Rev Left Radio - Red Hangover: Legacies of 20th Century Communism w/ Dr. Kristen R. Ghodsee

Episode Date: January 8, 2018

Kristen Ghodsee is an American ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; known primarily for her ethnographic work on post-communist Bulgaria as well as being a contributor to the field of postsocialist gender studies. She is the author of many books, including her latest "Red Hangover:Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism. Kristen joins Brett to discuss the collapse of Soviet Communism and the human costs of the brutal transition to free market capitalism.  Topics Include: Women under communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the human costs of capitalism in Eastern Europe, current wealth inequality in the former Soviet Bloc, false equivalencies between the Nazis and the Soviets and the ideological role it serves, the rise of fascism in the wake of communisms collapse, socialist feminism, fallacies inherent in capitalist arguments, the ravages of neoliberalism, the future of socialism, and much, much more! You can buy Kristen's latest book here: https://www.dukeupress.edu/red-hangover Learn more about her here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristen_R._Ghodsee#Books Read her article we mention in the episode here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/opinion/why-women-had-better-sex-under-socialism.html Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo Outro Music: "Bent Life" by Aesop Rock featuring C Rayz Walz This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

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Talked it in and turn it up loud Revolutionary Left Radio starts now. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Ann Comrade, Brett O'Shea. Today we have on Dr. Kristen Godsey from the University of Pennsylvania to talk about Soviet Union, what happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall, etc. Kristen, would you like to go ahead and introduce yourself and say a bit about your background? Yeah. First of all, thank you for having me on your show. I am, as you said, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Russian and East European Studies. I am an ethnographer and I have been conducting research in the region for about 20 years. I first visited the region back in 1990 right after the wall fell down and I've been doing both archival and ethnographic work on the region. cultures of socialism and post-socialism for quite a while. I've written six books about the topic and it's something that still animates my work and I'm very excited to have this opportunity

to talk about it. Definitely. And we're honored and excited to have you on. So yeah, let's go ahead and just dive in because we have a lot to cover here. Maybe just to start off, can you briefly summarize what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989 and afterwards to sort of set the stage for the rest of this discussion? Sure. So this is a very obviously complicated topic, and it really depends where in Eastern Europe you are talking about. One of the biggest problems we have when we talk about state socialism in the 20th century is people tend to homogenize the experience of state socialism and reduce it to that of the Soviet Union. And different countries had very different exit paths from state socialism.

And so the really important one, the one that we hear the most about, obviously, is East Germany, where the Berlin Wall fell in November of 1989, really in response to popular protests by East German citizens who were unhappy with the nature of the Erichonika regime in Eastern Germany. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many of the other East European countries, through popular, peaceful protests and revolutions, had their own socialist governments either to sort of abdicate power or they allowed for free elections. In the case of Romania, there was a violent uprising, and the dictator, Shoshescu, was actually killed. and as you may know in the Soviet Union that happened in 1991 it was a little bit longer these were changes in response to Gorbachev's policies of Glasnost and Parastroika

all of this was happening over as I said a two-year period Yugoslavia would break up very violently we would have the wars of Yugoslav succession that ended up incredibly violent breakup down in the Balkans. So different places had very different exits from state socialism. This was completely unexpected on the part of the West. We had lots of Sovietologists and experts on Eastern Europe in the 1980s who were completely taken by surprise by the events. And I think that the most important thing that Americans need to realize is that the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe, happened for very different sets of reasons in different places. But when we think about the Soviet Union in particular, and when we think about other countries in Eastern Europe, it's important

to understand that people like Gorbachev were reformers. They actually were trying to liberalize the state socialist system to create spaces for freedom of the oppressed and freedom of religion and freedom of speech to make the economic system more responsive. And it was at this moment of potential reform. Many East Germans wanted a sort of independent East Germany, sort of like Austria, a German-speaking country that would be more democratic socialist, not just to join with capitalist West Germany, which is what happened in the end. But there was a desire for reform among many, not all, but many people in the region. And in some ways they believed, and they were led to believe by advisors and politicians in the West that by embracing democracy, by

embracing free markets, they would have all of the social security and stability of socialism combined with the wonderful consumer goodies of the West, the bananas and the jeans and the televisions and the French perfume and the American cigarettes and everything that everybody wanted in that part of the world, which they had not had access to previously unless they had hard currency. So there was a way in which the events of 1989, many people have debated why it happened, how it happened, who was responsible, was it Reagan, was it Helmut Kohl in Germany, was it Gorbachev. I mean, these debates will go on forever. But I think the really important thing, when we talk about the history of state socialism in Eastern Europe today, 30 years later,

these final moments before the collapse, it's, we have to understand that there was an attempt to reform the system and that many people believed that the system could be reformed from within to make it a kind of socialism with a human face to borrow a term from the Prague Spring in 1968, and that those efforts were completely crushed in many ways, both by internal forces, but also importantly by forces from the West, forces from the outside that didn't want to see Eastern Europe take a democratic socialist path, but really wanted them to completely open up and embrace a sort of Western free market democracy, neoliberalism, which is what they got. Yeah, I think there's sort of a pernicious mythology that crops up, certainly around this time, but it goes back much farther into the Cold War, where there's this conflation between free market capitalism and democracy.

And when these discussions were being had and when they're still being had, there's this constant attempt to try to make them out to be the same thing. But in a lot of ways, we all know certain fundamental elements of free market capitalism are anti-democratic to the core. People have no say how their economy is run. People have no say in how their workplace is run. So that's sort of pernicious myth-making about what democracy is and how it cohes with capitalism is something that crops up again and again.

But what were some of the promises? I know you mentioned one or a few of them, but what were some of the more specific promises made by Western capitalists, so-called democracies around the ideas of introducing capitalism into these areas? And how are those promises different from what actually happened on the ground? Yeah. So I want to emphasize something that you just said, which is that capitalism and democracy are not the same thing. In the region, however, if you talk to people, they will use democracy as a synonym for capitalism,

as a synonym for free markets. And that's because those two things came sort of bundled together. It's like buying a, you know, a PC computer with preloaded Windows software. Like you couldn't get anything other than capitalism if you wanted democracy. And people in the region, there's a wonderful scholar named Daniela Donne, an East German politician and writer who said, look, we wanted democracy. We did not want capitalism. These are two different things. But what we got was this promise of prosperity.

And so what were those promises? Now, again, different places have different promises. And it's good to always keep that in mind. There's an incredible amount of heterogeneity throughout the region. But, you know, we look on the ground. What people really wanted was the stuff. They wanted the things that Western capitalism could produce for ordinary people. They wanted private cars, they wanted bigger apartments, they wanted nicer clothing, women wanted makeup and perfume.

