Rev Left Radio - Refuting Common Arguments Against The Left

Episode Date: July 5, 2017

Kristy is a revolutionary organizer and co-founder of the leftist organization The Nebraska Left Coalition. Jeff is revolutionary union member and one of the admins of Anarchist Memes. Brett, Kristy, and Jeff come together (and overcome a slew of technical difficulties during the recording of this episode) to collectively address and refute common arguments made against socialists. Topics include: Antifa, human nature, Hitler, economics, private property vs. personal property, and much more.   Random Song From Our Friends: "I Wrote This Song When I Was 17" by Not Ben Shin https://notbenshin.bandcamp.com/releases   This podcast is officially affilated with The Nebraska Left Coalition and the Omaha GDC.   Twitter @RevLeftRadio Facebook: Revolutionary Left Radio support us on Patreon (forwardslash Revolutionary Left Radio) Don't forget to rate and review us on iTunes to increase our reach.  Thank you for the support! 

Please support my daddy's show by donating a couple bucks to patreon.com forward slash rev left radio. Please follow us on Twitter at Rev. Left Radio. And don't forget to rate and review the Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes to increase our reach. Workers of the world, unite! We're educated, we've been given a certain set of tools, but then we're throwing right back into the working class. Well, good luck with that, because more and more of us are waking the fuck up. So we have a tendency to what we have, we have earned, right? And what we don't have, we are going to earn.

We unintentionally, I think, oftentimes kind of frame our lives as though we are, you know, the predestined. People want to be guilt-free. Like, I didn't do it. Like, this is not my fault. And I think that's part of the distancing from people who don't want to admit that there's privilege. When the main function of a protect and serve, supposedly group is actually revenue generation, they don't protect and serve. It's simply illogical to say that the things that affect all of us that can result in us losing our house,

that can result in us not having clean drinking water, why should those be in anybody else's hands? They should be in the people's hands who are affected by those institutions. People engaged in to overcome oppression, to fight back, and to identify those systems and structures that are oppressing them. God, those communists are amazing. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I am your host and comrade Bred O'Shea and with me today are two good friends, Jeff and Christy.

Would you want to introduce yourselves, Christy starting? Hi, I'm Christy Leahy, and I am a graduate student at the local university. I study inequalities, race, gender, and class. I'm also a founding member of a local organization called the Nebraska Left Coalition. And we work starting with grassroots efforts to build community and create class consciousness. Jeff? Oh, hey, my name is Jeff Anderson.

I'm a part-time union thug and gravel rouser, activist here in Portland. Awesome. And you're also the admin of anarchist memes. Is that correct? Also one of the admins on anarchist memes, yes. Very cool. So today's episode, before we get started, I do want to thank some Patreon Donators, Rev Mira Bebe, Barry DeFord, Phoebe, K. Peck, and Jace Paul, all donated to our Patreon this week, so I just wanted to give you guys a shout out and thank you very much for that.

So we can get into the episode. The episode is going to be common arguments waged against the left. So I think this is going to be helpful for a lot of our listeners that have, you know, no doubt been addressed with these criticisms to maybe bolster up, you know, your arguments or for younger comrades who come to this podcast to learn about leftist ideas, hopefully this will help you in your own political development and help you in your debates. And I also think it just kind of, you know, boosts understanding across, you know, across the entire left just to have these arguments laid out and have, you know, three different types of leftists address those issues. So before we get into those questions, I just kind of wanted to do a little

a tendency check to see where we all stand because people all over the left, all over the left of the spectrum listen to our show. And it might help to hear where these answers are coming from tendency-wise. So Jeff, if you wanted to kind of share your tendency. Sure, I'm a anarcho-communist but came to a disposition by way of Marxism first, more council communist Lexenbergism and whatnot and just progressing through anarchoicism to close them until where I'm at now. Okay, Christy. I am also an anarcho-communist.

I am a Marxist, first and foremost. That is where I draw my theory. I also believe that communism, at its final stages will be a dissolution of the state and that's where the anarchism kind of comes into my philosophy. Yeah and I guess I'm kind of

I thought it might have been a little more diverse but I guess I'm in that same exact area you know the left communist, council communist Rosa Luxembourg-esque sort of Marxist heavily influenced by anarchism so I think we're all kind of on the same page with that so let's go ahead and begin. What we're going to do is we're going to 10 questions. We're going to have both of them answer and then if there's something that I feel

could be added in at the end of each question, I'll throw in my two cents. But we're just going systematically go through 10 questions that are often aimed at the left. So starting off, question number one. The left is too obsessed with class. This can often lead to the downplaying of non-class based forms of oppression like racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, et cetera. Christy, would you like to start? It's important to understand that Marx was speaking as a European male and to a primarily European male audience. So a lot of misunderstanding or simply erasure happened with post-Marxists.

However, Marx actually spoke quite a bit about intersectionality. He talked about a pre-communist manifesto. He talked about the intersection of race, gender, and class, specifically talked about slavery in the United States, and how that has been built. Modern-day capitalism and consumerism was built upon that. He discussed it in capital itself, when he discussed labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin. He understood the implications of race in the entire class conversation. He discussed gender specifically in ethnological notebooks. It's important for us as post-Marxists to address everything through the lens of intersectionality.

We have to really look at how these different identities intersect and, interact with one another. But we have wonderful examples of people that do just that. Patricia Hill Collins is a wonderful author that discusses intersectionality a great deal in her work. But we have others. So I think that if you're paying attention and reading the material, you absolutely understand intersectionality within communism. It's there. It's vibrant and it's very clear. Absolutely. Jeff. I would only add that whereas liberals may notice the modalities of racism or sexism or homophobia, one neglecting class, socialism takes them all into account.

