if you look at kind of the classical socialist electoral strategy that the Bolsheviks followed and that the, before them, the German social Democrats, they got seats in the lower house and they just used it as a platform to, first of all, vote down like government budgets, vote down military budgets and to be tribunes of the people. and it gives you attention and that kind of thing. And they did it from a, from their own party too, which is something that is a lot more complicated in the United States and that something that held Bernie back from being more radical, from being more socialist was that, you know, he had to contend within the Democratic Party. Yeah, so I think, you know, in the future we can contest electoral arenas,

but not as a, not from a strategy of trying to, win through government but just as a beachhead to propagandize and agitate and really talk about things that are impossible to do within the constitutional regime and obstruct the function right so like any communists in government when we agree to do that which we should only do under certain conditions but we should only operate as an utterly intransigent opposition and all we're trying to do is impede the function of the bourgeois state to make room for our contest for sovereignty is my view, but I'll toss it back over.

I was going to say, it's like, where I tell a lot of Bernie supporters that are like really, a lot of the younger, a lot of younger people I talk to are, like we're really excited about Bernie and really got into socialism when I was the first big time through this stuff and they're just like, well, there's no hope.

And I said, well, think about it. But like, imagine if you had a movement like Bernie had, but instead of, voting for Democrats, they were organizing their own party. We had our own, like, party culture. We had our own militias, even.

We had, like, our own infrastructure. And we all were, like, dedicated the communism. And we said, you know what, fuck it. Let's just, like, take over. Like, we don't need to, like, have the DNC decide, you know, that we deserve to govern. Like, we have enough people right now to take the whole, to take over the whole thing.

Like, I think that's the kind of, of a pitch that we need to be making is like let's actually build like a mass like you know socialist movement that isn't tied to you know these institutions of capitalism like let's build up this kind of party and let's send people to reignite the labor movement and and build unions and build neighborhood organizations and actually build a counterpower yeah i can i completely agree with literally all of that um parker and donald um and you know i was actually kind of worried i had this sort of secret fear that if Bernie did win, if he somehow pulled it off, that it might actually have ended up being worse and set the movement back precisely because of the inevitable obstructionism

and the inability to literally, like if you think that he was going to be able to get Medicare for all past, like just look at how the Democrats responded to that, let alone the Republicans, he would not have been able to do that. And his idea of mobilizing the masses to come and put pressure on the system, I don't think it would have played out in a successful way. So what we would had is all the hopes and all the dreams and all the rhetoric piled in into the Bernie campaign. Then he goes on. He wins. He gets absolutely nothing done. And because we don't have the wide reaching ability to get our narrative out like the mainstream media left and right, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC has, it would be framed as a failure of left-wing politics and a need to get back to

centrist, pragmatic, technocratic leadership. And so a lot of people, because of the overwhelming advantage in the media that the ruling class has would basically be force-fed that narrative, and it would have actually set us back in weird ways. I think that just seeing the process play out of how the Democratic Party pulled out all the stops to prevent a Bernie presidency, even though, I mean, Bernie won the first three states in the primary unheard of. He had a huge, diverse coalition of young people, you know, Latino, great black support, especially for younger African Americans.

He had this wonderful sort of coalition that from the outside, if you didn't understand the dynamics of capitalism and the role the Democratic Party plays, you would say, wow, this is wonderful. The Democratic Party from day one should get behind this amazing coalition. This is clearly a route to victory. But we saw how they reacted. We saw what they were willing to do,

literally let people in Wisconsin die to go to the primaries. Obama working behind the scenes to really narcissistic. more than anything, protect his own legacy, because after a Trump, if you got a Bernie, the Obama legacy would have really been challenged from both side and destroyed. And Obama is really, you can see the narcissism and the egomania of Obama just not wanting that to happen and seeing Biden as the sort of proxy to continue whatever Obama thinks his fucking legacy is. But having said that, I do want to talk about the necessity of a communist party and of dual power.

These are sort of buzzwords that often get thrown around and not used with a lot of substance. But we really got to think about what it would mean if instead of putting all of our hopes and money and energy and resources into hoping that a Bernie Sanders type figure could get a hold of the executive branch, if we put all of that into organizing working people, of starting tenant organizations, of bringing these organizations together, if not into one party, then perhaps into a coalition of different organizations with different left-wing tendencies, at least at first. first probably. But imagine if we had the level of organization that past communist parties had, even if we had the level of organization of the Black Panthers or the early CPUSA here in the U.S. and then a crisis hit. We would be much more able to not just constantly have to play defense and just tweet our discontent out all the time, but actually be able to possibly go on the offense. We'd have a mass base of support. The Black Panther parties, for instance, had health clinics in their communities. Imagine if we could build up the capacity just,

us to ensure that we had health clinics in our communities, and our poor, low-income working neighbors could have access to good health care without having to go through the corporate system and deal with the insurance companies. Imagine if we had our own up-and-running food production and distribution systems led by a national communist party that could go out and make sure that people are fed in their homes as opposed to this tragedy we see on the news of these long five-hour lines of people wrapping around, you know, multiple blocks in line for food banks and in the richest country in the world. And so we see what happens when we invest in the electoral farce. We see that both parties will pull out all the stops to prevent even mild,

tepid social democracy. And in the face of that, it really seems dangerous and downright naive to insist that we continue to wait for another Bernie type figure. Maybe it's AOC, next time, right? Well, we're going to hear all the same arguments the next round. We don't have the time to wait around for that. So we need to be putting our energies into organizing and the grassroots level of combining organizations, if not into a communist party, then at the very least for now, into a coalition of organizations and figuring out how we can meet the material needs of our class in the here and now, as opposed to putting all of our hopes into this fundamentally broken and absurd political system.