People also wanted to travel. They wanted to be able to go to holiday in the south of France or in the south of Italy. They wanted a lot of things that we take for granted. Now, in the West, we often talked about freedom of the press and freedom of religion and freedom of conscience and freedom of speech and assembly, all these political rights, which people also didn't have. But if you actually asked people in the region, many of them were really desirous of the stuff. They wanted the goodies of capitalism.

They had lived very austere lives for a long time. Now, not at all periods, but certainly by the late 1980s, all of these economies in Eastern Europe were having serious structural problems, and they were no longer able to meet consumer demand. And if they were meeting some consumer demand, And they were doing so by taking very large loans from Western countries, which would be very unsustainable in the long run. So there was this idea that if you introduced democracy, which meant, you know, open parliamentary elections and multi-party elections, and capitalism, which meant taking all of the state-owned property and making it private property, like basically creating markets where there previously had been none,

lifting price controls and removing subsidies for things like housing and heat and food, liberalizing all sorts of social services that had previously been provided to the population, that by making these economies more dynamic, they would be able to produce all of these goods and services which the state socialist regimes had not been able to do prior to 1989.

So there was this, promise of prosperity. There was a promise of abundance. There was a promise that, you know, you could take your kids to Disneyland. You could buy yourself a brand new, you know, Toyota car without having to wait 10 years. You could eat strawberries whenever you wanted to or tomatoes in the winter. I mean, many of the things that you and I take for granted of living in the United States in the year 2018 are incredible luxuries, if you think about it, in terms of the food that we eat and the access to goods and services that we have, which people in this part of the world didn't, and they wanted. They wanted. And they were sold.

I mean, and in the case of Eastern Germany, you know, the West Germans gave them welcome money, right? The East Germans got these payments. And so there was a way in which, you know, the reunification of the Germans, states was about money and about wealth and about access to goods and services. It wasn't as much about the kinds of higher ideals that often get discussed when we talk about the collapse of communism. And so I think that it's important to remember that if you go back and you talk to people about what it was that they hated about communism, often it really, most of them will say it was the consumer shortages, the lack of travel freedoms in particular, and also the ubiquitous, the ubiquity of the secret police. And again, that was different in

different countries, depending on where you were. So those were the promises. But now let's get into the actual consequences. So what were some of the costs, whether economic, social, or even psychological, of the transition to free market capitalism in Eastern Europe after 1989. Yeah, and this is the really sad story that very few people want to hear. The absolute social and economic devastation that was wrought in Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism in 1989 and 1991 in the case of the Soviet Union. So we actually have really good data on this. There was a study that was done in Germany and it looked at the excess mortality rate among East German men that increased by something like 30% between 1989 and 1991. And these

were excess deaths from alcoholism, heart and circulatory problems, and suicide, which were causally related to the reunification process because so many men had been put out of work, had been dislocated. In 2009, the British Medical Journal, the Lancet, the premier British medical journal, a guy named David Struggler and a couple of his colleagues did a study that showed that there are probably more than a million excess deaths in Eastern Europe that resulted from the rapid privatization of these economies. Because, of course, what happened in 1980s, and 91 was that you had to go from a state control of the economy to a private economy. And that meant you went from the state as the only employer to a bunch of independent private

employers or foreign corporations that were coming in and buying up these previously state-owned assets. And so there was an incredible amount of unemployment as people lost their jobs. And at the time that this was going on, the people who were in charge of the transition understood that this was going to have massive reverberations throughout the economy, that there would be a lot of human suffering. But again, they thought that this would be worth it. There was a study in 2014 by an economist at, I believe, he's either at CUNY or at NYU, a guy named Uncle Milanovic. And what he found was that 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, only one out of 10 people living in these transition countries actually had a transition to capitalism

that was promised by the ideologues, the people who had promised that liberal democracy and free markets would bring all of this prosperity and freedom. And even more shocking is that the European Bank for Reconstruction Development, by no means a progressive liberal institution, right? This is a bank, in their 2016-2017 transition report, they found that people who were born during the period of price liberalization. So when I was talking about those price controls being lifted and the subsidies being removed and all of this unemployment, people who were born in this cohort are on average 1.1 centimeters shorter than older or younger cohorts. Now, that doesn't sound like a whole lot, but 1.1 centimeter is about what you would find in a war zone. It's what you would find if these people had gone through a war.

So these are huge effects that we see in the population in Eastern Europe. There was a massive amount of social and economic and psychological devastation, which has gone completely underdcussed. It's been underdustust. And, you know, the EBRD, this European Bank for Reconstruction Development in this report, you know, is very, was very worried that the growing inequality in this region and these devastating psychological impacts are leading to some not so nice outcomes, which I think we'll talk about a little bit later in the interview. But I do think it's very important to understand for ordinary Americans that, okay, Travel restrictions under state socialism were awful. People in East Germany could not freely travel to the West. But after the imposition of free markets in Eastern Europe,

most people didn't have enough money to travel to the West. People who, you know, once had food subsidies or had, you know, guaranteed public health care or decent education, suddenly those were things that they had to pay for, but they didn't have jobs. So there was this incredible almost bait and switch. They were kind of promised a consumer utopia, a land of prosperity, and what they got instead was incredible poverty and immiseration.

Now, now, not everybody. Certainly there are people who benefited greatly from the transition, but that has created these incredible unequal societies where there had previously been far less inequality. And I think that we really need to, one of the biggest things that in the kind of current political moment, we have to understand when we think about like what's going on in Russia and, you know, what's been happening in Eastern Europe with some of these quote unquote illiberal democracies, it's that we didn't, we, meaning the Western countries, didn't really pay attention to the incredible costs that this economic transition was going to impose on ordinary men and women across. the region. Yeah, and in a lot of ways it's a, it's a perfect case study and a real life experiment on what happens when you introduce capitalism to an area. And the fact that wealth inequality, absolutely. Yeah. The fact that wealth inequality skyrocketed is exactly what we would have predicted and it's exactly what happened and it's exactly what's happening

all over the world, everywhere capitalism exists. Wealth inequality is an intrinsic outcome of capitalism, it seems. And that happens over and over again. And here you can have a case where there was not free market capitalism, and then it was introduced, and then that exact pattern reappears. So it's beyond contention at this point. Yeah, and I mean, there are lots of other things that you can look at, such as a return to kind of traditional gender roles. There are, in fact, when you look at 1989, 1991, this period of time in Eastern Europe, and it is a perfect laboratory for studying the effects of imposition of capital. capitalism or the introduction of free markets.

