Rev Left Radio - Revolutionary-Guerrilla-Menace New Years Livestream!

Episode Date: December 30, 2022

We close out 2022 with a livestream!  All the members of the Revolutionary Left Radio family of podcasts came together for a two hour live Q&A that we had a ton of fun doing.  We hope you enjoy as we look ahead to 2023!   P.S. If you're on twitter, let us know what your favorite episode of the show was during 2022 - tag us @guerrilla_pod with your pick and we'll hopefully encourage some new people to check that episode out! Link to the video version of this conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2KrBF5xW6c  

Hello, everybody. Thank you so much, so much for joining us live and being patient, you know, where millennials and Adnan is, you know, Gen X, but we're acting like boomers today with these tech issues. I think we figured it out, though, and we're ready to go. So welcome, everybody. And again, thank you so much, whether you're a guerrilla history fan, Red Menace, Rev Leff fan, or a fan of all three. So happy to have you here. And this is the first time in Rev. Left history. We've had all four of us together at the same place at the same time and on top of that we get to engage directly with you our wonderful supporters and listeners

so this is going to be about 90 to 120 minutes we're going to aim for probably a hard deadline at about two hours here but we're going to get in as many questions from the chat as we can as well as questions that I collected earlier from Patreon so we can kind of resort to those at various times but yeah let's just go ahead around the horn everybody introduce yourself for the listeners although you're probably already known.

And Henry, maybe we can start with you. How are you doing? What's up? And who are you, for those that don't know? Well, it's early. It's 5 o'clock in the morning, my time. But I'm doing well overall. I'm Henry.

I'm one of the hosts of guerrilla history. Here's one of the people typing very loudly. Sorry, that way. Okay. That's okay, Allison. In any case, I'm Henry. I'm one of the hosts of guerrilla history alongside Adnan and Brett. As I always tell our guests, but I know that listeners won't ever hear this.

Pretty much the only interesting things about me are that I host the show and I currently live in Russia. So that's that's about it, about me. I'll turn it over to Allison next. Why not? Awesome. Yes. So my name is Allison. I am one of the co-hosts of Red Minus with Brett, where we tend to pick a text, dive into some review of it,

kind of get into what's going on there. We also sometimes cover current events. If you know who we all are, then you certainly know the show. I'm based in Los Angeles, and I've been, you know, doing this podcast thing for a little bit. I have had the opportunity to podcast before with Henry and with Brett, but never with Adnan before. So it's great to have everyone together and kind of, you know, have all of the Revlach family here. Adnan, I'll go ahead and hand it to you. Great.

Thanks so much, Adnan Hussein. People know me from guerrilla history. And I'm based in Canada, but am an American and visiting in the Bay Area right now. So I'm not in my normal environments. But I'm really excited by this opportunity to chat all four of us and also to engage with listeners with your questions and thoughts and get us going on about 2022 and also what's ahead. So this is very exciting. Yeah, and I think we're spanning multiple time zones here from California to Omaha, Canada, Russia. We got everything going on.

It's very early for Henry, late for me, but we're making the best of it, and we're just all happy to be here. I just want to say, just kind of as a way to open up this conversation, I'm incredibly humbled and honored to be able to work with all of you. You know, I really truly think that all three of you are objectively smarter than me. And so it's always an honor to be with you, to learn from you, to speak with you. And both Red Menace and guerrilla history have been huge in my life and have been instrumental, even in my own continued political development. So thank you all so much for doing this today and just for all the stuff we do together. It really means a lot.

And I consider each of you genuine friends of mine. Well, I'd also like to echo that myself, Brett, you know, I wouldn't say that I'm any smarter than you. I work really hard. I never sleep, but I'm also very pleased to have the opportunity to work with you and have done and have had the opportunity to chat with Allison before. I definitely would say that this is definitely one of the most since being involved with guerrilla history and having a chance to engage and interact. And I was a occasional listener of Rev Left Radio beforehand, but it's such a valuable

resource and I know so many people find great inspiration, knowledge in it and red menace. And I have myself listened to so many of the Red Menace deep dives and learn so much from them. So I think it's really great to bring us together. I've been hoping that we could call this a revolutionary gorilla menace as a life's name for us. Maybe we'll do it every once in a while and menace the world with more thoughts about revolution and guerrilla history and theoretical approaches. And I'm looking forward to the questions as well. We've got so many great questions.

Tough questions. I don't know how we're going to answer them. And just a reminder for, oh, sorry, Alison, just a reminder for listeners that we will be taking questions. So if you have anything that you want us to address, you can drop that into the live chat on YouTube. Anyway, Alison, go ahead. Yeah, I was going to just echo those sentiments. I think one thing that I love about this group of people in particular is I feel like we all have so many different perspectives at things. On Red Minnis, I really appreciate Brett and I have like very similar views on things, but somehow within those views often come at things from very different angles, which can be really cool. So having some more people here is good. And I always feel like I'm good at like the philosophy stuff, but not necessarily historical perspectives or economic perspectives. So having, you know, the three of you here who can all contribute, you know, the

side of things that you have better understandings on, I think will be really awesome for getting into these questions. Yeah, totally. All right. Well, let's do just that. Let's get into these questions. And there's a lot of great ones. We're going to try to be monitoring the chat as best as we can to continue to pull questions, but one that was asked in the chat before we went live from Carson. Carson asks, what in your, and this is a good starting question, what, in your opinion was the greatest victory for the left globally in 2022 and why? And maybe I'll go ahead and just start off with, I think, probably an obvious answer. And, you know, it is kind of hard to remember 2022. It bleeds into 2021 and 2020, you know, so I think all of these are more or less going to

