Rev Left Radio - Q and A

Episode Date: March 10, 2017

On this shorter episode, I attempt to answer questions from listeners. This will be a recurring theme for our podcast; after every few regular episodes, we will do a Q and A episode. This opens up dialogue between us and those who listen. This podcast is just as much yours as it is ours! Send questions to our FB page: Revolutionary Left Radio Our Twitter: @RevLeftRadio

I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin' frogs game. Shut up! Will you shut up? Now we see the violence inheriting the system. Shut up! Come and see the violence inheriting the system! Hell yeah, I would. Almost confess to her marks of views. Very nice words, but happens to be wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

They're smashing the Starbucks windows. They're smashing the Starbucks windows. barbex windows right now this is complete anarchy god those communists are amazing welcome to revolutionary left radio coming to you from a fortified bunker somewhere on the great plains i'm your host bret montaigne and today we're going to do something a little different you know given the response to our first episode and you know the overwhelming support that we received in the wake of it um a lot of people on my various pages started asking questions and so I wanted to address some of them as some of you may know I run a handful of leftist Facebook pages the first one and the

flagship page of mine is socialism anarchism and communism that's the name of the page I also run with a couple comrades libertarian Marxist musings and the Nebraska left coalition so we have avenues through which we can ask these questions in the future For this episode, I just asked on anarchism, or socialism, anarchism, and communism. I made a post there and let them ask questions. So the bulk of these questions will come from there. We have one from the Nebraska Left Coalition page.

And so, yeah, that's going to kind of be the template going forward. Again, you know, we're kind of learning as we go. So this is sort of an impromptu idea that we've come up with is trying to address some of these questions. because, you know, we could have long episodes on many topics, but sometimes people just have one question that they've never heard a good answer to. So I'm going to say up front that I don't pretend to be a scholar, I don't pretend to be an expert, I don't pretend to be anything that I'm not. All I am is just another working class person, you know,

who thinks deeply about the society in which I live. And so when I'm answering these questions, I don't do it with any, you know, air of authority or superiority and I don't pretend to have the definitive answers to all of these questions the best I can do is give my personal response and hope that it just sparks thought in other people so maybe you'll disagree with me maybe you'll agree with me but hopefully I present you with the perspective that maybe you hadn't quite thought of in that way so the point is not to talk down to or to tell people you know what the answers are it's merely to like i said earlier to have a recurring dialogue so getting into it we had our sound engineer david um say hi how's it going

this is the guy who does all the recording and editing you know he does a lot of work out of the spotlight under the radar without him this podcast you know wouldn't even exist so yeah big thanks to him shout out to him and so he'll be asking the questions um So again, this is going to be a shorter episode so we can get into it right now. All right. So the first question comes from Ashley B. And she asks, what is the purpose and goal of this podcast? Yeah, that's a foundational question.

I think we really got the idea for this podcast going sadly after Trump got elected. You know, I always say the left should have been organizing during Obama, you know. And if Hillary would have won, man, I would have. hoped that the left would have continued to organize, but with somebody like Trump, you just get so many more people energized and mobilized and into activist circles. And so in the wake of that, we decided, you know, we need to amplify voices on the left. You know, when you're on social media, you can go into your little corners and talk with the people, you know, on the pages that you visit a lot. But it's also nice to bring people into the fold, and it's also nice to have

more of an intimate dialogue with people, and a podcast is one way to do it. So, I would say that it's about it's about discourse it's about dialogue it's about education we want to we want to learn and we want to help other people learn we want to be just another voice out there you know screaming our our perspective you know with the left doesn't have any really mainstream vehicles through which to get its message out its vision for an alternative society out and so the more voices on the left talking the more voices on the left um especially bousing ideas, the more people coming into the fold. I mean, that's good for all of us.

And so that's probably one of the core foundational reasons we started this podcast. But another reason is to, you know, in Marxist jargon, to create the material conditions, to help raise class consciousness. We're trying to do everything we can, whether that's activism, that's organizing, that's community outreach, or that's, you know, propaganda through social media or through podcasting. we're trying to create the material conditions and raise the class consciousness of citizens in this country so that the left has voices and has momentum behind it. And so I would say that that's the goal and the purpose. And as I've said before, we're just, we're learning. We've never done anything like this before.