It is a wonderful opportunity to go back and see how inequality and injustice reproduces itself. You know, and as I said, I've been studying this part of the world for many, many years. So in some respects, my own academic and intellectual career has been about watching this process as it was happening. And, you know, in the very early years of the transition, when you had the creation of the mafia and the oligarchs and these very predatory foreign investors,

there was this initial distribution of state wealth, which was incredibly unequal. And people at the time would say, oh, well, you know, that's just how capitalism has to start. There has to be an initial distribution of wealth. It has to be, there has to be like the quote-unquote robber baron era of capitalism and then eventually you know the systems gets going it starts working and you know the invisible hand of the market will sort it all out um but that's not what happened um and you know

this incredible initial unequal distribution of the common wealth of the people at least in theory um is still in the lived memories of many people in the region and so i think that there's an incredible amount of frustration and anger that, again, people in the West have not paid enough attention to, as well as intellectual and economic elites in the region who have benefited from free markets and liberal democracy and are a little bit disconcerted that their compatriots are so unhappy with what's happened in the last 30 years. Yeah, and we're definitely going to get into the effect. of that later on in this discussion, namely the connections to fascism. But for right now,

I want to zoom out just a bit. This is something that doesn't get talked about a lot, and I think even on the left, this point is not really internalized often. But in what ways did the communist threat, i.e. the existence of a strong and intimidating socialist force emanating out of the Soviet Union, help give rise to social democratic reforms and capitalist countries, and what happened when that alternative was ultimately removed? Yeah, that is a great question. And I think that that's almost like a whole episode of your part. True, true.

Because it is so important to understand the ways in which the rise of Bolshevism, very specifically in 1917, in the Soviet Union, and then the subsequent spread of communist ideology around the world, really sort of existentially threatened the capitalist West. So there are a couple of very concrete examples I can give you. So if you take an international organization like the International Labor Organization or the ILO based in Geneva, it was created in 1919 as part of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, but it was created in direct response to the Bolshevik revolution.

Like the capitalists of Western Europe were terrified of a workers' revolt. So they created this ILO, this organization, to bring governments and the owners of capital and the workers together to try and sort out their differences before a revolution happened. And as you can imagine, this tripartite structure actually ended up empowering workers in a really profound way. It gave them a voice on the international stage to advocate. for their own interest. And the ILO, during the Cold War, was an incredibly productive period of time. Another really interesting example is a book by a historian named Mary Dudziak called Cold War Civil Rights.

And she makes a fascinating argument that the progress of civil rights in the United States was in some ways of response to Soviet criticisms about our policy towards African Americans. so that like we went around talking about freedom and democracy and right political rights and yet we were you know very hypocritically denying rights to some of our own citizens at home I've written also about women's rights I believe that that the Soviet Union and the eastern block countries really kind of model the sort of women's emancipation that the United States kind of had to play catch up to but here's the other thing I think that the United States in particular needed an enemy. And if you think about the rhetoric, there's this really interesting contradiction in the way that we talk about 20th century state socialism. So on the one

hand, many people, many conservatives in this country, many old cold warriors will tell you that socialism is a system that will never work. It never worked anywhere, and it will never work anywhere, it's economically unsustainable. It will just collapse because it cannot meet consumer needs. It is inefficient. It's not as efficient as the market. There's this way in which it's always tends towards political repression and so on and so forth. So it's just going to collapse from the inside. And on the other hand, sometimes in the same breath, those people will tell you that the United States needed to spend billions and billions and billions of dollars to fight proxy wars or support dictators in developing countries or engage in questionable covert operations

to prevent communism spread across the globe. So how can those two things be true at the same time? That it's a system that would have just sort of fallen apart by itself. It'll never work. It's unsustainable. Or we need to spend all of this money to prevent its spread. So on the one hand, I think that the Soviet Union and the existence of state socialism in the Eastern Bloc, really helped workers, women, minorities.

It provided a political and existential alternative to capitalism in this really profound way. On the other hand, it also sort of fueled the military industrial complex in the United States. It really fueled, you know, paranoia and McCarthyism and, you know, domestic persecution. And so it's a very, it's a very, it's a very. interesting tension because, you know, I think having an alternative is a really important thing because it allows people to think differently. You know, we often hear there's no alternative to capitalism or there's that quote that's attributed to Churchill.

You know, democracy is the worst system of government except for all others that have been tried from time to time. But when you remove the alternative, right, which is what happened in 1989 and 1991, what did we get? We got untrammeled, unfettered, neoliberal capitalism and austerity and financial crises. You know, we got the credit default swaps and the great recession. We got, like, there was nothing to put pressure on economic elites living in the West to distribute more of the wealth equitably to the workers. There was no ideological pressure to provide basic services like health care or education. So, you know, it's a complicated argument because, of course, there are always going to be counterfactuals.

But I think it's really important to understand the place that Soviet communism or state socialism and Eastern Europe more broadly. And of course, it's not just Eastern Europe in this case, because it's also China and it's Vietnam, and it's Cuba, all of these other countries that experimented with socialism, that increased the existential threat to the United States. And on the one hand, that produced a kind of knee-jerk anti-communist military reaction. On the other hand, it also inspired many people to be more generous. It inspired economic elites to put some kind of breaks on the worst ravages of the capitalist system. And I think that we are having a hard time with things like regulation, with things like, you know, any sort of redistributive policies.

Because the minute you talk about redistribution or regulation, people say, oh, that's socialist, right? But it's not socialist. It was an inherent part of capitalism when capitalism was having to be in dialogue with socialism. We had the New Deal. We've had many policies in this country that have put the brakes on the market. for the sake of preserving democracy. And when you take that pressure away, which is what happened with the collapse of communism

in 1989 and 91, there was this triumphalism in the West that led to what I think were some of the worst successes of capitalism. And we in, you know, the West in 2018 are really paying the price for those decisions that were made in the 90s immediately after the collapse.

of communism. Absolutely, beautifully said. You said so many important points that it's hard. I'm not going to be able to get to them all, but a couple of things I do want to reemphasize that you made was it's no coincidence that you had Reagan and Thatcher and the rise of neoliberalism at the exact same time that the communist threat was going away. And it's no coincidence furthermore that the Clinton third way policy of the Democrats basically abandoned the working class right in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Those two things are deeply connected. and it feeds into neoliberalism. That's what we're living through now.