So I really think that a lot of the left is waking up to that, and I hope we continue to move in that direction. I'm really hearing, like, the Chapo guys were saying, like, oh, like, you know, all these radicals are going to try and to sell you and, like, something. But, like, really, like, you know, we don't have another hope. We don't have any real hope until, like, we have another Bernie type figure who can run for office. This was, like, one of the best chances we had.

But, like, I think that's just nonsense. And, like, I'm worried, like, you know, because I actually do kind of like the Chapo guys. Like, I do like their show and enjoy listening to it. But I just, you know, I just think that's, like, totally the wrong thing to be seeing right now. Absolutely. I think, you know, both of you guys are 100% correct about this. And I do think that probably we will see some sort of facing away from the kind of naive optimism about the prospects for electoral victory or through, reformism or you know gradualism uh and kind of to that end i wanted to use this uh since we're talking

about it anyway as kind of a launching point like some of the trends that i see you know uh that you that we're talking about here towards like actually building you know um actual movement as opposed to hoping one materializes after we win this election or vote for the democrats or whatever the fuck like one good example there's this coalition um of organizations and people and organizers for like a Mayday strike that would act as a launching pad, right, for a wave of continued actions, hopefully and definitely and try to like kind of cohere a framework for achieving some of these goals and putting together a more coherent political and economic working class movement. And the importantly, in my view, you know,

is that the focus in that group, in that organizing coalition is on workers who are not already organized, right, on workers who might be unemployed or laid off right now or permanently and other members of the working class, you know, and it's not focusing on established unions, right? It instead is focusing on these more insurgent labor coalitions and organizations and campaigns that have been popping up from Amazon, you know, the Amazonians United for, you know, Target, from, you name the industry, right? Gig workers, like education workers, all sorts of people. And so I feel like that focus, like instead of trying to like organize the three percent of workers or whatever it is who are actually currently in business unions in the U.S.

and trying to get them to do whatever it is that you want them to do, the focus on the other 97% of the class, to me, that is a really important thing for us to signal boost and to emphasize and to support and demand. So I really hope that that turns out. Yeah, I just want to say really quickly, too, is I agree with that. And I think we should also think deeply about spontaneity versus an organized uprising. Of course, there will always be spontaneous uprisings and outbursts. Like we're seeing now in the coronavirus crisis, we see the Amazon workers, Instacart, Whole Foods, strikes going on. Nurses and medical health care staff are becoming completely disillusioned with the system. Teachers, you know, these are people that they are seeing the problems. And

And they're rising up in different ways, but in a really unconnected, spontaneous way. And yeah, we can jump in and support them and sort of tail those movements and watch them rise and fizzle out. But, you know, that's fine. That's great. I obviously believe in it, support it, love it. But there's a difference between that and already having an organized party or coalition of organizations that can then take that spontaneity and shape it, craft it, and sort of make it a spearhead towards broader fights, connecting fights up, not letting these things be just completely disconnected, but connecting them, having an ability to get our narratives out there and helping lead some of these

struggles and connecting them up not only with other struggles, but with a broader critique of capitalism generally and showing why this crisis is happening precisely because of the failures of capitalism, and just doing a lot of that work that would turn the spontaneous anger and confusion and uprisings of the workers. into something more sustainable and something more focused. Because I think we use terms, and I think we've used it in this episode, like disciplined. And I really think that we should take those ideas seriously. We need a disciplined, hyper-organized class for itself because we're never going to be able to defeat our enemies,

who are hyper-funded, hyper-organized, and hyper-militant without being hyper-organized and hyper-militant ourselves. And that could take a million different forms, perhaps, but it's something we really, really, we can really see how spontaneity is, is happening, but also what its limitations are. And we got to think through and beyond, just peer spontaneity. Yeah, I think one thing that we do need to organize is we need our own media infrastructure. Because the capitalists, they control the means of communication, not just like the means of production, but the means of communicating information, because they control that, they get to set the tone of the conversation and they get to control

what's being brought to people and I think you know and that was one of the reasons why they were able to kind of cut down Bernie so I think that's that's one thing the left really does need to build up as our own media infrastructure so we can get our message

out there and the right has done a pretty fucking good job at this if you look at like not just you know the mainstream kind of like turning point USA Charlie Kirkwright but also the far right they have all their own media infrastructure

and they're able to get their message to all the people all around. And I think that's one of the really important things that we need to do is get good at getting our message out there and building up the infrastructure that can transmit that message. And that's one of the things that you've been really great at with Rev. Left Radio

is like you really use your show to get a lot of people interested in this stuff. For sure, yeah. I appreciate that. And I think though that disparity between the left and right being able to, even the far right, being able to to get our messages out is I think because we were talking about earlier, I think is even before we recorded about the institutional connections between the far right and the political institutional