In doing so correctly analyzes the full spectrum of the oppression dynamics at hand. And that's something unique to socialism, and it's a blind spot for the rest of the other ideologies, capitalism, specifically, and liberalism. And to the extent that socialists are class reductionists, it's a flaw, it's an error. But I think there's a strong tendency, the dominant tendency in socialism to issue class reductionism. I think in my personal observations, it's the minority that engages in class reductionism or people who are just new to socialism and people more in the know are always there to lend them a helping hand, so to speak, and help them remember intersectionality better. Yeah, and I think any time that you're in a leftist circle and somebody is being a class

reductionist, you're absolutely right. Depending on the mood of the forum or how well people know other. It can be more of a call-out or it can be more of an educational time. But either way, class reductionism is honestly never allowed in any, you know, socialists or leftist circles that I'm a part of. And I also think it's telling that in the U.S., especially, in all over the world, but the U.S. since that's where we're based, when you look at the civil rights movement, or you look at the feminist movement, or you look at any sort of liberation movement, communist socialist and anarchists have always been there and those liberation movements have always had leftist edges to them the black panthers wasn't explicitly you know socialist leftist movement

and so to say that the left is so obsessed with class that it denies these other things is not only wrongheaded it's also extremely a historical and any even a cursory examination of history would disabuse you of that notion that it's a real deeply entrenched problem i think jeff's right when he says that it can be a problem or an error that's committed by people that are new to the movement that are just trying to gain their footing and learn about things those errors are made but usually it's it's it's grown out of somebody over time and then they leave that behind if it's even a part of their development at all well and quite honestly we have to remember that any movement is made up of human beings and so if you have someone who's entrenched in

privilege sometimes it's difficult for them to really kind of peel those away and dismantle that and see things in that more intersectional way. So that's kind of a learning process for human beings, period. But again, you're right. In every leftist organization that I'm a part of, in every discussion, intersectionality is held to be the lens that we use. Or it's wrong. And we will call it out for what it is. Absolutely. All right, moving on to question number two. Under socialism, there would be no incentive to work, much less work hard. Without a monetary incentive, what will prompt people to create or invent, Jeff? This argument is extremely ideological, ideologically rooted in capitalism. People are very creative naturally, and it doesn't require any sort of coercion to make us labor, to make us work. That's something we normally want to do.

Most people don't want to sit around all day, twilling their thumbs or play an Xbox. And really, this is something that this leisure time of doing nothing is really something that being forced to work causes people to want to do. So people in a capitalist society are really alienated from their own labor and this breeds dissatisfaction. What compels people to work in a capitalist society is coercion. It's forced. It's being, you know, forced to pay it. someone for your basic survival needs, no one's doing labor they actually enjoy. No one actually believes that if they work harder, that it's going to pay off in any

substantial way. Everyone's just, the working class, I mean, is just working in order to survive and to hold on. And if this were to change, if the workers were to be liberated, if they were to control their own work spaces and control the value and the commodities and the services which they produce, their lives would be immeasurably happier. They would be able to throw off the subordination, which the capitalist modality forces them to endure in order to survive. They would not have nine tenths of the wealth they produce, which is what the average American worker now has approximately

taken from them by their bosses. That would all go to them, or they would have control over it. And they can share in the wealth, the poverty that we know in any capital. capitalist society would effectively disappear and people would have choices over their labor, what kind of labor they did, how long they would labor, they would, you know, they'd be able to collectively decide these things with their fellow workers. There would be many more incentives to work and to do good job. And these incentives for people in a socialist system to work would be things like social pressure. It would be necessity still. And these things all exist in capitalist system, but in capitalism, as I said before, there was subordination and

there's humiliation and degradation, and this would all disappear. And to the extent the necessity and social pressure would exist, it would be a completely different form. And it wouldn't be this toxic form of those things. It would just be more of a lukewarm version of those things. And that's not bad. It's okay to feel like you need to do your part in society. Yeah, I think I think as social animals, those incentives are always going to be there from the community at large. All right, Christy? I think anthropologically speaking, you can look at cultures that are not capitalist, and you still find that everyone contributes to the support of their community.

The idea that only through capitalism do human beings find the incentive to work is an amazingly bougie concept. It's propaganda that really allows bourgeoisie to control the workers. And it really isn't true. You really look at it across time and space anthropologically. And human beings work. We always have. We always will. Which doesn't mean that there aren't exceptions to the rule.

Maybe your Uncle James would rather play Xbox. And that's fine for Uncle James. But as a big, huge collective, human beings work. And so the idea that if you take capitalism away, we all change our nature is pretty ridiculous. Human beings by nature do and always have produced. And that is something that we do. The difference in capitalism is you're not producing based on your innate human nature. You're not producing what you want. You're producing what you have to. So that's one of the things that I think changes, and Marx calls it your species being, working what is your natural inclination versus, you know, I have to go into Target and be a cashier because I have to pay my phone bill. That's a completely different incentive, but it doesn't negate our actual nature.

Yeah. People want to contribute. People want to feel like they are an important addition to any community. And that right there is incentive enough, is incentive enough under the right system. It's also worth noting that all big innovations in art, philosophy, science, or technology, rarely were these innovations made because somebody was dangling a few dollars in front of the inventor's head. Whether you look at Darwin or Marx or Mary Curry or any sort of radical thinker or engineer, all of these people innovated and made good creations because they were compelled internally to do that thing. And those compulsions are deep inside of the human mind because I think the human mind is in large part creative. And I think that once people are freed from the

constraints of an economically coercive system like capitalism, that natural urge to create will come out and it will come out in more beneficial ways. It won't be stymied and it won't be locked in because they have to get up for most of their waking life and go, you know, toil away for a few bucks an hour. It's also important to think about this whole conversation in the context of automation. As more and more of our jobs get automated, there'll be less and less need for a lot of these jobs that we currently do. You know, if you're a cashier at Target or you do administrative work in an office like I do, a lot of these jobs can and, ultimately will be done away with, and that will free human beings to pursue their own

interests and their own hobbies, while the things that need to get done are still done. They're just done by machines and technology and whatnot. So it's important to think of that inside of this conversation. Question number three, socialist oppose private property. Doesn't this mean that we will have to share everything? I like owning my house, for example. So why would anyone want to give that up? Well, when communists or socialists refer to private property, they're actually referring to the

private ownership of industry or the means of production. They're not referring to your house or your toothbrush or your car. They're referring to the means of production. So who is controlling what is produced? At this point in time, it's capitalists. You work, you sell your labor, and then a man at the top makes the money. In communism, that wouldn't be the case. You get to control your own labor and the production that you as a community do. However, we do believe that it is based on your need. So if you have 12 kids, then you might need a bigger house than someone who only got him and his wife.