The other thing you said about the communist influence on the civil rights movement here, there's also domestic communist movements that were a huge part of the civil rights movement and the opponents of civil rights called the proponents of it communists. They tied in communism and the civil rights movement as a singular entity. And you can go back and look at old photos of anti-civil rights marchers and it was always anti-communist as well as anti-black rhetoric

coming out of the reactionary elements there. And the final thing else... Absolutely. Go ahead. I just wanted to just jump on that and say that there's a wonderful book called Sojourning for Freedom by a scholar named Eric McDuffey. And that's about black feminist women

in the CPUSA. And how important the culture of the Communist Party was to many African-American activists in the 30s and 40s. And the other thing that I wanted to say, which is a little side note, I have a colleague at Yale

who's writing a biography of Jay Edgar Hoover, and one of the telltale signs of how they could figure out which white people were communists, according to her, according to the information that she found, was that white people who were comfortable in the presence

of African Americans had to be communists. Wow. Yeah, so anyway, so you're absolutely 100% right, that there was an incredible allegiance between African-Americans and leftists in this country going back to the 30s. But you were going to make a third point. I'm sorry. Yeah, no, that was great. That was very important.

And my third point was just to restate the notion that still to this day, they want to have their cake and eat it too on the right. They want to simultaneously, as you said, say socialism is not only bound to collapse, and doesn't understand economics, et cetera, but that it actually ontologically goes against human nature, which is quite the claim. Right. But in the same exact breath, you're right.

They spend, I mean, over the last century, billions, if not trillions of dollars on anti-communist movements, they prop up right-wing death squads. They overthrow democratically elected socialist leaders like Allende in Chile and install Pinochet, a fascist. So on every front, I mean, they had over 600 attempts on 50s, Adele Castro's life. So I mean, if socialism inherently collapses, then just stand back and let it collapse. But of course, you know, that's not the reality. Exactly. I mean, it's such an

interesting contradiction. And, you know, I sometimes I point this out to, you know, my colleagues. And, you know, they often, it's only when you point it out to them that they go, oh, wow, that that doesn't make sense, right? Because it is so completely contradictory. if you think about it, right? So if it's, if it's so unnatural to human nature, right? Then then why just, why not just let countries follow some socialist path? Like, let Venezuela just do what it needs to do. Like, why bother trying to, you know, support a coup attempt there?

If it's just going to fall down anyway, right? I mean, it's an interesting set of arguments. And I think that it's really important that we recognize that, you know, you know if I'm a little kid and I'm you know my mom says okay you know here are some blocks and you need to build a tower that's 10 blocks high with these blocks and every time I get to the ninth block you know my brother comes and like tips the tower over and I keep built you know and then I get the blocks and I put them back up and I get up to nine and my brother comes and he tips it over is it reasonable for my mom to come over and say oh there must be something

wrong with the block. Exactly. That doesn't make any sense. Exactly. Right? I mean, because, yeah, so it's just a, but it's, again, these are argumentative rhetorical points. These are, it's easy to sometimes talk about these things in the abstract, but we also

need to think about, you know, the exact historical instantiations. I mean, some people may believe that socialism doesn't work, you know, to be charitable. You could say they believe that it'll never work, but in the meantime, they fear. that it will have these nefarious consequences, so that's why we have to fight it now. I don't know. I try to understand, but I don't always understand. Well, before we move on to women under communism, because I know that's a big part of your work, and I think it's extremely important, just really quick, what were some of the biggest achievements? Because this often, in these discussions, often gets erased out of the conversation.

What were some of the biggest achievements of the Soviet-era state socialism for average working people in these countries? Yeah, so again, you know, you always have to discuss the good with the bad. And I do think it's important here to recognize that there were some very bad things, particularly in places like Romania under Shoshchescu or the Soviet Union under Stalin. But in terms of ordinary average working people, there was an incredible amount of social stability. There was an incredible amount of a security in terms of not having to worry whether you're going to be able to eat or not having to worry about whether you're going to have a roof over your head. So there's a great joke that gets told in many Eastern European countries. A woman wakes up in the middle of the night.

She screams. She's had a terrible nightmare. She runs into the kitchen, looks in the refrigerator. She runs into the bathroom, looks at the medicine cabinet. She runs to the window and looks out on the street. She comes back into bed and collapses like a sigh of relief. And her husband says, what was that about? And she said, I had a nightmare.

I had a terrible nightmare. I dreamt that the refrigerator was full of food. I dreamt that the medicine cabinet had all the medicine that we needed. And I dreamt that I looked outside and the streets were clean and safe and well lit. And he said, well, how is that a nightmare? And she said, oh, my God, I thought the communists were back. Wow. That says it all.

So, yeah, that says it all, right? Wow. So I think that there were, you know, incredible gains in terms of, you know, education and literacy. Many of these countries were peasant countries with massive illiteracy. That was overcome. Many of them were agricultural countries that became industrial countries, very quick industrialization process, women's rights. In some cases, the rights of minorities and certain nationalities. I mean, it's a mixed bag, again, depending on where you look.

It's hard to make overall comments about every country in the region. But there were real gains that were made. And I think that, you know, it's about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There were negatives, and nobody should deny the negatives. But I think it's really important that people understand that there were some positives and that those positives can be salvaged and we can learn from them. Absolutely. And that should be the point. We should have a clear, sober understanding of what actually happened so we can learn from the failures and the successes. Discard what did not work, find ways to control for the negatives, and then re-implement the positives and move forward in totally new conditions too. So that's something that all leftists should think about. But I do want to move on to women under communism. And you have this wonderful article for the New York Times entitled, Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism. And in it you basically argue that women's sexual and romantic life were objectively better than they were to become under capitalism.

Can you summarize some of the main arguments of that article and talk about how women specifically fared before and after the fall of communism? Sure. Again, like I said, this is probably another one of those topics that could be just a podcast for itself. But overall, I mean, what I was trying to do in that article, and again, I want to make a, you know, a clear statement that I'm not talking about all state socialist countries at all times. There was a lot of variety. But specifically for places like Eastern Germany, Czech

Slovakia, to a certain extent, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria, certainly Yugoslavia, and the later parts of the Soviet Union and the very early parts of the Soviet Union, there was a concerted commitment to women's economic independence. Women were fully incorporated into the labor force and they were supported in their dual roles as mothers and workers through things like maternity leaves and universal child care and really good avenues for education for their children. And so the argument of that piece was that women have more satisfying romantic lives when they are the equals of their partners. And we actually have, you know,

there were recent studies done in the United States about men and women who share housework equally. And it's very clear from the study that men and women in heterosexual relationships that are sharing just ordinary routine housework not only have more sex, but they also say that it's more satisfying because there's less resentment on the side of the women.