Republican right. Because they have those funding, you look at something like TPSA, that's completely astro-turfed. You know, that's funded by big, like, you know, Coke Brother type entities. And so the right, even the far right, have the advantage of having that Venn diagram overlap with institutional power and funding that can boost and really create the infrastructure for getting the right-wing narratives out in a way that the left just doesn't have. And I've talked about this in different places, but partially because of our skepticism towards big money, like we would not let some George Soros figure come in and then take creative control over our outlets, right? We are sort of DIY independent, and that's just sort of in our left-wing culture and how we see

ourselves in relation to capitalism. But it's also just the fact that we don't have the funding and the infrastructure that the far right does precisely because of its overlap with the institutional right. Well, and that's always going to be the case, right? I mean, like definitionally, right, the forces of conservatism, right, the forces who want to maintain the current way the world works and the class relations and distribution of resources and power, right? They're always going to have money. They're always going to have them, you know, I won't want to say always going to have the military, but they will always have a monopoly on legitimate violence until they don't. And we, you know, are always going to be on the other side of that.

We're not going to have a media empire, right? And that's why, or the resources, you know, material resources right off the bat to create one. And I feel like that underscores yet again the necessity of an organized party type movement, right? And a media, you know, media arms and, you know, funding and support for, you know, for, you know, for, projects that people come up with, you know, those are always going to be functions that we need a coherent class to be able to do. Remy, I want to just revisit this labor question one more time because I think it's really important.

What you mentioned about, you know, the business unions and the non-unionized layer of the class reminded me of a quote from Trotsky's transitional program where he says trade unions, even the most powerful embrace no more than 20 to 25% of the working class and at that predominantly more skilled and better paid layers, more oppressed majority of the working class is drawn only episodically into the struggle during a period of exceptional upsurges in the labor movement. And during such moments, it is necessary to create organizations ad hoc to embrace the whole fighting mass, strike committees, factory committees, and finally Soviets. So what he's saying is that the business unions usually are kind of the more PMC professional managerial

layers of the class, but during times of intense class struggle, like you see people like, you know, Amazonians United, Target Workers Unite, who are not traditionally unionized, like actually being militant and organizing together. And I think we're definitely in a period like that right now. But I also would say that we shouldn't necessarily like write off organizing within the existing unions. And I mean, I don't know exactly where I stand on the question of labor strategy because ideally we'd want to unionize, organize everyone as much as possible, but the left has very limited resources.

So we have to kind of work together to decide and where to put our resources. And I definitely think we need to focus on organizing the unorganized right now. But there is kind of a history of success with, like, for example, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, they took over the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in the 90s, and they were able to create, like, one of, I think actually the biggest strike the U.S. has ever seen in 1997, and the Teamsters election is coming up, and they do have a radical TDU candidate contesting that election, and the entire AFL-CIO election is coming up. And I don't necessarily think we can actually win against the rot and bureaucratic corruption of the entire AFL-CIO. I think it would be it's a harder kind of geography itself than even the Democratic Party. But there is Sarah Nelson, who is the CWA president, who she threatened a general strike and that ended the government shutdown. And she, in her, in her speeches, she quotes Lucy Parsons and fucking Eugene Nebs.

She's like a real ass, like, radical socialist. Make no mistake. She is hiding her true power levels. She's, she's going to contest the 2021 AFL-CIO election. I mean, and Trump goes stepping down. I mean, I don't know if she has any realistic shot, but I think it's worth, like, you know, for the people in existing unions to kind of coalesce around her and advocate a program of, like, intense and militant class struggle.

Because even if she doesn't win, like, that, that coalescing of the existing unions and union locals that are radical around her could be like a good, you know, beachhead again for, you know, maybe even eventually like splitting the AFLCIO like from the better unions from the bad ones. I don't know. So I think I think we shouldn't like necessarily let go of that of that arena. So a couple thoughts on that. I mean, just the way I see it, like, you know, guys like Trumpa, excuse me, Trumpa. have always been fucking pork chop union bastards right and this is a struggle as old as time and like this this won't come as news to anybody here but now more than ever these business unions and the afl cio that they have created almost as like a cartel for their own interests are nothing more than labor brokers um when you talk to you know we've got we at target workers unite are carrying on a parallel campaign in croger and some

other grocery stores because some workers there reached out to us and saw that there had been some successes and something coming together, right? The UFCW reps responsible for these stores that these workers are in that none of the workers have never never seen their face. Awful doesn't cover it. They may as well not exist. Phone calls will just go unanswered for years, forever, right? Grievances get resolved in backrooms if they get addressed at all and they never come out favorably. There's no enthusiasm for these business unions that these people are in. So as a broader question, I'm not saying I wouldn't advocate abandoning the field of struggle for existing and ossified and sort of consolidated existing unions. I do think that that's an important part,

but I think when we look at the history of the U.S. labor movement, what we see is that it becomes necessary first to wage a to form a CIA type movement and then you can maybe get you can work on getting into turning some of the labor broker pork chop

union folks right so like what we don't need to do I think right we should absolutely abandon this whole thing of coming cap and hand to the boss via your your representatives in labor if you're lucky enough to have them which again the vast vast vast majority of workers do not