So your private property, your personal belongings, let me clarify that. that's something that's going to be based on your needs. But our value systems change under communism. So driving the biggest SUV possible and having that amazingly huge mini mansion is no longer going to be something that gives you your value as a human being. The materialism changes. So all of a sudden, your value is based on who you are as an individual, individual, is your character on the way that you live your life. It's not based on what job

title you have and what kind of car you drive. So we have to remember that when we talk about changing these structures, it's with value and culture as well. So personal belongings are completely fine under communism. You get to keep your own house. But what that means is and what that looks like might change as the culture changes. Just like 100 years ago, your grandma and grandpa, great-grandma and grandpa, had a small little house, and they were thrilled with it. They were in love with their little tiny cracker box. And now we consider those things starter homes because you wouldn't want to continue

to live in that tiny little house. But that's because our culture changed, and we became much more materialistic. So culture changes. It's fluid. it would change again under communism but you still have a house it's still your house it's not necessarily owned by um you know honestly by the bank so exactly jeff um well when i talk to people about this issue um who don't understand socialism usually what i start out with is explain that their definitions of what is is private property are are they they assume this means uh their personal

possessions, which, as Christy pointed out, it absolutely does not mean that. And so I frame it in the context of having relationships with things. In capitalism, people who have no relationship with the means of production are allowed to control the means of production, are allowed to control, you know, the factories, are allowed to control the natural resources, which the working class uses to produce value, and which the rest of society needs for survival. And what socialism proposes I go on to explain is that if one has a relationship with something, and this can be the means of production, or it can be obviously your personal possessions,

then you have a right based on that relationship to those things. So if you're a worker at a factory, you have a fractional right to decide, you know, how that factory is run with your, with your coworkers and your home, you know, that's your personal space. and therefore your relationship with it is unique in particular. And so you have more rights than anyone else in society or a particular right. And I also like to explain that unlike capitalism, socialism actually has a metric for ownership.

Capitalism has none. I mean, if you go back anywhere, Hayek-Smith, Von Meese, anybody, there's no metric articulated for how one should control something. It's simply capitalism is might makes right and then everything else comes after as an excuse and so in socialism, you know, there's use. Are you using this thing presently? And then there's occupancy. Are you occupying it? Did your labor create it in need? And so in socialism, all these things are weighed out in a fair way based on the varying vectors of one's relationship vis-a-vis those criteria. And I find people usually respond to that much better when you put it in those terms. that's my that's my go-to explanation and touching back on that might makes right metric for capitalism I like to ask people capitalists liberals and you know the more ardent libertarians what entitles someone to something under capitalism and they'll fall over all over themselves trying to say that someone's labor someone's economic investments and and whatnot and you can very easily shoot those down because those things absolutely do not

not entitle anyone. And we can all think of 100 examples of why not. The guy who's picking strawberries for Driscoll does not own the profits of Driscolls and so on and so forth. So that's why I usually like to start in with. And it usually doesn't go very far after that in my experience. Yeah. Because capitalists are kind of, they don't understand capitalism at all and they don't understand socialism even more. Exactly. Okay, because question four touches on a lot of these it kind of expands the question a bit when it comes to private property i.e. the private ownership of the means

of production isn't it unfair to capitalists since they are the ones that take the risk of initial investment and therefore are entitled to a profit Jeff you can start with this one I always like to point out that this is completely

circular logic it's title logical they're using modality of capitalism which requires us investment to own things to own the means of production as a justification for

the thing itself for capitalism and that's just illogical for obvious reasons and another thing I like to touch on is that capitalist apology has verbatim analogs with slavery apology.

I mean, capitalist apology is essentially just slavery apology rebuffed and reconnoiter for tablism specifically really just by adjusting the pronoun. So instead of slaves and masters, we're talking about bosses and workers. And this was also an argument that people used to justify slavery. And it was wrong because slavery is wrong. And for the same reasons, it's wrong because exploitation is wrong.

Nothing legitimizes exploitation, even if you invest money in the hopes that it will return something that still doesn't give you to explain people. It's a completely immoral argument. And like I said, it's an logical one because it's based on the specific modality of the

ideology there attempting to defend with it. Absolutely. Christy? No, I mean, I think we really kind of covered everything that I would speak about. I mean, the fact I think he hit the nail on the head. If you

just because you and made an investment, it doesn't give you the moral right to exploit labor. And that's essentially what the argument states because you invested this money, then it's okay then to make profit off of exploited labor. And what we're saying is, no, it's not. It's not okay to coerce and to trap another human being in this cyclical this poverty cycle um so i i think he he hit the nail on the head i think we've

covered it but i don't think ultimately we have a moral um right to do that yeah and i also think it's worth asking where did the initial wealth come from and once you start examining wealth and it's its origins you have to start tracing back to the beginning of capitalism now capitalism was fundamentally founded, at least in the United States, which then went global, on two major crimes against humanity. The enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans. Absolutely. The enslavement of Africans gave American capitalism the jumpstart it needed. It was hundreds of years of free labor, which produced an economy that was strong enough to create a large

military, which created imperialism and on down the line. And then the genocide of Native Americans cleared out untold acres of land for this capitalist development. to then take place. So all wealth that we currently have in this system is rooted in some of the worst things that human beings have ever done on the planet. And then even after slavery, you had segregation, you had institutional racism, which we still have. So that again pushed money to some people's pockets and took it out of other people's pockets. So the whole origin and the geneal of wealth in the world is founded on this corrupt immoral root system. And also, as Jeff said, it is taking what we assume what the capitalist mindset is right now and then elaborating

that into the future. The fact is under socialism, the ways that investment is made and the way that people are compensated for their labor will be totally different. So you can't take what it currently is the truth and then say that will always be the truth and therefore it's inherently unjust to make a change. So the real question is how do we transition away from capitalism and into socialism? And we can have those debates because there's going to have to be a transition phase where some people that currently have private property, that's going to have to be taken away. Now that historically has been done via violent revolution, but there's other ways that could be done. In Cuba, when Castro took over, there was large chunks of land owned by

foreign companies. And just to kind of start off in good faith, Castro and his government offered to pay for that land with bonds over time because the treasury was ransacked by Batista's regime as they as they tuck tail and ran. So even in that context, Castro tried to pay for the land so that he could give it back to the people. So it's really the transition away from capitalism that we would be arguing about with these questions. But everything that Christy and Jeff said, totally true. And yeah, so that's what we're what I have to say about that. Anything else you guys want to say on that? Often, you know, these people who make these investments or put down this money are just taking out loans.

It's nothing, you know, that they haven't earned money as a worker and put it away. And now they're throwing this harder money down. This is just money that literally the banks have created and they're bequeathing to these people. And then they put the worker on the hook for the rest of the wealth. And then, you know, once the wealth is paid, the work does not then become a co-equal. It doesn't turn into a cooperative. You know, they're still getting nine-tenths of their labor value stolen from them. With regards to the violence, inherent in reclaiming or expropriating private property, you know, a lot of times in history, it hasn't been violent, save when the owning classes retaliated against workers simply something.

saying, you know, this is ours now. It's always been ours, and now it's ours. And, you know, we've stopped recognizing your right to this. It needn't be violent. Contrary to this the hyperbole of capitalist, you know, capitalist defenders, the, you know, workers rarely, you know, are this bloodthirsty group of people who want to go around in revolutionary times. You know, we want peace. We want to just have peaceful lives. And really, the only violence comes when there's the counter revolution, when there's the attempt to take back what workers have just decided what they're going to sit on and claim.