So if we go back to the late 19th century and the early 20th century and read the writings of people like Alexandra Colentai, but also socialist feminist theorists like Lily Brown or Clara Zetkin, there was a lot of discussion about women's economic independence being sort of an essential part of a socialist society and that the true emancipation of women could only happen when women were no longer. commodified, when their bodies were no longer things to be bought and sold, whether, you know, through prostitution or sold once and for all into a kind of relationship like marriage. But essentially, most women throughout history, their primary, you know, vocation has been to get married. They become a commodity. Women are traded between men and women, sorry, between men, fathers and husbands. And I think that, you know, what I was trying to get out of in the article is that a commitment to women's rights in this really profound way, not only from the state, but also in the society, when not only women, but men as well are not just commodities,

when their bodies are not just things to be bought and sold, to be traded on the market. And if you think about the way we talk about romance in the United States, you know, we talk about, like we see a couple and we'll say, oh, well, she's out of his league or he's out of her league or, you know, we think about the, you know, relationships being work, the way we, you know, commodify our time together. Like, we relate to each other in very capitalist terms. And if you can imagine a society where people are just people, where you're, like, in a relationship with somebody because you actually like them, because you enjoy their company,

not because you are getting something out of that relationship or they're getting something out of the relationship or you're mutually getting something out of the relationship. It's not a transaction. It's not a market transaction. It's something that's just about two people being together. You could imagine that for everybody involved, men and women, both, it's going to be better. And then the further thing is that, look, relationships, whether they're romantic or even just platonic friendships. They take a lot of time and energy. And our capitalist society is such that we are so short on time. We're running, you know, from place to place. We're exhausted. We're burnt out. We're, again, having to play this game of constantly self-branding and commodifying

ourselves is some kind of good to be sold on the market. And so we often don't have the time to really tend to the relationships in our life that are going to be the most satisfying. So the point of the article was to try to try to imagine, you know, to try to get people to discuss, like what was it like when women's early commodities? You know, when you didn't have to be a gold digger in order to pay your rent. Or, you know, there's this website Seekingarrangement.com where all these young university students like find sugar daddies or sugar mamas to pay their tuition so they can go to college. You know, we have so hyper commodified our romantic and personal lives that I think it's really important. Imagine that there might have been, you know,

a world in which that was, it wasn't, it didn't disappear altogether, but it was certainly less of a consideration when you entered into a relationship with somebody. And a lot of that had to do with female economic independence. And again, you know, this is not just my work. This is the work of many, many historians and anthropologists working in the region. People like Dagmar Herzog has written a wonderful book called Sex After Fascism. in Germany. Paul Betts wrote a book called Within Walls. There's a great book by Josie McClellan called Love in the Time of Communism, which is all about how intimacy is shaped by political economy. Now, many of us on the left think about political economy in our daily lives when it comes

to work, but it's also worth taking those frameworks and thinking about how political economy shapes how we are with the people that we love the most. And that, if you kind of apply some of those ideas, I think we can all come out of, you know, we can all have more robust, maybe, in fulfilling relationships with each other if we understand how capitalism can commodify even our most intimate worlds.

Yeah, beautifully said it. I completely agree. And you made me think of an idea when you talked about the commodification and the reducing of relationships. almost to market transactions, I think a lot of the male entitlement to women, to their time, to their bodies, stems from this. You'll often hear if you go into like these men rights activist organizations or, you know, reactionary men circles that are anti-feminist in nature,

they'll complain about how I bought her flowers, I took her to a movie and she still didn't put out. Or you'll go on to these websites that document how men talk to women on dating websites. And they'll be like, oh, you're so pretty, you're so pretty. And the girls, is not interested, and then the guy turns fucking brutally evil and starts calling her all sorts of names, et cetera, there's entire websites dedicated to men behaving this way. So I think that actually it manifests this sort of patriarchal entitlement that men feel when relationships and things are reduced to transactions because men feel, hey, if I put in the costs, if I pay my and my fair share, then I deserve you as a woman. You are my property now. And so that's a really

pernicious and insidious aspect of this. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you know, and again, I think it's really interesting that when we look at what happened in these East European countries, you know, Catherine Verderi, the anthropologist, was this wonderful argument that

the social state reduced women's economic dependence on men by making men and women sort of equally dependent on the socialist state. But what happens when you reduce women's, like, so men have an incredible amount of power when women have access to basic goods and services such as health care

through their husband. So think about that. Like if you are married and your husband has an employee based employer based health care plan, your access to medical, the medical establishment is through your husband, through his employer. That's an incredible relationship of dependence. that is just sort of the function of the system that lately happen to live in. If your grocery bill is being paid by this because you don't have an opportunity to get a job or because there is no child care, it's not worth it for you to try to go to work and find somebody to look after your children while you're at work, and many women in this country are in that situation, you know, that creates an incredible power imbalance within the

relationship. And I absolutely 100% agree with you. I think, you know, for some men, it is a sort of conscious entitlement, particularly some of these men's rights activists who feel that they're really, that feminism really threatens their masculinity. I can, I mean, again, I can understand why they feel that it threatens their masculinity, because if their masculinity is based on a subjugation of women, of course, it's going to be a threat. Exactly, exactly.

Right. But I think that some men just don't understand, you know, they just think these are the rules of the game. And when they go out with a girl and they buy her dinner and, you know, they sort of, they think, well, I did everything right. Why doesn't she, you know, put out or whatever? That it's, you know, it's also about the system. I mean, this is a systemic problem. You know, we live in a society that is essentially, as you said, patriarchal. And it is predicated on this unequal relationship between men and women. And so men and women, women relate to each other in large part because of the system around them. And if you could, again, change that system. If you can look at the way the political economy shapes intimate relations, and you could see that in a place where women have economic independence, a woman who can take care of herself, who has her own access to health care, she's not going to stay in an abusive relationship with a man who doesn't treat her well. She's not going to stay in a relationship with a man who's cheating on her or sleeping with

a bunch of other women. She's certainly not going to stay in a relationship with a man who's hurting her children. So that's going to create a kind of independence and autonomy for women that, you know, I ultimately argue, you know, I believe is going to be better for everybody involved, right? It's not just for women. I actually think it's better for men too. And again, come back to this housework survey, I believe the article is from 2016, where, you know, men and women who share chores more equitably actually have like more sex right and based on what I know I think that'd be make men a lot of men happy too yeah for sure yeah that's that's a that's a

perennial point that feminists constantly make is you know men suffer under a patriarchal strict gender role society as well we suffer in terms of toxic masculinity we suffer in terms of homophobia in our own male friendships we suffer in terms of the inability to express our emotions without feeling like a girl or whatever. So the feminist critique of that system is liberatory for all people, not just women. And that's why I think men and men's rights activists fundamentally don't seem to comprehend. Exactly. But I do want to move on because we're bumping up against this exact issue going a little deeper.