But anyway, regardless, that's not what socialists ought to be doing. Instead, we need to be demanding a seat at the table. So, like, for example, Target Workers Unite, our demands in coordination with this Mayday strike effort. And, of course, the demands vary from sector to sector and place to place, of course, because it has health care workers and teachers and everything involved in it, so they're going to be different. But in any case, our demands is not, oh, please, Mr. Boss, can you give us some PPE and maybe a couple of sense more? for hazard pay instead it's we demand resources and we are going to distribute them right and another one is we are going to determine the scheduling because we know who needs hours we run the store

better than your shitty ass managers do anyway and we know who needs hours we know who needs sick time we know you know all of these things so what we want is we want co-determination and power instead of a handout and i feel like that's first of all catching on that's really igniting in a lot of industries particularly newer ones that have evaded the existing pattern of unionization and the law is applicable. Like, for instance, you know, almost everybody's an independent contractor for some gig, gig economy, app-based, you know, platform-based company, right? So all of these things I think are coming together. And the way that I would think, and again, I'm not fully formed in terms of my labor strategy either,

but the way I would tend to think about it is we first focus on an industrial unionism-type model. And then we leverage that and get people, you know, to see the possibility that are in these unions to see the purpose for and possibility of actually making the union their union, you know, recognizing that the members are the union. And that's why I like UE so much because, I mean, their fucking slogan, like their motto is the members run this union. That is like the central thing. The leadership, the international leadership of UE draw no more than the median pay of a skill. member, right? And like those are principles that are going to be necessary. And yet at this point, the trade, the, the business unions are essentially just a vestigial organ of the state. I mean, they're going to be just as hard to take on because they're part of the whole management of labor.

It's funny that when the unions are actually run democratically by their members, they turn out to be militant left wing, like you said, like you, U.E, ILWU, even though they're not as radical as they were when they were started by like communists in the 1930s and created a general strike on the west coast they're still like pretty fucking militant so you know there there are but there are good existing unions like those two and and and new so yeah i mean well but what does that demonstrate right like when you actually have rank and file democracy all the way up it radicalizes people it transforms their consciousness you know and then project from there if if we want this to become a socialist and revolutionary movement

is to move on from a trade union consciousness to an internationalist and political consciousness and I think that that's going to be the way that we can get at that is through these thoroughly emiserated workers at the bottom of this society and moving on up from there, I think. The way I would phrase it was we kind of like need

a cultural revolution in the unions. You know, you need to need a struggle session, the bureaucrats and kick them out and, you know, democratize them. But another thing is, like, I think, like, one idea I've kind of been having is that basically what we need is, like, a united front of the left to rebuild the labor movement. Because I think, you know, labor movement historically has been the strongest when the radical left has been involved in it. And the radical left has given its best organizers. And because they have that ideological motivation.

They don't just see it as like a bureaucratic job, but they're inspired by greater virtues of egalitarianism and work. or solidarity. So I think if we got like, you know, Marxist center, we got some of like, you know, the Marxist Leninist and Trossius groups, we got like the Bernie people even, we got them all together and said, you know, we may have our differences on like almost everything else. But what we do have in common is that we can only win if the proletariat, if the working class is organized.

And so we should have a united front to rebuild the labor movement, basically. And that's been the inconvenient fact, hasn't it? especially in the U.S. is that, well, guys, you know, if socialists are going to win, you kind of, we got to have the working class be socialist, right? Like, that's been the inconvenient fact. And I think that the way to crack that nut in a way that was not possible in the post-war era because of just the fact that the U.S., the very abnormal historical fact that the U.S. was the last guy left standing, which enabled there to be, you know, more of a share

with the labor fund right of that prosperity that's over right and so like i think what we're seeing the way to get around that and to actually mobilize like a true and broad socialist movement in the u.s is going to probably be through a combination of labor and other social organizing like tenants and stuff like that any thoughts on that yeah i was going to zoom out a little bit and and just sort of include that in a broader point i wanted to make um which is this idea that i think it was alluded to earlier about some sort of militant fighting force or whatever it may be. And I just want people to really think through and understand the reality of what we're facing. We can talk about building socialism and all these ideas are 100% wonderful and should be thought

through and pursued. But we also have to recognize just how much resistance we're going to get. I mean, and you can use the Bernie campaign as a starting point, just seeing how the the liberal Democratic Party and the Republican Party and the media all came together to push out Bernie Sanders and to try to bring them down and make that an impossibility. That's just a tiny hint of what they do to one of their own. But the moment that we start striking at their power, we're going to have to fight back. We're going to have to be able to defend ourselves. And that is going to have to be thought through very deeply alongside any other strategy