fit into that time frame. But a win for the left, even with all of its, you know, other variables to consider, I think is Lula beating Bolsonaro in Brazil. I think the implications for the Amazon are huge. I know that Lula has tacked to the center just to build a coalition capable of beating Bolsonaro. But, you know, with the rise of Bolsonaro and during the Trump years and with, you know, Modi and now Netanyahu back in power, there has been a protracted period of time where reaction seems to be on the march. And to see any one of those, the links in that reaction chain break is a good thing. And specifically with the consequences for the Amazon and climate destabilization and, you know, Bolsonaro's sort of nihilistic reaction area approach of just

slash and burn it all for profit. It's a positive thing at least to see Lula get in there. And I think I just saw on Twitter before I jumped on that there was even a possible assassination attempt on Lula or a bombing or something. I didn't get the full story because I just peeped it right before I jumped on. But that just shows that, you know, even after a loss, reaction doesn't go away, it gets more violent, gets more desperate. We've seen that in the U.S. We're going to continue to see that, I think. But certainly Lula taking the mantle away from Bolsonaro can be seen broadly as a victory for the left or for the climate or for humanity, however you want to phrase it. Anybody else want to go next?

Yeah, I can go ahead and take one as well. So, you know, in the context of the U.S., which I think has global implications, what stands out to me is an incredible amount of union organizing that's happened over the last year. That's happened really interestingly across different sectors. We've seen it in education with the UC system strike, which obviously has had some complicated aspects. We've seen it with the rail strike, also with Starbucks workers, and also further, you know, unionization efforts at Amazon. And I think this kind of cross-industry unionization represents

something really big and really important that is happening in terms of the left being able to start to focus on labor and start to focus on actually organizing the working class in the site of labor itself. So that stands out to me. And obviously, I think within the imperial core, when we see this kind of organizing happening, that has the ability to potentially undermine some of the structures of capitalism here, which has global ramifications that need to be considered. You know, we have to be honest about the limits of unionism, but the development of these very broad waves of unionization to me seems globally important for the left. Yeah, I'll go quickly. I don't have anything like groundbreaking to say here. What I would say is that I'm very hesitant in terms

of saying whether we have wins or losses because it is an ongoing struggle. Even when we think that we have completed something, it is still an ongoing struggle. Ask any Cuban about the revolution in 59, of course, you know, it looks like it's a successful revolution. Batista's gone. They have a new government in charge and that government has withstood the last 63 years. But if you ask any Cuban, they will tell you that it's a very much, an ongoing revolution. So I'm always hesitant in terms of chalking things up as wins and losses. I try to look at trends rather than discrete events. But I would say, and this goes back towards what Brett was saying, Latin America was definitely,

a good trend in the last year outside of maybe Peru, but Peru is a little bit of an exceptional case here. Castillo, you know, he turned his back on his party. It seemed like he didn't know what way was up at times. And of course, we have seen this, despite his flaws, is what can only really be described as a coup in recent weeks. But other than that, much of Latin America was very positive for the left this year. Everything from Colombia to you know, Chile to some extent, although, you know, I'm not as big on Borich as many people are, you know, the withstanding of continuous attempts on the Cuban Revolution, Cuba is still up and running, you know, despite everybody might forget, but at the beginning of the year, there was more pushes to try to

overthrow the government of Cuba, which also, you know, was happening last year. We talked about this basically every year, you know, look, this year, there was more attempts to, you know, subvert the government of Cuba. It happened again. But, you know, overall, I think that Latin America is a bright spot. It's far from the only bright spot. But I think that having this kind of regional block of countries that is trending in the right direction, again, not saying that we've really won anything. But trending in the right direction all roughly at the same time does allow for more interlinkages between these countries, both one on one, in terms of bilateral or.

relations between the countries, but also in terms of, and I know that Adnan might pick up this point, redistributing global power in different ways. So looking at how some of the decisions have been going in the last year, in terms of UN votes, in terms of statements on various events that have happened in the past year, which I'm sure will come up at some point. We can see that at this point, much of Latin America is in a block with one another. kind of a liberal left block, which, well, far from being perfect, having these countries somewhat united in the stance does create more power and give them more weight when they are

making their decisions collectively on a global stage. Otherwise, if you just, you know, fractionalize Latin America into these discrete units that each have their own brain with no coordination happening between them, it's very easy to ignore any of them in particular. So I would say that Latin America right now was trending in the right direction, with Peru being a bit of an exception. And one quick comment before I handed over to Akanon is just on that Cuba attempted coup thing, it's really a textbook lesson. And this is really stark for me because we understand historically how these things have happened in the past. We like, oh, yeah, this is how the U.S. operates. They get people on the ground.