So we're kind of, you know, wandering around in the dark to a certain extent as well. So things will change. Things will evolve. But that's probably the core reason we started this podcast. Excellent. Then our next question comes from Timothy Rottenberg, and he asked, is socialism in the United States possible through chain from within, i.e. social democracy, or is it necessary to use violence? So this is a important question on the left. This is debated endlessly.

This is also where we have to be careful, because I think we can all safely say that in our Facebook groups and our social media groups, our cops lurking at our meetings there are cops lurking at our protests there are cops infiltrating um i guarantee there's somebody somewhere listening to this lowly podcast um just trying to find any incendiary remarks so we're going to be careful about this but i actually think that the first place you have to look to answer this question is as we say the material conditions of society. You have to really analyze what is actually happening in the world in this country and ask yourself, what would a violent revolution look like? Do we have the numbers? What would the cause and effect relation be? And when I examine that political landscape, I do not see room at this moment

for any sort of violent uprising. The fact is the left is not in any position to wage any sort of of physically violent war. Now, that is not moralism. That's not idealism. That's not me wagging my finger because I hold dearly to some, you know, abstract principle of nonviolence. That is just me being a hard-nosed realist about the situation. The fact is, if any segment of the left decided to pick up guns and try to take on

this state or take on the right, we would be in over our heads immediately. We would lose support from the population broadly. the state would just crack down on us extremely hard and when the state cracks down on the left the marginalized aspects of the left are the first to get cracked down on the hardest so you're putting people at risk it just seems like adventurism and adventurism is a term on the left that we use for unprincipled action where the action is not thought through it's just done for the sake of doing it it might feel good to the person doing it but it really has no material effects that are beneficial to the working class as a whole.

So then that leaves us, well, I also want to point out that if the left tried to do that, I think the only logical conclusion of that would, if it even got to the point where it was meaningful and powerful, it would be a civil war. You know, the right has militias and veterans and police officers, and they're itching for a fight. I don't think the left is in any position to take on the right in an armed combat. or anything like that. So I think we have to be realistic about, you know, what options we have and what we can do to implement socialist ideas.

And if that is off the table, then the question is, what do we do next? Well, there's a bunch of different strategies we can employ. So I'm all for diversity of tactics. Building up a social democracy is one way we can do it. And that does not mean that we're social Democrats. That does not mean that our political project begins and ends with creating just a welfare state with capitalism still as the, you know, economic engine. But what it does mean is that we fight for reforms insofar as we can to build up

programs like universal health care or maybe a basic income, which we'll touch on later, that give working class people material gains in the meantime. So you work for reforms, but you also work outside the system as revolutionary agitators, as class consciousness razors you got to you got to hit the streets you have to be active you have to organize in your community you have to build up alternative structures so in every major city including ours there's homeless people there are people that don't have food there's people that that sleep in the gutters so if you're if you're on the left you should be out there trying your damnedest to feed them to clothe them to give them you know whatever you can give them to reach out to your community

and say hey the system has failed you in this respect and in that respect and we're going to try to fill that gap as best as we can because we care because we offer an alternative vision of what the society could look like and we're trying to put that in practice in our own lives now capitalism is the strongest most most insanely clever system to be devised it it reinforces its authority at every front physically in the form of the police state but ideologically in the form of marketing and pop culture the system is built to withstand certain levels of dissent and it's built to make political change

extremely, extremely difficult. So we have our work cut out for us. But to just say that let's pick up guns and let's start firing at people, it doesn't seem to me to be anything other than meaningless, dead-end adventurism. And so I think that the left needs to build a party. We need to build from the grassroots up.

We need to have national organization that brings together all the different leftist organizations, organizations in all the different cities and start working on a coherent national political program that we can carry through via the democratic means available to us and via direct action, via resistance, via, you know, propagandizing, everything and anything we can use. But we also have to realize that it's important to uphold the moral high ground to be tactful and strategic with how we go about doing this stuff. And so that would be my answer to that. And I'm open to criticism. I'm open to dialogue on this front, but right now I have no interest in wanton violence. The only violence that I support at this moment is defensive violence against fascist elements on the right or against the state. I'm all for defending yourself in a militant, organized manner. But again, violence has its limits. So we have to be thoughtful in our approach.