is our gains and the progress that we make as the unified socialist communist left is only as good as our ability to defend it. And we have all of history to remind us of that over and over and over again. And I wanted to read this quote from James Connolly because I was just thinking about this whole idea of recently the capitalist class was playing with the idea and still playing with the idea of getting us back to work during a pandemic. And the idea that it might be worth losing a few 10,000 American lives if it means restarting the economy and the accumulation of profits for the ruling class, James Connolly in 1910 said, quote, when the capitalists kill us so rapidly for the sake of a few pence extra profit, it would be suicidal to expect that they would

hesitate to slaughter us wholesale when their very existence as parasites was at stake. And I just don't ever want us to lose sight of the fact that anything we do is going to have to be in conjunction with a real political fight, not just a fight online or an ideological fight, but in the final analysis, when push really comes to shove, a physical fight. And that means, at least in my opinion, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, taking the idea of above ground and below ground organizing incredibly serious. We can talk and disagree about the connections between the above and the below ground. The above ground will obviously include stuff like strategically running candidates like we've discussed,

media outlets and building up our own narrative infrastructure, labor organizing, all of those things will absolutely be a part of the above ground organizing. But then I also think especially in the face of paramilitary and fascist forces, which you know will become increasingly violent as the crisis continues and deepens. Over time, we're going to have to take self-defense, community self-defense, armed self-defense even more seriously than we already have. And so just constantly reminding people that there's going to be a continuous political fight alongside any strategy that we pursue is incredibly important. I think a lot of what the Bernie crowd, especially some of the newer leftist or maybe the more naive leftists, they think that if we pursue our changes democratically and through the normal sort of allowed routes that we won't have to deal with the fact of armed.

defense or armed conflict because, well, you know, we followed it all, you know, the very idea of democratic socialism. We will just use the democratic institutions and mechanisms of a capitalist society to push our class interests. And we know that the ruling class will put up with it for a while. But if you really ever even get close to striking at the heart of the power, we know what they will do and they will not spare, you know, bloodshed and extreme forms of violence against their own population if they have to. So, Taking that seriously alongside these other fights, I think is essential. One thing I noticed is-

Just look at I-N-Day, exactly. There's so many instances in history where, you know, the working class wasn't prepared to actually fight, and even instances where the working class was prepared to fight and had guns and militia, like in Austria, like, in Austria in the 1920s and 30s where they failed anyway because they weren't disciplined enough and they weren't, you know, really, you know, prepared for that actual military fight. And, like, the thing is, like, you know, I've noticed on Twitter,

a lot of DSA people are like, oh, I'm buying a gun. Now that Bernie's lost, I'm going to go, I'm going to spend my Trump bucks, you know, my, my cash stipend that we got for, I mean, I'm going to buy a gun. And, like, I'm thinking, like, you know, that's, I'm with you in spirit, you know, I agree. We should all know how to use a gun. We should all know how to shoot. You know, I personally haven't been to the range in a bit, but, you know, nonetheless, I think we should all know how to shoot a gun.

We should all be, you know, prepared for. you know, we training even and, you know, we should all be fit and, you know, we should understand the seriousness of political politics. But I just felt like the way a lot of these DSA people were at going about it was like so unserious. Yeah. If you were really like buying a gun with the intent of like using it in a revolution, would you really be like bragging about it on Twitter? You know what I mean? Like people don't think through just how violent revolution actually is or any actually like really any class struggle once the gloves are off and the veneer of legitimacy through the state i mean i think that like this attitude of that brett

was alluding to amindigo about uh oh well if we follow the rules and and you know then they can't they can't contest us because we played by their rules that's bullshit and it comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what what the state is right like people don't understand that what a state is is a post facto justification of and consolidation of ruling class power. And that ultimately comes down to the everyday quotidian forms of violence that we see all around us from homelessness to dying from lack of insulin to imperialism abroad to, you know, making people's lives on mass, meaningless drudgery full of poverty and despair and a lack of any purpose in life until they die

just for the continuation of that social power and like people don't understand what this is this is a gloves off fucking fight to the death right and like i think it's easy to be glib about it like i don't know the state took my trump bucks i ain't getting shit but i still went and bought another gun right like but every time i buy one and shoot it i i always on the drive home and i have to drive a fair distance because i live in a state that doesn't have a lot of public ranges but i always am consumed with thought of just how fucking horrific violence is and just how serious this shit is. You know, I think that it's very

reasonable to expect that in the next 20 years or so, unless there's a continued just coma for the working class, just stays in a complete like, well, there's nothing we can do about it. As long as that doesn't happen and there is actually working class activity, I think it's reasonable to expect another Blair