They try to, you know, set up, you know, organizations there that will be activated when needed. but it was really telling in that Cuba Qua or that attempted coup where all the media and the political class were right on it like they knew it was coming right when it occurred they all came together to get it out as much as they could it was trending on Twitter every politician had to make a statement about it all the media was covering it and you could tell that coordination was not a mistake and you can tell that by many reasons one of the one of the variables is that

it doesn't the media does not act like that in many other situations There has to be a reason for it to all come together and coordinate in such a way. And of course, just ideologically anti-Cuban, anti-Castro, anti-socialist ideology is permanent or permeates the society. So those things are going to happen. But it just seemed all too well coordinated. And it was a really interesting thing to learn from to see exactly how this plays out in real time. But Adnan, go ahead. Well, just to pick up on some of these themes, you know, I also wouldn't really say that there are a lot of obvious.

victories for the left and Henry points out that maybe we shouldn't even think of that in those terms because we're in a historical but I think it would be nice if there were at least a few clear

victories or at least things that look like very progressive developments for the left there aren't that many I mean there's some great that you mentioned but I think that we are in some kind of a transition we were chatting a little

that it feels like you know the era of neoliberalism you know whatever period of capitalism we've been experiencing in the mid late 70s to you know these financial collapses in the mid 2000s and in early 2010s that we're involved in some kind

of transition to whatever will come next and that may not be a victory for the left but it may be opportunities it may present opportunities we are looking at you know a possible you know undermining of u.s. imperial hegemony the unipolar moment so from geopolitical perspectives there may be openings and opportunities in the global south my sense is that the u.s. attempts to establish a strict regime of its so-called rules-based order are being challenged by the friends of the UN Charter, for example. There's been so much overreach in attempting to isolate

and marginalize and sanction. And we've had a great series on sanctions as war in different countries and societies that in some ways there is a natural cohesion and potential of cooperation to develop a different system, you know, that might unbalance or the dollar as the, you know, global currency. And there may be other sorts of things that take place in military terms, in military alliances, as well as these economic ones and the infrastructure of how the global economy has been organized. So that's something. thing, you know, to look out for for 2023. We've been noticing it happening over the last couple of years. And it feels like there is some transition. And there are a possibilities of a new

non-aligned kind of movement. And we've seen that with many countries resisting U.S. pressure. Why did Biden have to have 49 African countries, you know, attend some conference in the U.S. basically in order to browbeat them and insert the U.S. into trade and other military arrangements because people, you know, other countries have not been so cooperative and they've wanted to maintain independence and maybe there's more of a chance and an opportunity to do so. That's no kind of victory and we don't know, you know, in such a transition, whether the outcomes could be more negative in some ways, of course, we can see the rise of right wing

ultra-nationalist, proto-fascist or fascistic movements are also organizing and they have also had victories and it's unclear, you know, whether 2022, you know, has provided the kinds of opportunities that might lead to a better future or a much worse outcome. But it is being contested. I think that is something that we can say. Yeah, absolutely. I saw a question. I saw a question. question come up, it's directed directly towards me, so I'll just answer really quick. It's kind of fun as well, and then we'll jump back into some other questions. Comrade Stu asks, hello Brett. On Twitter, people have accused you of being a revisionist and called you the Joe Rogan of the left. How would you respond to those claims? Well, first is Twitter, so right

there, I mean, people are going to be saying things on Twitter. There's algorithmically inclined outrage, and people want to be right. It's an ego arena, and people are always going to be shitting on other people and all of this. But, you know, I could be seen as a revisionist, by certain people and certain tendencies that feel like I deviate from that tendency in some position. And so, you know, I'm going to, you know, be called names from anarchists who don't like me, from, you know, democratic socialist who don't like me, from Maoist who don't like me, and from Leninists who don't like me. And so everybody has their own little preferred term as to what they should call somebody that disagree with on Twitter. But, you know, the whole point behind

Rev. Left and my entire thing is not like, I have all the ideas in my head and here is my line and, you know, this is exactly what I believe on every single thing. With Rev. in particular, it was always meant to be a broad conversation that was useful to people on the revolutionary left. So I'll have on people that, you know, Maoists, I've had on many anarchists, I have on Leninists. My opinions come through, but it's not really about what I and me believe. People can disagree with those views. I think they come out probably a little more staunchly in something like Red Menace, where I'm really taking the time to work through text and giving my criticisms and my thoughts, but I've always wanted Rev Left to be a welcoming and open environment

and, you know, I really wanted people from day one to just take what's useful. You're not going to agree with every guest. You're not going to agree with every show. You don't even need to agree with me. Who the fuck am I? But if you can listen to these shows and there's something useful in there, then that's a success for me. And I truly believe that, you know, even when I listen to people I really disagree with, even outside the left, you know, like sometimes conservative intellectuals, liberal intellectual, that could disagree with 98%. of what they say but you know they might have give me some food for thought or challenged a view i have or offered some information that i can then take and implement into my sort of circle of concern and

and you know my approaches to things so i don't really get too caught up on on what people are calling me on twitter in fact i don't spend very much time on twitter at all i just try to keep my head down do what i think is right and and hopefully provide something useful to people and if you don't like it you don't have to like it there's a million other shows out there a million other things you could be doing. And as for the Joe Rogan of the left thing, I just think that might come from the fact that I just do have a broad audience of people that comes in. And I'm not temperamentally inclined to bash everybody that disagrees with me

or corner somebody on an issue where I really disagree. I kind of let people talk. And if that gets me called the Joe Rogan of the left, I mean, whatever. But, you know, Twitter is what Twitter is, and I don't let it really get to me too much. So let's go on because that was just all about me. So let's go ahead. Well, let me hop in for one.