Tyler H. asks, what is the difference between socialism and communism? all right yeah that's a very good question a lot of people especially when they first get introduced to the leftist ideas they're confused on this point i would start off by saying that there's a marxist conception of the difference between socialism and communism and that is one of stages so socialism in the marxist you know um worldview is the stage after capitalism and before communism so socialism is the is the building up of a society that transcends capitalism that deconstructs the capitalist mode of production and starts implementing in the material conditions that we can use at some point to move to communism communism of course being the

end goal of the leftist project which is a classless moneyless stateless society in which every human being has equal access to the wealth and resources of the world and can use those wealth and resources to self-actualize to not be dominated by those with money to not be oppressed under, you know, patriarchal or white supremacist structures to have a truly liberated global civilization of human beings working together to sustainably create and recreate the material means by which they live. So you can view communism as the great goal of the leftist project.

Maybe it's far off. I tend to think it is. I don't think that we're going to see communism in our lifetime. but socialism is what we're interested right now in building so if the stages go capitalism then socialism then communism we're in late capitalism and we're trying to find ways right now to build socialism so that is where we're at in that historical development and that's the fundamental difference in the Marxist view

between socialism and communism but there are alternative conceptions not everybody on the left is a Marxist clearly you have democratic socialists who don't necessarily think of socialism as a step towards communism they might support communism they might not and they might not be democratic socials they could be there's i mean there's you know there's many varieties of socialists um and not all of them share the marxist conception so um it really depends on who you ask but i tend i tend to take the marxist conception i tend to view myself and this historical stage is as attempting to build socialism um with communism as the far-off end goal but there's also

confusion around the use of the word communism because you have you know nation states like the USSR or Maoist China who are commonly referred to as communist and in some sense they were attempting to implement communism via the Marxist-Leninist slash Maoist strategy and so by calling them communist you were saying they're in the process of building communism but for many people it just means, oh, communism just means a, you know, relatively dictatorial one-party state, you know, with highly centralized economy. And I think that's a misnomer. I think calling that communism leads to an abundance of confusion on the topic. So that's my conception of communism.

That's what I would say about it. Again, people would disagree with me. I think anarchists and Marxists share communism. as an end goal. So I think most Marxists and most anarchists would both agree that communism is a stateless, classless, moneyless society, as I said before.

But the difference there becomes one of how to get there. And I don't want to get into all that right now. We'll have episodes of re-touch on that. But that's kind of a fundamental fissure in the left as far as strategy and tactics.

All right. And Austin Holmes asked, how Is the context of increasing globalization influence the conceptualization of socialism in the 21st century? Wow, that was a big question. Yeah, that was a mouthful. I would say that socialism in the 21st century has to operate and build itself up in the context of neoliberalism.

And when I say neoliberalism, I basically mean what Austin says here, globalized capitalism. You know, neoliberalism is the stage beyond just nation-state capitalism, colonialism. It's the implementation of the capitalist paradigm all over the globe. Global markets, that's what we're seeing right now. And the traditional response in the last half a decade to a decade has sadly been on the right, whether it's in Brexit or we have Trump here in the United States, of ethno-nationalism. So neoliberalism creates these conditions where the working class, class is extremely, you know, beleaguered and beat down.

Wealth is concentrated to a truly mind-boggling degree at the top of the economic, you know, pyramid. Like, you know, Oxfam came out with a report recently saying that the richest eight men in the world own more wealth than the bottom 50% of human beings on planet Earth. So that's what we're dealing with. That's the monster we're wrestling with. The right comes along and says, what we need to do is blame brown people, blame Muslims, blame immigrants. If we just get them out of our country, you know, make America white again, go back to some romanticized, mythologized past where things were great, which we all know never actually existed. It's a fantasy.

But that is the right wing offer in the face of neoliberalism. And sadly, given its simplicity and given its. its appeal to our baser instincts, it does have white appeal. If people don't understand how capitalism creates the problems that they face every day in their lives, they don't understand that the overarching economic paradigm is the cause of their suffering, then they're more prone to accept simplistic narratives and scapegoating. And so the left has the problem of offering a more complex analytical analysis of the, problem and then only once people understand that can we offer the alternative vision which is a society

based on solidarity on cooperation on sustainability um on dismantling institutions and hierarchies of oppression and sharing the immense resources and wealth that the capitalist system has managed to accrue over the last couple centuries you know that is the solution for us um so i guess what i would say is that socialism in the 21st century has to do dual battle with the status quo of neoliberalism and we have to battle the narratives on offer from the right because when capitalism is in crisis like what we're seeing now that's when fascism rises that's when the simplistic ethno-nationalist far right-wing narratives really get toxic and get powerful you know there's that old saying fascism is capitalism and decline and so when we see capitalism sputters.