And I would add to that and I would say that there's legitimized violence, there's violence that we just accept as part of our lives, and then there's violence in which is considered bad. So right now there's this big push about the left, being violent. And again, we don't have to be violent. But we don't ever talk about the violence within capitalism. We don't talk about the fact that there are workers that don't have health care and are dying from these factories and these working conditions that are horrible to their health. They can't get the health care to save themselves. That's violent. You are literally

taking a human being, exploiting their labor, poisoning them, and refusing to then take care of them. We're not talking about the fact that the police state is extraordinarily violent. If you go out there with a sign, you're subject to be hit in the face with a bike. You're subject, if you're a black man, to be shot and killed at three times the raid of white men. I'm sorry, but I think that's pretty violent. I think that the violence that they keep talking about is something that They perpetuate upon those people who don't agree with their terms. And that's something that we have to clarify. Yep.

And every time working people in the entire history of capitalism have come together to try to fight for better rights, they've been met with the brutal violence of the state in the form of the National Guard or the police as the capitalists sit back and, you know, kind of orchestrate the whole ordeal. So this system is already inherently violent, and it's always been inherently violent. I just wanted to add one more point about investment before we go on to the next question. A big reason what a corporation is is a limited liability corporation. That's what it's actually called because that creation of a corporation in that sense is to take

risk away from the individual capitalist. So if the company fails, that debt will fall on the company's shoulders, on the investor shoulders, but the individual capitalist might be able to get away more or less unscathed. It doesn't come out of his personal pockets. So even when we talk about this huge risk of initial investment, investment, it really depends on how big the business is and what kind of investment it is, because in a lot of cases, there isn't even that big of a risk at all to the individual capitalist. But having said that, let's move on to question number five. Rich people are rich because

they worked hard to obtain that wealth, and poor people are poor because they didn't work as hard as the rich person. Christ, do you want to start? Absolutely, this is rhetoric, 100%. First of all, a lot of wealth in that top 1% is inherited wealth. So that person did not work hard. Trump did not work hard to get his wealth. It was given to him. It was a small loan of a million dollars. A small loan, a million dollars.

So I think it's important that we understand the role of inheritance. I think that over the next three decades, the world's ultra-high net worth community who are going to bequeathed $16 million, trillion dollars in cash property and assets to the next generation of ultra-wealthy. Just to put that into perspective, the most recent U.S. GDP figures from, I think, I don't know,

it was like 2013 or something, was $17 trillion. So these people are about to bequeath the entire U.S. GDP. This is not wealth that they've worked for. This is mommy and daddy's money. And it's handed down over generation to generation to generation. But that aside, we also need to look at what being poor really means or what being well-off really means. It's an access to opportunities. So if you are wealthy, you have a very different access to education to health care to networking.

We don't get to study the 1% very much, but one thing that has been made clear in studies is that these folks network and they create a very solid glass floor in which they cannot fall through. So this is not the, this is not someone who's working really, really hard. Zuckerberg is kind of an exception to the rule. And there's always exceptions to rules. That's the, that's an anthropological truth. But in all, poor people generally are poor generationally, rich people are generationally rich. And that is because there is really limited social mobility and capital, it doesn't, it doesn't flow the way that. they tell us it does. Yeah, and those stories of rags to riches are amplified while the inherited wealth

are downplayed in the national mythos. You know, when wealth is talked about, the few people that go from rags to riches, they're really elevated as like, this is an example of capitalism, but the people that just get their wealth handed down to them generation to generation, you don't see movies about them. You don't hear stories about them. Right, because you have to, you have to consider who is controlling this dialogue. Who's controlling this conversation? Is it the poor person who's speaking out and saying, hey, this is actually the way that it is for me? No, no, no. It's the rich people who want to control labor.

And so they are controlling the discourse. They have access to all of the mainstream media outlets, whether that is social media, whether that's mainstream newspapers, whether that's all of these wonderful CNN and control. trillion other, you know, 24-hour news stations. They're the ones controlling the discourse, and they want you to believe a certain thing. Yeah. Jeff? One thing I, you know, when this comes up in a argument with folks, I like to always point out that 100% of wealth is created by labor. The owning class produces literally no wealth. Their wealth comes entirely through owning and not through any labor whatsoever and that this wealth is you know so stolen from the work class

and there's really no way of determining who works hard or who deserves more than anyone else if they're working I often point out to people that you know a bigger person a bigger person who's stronger may be able to lift more widgets in a given day but the person is smaller and has a more difficult time and can lift less is often going to be regarded as a person who worked harder they're you know they'd be sweated more they're obviously more physically exhausted um so who who deserves what another issue is the way in which all labor is connected and so i'll go on these long lists um just to make the point where you know you got a farmer and that farmer needs tractors and tractors require mechanics and mechanics require uh roads to

work. And roadmakers require people to extract ore and those people and so on and so forth. And you could really just go on and on and on. And the connectivity of labor, it crosses industry, across the

geography, and it crosses time itself. You know, we're still, to this day, relying on the labor of people who are dead and gone. And people who worked on the Grand Coulee Dam. How long will that thing be up and be providing power to the factories of

Puget Sound and surrounding areas. So studying who deserves labor is essentially an impossible task. It's trying to objectively quantify what is a subjective determination. And so

what socialists do rightly is say, okay, we're all in this together. We all have rights to access. You know, you do your part. You don't have to, you know, lift as many widgets as the strong guy, but you just do your part and you will have access to, you know, all that the working class produces, whereas in capitalism, you know, people who do no labor and produce no wealth

control 90% of it. Yeah, and I always bring up the notion that capitalism is already a redistributive economic system. It redistributes wealth from the bottom and the middle to the very top. And you can even say from the past generations of humanity to the country to the current very top. So it's already a redistributive system. So you're already working on an economic paradigm that does not reward hard work necessarily, but that redistributes it to the people that have the most wealth and that can turn that wealth into power. It's also worth noting that the latest

Oxfam study shows that six men own more wealth than the bottom half of human beings on planet earth. So if you're going to take this argument to its logical conclusion, you would have to argue something like these six men just do more work than billions of people or hundreds of millions of people or however, however that math breaks down. And once you start doing that, you just find the utter absurdity at the base of this argument. And then finally I'd point out that there is no equality of opportunity. And in that context, when a poor kid in a ghetto with black skin in America and a white kid in a rich, you know, suburban area of the most, you know, wealthiest city in the country, those two kids do not have equality of opportunity. So when that's the

base and everything starts from that, when the game begins, it's already rigged. And so when you're talking about the rich people are rich because they worked hard, well, that poor black kid in the ghetto has to work hundred times harder than that rich suburban white kid does to get to the equal level. So without equality of opportunity, this entire argument falls apart immediately. Oddly, too, you know, you often have, the people who, I argue with you who support capitalism are almost always workers. They're very, very rarely people who are, you know, the owning class or what your uncle excluded, Brett. Yeah. But the, you know, these workers are, when I asked them,

On a personal, I say, well, is this your experience? When you work harder, do you get more wealth? And it's almost always no. In fact, categorically, it's no. I never had someone say yes. You know, you talk to someone about it. And they'll say, no, the more work I do, that just becomes my new standard. I don't get more money.