We recently had Sylvia Federici, the author of Caliban and the Witch on, And, you know, her work traces the rise of capitalism to the oppression of women and specifically the burning of women at the stake as witches to the development of capitalism, which is all fascinating. But that argument is basically that capitalism itself is rooted in the oppression of women. And I know that you've touched on this a little bit, but for a lot of socialists, the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a more egalitarian society is a prerequisite to the complete liberation of women. women. What are your thoughts on that general idea? I know you touched on it a little bit, but what are your basic, how do you orient yourself to those ideas? Yeah, I mean, I think that this is just, this is, you know, bread and butter socialist theory. This is August Bebel. This is Frederick Ingalls. This is even Lenin. I think that, look, as long as women's unpaid labor,

and that's, you know, taking care of the children, having the children, doing the housework, doing the cleaning, you know, caring for the sick, caring for the elderly, all of this labor that is done by women for free in the home allows the capitalists, the economic elites in our country to increase their profits. Like this system is predicated on women's unpaid labor. And you can see this very clearly, right? So if you had, again, this is where it's very useful to look at Eastern Europe as a kind of test case or a laboratory, or even to look at countries in Western Europe, such as Greece, for instance, where there was a larger social welfare state that then got shrunk because of austerity. what you see is that in an expanded welfare state the the taxpayers money or the accumulated profits from public enterprises are used to pay for things like education and child care health care for the elderly care for the sick and so on and so forth when the state budget shrinks whether that's because of externally imposed austerity politics or because of privatization imposed on you by the west the

IMF and the World Bank, or for whatever reason, an internal tax bill basically, you know, decides that we're going to give a huge corporate tax break, and that means that we have to cut something like Medicare or Social Security. So what happens? All of those social services start to disappear. The child care disappears. The health care disappears. The elder care disappears.

The care for the sick. The hospice care disappears. All of that state-funded care disappears. years. But the work doesn't go away. The work is still there. So who does it? 90% of the time, it's women who do it. So you can actually clearly see that capitalism needs the unpaid labor of women in the home. And so I am 100% on board with the idea that you have to have to challenge the fundamental principles of capitalism in order to truly liberate women. And you know, again, different people can argue this until the cows come home, whether this

is done by the accumulated profits of public enterprises or whether you do this through taxation and redistribution or whether you do this through building cooperatives or local syndicates or whether you form communes. I mean, you know, if you, I know you're a pan-leftist show. So if you talk to different, you know, permutations of people on the left, they're all going to have slightly different ideas about how we should collectivize the kind of care work that women do by themselves unpaid in the home under capitalism. But I agree 100% that socialism is a pathway forward again it's not only just for women I think men will benefit from this too because you know all of us not all of us have children not all of us will have children but all of us

especially you know I mean all of us have parents and those parents those parents are going to need care and if you know and if they cut whatever social programs minimal social programs we have that care for the elderly, that labor is not going to go away. Somebody is going to need to care for our parents. And so I think that we have to be very thoughtful about the structures that we set up to redistribute income. It's a question not only of social justice, obviously, because that's an important consideration, but it's also about recognizing the places in our economy.

where capitalism, I mean, capitalism exploits people in the former labor force as well, obviously. Capitalism exploits many, many people, but there's a particular form of exploitation that is very specific to women, and which is going to be very, very hard to overcome in a capitalist economy because, for better or worse, right now at least women are the ones who have the babies, and women are the ones who do that care work primarily in the home. And the gender wage gap makes it such that if there has to be a choice of who stays home with the child, it's going to be the person with the lower wage, which is inevitably going to be the woman. So the cycle repeats itself. Great point.

Here, here. Yeah, I could listen to you talk all day. Everything you said is on point 100%. But now let's move on to what we talked about earlier, hinted at, is fascism. Because you cannot have this conversation, especially when you're talking about 20th century communism, where you're talking about 2018 reality. in the world today, without talking about the rise of the ugliest form of capitalism, which is fascism. So what are the connections between the fall of communism, the implementation of capitalism,

and the subsequent rise of fascism in contemporary Eastern Europe? Yeah, so there's this quote that's often attributed to Lenin, that fascism is capitalism in decay. And I actually think that that is a fairly accurate, a fairly accurate description of what's going on in the world today. So as we discussed earlier, you know, the fall of capitalism, sorry, the fall of communism, fall of state socialism, Eastern Europe. And I mean, and it's important here to think about, for instance, I mean, China is technically

still a communist country, but as we know, it's actually a capitalist country. It's a state capitalism is what they have. So it's not only the fall of state socialism, it's sort of the fall of, the fall of like really sort of existing socialism with all its flaws, but that was really still about, you know, kind of a planned economy and an anti-market ideology in the case of these, you know, these Warsaw-Pact countries that were part of this thing called the Comic-Con, which was the Council of Mutual Economic Exchange. So there was this whole part of the world that was outside of the Western capitalist system. And then, you know, suddenly in 1989, 1991, the

West, just all these multinational corporations had suddenly, you know, hundreds of millions of people to buy their stuff. And so that part of the world got sort of incorporated into neoliberal global capitalism. So of course, and then as we talked about earlier, all the breaks were taken off. So as you said, with Reagan in the White House and Thatcher in charge of the United Kingdom and kind of the rise of this thing called the Washington Consensus and neoliberalism being imposed willy-nilly across the world through structural adjustment programs and the implementation of austerity. What you start to have is the kind of the worst form of savage capitalism. And people are increasingly angry with capitalism, right? Capitalism is starting.

to falter under its own internal contradictions. You know, these are contradictions, obviously, that Marx pointed out many, many years ago, David Harvey has written a wonderful book about the contradictions of capitalism. Capitalism, ironically, right, is the thing that's supposed to just fall apart by itself because it's unsustainable in the long run. It has this boom and bust cycles, which create incredible amounts of misery for ordinary people. And so what you start to have is the polarization of the population. People start to get very frustrated with the inequalities and injustices of capitalism. And as capitalism

falters, economic elites need scapegoats in order to keep the system going. And because anybody who's really thought about this understands that the real culprit, so to speak, are these faceless economic elites at the top who are, you know, becoming incredibly rich and then hiding

their offshore monies in Panama or these, you know, banking systems and hiding and not paying taxes and, you know, all the backroom deals, right? So, but they're faceless. They can hide. So, but you can take the anger of the masses and you can

you know, point it towards minorities or immigrants or women, right, scapegoating the other, the near other. This is a really good way to kind of fuel capitalism as popular anger is starting to question the system. I mean, it's interesting in the United States that politicians on both sides of the political spectrum are talking about the rigged economy, right? But the, but the, but the, but the, the right, the fascist answer is always going to be to blame the other, to blame anybody but the actual people who are in charge and who are benefiting from the system. And so I think that, you know, what you see in Eastern Europe is there's this incredible frustration with what's happened in the last 30 years. And people are getting very angry.

and they're starting to be a very natural polarization. So many people are evacuating the center and they're either moving to the far left or they're moving to the far right. And we've seen that pattern happen again and again in the Weimar Republic right before the implementation of Nazism during the Spanish Civil War. Whenever the center of liberal capitalism falls out,

there's that polarization, and then there's combat. And we're starting to see that in the streets of the U.S. today in the 21st century. You're 100% on point when you talk about fascism as capitalism and decay, fascism as capitalism with its teeth out. The elites very much will get behind far right-wing nationalistic scapegoating programs way before they'll get behind left-wing movements because left-wing movements actually challenge their position atop the hierarchy.