Mountain within, you know, this century and more, right? A more colossal. Like, think through the implications of this exterminist policy that is already being proposed with migrants, putting them in camps. Sooner or later, you know, that'll morph into, well, Fortress America, we just got to fucking kill them, right? And the same logic is being exposed through this idea of sending everybody back to work

because the loss of, you know, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand people, well, that's just the sacrifice that we have to place on the altar of capital to keep, you know, keep speculative finance funds high that that is going to intensify that exterminous logic as things get less and less stable and and the world system the foundations for it start to shake apart and I just would really encourage people to think about that and join uh some sort of concerted community self-defense program like socialist rifle association or something and get plugged in because otherwise we're going to get mowed the fuck down when shit gets real yeah and what and what I don't want to do, it's sort of there's an error on both sides of this question because I

definitely want to completely reject the fetishizing of violence, the machismo fantasy of revolution that a lot of, especially like Imperial Corps men might have in their heads about what a revolution is, this romantic idea that you'll be in the smoke-covered streets, shooting it out with the enemy. I don't want to do that because I think we should always keep in our mind just how fucking horrific and tragic and scary real political violence and disintegration is and more than that who it really falls on the burden does not fall on you know white ds aers that might have the social safety net or or rich parents house in the in the rural countryside they can run to when shit hits the fan it's going to fall on people of color um you know the first targets of a

fascist or repressive state and more than anything it falls on women of color the mothers, the daughters, the grandmothers, the wives in these besieged communities of color, who already deal with daily trauma at the hands of the state forces like the police. You know, that will only be hyper-increased. So on one side, we don't want to be under-prepared. We don't want to be like, I'll just buy a gun and go to the range a couple times and I'll be good. Like, we want to be more principled than that. And I totally agree that we need organizing and training along with just the

purchase of a gun. One individual buying a gun and being okay with it is certainly not enough. So we don't want to be naive about it, but we also don't want to be fetishistic about it. We really want to take seriously the effects of any sort of violent act and who the blowback eventually will fall back on. So we really have to walk that middle line. I would say that any like our conceptualization around, you know, insurrection or armed working class uprising like has to be in the context of like a defense of the revolution like we need we need to have the revolution and we need to defend it with the armed working class we need to make sure a majority of the working class is behind our like and a revolution really just

means to me it means uh you know in the u.s context abandoning the constitution and the rule of law setting up a some sort of you know socially organized working class uh dictatorship of the whole class and then we defend that with the armed working class or else we're going to get mowed down in counter revolution we are all absolutely on a list right now by the way been on a list for a while a lot of these democratic socialist types like they'll you know they'll be all like oh like uh you know you want to just buy a gun you want to go run out into the woods and you know pretend to be chegovara and that's just not going to work in the united states because the military is so powerful

but I think the way we have to look at it is we want to basically be as part of the kind of said we want to be defending a revolution we want to already have a ton of people on our side and basically have it be phrased as like us defending our legitimate struggle

from a right wing counter attack from a fascist counter attack like you know we're trying to you know stop fascism from taking over like that's ultimately like a kind of like part of military strategy you have to look at the social and political aspect of it for me i would differentiate between the democratic road to socialism and democratic socialism because i think like the democratic road to

socialism which means like oh let's do it within the existing constitutional confines is like the evolutionary like burnsteinist reformist approach which is proven failure but to me democratic so like a democratic socialism requires that one like when we're ready to for revolution. We have a mandate from the working class. We have like a super majority of the working class behind us, which makes up a majority of the population, even if it's, you know, just people outside the circle of whoever is, you know, the future Communist Party members, even if that's most of those people are just supporters in some sense. Like, we need a mandate from the working class and then we need a revolutionary rupture with the existing rule of law and the state, which means

that to me democratic and revolutionary socialism are kind of like interpenetrating each other and like inseparable and you can't have one without the other. Yeah, but I would also say that like in the current context, democratic socialist means like democratic road to socialist like Bernie supporter types. Yeah, I was going to say that like I wanted to ask everybody here, you know, it's kind of clear to me, I think that when you follow like the fundamental logic of this like democratic socialism trend bad whatever to its ultimate conclusion what it really advocates in the way that it moves and represents is just essentially like kind of a weak sauce like progressive with a capital p like you know operation democratic party type shit right like that's the ultimate logic

of what their thrust has been thus far and i think that it's pretty clear all of us that that doesn't work right but like i do think that that same thing is becoming clear to huge numbers of people who may be part of the DSA or a DSA adjacent or participate with the Bernie wave, all that. And I think, like, I wonder if, you know, what we ought to do is try to operate within DSA and advocate our politics or if we ought to be doing other stuff than that and what people think about that. I mean, I'm, I'm a member of DSA. It's the existing socialist movement in my area. I think socialists have a responsibility to, like, win over, revolutionary socialists, specifically,

have a responsibility to win over the like less developed theoretically you know people and I think you know some sort of split with reformists has to happen but we shouldn't necessarily like fetishize the the split that happened in 1914 or 1917 and abstract that to every single moment because like in my experience it was like really easy to like kind of take over or just start like a political education group in my chapter and like have people reading like a bunch of shit that I think people should be reading and like having some big success that way. I don't think necessarily that we can expect DSA to be the future communist party that creates a revolution. But and I'm not saying that everyone should join if you have a better option in your area.