My boss just expects more for me. Well, they give me a pat on the back and, you know, think that that pat on the back should be reward enough. It's sort of patronizing, you know, the way the bosses will patronize the workers like that. Always. So that's something I like to add to you. I always ask them if that's their experience. And they always say no.

Yeah. Carry on with the tournament. Yeah. At my job, when we had a really busy season, it comes around every year. We have a very busy season. Everybody's pressed to the medal, you know, trying to do their job. And it's very difficult. And what our company did afterwards was they gave us a free bowling trip.

So for two hours, we got to stay on the clock and go bowling. And that was supposed to be like, thank you for all your hard work. I'm like, look at my fucking paycheck. I want more money in that fucking paycheck. I don't want to go fucking bowling with my boss. Right. Or they'll do the, you know, work lunches, or it's your Christmas party or any number of things. But these are not true reflections of the labor you produced.

Exactly. Question number six. We're kind of moving a little bit away from the economy here. Antifa opposes free speech and uses violence against the far right. Doesn't that make them just as bad as the fascists? Aren't Antifa the real fascists? Jeff, you can start? The narrative of the alt-right in these rallies of late,

these are free speech rallies, is a dishonest and ludicrous narrative. Not only are these people not actually pushing the boundaries of what is legal speech, but they are actually rallies with the main objective of organizing, recruiting, agitating, and normalizing, fascism racism and racism and xenophobia um you know that that's the real point these things it has nothing to do with speech speech is just sort of the um shield they use to disguise uh what they're actually attempting to do and any time you go to these rallies i was at one uh on saturday um with

antifa there's a local yokel named joey gipson um who likes to uh hold these free speech rallies you know they're they're completely populated by white supremacists and proud boys and these people wearing uh racist helmets for example this is one guy that comes that says right with a helmet that says the goym no um joey gibson and his elk aren't aren't um as i say pushing the boundaries of free speech this is just their narrative and anyone who tries to pick up this narrative of speech is acquiescing to the bullshit narrative of racist. All right, Christy. I think it's important for us to agree as a society what is acceptable and not acceptable.

And that is the center of a lot of this conflict. And that's okay, because change comes from conflict. So let's go ahead and have this conflict. but you can't lie and say that this is free speech when in fact it's hate speech. That lie allows people to cover their actions because it's not socially acceptable. It's not socially acceptable to make these expletives as overtly as they're doing. We are pushing back as the left, as people who are anti-fascists, against that narrative, like Jeff used that word, because we're saying that that is not socially acceptable. This hate speech, this racism, this transphobia, this misogyny, all of this stuff is unacceptable.

and we're going to push back and there's going to be conflict because we need to make that cultural shift to rid our culture of these hateful things, these oppressions that people face every day. We cannot stand for the oppression of Muslims. We cannot stand for the oppression for anti-Semitism. We cannot stand for racism. we cannot stand for these things because we have to make a stand on a moral platform

that says these oppressions are not okay and that's where this conflict leads but we can't lie and pretend that it's free speech it's not free speech, it's hate and it's the perpetuation of this power and it's unacceptable. Yeah, and the big irony with fascist hiding behind the notes

of free speech is that in every society where fascists has ever taken power, they've always squashed the free speech of other people. When you commit the Holocaust or, you know, in Spain, when you slaughter leftists and workers, you know, by the tens of thousands, you're suppressing their free speech. There's never been a fascist society that is not violent and there's never been a fascist society that allowed a robust set of rights for all its inhabitants. So every time that they come together, they start flying their flags, they are recruiting and organizing to bring to fucking power that exact same historical tendency. And so that is already violent. So any militant reaction to it is inherently self-defense. That doesn't make anti-father real fascists.

It makes them the only people with the guts to stand up to fascists and not let it happen here. And I think something just kind of off topic, something that you hear a lot of is that Antifa wears all black and covers their face. But they're not covering their face because they're cowards. They're facing down some pretty hateful human beings. They're covering their face to keep their families safe, their identities protected, because these folks do come after you. And they come after your family and they come after your employment.

and they search you out. So covering your face is a means of protecting your loved ones as much as yourself. It's not cowardly. We're still facing baseball bats. Yeah. And they exist in the context of a police state, of a surveillance state with cameras all around. And the police are way more sympathetic to the fascist right than they are the revolutionary

left. And when push comes to shove, we've seen it over and over and over again. The police will crack down on the far left. and if so if so we're not the you know the anti-fascist aren't just fighting the fascist right you're also fighting the state because the state is going to identify more with the fascist right than it is with the revolutionary left by definition almost maloma county republicans the biggest most populous county in oregon uh same county portland's in um they've these monoma county republicans have um teamed up with the three percenters and the oathkeepers who they have

have now allowed to perform private security for them. She had oathkeepers and three percenters June 4th at this big alt-right rally to get some national tension. People like Jeremy Christian, the guy who stabbed to death, two people on a light train here in Portland up at several of these events, he'd been obviously whipped into a bit of a fervor into action by these events and the people who he felt. common cause with. And that's what these rallies produce. They produce kicking violence. They produce a more violent, more militant, more radicalized, or for lack of a better term, fascist

milieu. And that's why Antifa shows up like they do. It's to stop that from happening. Just stop more Jeremy Christians from acting, from feeling that they have a base of supporter. It's about making this seem not normal to people and their movement is not succeeding or growing but dwindling and that is not metastasizing right yeah and just just here in omaha um a week or two ago we had a hate crime in the city where um some alt-right neo-nazzi types you know saw this black man get out of his car and after he had gone into wherever he was going they walked over and they smashed in his window and they left a little calling card in the in the glass shards and it was just basically it said you know alt right with like half the swastika

and it said Trump is the first step we are the next join us now and then it linked to like you know a couple podcasts and a website or whatever far right wing neo-Nazi websites and podcasts and podcasts and the media covered it and threw that card all over the internet and all over TV and people were wondering why would you smash the window in of you know somebody that you're being racist against and leave a recruitment card there like that guy's going to come to your rallies and be a part of your team of course not