Whereas I think in a lot of ways, fascism violently reasserts the hierarchies of gender, race, and class. that are fostered in capitalism. I had somebody on a few episodes ago that called it in large part fascism is the revenge of the petty bourgeois because it's white men. It's white men who feel entitled

to sort of middle management positions in society. And when capitalism fails and that white maleness doesn't get them what they were brought up to think it should get them, there's a violent lashing out. And of course there's massive confusion, the way capitalism,

the way ideology operates under capitalism is as a muddying of the water. So working people are destroyed, left and right, but there's sort of an inability for these people to see that the problem stems from the economic system itself. So it's very scary. I mean, that's what we're dealing with right now. I have a mixed son. I have many friends that are LGBTQ, that are, you know, native, that are black and brown. And this is just a very scary time. all over the West with the rise of fascism and we're trying to educate people. We're trying to say, hey, look at the class dimensions here. Look who really runs shit. Look what the real problem is with your life. But it's just, it's scary. I know it's popping off in Europe in a lot of places

as well. Absolutely. It's, yeah. I mean, it's very strong in Europe. As I wrote in the beginning of Red Hangover, you know, I wrote that book while I was living in Vienna, which is in the former eastern part of Germany. And I was inspired to write the book because there had been a neo-Nazi attack in a sort of immigrant neighborhood in Leipzig, which is a city that was only about 40 minutes from where I was living. And I'd never seen, you know, the video of this, somebody took a video out of their window and then posted it on YouTube. And these were just sort of several hundred neo-Nazis with baseball bats and axes, sort of rampaging through this immigrant neighborhood and just smashing windows and smashing cars and shouting these chants. And it was so

frightening to see. And of course, I just saw this, you know, on, on YouTube. And then about five months later, that was December, April of 2016 in Yenna, they were going to have a torch-list March on Hitler's birthday in Germany. And so, you know, this is something that it's not just unique to the United States. I think it's very important to keep in mind that this is a, this is an international phenomenon. It's, it's something that's happening everywhere. And it really is about, you know, I do think it's about this capitalism into decay. Like, capitalism is faltering.

Capitalism has sort of lost its mooring in liberal democratic politics, which is, you know, is what we sold Eastern Europe. We told them that like free markets and liberal democracy are going to create prosperity and economic stability and growth. And then they didn't. And also, you know, we these days don't seem to care all that much about liberal democracy and are really focused on preserving the economic system of capitalism. And as you pointed out, absolutely. I mean, if you're an economic elite and you're seeing the polarization of your population, you're always going to throw, I mean, not always, this is a broad generalization. I think there are some economic elites who actually sometimes end up going the other way.

But for the, for history, in history, it is the case that the owners of capital, but the large industrialists will generally tend to fall in line behind fascists because they represent fewer threats to property in the long run. And so I do think that that's what's happening. And it's a very frightening time. I 100% agree with you. It's a very frightening time. If you've spent any time looking at European history,

if you look at the history of the Bimar Republic, for instance, before the rise of Hitler, it is a history of incredible polarization between left and right, which led to the collapse of German democracy and the rise of the Nazis. Absolutely. And I think when we're having conversations with people who advocate or defend capitalism, the broad center, we should talk about how capitalism creates these conditions. And we have Nazis marching through the streets with torches in 2017, precisely because people are still clinging on to capitalism and refusing to look forward and try to figure out a new way forward. This is an unsustainable system. And people who are still propping up the center are creating the conditions that give us. rise to the far right. But if you look at the center and you look at the dialogue around these issues, there's false equivalencies all over. People and liberals, centrist, conservatives,

libertarians, they will constantly and inexhaustibly make false equivalencies between the Nazis and the people who stand up to them. The people dressed in all black who hit the streets and say, no, not in this community. But this reflects a larger historical false equivalency between Nazis and the Soviet Union. So why is this equivalency false? And more importantly, what ideological role does this false equivalency play in maintaining the status quo? Okay.

This is a really important question. And I would like to point out if you're really interested in the most nitty, gritty intellectual history of this equivalency between the Nazis and the Soviets. I have this article called A Tale of Two Totalitarianisms, the Crisis of Capitalism and the Historical Memory of Communism. And I go into excruciating detail. It's from 2014 in a journal called The History of the Present about exactly how this happened and why it happened in the wake of the global financial crisis. But very quickly, what I'd like to say is, look, Nazism is based on the racial, supremacy of one group of people over all others and the extermination of others, right?

It's about white supremacy and preserving racial purity. It's a very, very clear in sort of Nazi propaganda, right? You can go back and if you can stomach it, read that stuff. Socialism, as it exists as a doctrine, doctrine in theory, right? It's supposed to allow workers. These are ordinary men and women, no matter what their base or ethnicity, right, to receive a fair share of the wealth that they helped to produce in society. So socialism, at least in theory, was always from its get-go an international doctrine about inclusivity. That's why we say, I think your kids say, right, workers of the world unite. It's not workers of the United, it's not workers of the United States unite, or workers of Great Britain unite, or white male heterosexual workers

unite, right? It's workers of the world. It's like, okay, so there's this category. Now, of course, we understand that it should be an intersectional category and so on and so forth. But it's supposed to be an inclusive category. Workers is supposed to be a broad construction. Fascism is always about exclusion. And socialism, at least in theory, is about inclusion. Now, in the 20th century, there were many crimes committed in the names of both of these ideologies. And it's important that Stalin tried to build socialism in one country because he's sort of feared, you know, for his own paranoid reasons, these constant threats from the capitalist West. Some of them were real. Some of them were imagined. And so Stalin really deviates from the idea of an international socialism.

You know, he really wants to focus on just sort of building the Soviet Union. But the equivalency is always false. I mean, it is a useful equivalency because it's about. two specific historical formations in the 20th century and so when people are making that equivalency what they're trying to do is to say there were two totalitarianisms in the 20th century and they were both really awful because they committed a lot of crimes there's this book the black book of communism which tries to make that equivalency it's a it's a that figure of a hundred million people dead under communism you'll see it everywhere it gets promoted by the victims of communism Memorial Foundation.