When we see capitalism going to crises, you always see to some extent a rise on the far right of fascist elements. And we're seeing that in the West all over and in other parts of the world. So we have to be on guard. We have to fight the status quo and fight the toxic, vampiric, disgusting, bigotry and scapegoating of the far right. And so that is the problem of trying to build socialism in the 21st century. Okay. And our next question comes to us from Ramsey's Hawk. I apologize if I butcher any of your names. It's nothing personal. But he would like to know what does it mean to be a revolutionary? All right. Well, I would say that the fundamental aspect of being a revolutionary in today's world is the mixture of theory and practice. So you have to have a certain depth of analysis. You have to have an analysis that probes the basic cultural assumptions of the society in which you live.

You have to analyze and critically examine everything you've been taught growing up. That sort of radical critique of society is the first step of making a revolutionary. So you have to be knowledgeable about why you're engaged politically. You have to be knowledgeable about the problems if you're ever going to offer solutions. And so the theory is a fundamental aspect of that. And going back to the first question of this episode, I hope that we can help people develop their theory. I would say it's also one of the main goals of this podcast

is to help that aspect of things get started for a lot of people. Because we're all learning. We're all at different levels of understanding. And the best thing we can do is to help each other build up theory. But the second element is practice. So once you have theory, that's nice. You know, you're a revolutionary thinker. but you're not a revolutionary until you put that theory into practice until you start organizing

and still you become an activist and I know that some people might not have access to that some people might live in small towns some people might suffer from disabilities and that's totally understandable I'm not aiming this at at those sorts of people I understand those conditions exist but for many of us I think putting theory into practice is essential and so to be a revolutionary doesn't necessarily mean driving around with a gun and shooting cops you know that's not being a What being a revolutionary is is having an understanding of the system, having an understanding of the possible solutions to the problems of that system, and going out and operating as a strategic, intelligent, organizer and activist in your community, trying your best to build up and reflect the values and principles of the theory that you represent. And so I would say that that is, in my opinion, what makes someone a revolutionary. Okay. Our next question is from Emily Painter.

And she asks, how would the justice system operate in a socialist society? Oh, man. That is a big question. And you could ask 100 leftists, and you'll get 100 different replies. But I think that there are some commonalities that I think most people in the left will share. One is, I mean, of course, the whole private prison system that we have right now under capitalism, where there's actually a financial incentive to, arrest and detain and incarcerate human beings for the profit of other people and even in non-private prisons you have you have basically what amounts to slave labor if you read the 13th amendment

there's a little exception in that 13th amendment that says you know slavery is not is not allowed except in the case of criminals so if you are charged and convicted of a crime your labor is now free labor for the state to use or private corporations to tap into and you get paid a few cents a day, and you basically make products for, I mean, what, Applebee's or McDonald's uniforms, you make license plates or whatever the situation may be. And the same is true in private prison. So you see how capitalism intersects with the police state and how those two things happen. And you also see in the judicial system, in the court system, how money is a huge factor in how you're treating in the court, how you are treated in the court system. So if

a crime gets committed and I'm charged with it. If I have a lot of money, well, I'm going to buy the best lawyer in town. I'm going to have maybe a team of lawyers. Hell, I might even have one on retainer. And I'm going to have a markedly increased chance of getting out of that, or at least plea bargaining it down or, you know, maneuvering such that I don't actually go to prison, blah, blah, blah. But if you're poor in this society, you are going to get probably a public defender.

Somebody that's overworked, you know, somebody that can't dedicate a lot of time to your specific case and now you have a marked decrease in the odds of you getting off with anything you know that's that's acceptable so capitalism and class cuts to the core of of of the judicial system under a capitalist society and that gives rise to a lot of disgusting things like the drug war and then i would also say i don't want to go too deep into this but one of the things that a socialist could look at is the connection between poverty and crime and if you want to solve crime, you have to solve poverty. By giving people access to education, by giving people access to health care, by giving people access to jobs, by giving people an invested stake in the