but the reason they did it is because they knew the media in their search for ratings would pick up that picture of that card and spread it all over the news all over Facebook all over the newspaper and that's how they recruited so they kind of it's not even that clever because you know the media and you know how they're going to act

but that's the sort of stuff they do they initiate violence they create violence and then whenever the far left comes to push back against that violence, the media and the center and the liberals and the libertarian right and the conservative right and of course the far right, they'll all team up and be like, the revolutionary left is the real problem. But if you look at these circumstances, tell me when the last communist mass shooting happened. Tell me when the last anarchist, you know, bombed a train or did or killed innocent people. It's always the fascist right that walks into

abortion clinics and shoots up people, that walks into a black church and kills a bunch of people while flying a Confederate flag or stabs people in the neck on a train because they're trying to stop him from harassing a Muslim girl. It's always the far right that brings violence. And it's always only the far left that's willing to step up and offer some militant self-defense while liberals, you know, hand ring and wave their fingers. Absolutely. And I think that's an important distinguishment to make. Liberals are not the left. So when we're talking about the Democrats and someone who might be labeled a Democrat

who might be involved in some sort of violent action that's still not the left that's still a completely different breed yeah and it's precisely the neoliberalism that the Democrats and the liberals promote that give rise to the far right

that create the conditions that allow the far right to come up and so when you're fighting fascism you also have to simultaneously be fighting the conditions that give rise to them. And that means fighting the neoliberal world order. And another thing I like to point out, too, when I'm talking to people about Antifa, in addition to saying these are not actual legitimate free speech events, is that far-right populism, xenophobia in fascism, or even proto-fascism, which are all arguably sort of co-dangerous in a similar way that doesn't really warrant a distinction, have always required

a militant response in the end. These claims have, you know, the left being too violent, have always permeated the resistance. And sometimes the left has actually acquiesced to them. And invariably, what's happened is to the extent that fascism is tolerated and to the extent that they're ignored, which is another tactic that people often urge leftists to take, is that they have entrenched themselves and they have grown in fascism. thrives in that environment they want you to ignore them they want you to do anything but be militant militancy is ultimately in every case of fascism literally required to suppress and roll back

that fascism that's true for the mosleites obviously true for Mussolini and hitler and the various fascist regimes in the 30s and 40s but it's true of the edel it's true of every instance in France, in Sweden, in the United States, in the UK, there's not one exception to this. And to the extent that we do not act militantly now, it will just mean we'll have to act more militantly and that there'll be more innocent people hurt in the future. Absolutely. So it's actually the more ethical option is to be militant from the get-go. That's a great point.

All right, well, we're running out of time. So I'm going to just do two more questions. Questions number nine and ten, if that's the right with you guys. Question number nine, kind of piggybacking off of our last question, a common argument I hear is Hitler was a socialist. The Nazis called themselves national socialist, and so a lot of people on the right or in the center will throw that in the left's face.

Christy, would you like to start with this one? Well, I think this requires some historical knowledge. First of all, the National Socialist Party, Hitler's Party, was formed fairly early on, and it changed quite often. One of the things that Hitler was good at was politics, and he did promise certain labor unions, for example, all sorts of wonderful things if they joined up with his party to help grow the party. However, as soon as he gained power, none of those promises were upheld.

It was not socialist. It did not hold two socialist values. It did not follow a socialist ideology. It was nationalist, which under communism is not something that we are. We are not nationalist. And it followed race heavily, the German race. So these things, these are antithetical for, Communism. It doesn't exist. It's not socialist. What it is is a big mishmash of ideas

that Hitler created over time to achieve his goal, which was power. It wasn't, it was not ideologically any one thing in truth. So Hitler was not a socialist. It takes very little historical reading to figure that out. And when he got power, he fought really, really hard against socialists and communist. They were one of the first targets for Hitler when he assumed power. It wasn't just Jews or disdifferently able people. It was also communists and socialists. he he did not believe in those in those ideologies he preached against them often it just happened to be in the title of his mishmash crap party jiff yeah yeah um you know people have talked this is a big one that um right wingers like to throw and and all right wingers from uh contemporary ones

to the right wingers in the 40s in the 30s and the 20s you know are historically and philosophically illiterate like almost every single one across the across the line like they just don't know what they're talking about and so these kind of things throw them they will make these proclamations about who they are based on misunderstandings so that's why you have today's libertarians who are these you know these some capitalist no-nothings decided they like the word it sounded nice and so they would take a word which has always meant communism what was that was coined um to me communism to mean anarchism specifically and you know Hitler did the same thing um you know there's I've read some things that you know the initial nucleus of the Nazi party which came out of

something called the Thule Society which is a bunch of right wing dorks basically 30s version of the alt-right the Nazis fundamentally murderously hated socialism and they mass murder socialists it was among the first things they did you know when the Reichstag fire happened immediately Hitler criminalized socialism. Concentration begins were built for socialists. Socialists were sent to concentration camps. Socialists fought Nazis in the Brown Church and the, you know, the essay in the

brown church in the streets. You know, there was no one back then was confused about whether or not Hitler was a socialist. It's only today's no-nothing weirdos who go, hey, it says socialism and national socialism, therefore, you know, it's

religiousist. It's revisionist. It allows us to control and change the discourse. If the Nazi Party would be called National Democrats, today's right means would say that's what democracy is. Just because it's in the title. It doesn't matter what's in the title. They don't hold, curiously, they don't hold like North Korea or Afghanistan or the Congo to the same standard. All these regimes call themselves democratic.

But for some reason, no one quite believes they are. And yet, you know, they're North Korea somehow socialist because it says it is. right mean they're just very confused and they pick and choose and they're it's intellectual dishonesty every time and it's propaganda it's it's who's controlling the the discourse you have you always have to look at that so who who is who is talking about this and why are they talking about it is a is a great first question you're not you're not getting socialist confused about whether or not Hitler was a Nazi you're getting people who either a don't have much understanding outside of these mainstream media venues, or you're having people

who have an agenda, who are trying to push their agenda. And their agenda is to cast dispersion upon the left. Yep. Yeah, either you're being cynical and manipulative, or you're so out of touch with reality that you're just taking the word on its face value and making a whole argument off of it. And the cognitive dissonance is just, is, is remarkable. You know, these same people can admit that, you know, there's no Nazis out there who regard themselves as socialists.