One quick second, Brett, just to add a little bit more to what you were saying. People need to understand first and foremost that each of these shows is for the purpose of education. They're not to drive people towards an ideological end. You know, that's what, you know, or in-person organizing and political parties are for, you know, party formation, you know, getting together with a cadre. Like, this is what you do in your own community. You sharpen your own ideological lens in person with commerce. ads. These shows are specifically for the intention of education. Now, that's not to say that we're just doing education for education's sake. We are educating for the purpose of implementing what

we've learned in the real world. Now, it's important that we understand that we don't have to agree with everything that everybody says in order to take important things from them. One of the things that we were criticized for on guerrilla history this year was talking with Noam Chomsky of all people. We brought on Noam Chomsky onto the show to talk about American Empire. Now, you know, Noam Chomsky offers to come on the show. You generally say yes. None of us are ideologically aligned, particularly, you know, directly in line with Noam Chomsky, but to say that Noam Chomsky has nothing of use to offer, in the course of a two-hour conversation, you're not going to learn anything from Noam Chomsky. That's just saying that, you know, it's being, I don't know,

It's early. I can't think of the word that I'm looking for, but like you're being very full of yourself to think that you have nothing to learn in a one hour conversation with Chomsky and then one hour with Vijay Prashad, which is how that episode ended up working out. It was an hour with each of them. So to think that you're smarter and you have all of the right answers already before you listen to the viewpoints of other people, that's kind of dangerous in itself. But also, it's important to consider that our favorite revolutionaries and our favorite theorists, they were not relying on. the works of people that agreed with them on everything themselves. They had to take in information from where it was available. They had to synthesize new information from that existing information and then put it out there. Let's look at Marx. How many communist thinkers were Marx working off of?

Not very many. He was working off of all bourgeois scholars, right? You know, Lenin, what's Lenin's, you know, one of his most famous works, imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. This is rooted in J.A. Hobson's imperialism. Jay Hobson was also a bourgeois scholar. He was not a revolutionary communist that he was basing his ideas off of, but this is the basis for one of Lenin's key works. If we did not have Hobson's imperialism, we need to understand that work and we need

to use that work as a basis for analyzing today's situation. That would not have been possible without the bourgeois scholar Hobson, who in many ways was very, very racist. You know, we have to be able to take information from sources that we don't necessarily agree with on everything. We're not looking to these people that we're bringing on leaders. We're not bringing on just any person

that has something to teach us and putting them in a position of leadership. That's something that everybody has to understand. And I know that the vast majority of the listeners of all of the shows do understand that. Oh, they brought on an anarchist or they brought on a Maoist or a Trotskyist or whatever. If you can't

learn anything in two hours? Either you're way smarter than I am or you're delusional in terms of you think that you have all of the right answers simply because of your ideology and not because of actual devoted study to the existing material. Adnan? Oh, just I would agree with the point that it's really important to be humble, you know, in this work. There's a lot of attraction to being right, I think, for leftists, especially if you get involved in theory and thinking through, and that's why I think history is very valuable and sobering, is because it's very difficult to pin down an answer in history. You have to take into account the various forces. It's such a complex, to understand motivation and causality in history is a really difficult

thing to do. And we try and think about on guerrilla history, the lessons. that we might learn from things, but you can't be completely definitive about what worked, what didn't work. It's a process, and we have to be humble. We're going to make mistakes. We're not going to be right all the time. Frankly, being right has not really helped, you know, achieve liberation.

I mean, obviously, I don't mean that we should go down paths that are, you know, conceptually, jejun, make no sense, or are based in false premises. we have to do our best. But sometimes I feel like on the left, we're more concerned with that egoistic position of being right and arguing with others in order to assert that we are in the correct position. Where abstractly, you know,

Mark's never believed in just abstract kinds of ideas. He believed, you know, ideas came from active experience. And, you know, what you know, what you lose in comradeship and connection by insisting sometimes on being right rather than bringing people in by being humble, by being engaged. We turn people into allies and we both grow from that. So I think it's important to have a balanced perspective. You know, I might be a little naive, you know, when platforming people whose ideas maybe are going to mislead people and maybe it's not the right, you know, approach politically or theoretically.

I'm not sure. But I do know that more damage can be done by insisting in the sectarian way in anathematizing one another rather than building bonds of affiliation upon which we can cooperate on the things that really matter to us, which is, you know, for Western Marx, I read a really great critique in the Black Agenda Report. I'm forgetting the name of the author was a Brazilian Marxist who called out the Western Left because he said it's much more concerned with struggling, suffering, having martyrs, and being correct. And it's not enough about actual transformation, building political movements to be effective and being dissatisfied with being correct but losing. You have to have movements that are

organized around trying to win because that's the change that we need. We may be, you know, it's really a pessimism. Recording in progress. Only on being, you know, correct and being pure. That's actually a form of a revolutionary pessimism because we're putting ahead of actual, you know, meaningful material change, our own sense of being correct and fetishizing you know, abstract conceptual or theoretical purity over the real work, you know, that's necessary. And sometimes it happens because we don't think. And it's indeed easy to fall into this

because we, the forces we're fighting. I just was a little pessimistic. I was saying I'm not sure there have been that many victories. And we need more. And we can fall into the position of thinking that at least being theoretically rigorous and conceptually pure is a substitute for actually engaged action. That is a sign of the weakness of the left, you know, when we fall into that, I think. Yeah, I want to follow up on that a little bit real quick, too, to hopefully finish off the conversation on this. The other thing is I just like would like people to take the three shows as kind of, you know, complementary to each other and doing different things, right? RevLeft, I think really what makes it great is that it has a lot of different people on it. I'm here right now

because someone tweeted at Brett asking him to have me on RevLeft one time. And I went on and then eventually we ended up here. And I think Brett's like openness to having people who may not have a big platform contact him and want to get, you know, a chance to talk is one of the really great things about RevLeft. And in the context of Red Menace, I think, you know, one of the things I appreciate over the last year that we've done is I think we have turned in a critical direction in a lot of ways. In the chat, EL, I saw you mentioned that, you know, marks and Lenin, they did draw on Boucho theorists, but they were also criticizing them. And I really feel like on Red Menace over