society that they live in, they are far less likely to commit crime. It's only when people have nothing to lose that they turn to crime, and it's only when people are deeply psychologically alienated and hurting that they turn to drugs as a way of numbing the pain. So on every front in judicial system from the cops on the street to the court system to the guards in the prison you have it being influenced by the class society around it and by deconstructing that wider class society you're going to start looking at these problems in a brand new way and i think that's what socialists can can offer people with respect to um you know the judiciary system and our final question comes from quin heig i'm sorry if i butchered your last name but he would like to know what is your

opinion on a basic income. Okay, so a basic income, for those that don't know, is the idea that one way or another, wealth is redistributed in the form of a paycheck that gets handed out to just every American citizen. And there's some controversy on the left as far as, is this a good thing or is this a bad thing? The people that say it might be a bad thing are the people that say allowing the capitalists, allowing the elite to cut us a small time.

check will allow them to to maintain their stranglehold on the economic system as a whole and basically placate us so they'll give us a you know $500 a thousand dollars a month and that will make us feel better and to help us out economically but that's the way that neoliberalism can basically continue is by paying us off in the form of a basic income and they say that's bad because it it keeps the capitalist system around longer. And they say, wouldn't it be better if we oppose the basic income, didn't get it, and accelerated the speed at which capitalism could no longer continue, could no longer create avenues for itself to continue to go down?

And, you know, there's something compelling about that. But my argument is that I'm in support of a basic income for a few reasons. One is that I'm in favor of anything that materially benefits working people. I'm not an accelerationist. I do not want to gamble or take risks with the lives of my fellow working or poor citizens. And if we're going to play the game where we just stop accepting reforms, then what you're basically saying is, one, you're treating people as a means to an end. Their suffering is just a step in your game. And there's no guarantee, by the way, that it'll actually result.

in an accelerated move towards socialism so you're taking this big gamble but the other thing is is that i think a basic income would actually benefit working people beyond just materially providing for them because it will do two things it will give them more free time and they can dedicate that free time to pursuing their own interests their own hobbies they could also dedicate it to political activism and becoming more involved but it also empowers labor so if somehow we get let's say $1,000. Every American citizen gets $1,000 a month from the government. That's going to give us way more bargaining power when we go to our job. Oh, you want me to wear this uniform. Oh, you want me to work these absurd hours. Oh, I'm already in here and you're telling me that I have to stay an

hour late because you need something done even though I have a family obligation. We're not going to be as desperate to keep that job because we have a safety net of $1,000 a month. That will allow us to be more choosy and who we want to work for and in turn will force the capitalists and the business owners to offer more attractive packages benefits higher wages better um off work time pay time off you know child leave maternity leave all of these things so the basic income is not the end it's not um it's not what we should strive for as the end all be all of our political program it should be analyzed critically and we should take it for what it is as a means to further ends. So give us $1,000 a month and we're going to continue to bang on the system.

You're going to free us up to find jobs we actually care about or to spend our free time doing stuff that we actually care about. And we're going to be more empowered. The working class is going to be more empowered. They're going to be more boldened. I'm a believer that if working people gain certain victories, certain wins, that it doesn't, placate them all the time, but it actually could empower them and make them want to go further. So my opinion on the basic income is it's good, but we should realize that it only plays a role in a bigger political program and that we should never lose sight of the role

that it plays, which is fundamentally a transitionary role and not an end in and of itself. All right, so that about wraps up the questions for this episode. Like I said in the beginning, We're going to do a few of these. Maybe every three to five podcasts, I'll put out some questions, or I'll put out a line for questions on my pages and take a handful of them and do this from now on. I think it's important. And again, for people that don't know, I run a few pages. My flagship page is socialism, anarchism, and communism on Facebook.

I also run libertarian Marxist musings with a couple other comrades. I run the left or the Nebraska Left Coalition page on Facebook. with a few others and I help admin the anarcho-communism Facebook page, not the Facebook group, but the Facebook page. So you can follow those. And we also have a Facebook page for our podcast, Revolutionary Left Radio, and we'll post all of our episodes on that page directly. And as that page starts getting more people into it,

we'll ask questions probably more exclusively through that page because that's what I really want to focus on. but as it stands, we only have like 100 and some followers because it's a brand new page, a brand new podcast, so it's not the best route at this time to ask questions through. But if you wanted to go to that page and message us questions, we'll definitely put that in the mix and the best questions or the most probing questions

they'll get answered on future podcasts. So thank you very much and hope to talk to you next time. You know what I'm going to be.