And there's no Nazis out there are like, yeah, like Karl Marx. There's none. And they, people who will acknowledge this. But at the same time, they'll go, oh, yeah, well, you know, Nazis were socialists. But these are the same people who, you know, they stub their toe. They blame Karl Marx. They just want to make everything bad socialism. everything yeah you know my the paint's chipping on my house it's damn socialists yeah so i have a few

responses too to to add on top of this pile um there's that famous poem that says first they came for the communist and i wasn't a communist so i didn't speak up then they came for the socialist blah blah blah everybody knows that poem that poem is literally about the nazis going after the communist and the socialist so i just think it's funny that that's something that everybody knows but in these arguments it's never brought up the second point is is in mind conff it's himself, Hitler went out of his way to connect Jewish people with the Bolsheviks and Marxism. He would use the two terms, like when he used one in a sentence, he would go out of his way to use the other in a sentence to just tie those two things together.

And as both of you have said, the moment he took power, leftists were among his first victims. Even in Nazi Germany, the conservatives and the liberals offered cover for the Nazis. The liberals laughed and mocked the Nazis thinking they'll never do anything. They're just a fringe group, just like they do now. And the conservative said, we can use, you know, this support for this Nazi party for our own benefit and both ended up getting steamrolled. And then my final point on this would just be to make some big comparisons. The whole notion of the Aryan race and this bullshit mythology that the Nazis built up around, you know, this fake history of this wonderful race that, you know, was superior to all of the races, I mean, that's thoroughly idealist. and on the left we like to adhere to a materialist understanding of history and of race and of the

world and so right there there's a big split there's also the split that christie mentioned nationalism versus internationalism the only times leftism is used in a nationalist context is for nationalist liberation against colonialist oppressors but it's never a hypernationalist in and of itself movement it never has been it's always been internationalist and then the last one would be leftist favor equality while nazism and fascism they favor not only hierarchy but a brutal hierarchy based on race and privilege and wealth and it's almost like this this hyper reinforcement of the hierarchies that exist in capitalism so whenever there's a revolutionary movement that gains steam against capitalism it's always the fascists that get drawn out to kind of use the brutal

force of fascism to reassert those hierarchies that are being challenged So on every single front, this whole argument falls apart at the seams. And really the only person that could uphold this argument is either a deeply ignorant person or just a deeply absurdist, you know, cynical person that's just trying to throw out this shit argument as a last resort. Or has an agenda. Yeah, exactly. And as Jeff said earlier, literally, they were leftists in the streets that were fighting

Nazis, that were fighting the brown shirts. Absolutely. I really, I'm glad you made the point. Hitler was very conscious and methodical in his tying of Jews to communists and socialists. So he made it a Jewish thing because he was already on that very anti-Semitic bent. So for him, Jews were communist, Jews were socialists. And so that was, that was, that was, that was part of the agenda before he ever even gained power. Yep. Okay, I've listened to all your arguments and they're pretty good. But ultimately, this is the human nature argument. But ultimately, people are naturally greedy and selfish. Socialism is antithetical to human nature and therefore it can never work.

Capitalism, on the other hand, is the most conducive to human nature. Jeff, you want to go ahead and start off with this one? Sure, there's so many tactics I think of this. Well, the first capitalism requires on tremendous charity by the working class to let this opulent minority control what we all produce and require without, you know, overthrowing them, you know, tomorrow night, which we could do if we were so inclined. You know, human beings are unequivocally in the majority, kind nature that we're passive, we're not these greedy, self-interested, inherently malicious creatures. And by the way, I like to point out, this idea comes from the 18th century notions of of Christian notions of human nature, vis-a-vis sin.

And, you know, that's what capitalism came out of. It was sort of intermarried with this Christian ideology. And so when we talk about this, it's a very religious idea. And what's curious is you often find these libertarian new atheists types who will believe this about human nature, without understanding the religious context of what they believe. Another thing is that, you know, we act like communists right now in our interpersonal relationships. You know, this is sort of what our society calls good manners or just being a decent person,

you know, from each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities. You know, this is how we act when we meet strangers. around our friends and family. If we have it, and it's not going to put us out, we'll give it, usually. You know, you can rely on a person to give you directions or give you a cigarette or whatever it is. Every small favor to a stranger, most people are willing to give. You know, the guy who doesn't pay his portion of the pizza bill or whatever, you know, regarded as a dickhead. We all understand this intuitively.

It's really just a superstructure and not the population itself that needs to be, be configured. I think the American working class would find a socialist modality very natural, comfortable. When we work, you know, we don't try to, you know, create some arrangement with a co-worker for borrowing a printer or a stapler. We don't try to gain some sort of personal leverage out of it. In fact, we'd be fired for it. You know, we're expected to act cooperatively in the workplace. So, really, as individuals, as workers, we wouldn't have a problem at all with socialism. And, yeah, I guess I'll end it there.

Christy? Well, I really liked the fact that you brought up that communists are very community-oriented. So this follows throughout time. So if we looked at Black Panthers, which you talked about earlier, they had these programs that served the people. That's how their organization really operated. It was for the people. And I know in our particular organization, Nebraska Left Coalition, as well as other local organizations on the left here, Red Plains Revolutionary, for example, we serve the community in the same way. way. And whenever I hear people talk, they're like, wow, that's so great. It's so amazing.

That's what we do. That's how we do. That's where it comes from. It's a community. It's a commune. It's it's communist. It's all related. And it's it's it's fundamental to who we are. We believe that the people should be able to care for themselves and control the care of themselves rather than have this nationalistic state control yeah and I would and I always I always like to point out evolutionary biology and anthropology because when you go back and you study the evolutionary roots of human beings you will find that naturally they cohere into into tribes into villages into communities that that the human animal is a social animal a deeply social animal that

doesn't even gain language if it's not for social interaction. As human beings, when we're driving down the road, we see somebody getting a crash. We want to stop and help them. If we see a little kid lost in the grocery store, we want to protect them and make sure they get back to their parents. It's deeply ingrained in human beings to be communally oriented and to care about one another. Because if we didn't do that evolutionarily, we would have fallen off the evolutionary tree a long time ago. Because we're not particularly strong. animals. We don't have particularly big teeth or big claws. It's our intelligence and our ability to work with others that promoted us to the level that we are today. And I would actually,

I would actually argue that alienation, this sense of hopelessness, this rise in anxiety and depression and addiction throughout the population, we're talking about opiate addictions a lot lately on the news. That alienation and that mental suffering is actually a product of capitalism because this hyper-competitive, everybody's out for themselves just to gain a dollar sort of system is actually antithetical to our evolutionary history and antithetical to who we are as human beings. So it's actually capitalism that is anti-human nature

and socialism that is its most beautiful flourishing. I would like to link something both of you said. Jeff talked about Christianity and Protestantism specifically. And we talk, you're talking about individualism versus the group. And that's something that has been studied since, since the 1800s. And it's just the way that it is. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant religion is what really created this individualistic culture that we accept as our nature.