really the last year, that's what we've started to do, is take works that are outside of what we agree with, figure out what's useful in them, but also take the time to try to criticize them and do comparative and contrasting work to Marxism with them. So each of the shows, in my mind at least, kind of plays a different function for what it is offering in terms of educational material. And my hope at least is that Red Minis, you know, has pivoted, I think, in a lot of ways to being a chance for me and Brett to get out some of our critical thoughts along with kind of constructive summary and comparison. So just kind of throwing that out there. Yeah, absolutely. All well said. Let's go ahead and move on to a new question. There's so many

here. I guess we can kind of try to be quicker with our answers, but it's difficult because these questions are really good and complex. I guess I'll take one from Patreon really quick and then we'll jump back to the chat. A good question from Patreon is I would be really interested in hearing the Revelaf families take on nutrition and physical health and the role politics play in this because I think it's an enormously important factor of being working class. The role industry plays in our country's general dietary guidelines. They're hijacking of science by funding misleading studies and using PR to discredit legitimate research, etc. And also access to nutritious food in the way that it is gate kept by the capitalist elite, the managerial class. So this is a really

great question. I'll just open it up by saying that, you know, my first thought here is um to to reclaim some of these things from the right there's a thing that's developed recently um mostly in liberal circles uh where you know anything with a lot of emphasis on um physical fitness exercise and even nutritional health is kind of seen as like maybe a suspect you know if not outright conservative or reactionary and i think that's really harmful um to the left in general to to to try to embrace that that that line of argumentation we should reclaim um anything we can for the left. And there's many, many terrains that we have to combat on, you know, combat our political enemies on many different terrains. And I think this is one of them. I think things like honor and

discipline and, you know, fitness are not things that should be used to bash other people of the head or compare yourself to others or put other people down. But it should be something that generally we all strive for in our personal lives and politically, you know, keeping our bodies and our minds healthy is an important thing. And so when we refuse to engage with this stuff, we seed that territory to the reactionary right, we see what happens. And so again, this is not to judge anybody who doesn't do that or can't do that. And of course, there's, you know, the whole consideration of who's able-bodied and who's not. But I think in general, for most people in most places at most times, taking nutrition and fitness seriously is really beneficial. And within our

collectives, within our organizations, within our cadres, I know me personally have experience in this, where we really emphasize that. And we, you know, for a long time, we set a weekend day aside where we'd all meet up all people of diverse backgrounds of different body types of different athletic skills and we'd all work together we'd we'd go on hikes together and we'd be only as strong as our as our least well-off comrade and we'd slow down to help them and that builds that builds unity and camaraderie and solidarity as well and your points about the industry of course are incredibly crucial as well but i'll let somebody else take this next well i'll hop in um so first of all, I'd like to echo Brett's point that, you know, we should be doing what we can.

I know that there's a bit of a, in some corners, there's a bit of a fetishization of the person who sits back in their apartment, curled up in a blanket and reads 150 books a year and is able to think through every problem and answer, lickety split, but this is all that they do. We do also have to make sure that we're physically doing well to the best of our abilities, and those abilities are going to vary from person to person. That's not to say everybody needs to be lifting weights. Or like, for example, yesterday I was playing football with my work colleagues. That's soccer for you Americans.

You know, like this is what I can do. That's what I do. But not everybody is going to have the ability to play football slash soccer in just after work with work colleagues. But, you know, if you can, you should. And if you can't find something else that is beneficial to your body. But turning towards the question of the industry and how politically, impacts health. This is a very important question, one that I've had my eye on for a long time. For people who listen to Rev. Left and Red Menace, but not guerrilla history, you may not know.

My background is in immunobiology, so I come from the hard sciences. And while looking at the epidemiology and the politics regarding personal health is not immunobiology related, it is something that I have been looking at within my field. And it's very important for everybody to understand that the politics is inestricably tied to the health of the society, the health of individuals within this society. We'll take the United States, for example. In the United States, we of course have massive inequality. This is the case in most countries, but the United States is one that I'm familiar with, even though I haven't lived there for a few years. We have food deserts that cover the vast majority of the country.

food deserts are places where people cannot easily walk to places where they have fresh fruits and vegetables. Fresh fruits and vegetables are essential for having a healthy and balanced diet. Why are there these areas that don't have fresh fruits and vegetables, which seems like it should be the basis for a healthy diet? Well, one, they're more expensive. I think that most people understand that buying nothing but fresh fruits and vegetables is a lot cheaper than getting some heavily processed foods. But also when we look at the demographic breakdown of these food deserts, they're almost entirely minority, like minority majority areas. It's very, very rare that you find a majority white area that is a food desert outside of very rural areas. Like where I grew up

is a food desert and it's almost all white, but that's just because I live in the middle of the woods. Like you can't really walk to any story from there. But this is, you know, something that is tied to it. We have to look at the racial and class dimension side by side when we analyze where is the food availability. We also have to consider that just the pressures that are put on working people is going to impact their health, both in terms of the toil that they go under at work, but also in terms of their ability to take time and have a nutritious life outside of work. Take, for example, somebody who works a full-time job in one or two part-time job. Let's say they're working 70, 80 hours a week, especially if this person has

children. Are they going to have the time to go out to the store, pick up your fresh fruits and vegetables, bring them home, cook up a nice meal for themselves, their children, and then also package some ways so that they can eat that nutritious food at work the next day because they're working almost every day. Of course not. When they're away from home, their children are going to have to either fend for themselves or rely on, you know, a partner of them. theirs the children aren't necessarily going to be able to make a nice pot of borsh like my wife and i can they're going to have you know a boxed macaroni and cheese they're going to have frozen pizza rolls this is this is what these people are going to have to rely on both from a