I just think, you know, we're going to have to like Donald said earlier, like create a united front of the left to hammer out some sort of tactics and strategy right now to work within the labor movement, within, you know, tenant organizing and stuff like that, so that we can use our limited resources together in a rationally planned manner. And if, because if we can't do that, like we have no responsibility like trying to like run a say or run the planet. You know what I mean? Yeah, for for me personally about the DSA and obviously plenty of ideological disagreements, one of those things is, I mean, it's sort of the strength for the communists trying to get into it and move it in the proper direction, but it's also just a general weakness, is just the completely low barrier to entry. You just have to go online and pay a few dollars and you're a member of the DSA. And I think for any really successful future revolutionary group or coalition, political education is obviously going to be something that's essential when you're bringing people in. I don't know if DSA has that capacity given a sort of decentralized autonomous network, strong. structure. And, you know, obviously I would have plenty of critiques on their position on

anti-imperialism, never being anywhere close to being strong enough and thinking through centuries of imperial plunder and how to make that right as a part of their political program. But broadly, I see the DSA just from zooming out a little bit. It's just, of course, an inevitable manifestation of the left on this continent trying to get its shit together. It's like it's evolving and it's going through these stages and it's forming a organization organizations and organizations fall away and new ones are built. So instead of sort of sitting back and sort of idealistically condemning this org or that org for their ideas in a vacuum, I think it's much more helpful to view all of these manifestations on

the left in North America as, you know, imperfect attempts to get to its feet after not only, you know, a century or half a century of Cold War propaganda, but 40 years of, you know, Reagan introduced brutal neoliberalism, you know, the left is going to have to go through these phases where different organizations rise and fall. Organizations might be able to advance the ball for the class just a tad and then some new organization or some more principled formation will have to take its place, et cetera. So I kind of view it in that way. And once you view it in that zoomed out sort of evolutionary way of the left trying to get its shit together in a bunch of different ways, you're much less sort of hostile to any one

manifestation. That's kind of how I think. it's a good way looking at it and like the more we can get everyone to kind of look at it that way instead of just like shitting on everything that's not pure enough for them the more we can start building like real cooperation and start actually building a mass movement well and it's i think it's probably possible that like you're saying brett like this you know dsa consciousness or whatever this dsa stage might be unnecessary stepping up like for example with the failure of the sanders effort I've seen reports from folks who are involved in some of the many, like, sects that exist on the American left, that they're getting huge influxes of membership. And I'm not advocating any particular sect or any of their politics, much of which, you know, I think we all find issues with. But it does kind of maybe demonstrate a sort of case study of how these things happen, of how you become prepared to go from a really loose, like, not, it's not hard to be a DSA member. you don't have to go out and sell newspapers or whatever the fuck you don't have to like attend you know meetings regularly you know and people may be ready for that like a loose like membership kind of club and then later on as things as their lives develop and as events develop in the world they might be ready to be stepped up into a more disciplined party like formation so I definitely don't you know I am a DSA member myself just because it sort of has serves as like the locus of left activity in Baltimore where I am. So it's kind of like a clearinghouse of all the various struggles that are going on, whether they be around immigration or around students against

private police at Johns Hopkins or against ICE contracts or, you know, all these different struggles. And in fact, that's proven to be like limitedly effective here. So for example, there was a group of immigrant organizers who we found out that, you know, ICE was going to be building a camp outside of Baltimore. And that shit got shut down. Like, I don't know to what degree that was because of the organizing and efforts that were coordinated in part through the DSA network and the community at large, or what degree it might have just been canceled for internal reasons with ICE or the federal government. I don't know. But the point is that it proves the usefulness, I think, and it can maybe activate people further as time goes on. I think just broadly also,

So the left needs to take seriously the distinction between non-antagonistic contradictions and antagonistic contradictions. I think it's sort of a feature of online leftism broadly that you sort of fetishize the minutia and the differences between these, you know, really sort of minorly different sex on the left. And it's sort of a cause and effect of the left's impotence and powerlessness that they can have the luxury or really the only thing they can do is hyperfluous. focus on the differences, and that's why you'll see a lot of, you know, people on the left,

just shitting on every other tendency or shitting on an organization that's not exactly perfect. And I think thinking about things from a broader, more long-term perspective and seeing these things as evolutionary, growing pains, if you will, is much more productive than just, you know, I don't like that. They're social Democrats. They're my forever enemy, and I don't have any interest other than to attack them mercilessly whenever I can. It's just sort of immature. sure. And I'm hoping that the left broadly will start to grow out of that phase. I'm not so sure if that's going to happen or at least not completely. But I'm hoping that some significant chunk of the left gets away from that sort of thinking about our differences. Yeah, that's a really mature

nuanced way to see it as always. I think like just quickly and then I'll shut up. Like this kind of demonstrates to me. It occurred to me while you were talking, Brett, that like the truth of what, you know, for instance, Mao wrote on practice, right, about the only way that we achieve, that we move beyond these just turgid and dead formations is by, is through our practice, like our theoretical constructs and our knowledge of like how to do things. They only evolve by going and applying these lessons. And so I think the same is true of like sect brain in that like, yeah, if the left has been literally functionally dead for 60, 70 years, of course, you're going to have awful left organizations. But as they reactivate in a time with revolutionary potential, the membership

gets better, I think. I'm really excited about a lot of the new blood that's coming into the left with the Bernie movement. You got a lot of people who, you know, haven't really been dogmatized, I guess is the right word, by kind of these sectarian ideas. And they want to have unity and they want to, you know, get stuff done. And, you know, maybe they have some illusions from liberalism and social democracy, but I think, you know, people learn fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of a lot of interesting stuff coming up soon. Yeah, and few things are more dispiriting to a new burgeoning left, you know, socialist or communist, somebody that's really wanting to learn, then going into these spaces, especially online, and just seeing, you know, the absolute

takedown of every other tendency and just the minutia and the personality sort of fetishism and the myopic nature of the sectarian. in fights online. Like, I think it's as more and more people start looking for alternatives and looking leftward, I think we have a responsibility as principled communists to try and push back against that tendency on the left and not partaking it as much as we can. And I think we both do that with our projects to differing extents. Of course, you're never going to be able to totally not engage with it.