They're always comparing it to the number of people who supposedly killed by the Nazis, but that number never includes the number of people who actually died in the war. There's all these weird rhetorical strategies to try to make communism or really Stalinism, Soviet communism, the equivalent of Nazism. But look, as capitalism falters, ordinary men and women, ordinary people on the ground are looking for answers. They're looking for alternatives. And as we just discussed, there's this polarization that starts to happen. People start to move to the right and the left.

And if rhetorically, you set up, right, if you're an economic elite in this country, or even, you know, it doesn't even have to be economically. political elite or media elite, if you set up a paradigm in which fascism and socialism are the same thing, because of course we know that socialism is always conflated with Stalinism and vice versa, then basically what you're saying is, if I'm forced to choose and they're the same, then there's nothing wrong with me choosing fascism. And as you said, so eloquently, just a moment ago, economic elites will choose the system that allows them to maintain their wealth in the name of protecting the quote unquote nation we've seen this before in italy we saw it in germany and so wherever the threat of a workers revolution or even just like really massive types of redistribution

whether it's through land reform um or some kind of expropriation of you know the oil industry or natural resources it's going to emboldened the wealthy to support fascists. It's going to embolden those who have the most to lose to support this very exclusive ideology based on, you know, a kind of fantasy of racial purity that doesn't really exist. And so I think, I mean, there can, I think you can make all sorts of arguments about 20th century socialism or Stalinism and Nazism. And as I said, in that article, I do, I feel like a very careful job to try to show how these debates have played out in Europe, particularly in Germany and France, from the 1980s all the way through to the present day. But what I think is important in the United States

is that this equivalency is a rhetorical tool, as you said, to kind of blame both sides. And if both sides are equal, then it's okay to throw in my lot with the white supremacists. I may not like the white supremacists all that much. I may have issues with them. but oh my god they're better than the communists they're better than the anarchists they're better than the anti-father they're better than the guys in black with the baseball bats right so it's it's a way of creating a universe that is black and white and you know the most important thing that we should learn from the 20th century is that nothing is ever black and white in history there's so much nuance that we have to pay attention to and leftists should study study the history of the 20th century, they cannot be ignorant to what happened in Europe, including the really bad things that happened in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. But they should also be very wary of falling into these traps and reproducing these binaries that are going to create and generate conflict because I think that's exactly what the right wants.

Absolutely, exactly. And, you know, on this show you mentioned earlier, where Pan left. We're non-sectarian precisely because at this moment in history, there's a material need for leftists of all stripes to put our petty differences aside for now and figure out how we're going to fight these very real threats on the other side because the far right and the capitalists, they have no qualms about teaming up when push comes to shove. And if we're arguing, oh, you're this type of leftist or you're a Trotskyist, I'm a Leninist, you're a Democratic socialist, I'm an anarchist, we are going to weaken and divide and break ourselves down into smaller and smaller groups. going to be impotent in the face of this onslaught of late capitalism. So that's one of the core goals of this show. I appreciate you coming on, Kristen, so much. I find your work fascinating and so important. You're absolutely essential at this time. You're a voice that needs more amplification. Before I let you go, can you let listeners who want to learn more about you or anything

we've discussed today? Can you let them know where to find your work or other recommendations? Oh, gosh, I could give you recommendations until next year. There's so much great work out there to read, especially, as I said, about the sort of history and the anthropology of Eastern Europe, really existing state socialism. I mean, a couple of books that I would recommend, as I said, Love in the Time of Communism is a really fun read. this book by Dagmar, Herds Dogs, Sex After Fascism, if you're interested in sort of women's rights, almost all of my books are with Duke University Press. I have one book called Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe,

which is at Princeton University Press. But I think that it's important to just stay, you know, aware, read broadly on the left, especially, you know, other stripes of leftism that you may not completely agree with, as you pointed out, it's really important to build really broad coalitions. And I think that we have a lot to learn from each other. And we really do need to form alliances. And so, you know, I think there's, again, there's tons of things that I could recommend for people to read. But I think that what's really important is to just, to read

foraciously as much as you can and educate yourself. I mean, we can all be autodidacts when it comes to kind of leftist theories. There's these great original texts that go back to the 19th and early 20th century. There's tons of contemporary work being written. There are people like David Harvey and Dave Graber. It's just really wonderful people out there. And I just think we should all be in dialogue with each other as much as we can. Absolutely.

Well, thank you again so much for coming on. It's been a wonderful conversation. I could talk to you for weeks at a time. So thank you for coming on. I appreciate it. Thanks for inviting me. It was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it as well.

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Street Chronicle Abnormal Abdominus pushups Phenomenal Relaxing drinking my six-pack maxing Faxing my thoughts on the satellite via Donahue push it table talks salt and pepper conversation integrated sectors metropolis and mecca it's a conspiracy you know i can't lie dukes sometimes i feel the rats got a better deal than i do go thieves bandits low life scum pumps that buckle under the rumble

of my drum instead of these searching for something new under the sun but it's stagnant active element burst of madness thieves bandits low life scum punks that buckle under the rumble of my drum instead of these searching for something new one that a sun but it's hurting active element first a burgeoned a new universe is ancient so i stay patient in the gravel pit traveling thoughts unraveling pacing embrace the light of america and found the shade of darkness underground the train car used to be my apartment sick of people rushing in the doors before i get out and conductors closing the doors before i get in i shout the blizz is coming the bliss is coming don't get worried now we've been in a cold world we just getting flurries now it's like

Slow down. You will be much too. That's the bus through the finale fashion glass. It's delicate demeanor and I teach you how to hang, but we like 197 something 20 clicks outside the name. Dear obedience. I apologize for the 40 academics, but they placed us in a miserable stasis. I let bygones be bygones but trying to see eye to eye with the baseless just ain't working the way the manual paints it.

See I soak in a blue note factory where most cats hassle bare this land for solo. Now when the last red brick topples over the earth to intercept your quick. a little mess. I could be found in a social coma directly to your left. Engaged in a conversational marvel with my breath. Regarding how to document the shady baby steps, I bounce checks like a modern man. Sleep with one eye open, but the other two drift together specimens from the promised land. This for the thinkers.

This for the urchins allergic to their own stingers. This for the absurd verdict linkers. This for that cat at my shows that's always got prophetic opinions, but can't remember where his drink is. I'm wallowing. I'm plugging your corporation cause we all together. We alley cats addicted to the sickly warped sensation. Answer this. And all that said and done are you a memorable trooper and just a lab right on the run.

Choose one. Those, bandits, low-life scum. Hunks that buckle under the rumble of my drum. Restead of these searching for something new under the sun, but it's stagnant. Active element burst of madness. Thieves, bandits, low-life scum. Hokes that buckle under the rumble of my drum. Instead of they searching for something new under the sun, but it's hurting.

Active Element First diversion. I don't know.