cost perspective and also the fact that the person has gone much of the time working and when they get back they are so physically drained that the last thing in the world they want to do is spend two hours making something so it's very important that we consider that not only are the political forces directly influencing the way that food availability is set up on both a class and racial basis in most countries. But also we have to consider that the simple fact that the way that these societies are set up, these capitalist societies are set up, to be a toil on the working people, it makes it so that these people are inhibited from having the time and the resources

to be able to go out and have these nutritious home-cooker. meals with themselves, their families, if they have them. We have to keep that in mind. There's, of course, a lot more that I could say in terms of health and politics. You know, we talked about emissions. There was a major study that came out two or three years ago. And I'll try to be brief because I think I've talked about this on guerrilla history before. But that was looking at where the money, the revenue from production goes and where the environmental degradation and pollution goes. And they find that when we look at where is the money from an enterprise going, it all flows, not all, it mostly flows to majority white areas, more rich and white areas.

And where are the pollution from these exact same enterprises going? Almost all of them go to majority minority areas, particularly black communities within the United States. So in the same factory. The money goes one way. The pollution goes the other. This is a very, very, this isn't incidental is what I'm saying. This is designed. And we have to keep that in mind. Anyway, I think I've gone on a little bit too long anyway. Yeah, building on that somewhat, I think all that's really helpful. I want to shout out real quick what Caitlin said in the chat, which is suggesting talking about food deserts as food apartheid. And I think that's a really useful framing. Because it gets that what you're saying, Henry, that when we actually look at this distribution that's occurring here,

it maps onto class and racial lines. And I think it's important to call attention to the fact that those are colonial lines as well, right? And access to nutrition and access to food has actually really been an important tool of colonialism globally for subjugating peoples. So it's not surprising when we take that in mind that in the United States, as you point out, it's often black communities that are deprived access to nutritional food. But thinking more broadly about North America on the whole, we can also think in Canada where it's often far north indigenous communities as well, who have a severe lack of access to food, which is produced within a more industrial context because of distribution networks. And I think it's not just a racial

issue, but it's also a question of settler colonialism and internal colonial contradictions that, you know, very similar strategies to what we saw India or Britain inflict on India or Britain inflict on the Irish are being applied within North America to what I would argue are internal colonies that exist there. So I want to kind of call attention to that colonial dimension as well and the continuity that it has with colonialism internationally. Yeah, without a doubt. And of course, here in the U.S., you know, indigenous communities are among the most impoverished as well and they have the same exact issues. And so it's a real, the issue of settler colonialism is really paramount here as well. Let's go ahead and move.

on. This is a quick one for me and Allison. We'll just get it out of the way really quick. Question for Allison and Brett. What is your favorite episode of Red Menace? And would you consider revisiting the topic of that episode? Alison, you can go. God, that's a tough one. We have had so many fun episodes. You know, I think on the whole, the series on Wretched of the Earth, which isn't a single episode, but we split that up into several. That has been my absolute favorite that we've done. I thought those were really, really productive discussions. We had some interesting attempts at thinking about what they mean in the context of North America, what that text might mean for us. And I also just think Fanon is like one of the greatest thinkers we've had

the opportunity to interact with. So those all stand out to me. And I would absolutely be happy to revisit Fanon at some point. We have so many ideas for where to go with the show. So that is not a promise by any mean. But yeah. Yeah. That's a great one. Definitely top. high on my list as well, but I would just say this one, state and revolution, because it was the first time that Allison and I really worked together on a topic, I believe. It was originally released on Rev. Left. It was the impetus to the creation of Red Menace. And I was really, really happy with how that episode came out. And I really think that it's a very useful compliment to the text itself, as I hope all Red Menace episodes are. I found the Carl Schmidt one recently

very interesting. Like there's very little internal motivation or even time for me to read reactionary thinkers from the past, but I found it very helpful and illuminating. And once you start reading figures like Evela and Schmidt like we have on Red Menace, you can really start seeing strains of reaction and how they manifest in the modern context. And so I find that to be incredibly instructive as well, while at the same time, of course, being repulsed by the politics that underlined that stuff. But it was a learning experience for sure. let's go ahead and do another one let's see here there's so many i guess we could ask henry and adan because this is a question uh separate and we just kind of did it for alison and

i but uh what's your favorite episode or interview that that we've done on on guerilla history do does anything jump out to either of you well well adnan is unmuting himself i'll just jump in then and say that the one that i always think back to in terms of wow you know this is somebody that we've interviewed before, I always jump back to the Comrade Joma episode. And Comrade Joma just passed away within the last couple weeks, and I'm currently

in the works of setting up a, like, a panel discussion with some people that were close to him on a Comrade Joma tribute episode of guerrilla history. That's something that our friend Emmanuel Ness, who is

very close with him and myself are trying to put together in the future. But, you know, having somebody who was the founding chairman of a major communist party, an existing communist party, a communist party that is still struggling in an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist fashion, in the way that the Communist Party of the Philippines is, having the opportunity to interview one of these major leaders, these major founders of these revolutionary movements was really like a life-changing experience and I know I didn't really talk about it much, but I did keep in contact with Comrade Joma via email after we were done with the episode

and actually we were thinking about bringing him back on in the near future when the news of him passing hit. We were talking about doing an episode on People's War specifically. So the opportunity to talk to Kamrad Joma and the connection that I was able to, I mean, I'm not saying that I was friends with him. I don't want anybody to, like, you know, take it the wrong way that, ah, I'm Comrade Joma's closest comrade. No, no, no.