But we, but it isn't our nature. It's something that was imposed upon us primarily by Calvinism, but throughout other, with other Protestant religions as well. But it's a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. It's European. It's not something that you see across time and space. Yeah, it's not like rooted in our biology. Right. And anthropology shows that human beings have lived at least a thousand different ways and conflicting modalities.

you know, that completely oppose each other on one end or, you know, this vector or that vector. And if anything, if human beings can go along with not having access to good health care, if human beings go along with being exploitive, people can go along with all the alienation, with all the stresses and the degradations of capitalism, then we can certainly go along much better without those things where we do have access to health care, do have access to employment or labor, which is satisfying and, you know, where we don't have to worry about our survival needs being taken from us if we miss, you know, three months worth of rent. You know, if we can, if we can exist in capitalism, then we can definitely

exist in socialism. Absolutely. Yeah. And my argument I always make is that if you're talking about human nature, you're talking about a spectrum of human behavior. And that's a pretty broad spectrum. You know, we have both serial killers and saints. You know, we have everything in between. So then the next question becomes, you know, how does a certain system incentivize different aspects of human nature? In capitalism, it's literally incentivizing some of the worst aspects of human beings, the greedy, selfish side of things. You could have a system that just implements and institutionally perpetuates incentives that work in the favor of altruism, in the favor of supporting one another. And I think once human beings have a taste of that,

they'll be a lot happier and you won't be able to take it away. I think once people actually get a healthy functioning socialist society, they will look back on capitalism in horror in the same way that we look back on slavery or the witch trials or a whole number of historical arbitrary historical events that happened in the past that just discussed us today. One day, hopefully if we survive as a species, we'll look back on capitalism in the exact same way that we look back on some of those things. And also, you know, these aren't the incentives for the average working class person. You know, no one wakes up at 6 a.m. to go to the job they hate because they think that,

you know, they're going to be able to own the company someday. They do it because they want to be able to buy groceries next week or, you know, pay off the rent this month. When people talk about these incentives based on greed and self-interest, they're really just talking about the capitalist class, the exploiting class. And they assume that everyone aspires to be this or that there's the opportunity to be this. It's really, you know, capitalist, I keep saying this term philosophical literacy. It's one of my favorite days all the time. But that's what they are.

They're completely confused about how society works. They're completely confused about what incentivizes the working class. You know, when they talk about these incentives, these aren't things that enter into the equation for working people at all. and you know the working the working class is not so naive to believe that you know if they work a little bit harder they're going to be able to own the company or that you know the life is going to be substantially easier they're just we're just hoping that you know that our immediate needs are met and that is the basic sort of modality that we live by just trying to eat by month to month or you know week to week as it may be depending our situations. Yeah, and when I think about the people that stood up for those Muslim girls and that Portland public transportation, and they paid the ultimate price with their lives, that to me is human nature.

You know, to set aside your self-interest and to really stand up for somebody else and to pay the ultimate price for that, there's nothing more beautifully human than that. And I hope that those people, they'll be remembered in our hearts and our minds for a long time because they touch on the questions of fascism, but they also touch on the questions of human nature. And there's something very beautiful inside the human being that I believe can be released if we're given the right context in which to flourish.

All right, so that's the end of our discussion today. So thank you guys both for coming on very much. Christy and Jeff, I really appreciated you guys coming on the show and throwing your two cents in. Before we leave, though, do you have any recommendations or anything for listeners who might want to learn more about any of the topics we discussed today that you could maybe recommend for them?

I like to recommend that people begin to read Howard Zinz, a people's history of the United States. I think that this gives you a materialistic understanding of the United States, and it's a history that we're not taught in our schools. We're not taught in mainstream society, but it's a history that is ours to claim and accept nonetheless. I would really recommend that if anybody is interested in communism, that they start with a communist manifesto. It's a fairly easy read.

It's a pretty thin book. And it gives you a good kind of broad understanding. I do recommend anyone read Das Kapital, Capital, by Marx. It's very hard, it's very thick. So if you're not much of a reader, definitely start with Communist Manifesto. And even if you are a reader, you take lots of breaks during capital. It's a lot to chew, but it really gives you the full critique of capitalism and a clear understanding. There's a lot of, like, Christy by my interject, there's a lot of great, you know, Mark's Readers books out there.

Right. Right. Yeah, and that was actually my next suggestion is there's any number of readers out there that, that allow you to kind of, take pieces, the kind of important pieces, and break them down and explain it in kind of modern terms. That's awesome. So I definitely would recommend those. And really, you can even do smaller pieces of Marx's writing if you go to the Marxist archives online. There's lots and lots of stuff, and you can really, you don't have to dive into the big, thick capital.

You can start to read some of his ideas, like alienation in 18. 1444 manuscripts. That's right there. So there's a lot there in that site. And there's a lot of commentary that helps you kind of digest the information. All right, Jeff. I, well, you can come over to anarchist memes on Facebook and pick our brains, if you like, ask us a question or just start to argue with us and ask, you know, and give us a private message and if you have a question. also some authors that I would like to make note of would be Peter Gelderloos he's a great author who tackles a lot of these issues in very sort of concise and short snippets or essays also David Graber is another great source

who talks about anthropology he's an anthropologist so he talks a lot about the anthropological development of human beings and the more recent book debt is a great primer for um you know how we got here um how capitalism has evolved over time and just the concept of debt and and uh economic hierarchy yeah and i guess my one recommendation just because of the format of the show um i'm going to recommend this book it's called why marks was right by terry eagleton and what he does is every chapter is uh is his best articulation of a criticism of Marxism. And there's 10 chapters. So every chapter will be a question and he'll be as charitable as possible and give it the best possible airing, just a little paragraph of the question in its best form. And then he'll spend that chapter addressing that

question systematically. So 1 through 10, he'll just knock down the most common arguments against Marxism. And it really helped me kind of formulate an intellectual base of defense, not just of Marxism, but of leftism generally, because what applies to Marxism often has a lot of overlap with anarchism and other tendencies. So I'd really recommend that book as well. So that's the end of the show. Thank you, Jeff and Christy one more time. Thank you so much for coming on. I had a great time and hopefully listeners find a lot of value in this. in the world got me down on my luck these people keep walking on my some throw money in my hat others just keep on walking I expected that and I know

that playing on the corner won't get me anywhere and I know that it might not be that good, but it makes me feel all right. Out here on the corner, the same shit, just a different day, same people keep walking on by, on by some throw money my way others just keep on walking as if they have some place to go wish I had a place to go to feels like I have no home and I know that playing on the corner won't get me anywhere and I

know that it might not be that good, but it makes me feel alright.