I think at some point it actually is principled to call out misrepresentations or dead ends or, you know, certain formations that we think are counterproductive to our. overall goal. But it's just about how you go about doing that and the sort of environment that you create for all these new leftists to come into. You don't want it to be one of complete hostility and confusion for these people. You want it to be as much as it can be a welcoming open space where they feel like they're comfortable and welcomed enough to learn. Definitely. Then, you know, that comes from, the problem is with that particular trend in online leftism is it comes from viewing Marxism as like a, it's a nerdy and anti-social and selfish narcissistic trend at the

end of the day because it comes from viewing Marxism is like a hobby or like a study group or a fan club. A subculture, yeah. Exactly, exactly. It's related to the liberal mindset of individualism and, you know, you want to be an autonomous individual who doesn't like, you know, submit to a collective. And so, you know, anyone who thinks differently from you is, like, a problem because you're right and everyone else is wrong. Yeah, like, what are your goals? Are your goals to be correct and isolated in your Crystal Palace and, you know, all alone? Or are your goals to change people's minds and their lives and organize them to do something? And, you know, it's completely obvious to me.

And we all make mistakes. We all engage in that stuff and regret it later, of course. But, like, you know. Yeah. It's like you can be completely correct, but if you can't actually, like, bring your message to people and work with other people, it doesn't really matter how correct you are because you'll never win. It's just being correct and winning is the same thing. So, it's great. I appreciate all of being so generous with your time, especially Brett, for being willing to do this crossover and everything really appreciated a lot.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm always honored to speak with you, and I hope we can maybe do some live streams as this quarantine continues to play. out. We can continue to collaborate and give people something principled to engage with while they're sitting at home. Oh, definitely. So Brett, I can't believe, I really strains the imagination that anybody listening to this would not know already what you're up to and where to find you. But I definitely want to plug the excellent work, consistently excellent work, that you and your co-host Allison and all the other things that you're involved in that you're doing. And I'd like anybody who doesn't know who's listening to find out where to follow that.

network and you online. Sure, yeah. Both of the podcast, Revolutionary Left Radio and Red Menace, can be found at Revolutionary Left Radio.com. You can find our YouTube channel, our Patreon, our Twitter. Everything is centralized right there for anybody who's interested in learning more about what we do. That's awesome.

And I really do hope that we can continue this collaboration and have it evolve and branch out in different ways. You know, you suggested a collaborative live stream. I strongly support that and we'll make myself available for it whenever you want to do it. Meanwhile, I think if you want to follow it, for any of Brett's listeners

on here that aren't familiar with us, we are Cosmonaut Magazine. You can follow our written and audio work at cosmonaut. You can follow us on Facebook at Cosmonaut Magazine, Twitter, at Cosmonaut Mag, and support us on Patreon

for cool perks like T-shirts and buttons and soon our own original written work, which will soon include a first-ever English translation of a work by Kautzky that I think Donald can probably shed some more light on. Yeah, yeah, we're going to be publishing a first-ever English translation of Karl Kautzke's historical accomplishments of Karl Marx, which was an extremely influential text on Lenin, actually, even though Lenin is known as being a rival of Kautsky. This is before they had that split. and this work really fleshes out

a lot of the classic socialist political strategy that Lenin was influenced by and you know if you sign up for a Patreon at the $10 a month here you're going to be able to get a copy of this book in its first English print and there'll be more books coming in the future so we'll definitely make it worth your money

if you sign up for Cosmonaut on Patreon you'll get early access to these podcasts and more Yeah, and also our upcoming kind of collaborative study group project that we're going to have going on with our audience members, where we ask everybody to participate and add their questions and so on and so forth. So anyway, we've got a lot going on. All of our contributors also have their own projects, and you can find links to all of that stuff in the show notes. But meanwhile, most importantly, Brett, I so much appreciate you coming on. And I really appreciate your time and your insight. As always, it was incisive and excellent.

There's really pretty much almost no daylight between you and me on how we think about these things. And I think I can say that for Parker and Donald as well. Yeah, well, from my perspective, just thank you so much for having me on. I love what you're doing with the podcast and the magazine. And I learn a lot, genuinely, I learn a lot from your show. So keep up the great work. And I totally agree our two projects are very similar. So that's just more reason for us to continue to collaborate.

Awesome. Any last thoughts, guys? Costa La Victoria Sampere. Solidarity. Yeah, solidarity, everyone. Solidarity. Just land and bread. Oh, wait, no, I guess that doesn't. Sort of.

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cry, Oh, I Oh, she's got out. Oh, we can't know. Oh. Oh. Oh.

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