He was just a very friendly person that I would email back and forth with periodically. He would send me some statements that they were putting out. I would ask him some questions periodically. But he was an incredibly kind person and incredibly principled person, a wonderful theorist. I've got several of his books in my apartment here. And a fascinating interview, you know, as somebody who was a political prisoner under a military dictatorship for years and came out just as resolutely anti-capitalist, anti-imperialists as he was before. It's truly astounding. And in a similar vein, just as a brief shout-out, the Margaret

Schiller episode also was similar in terms of somebody who was imprisoned by a capitalist imperialist nation. She, of course, was a member of the Red Army faction. And we had her on guerrilla history this past year, I think at the beginning of 2022. And she also was imprisoned. solitary confinement torture at the hands of the West German state and came out just as resolutely anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist as she was before. This is really, really in not only encouraging, but, you know, like just eye-opening that there are people that are able to go through those ordeals and stay just as principled as they were before. It's really inspiring on my, from my perspective. Oh, and just sorry, one last one. Salvatore Engel

de Mauro, the social estates in the environment. Fantastic book, fantastic interview, and Salvatore has ended up being one of my closest friends since we did that episode. It turned out he was a guerrilla history listener before we asked him to come on the show. He came on the show. We had a great time. And yeah, he and I have been very close friends ever since. And we're even co-editing a new translation of Lacerdo Stalin book that'll be out

within the next month or two, I would hope. We're just in the final editing phase before it goes to print with Peaceland Bread. So that was a really enriching experience for me just in terms of making that connection with somebody who has ended up being a really, really close comrade of mine. Adnan? Well, I've just enjoyed pretty much every episode. I've gotten something important out of it.

So it's very hard to pick. And I do think that the interviews with, with activists, people who, you know, led communist movements or suffered and were imprisoned in the course of struggle. Those are really special episodes. I mean, I would like to look forward to hopefully someday perhaps we might be able to interview Leila Khaled,

for example. I saw a really great interview with her. her colleagues show Dispatches, and I've met her briefly in the past, and I have some context, and I think that would be also another one of these wonderful opportunities to talk with someone who has engaged in struggle and sacrifice. So that's not an episode in the past, but I would say, looking forward, I think that would be in the vein of those great episodes that you mentioned, Henry. But I guess maybe my current favorite episode has yet to come out, It's a discussion with Jason Moore.

I think his work is absolutely fascinating and really important, and it's helping me think through issues in medieval history, integrating ecological and environmental factors, you know, into analysis of capitalism and imperialism. So I say look forward to that one, because I think it's going to be one of the great episodes. And Adnan is not just saying that because we also know that Jason Moore listens to the show. So he will hear this, but that's not why we're saying that we enjoyed the episode, Jason.

We're not trying to butter you up. You've already been on. We have plans to bring you on again. It was really a great conversation. I hope everybody looks forward to that. Brett, you know, you're also part of guerrilla history. Why don't you briefly tell us about one that stuck out in your... Sure.

Well, really quickly, somebody in the chat here says, are you ever planning on covering the Ethiopia and People's War? and there's that book like Ho Chi Minh, like Che Guevara, that we've talked about, we've batted around, and I would love to do that this year for guerrilla history. There's so many. When you guys were talking about guerrilla history, I was kind of thinking about Rev. Left, because, you know, we answered Red Menace, we answered guerrilla history.

So let me just go ahead and answer Rev. Left. It's so hard because, one, there's a memory issue, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of conversations, and I get asked this question and I answer it, and then, you know, like driving home later, I'm like, damn, I should have mentioned that or something else. So I'm not going to say this is my favorite one, but one that I found very moving and very informative was on Rev. Left, our interview with Kevin Rashid Johnson, who, you know, is a Maoist political prisoner, an artist as well. And the first person, and we literally called, did the interview with him in prison. So every 15 minutes or so, the call would end. We'd have to call back, reestablish the connection. And he talked about the torture, just, you know, being cornered in his gel cell, having dogs stuck on him.

and then a bunch of guards run in and, you know, beat him brutally, the racial politics in certain prisons versus other prisons, how some prisons really are completely self-segregated by race, and you have to pick aside. And, you know, Kevin would talk about how he would defy that and the consequences that would come from trying to defy that. And in other prisons, that just simply doesn't exist. So I found it a crucial episode with regards to the insight into how the carceral system actually works from somebody actively still in it. and more on top of that is a political prisoner and it is sort of oppressed within that context further for his political, you know, aspects and organization and struggle, et cetera. And then trying to engage politically in the context of prison. He talks about those experiences that he's had trying to reach out to people and elevate their social and political consciousness and see what he can do on that front. So I would highly recommend that as well. So many great ones, of course, I'm going to remember.

a bunch when I'm driving home. But let's go ahead and move on to this next question here. And maybe Adnan might be able to say something more meaningful than I could on this. But the question is, as someone who grew up in a quasi-fundamentalist evangelical background, I've been trying to figure out how and when Christianity reinvented and devoted itself to being a predominantly exclusionary and often nationalist framework as opposed to a call to show God's love in a universal manner. And this is a really wonderful question.

I don't have deep historical knowledge on the evolution of Christianity as a whole, but I do see what Christianity became in the United States, where that sadly is the sort of predominant posture of Christianity writ large in the United States, one of conservatism, if not outright reaction. And using, I always find it utterly perplexing, using Jesus Christ and his message as the justification for someone's bigotry or insanely reactionary politics, justifying inequality, right? These things are so on their face antithetical to the actual message of Jesus Christ that I'm continuously flabbergasted, that people not only call themselves Christians, but

make it the main form of their identity and stand pretty much on every single issue against what we could only imagine the position of Jesus Christ would take, one rooted in. universal love and, you know, unconditional compassion. So, so that is just like a quick thought off the top of my head. I'm sure it has something to do with settler colonialism and white supremacy and capitalism because religion can take many, many different forms, even the same religion takes many, many different forms depending on the context in which it is established. And of course, the church as an institution of power and influence can very easily and historically has co-zied up to other institutions of power that have not been savory, to say the least.

So it's an interesting thing, but I do always want to stress that Christianity, like all religions, are still in the process of evolution, and they are a terrain of struggle. So rather than fetishizing atheism or trying to over-emphasize that, especially on the left, that might have served a purpose a hundred years ago when the religious context was very different. But today, I think it's an albatross around our neck to try to promote atheism. I think we should find interesting aspects of every religion, see how they dovetail with our goals and our politics, embrace them, learn from them, and vice versa. And so I really want to just always emphasize the continued evolving nature of religions and that they're an

important terrain of struggle for us as communists. Well, not much to add there because the last several points that you made are really, I think, the key that it's a terrain of struggle. And of course it is also not a simple kind of field of analysis of like Christianity. I mean, it's a global religion over 2,000 years of history, and it always has in it the possibility of inspiring people to fight for equality and for, you know, these human sorts of values, or it can easily be used, especially. when connected to an institutional sort of church structure to conservative, you know, conservative forces. And of course, that's the context in which, you know, Marx was writing, is, you know, having to try and disestablish the church.

But I guess the short answer for me is that if you want to look to a period, I mean, there are many periods where, you know, say Constantine, it or converting to Christianity and then the edict of Milan later in the fourth century where it becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire and you have this intersection now between a kind of confessional form of religion and empire to something that I would call a confessional empire that enforces it as dogma supports an institutional framework of the church and turns it into a legitimating tool of empire. Obviously, this is a deleterious, you know, movement in the history of Christianity.

And I think the other big period is the Crusader period. And what transforms in Europe and the Latin Church, the construction of Christendom, and people who are interested in my more deeper analysis on this subject, two things. One, I'm doing a class that's still going on. It's called the Crusading. Society. It's free, open online. I do it on Saturdays 930 to 11 Eastern. We're taking a

holiday break. We'll be resuming again January 7th. And what we're looking at is essentially the way in which a certain orientation within Latin Christianity in the medieval period establishes a new kind of persecuting society and war and militarism externally. that really are part of the roots of what we might think of as white nationalism or white supremacy, settler colonialism, and Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism. These are all interconnected in my view. And so if you're interested in kind of thinking about those issues, join my course. We still have quite a few weeks, and you don't need to have any background.

And I am working on a book or, you know, a short book called The Formation of a Crusading Society that will look carefully at what transforms in the medieval period. I'm not going to say it's the only or definitive transformation of a version of Christianity that has deleterious effects and consequences, but it is a major and very important one in crystallizing some key features and roots of some of the contemporary problems that we're dealing with. today, I do this not to demonize Christianity as a religious system, but hopefully that it can be decolonized, that it can be liberated. And, you know, it provides spiritual and, you know, ethical meaning for people, but that needs to be directed towards human liberation and the cause of justice like we've seen in movements like liberation theology. That could happen again, but right now, of course, we're facing the most right-wing version of it in the United States. So understanding that history might help us think about the ways in which different paths

within any of these world or global religions or ideological systems can be geared and oriented towards liberation rather than oppression and exploitation. Yeah, I think all of that's really fantastic. And I think it's hard the way the question poses this of like what is the moment that this happens because there are transformations throughout Christianity's history that have to be wrestled with. You know, I should preface that my knowledge of Christianity having been raised in it is mostly Western Christianity, so I can't speak extensively to Eastern Christianity, which

has a divergent history in many ways once you reach the Great Schism. But nonetheless, I think, you know, there's a couple points that matter. One, obviously, as Adnan said, is the, you know, in making Christianity the, religion of the Roman Empire, right? The role Constantine plays there is obviously very, very important. But also for thinking about Christianity as it shapes in the West and in the United States in particular, I think we also have to think about some particularities with Protestantism and the way that Protestantism in the U.S. operates as often, like a very conservative reactionary force. The question asker, you know, point to how did Christianity get tied to

nationalist frameworks as well? And I think, you know, thinking about the Protestant Reformation as well, we can think about the Protestant Reformation as a political and religious rebellion against the authority of Rome to a certain degree and to the political institution of Catholicism. And it's not surprising that the early Protestant churches aligned themselves with what we wouldn't quite historically identify as nationalists, but perhaps proto-nationalist developments within the European countries where they occurred, like Germany, but also within the Calvinist movements, which had a political bent to them as well. So when we're encountering kind of right-wing Christian nationalism in the U.S. I do think it's worth considering the way that that is a predominantly

Protestant phenomenon and Protestantism and the Reformation had a political dimension, which I think is relevant there as well. So I think that's important to point out. And then the other thing, you know, just to echo what everyone's saying is like regardless of how we feel about Christianity, Christianity exists, a huge amount of the masses we hope to organize are Christians, right, and are committed to that. And what's really important, I think, is to be able to converse with Christians and put forth arguments for communism in the terms that they believe in and in the terms that they speak. And there's so much within the Christian tradition that we can point to as well. That can be very, very useful. I was raised pretty fundamentalist myself. I still talk to family

members who are into that. And when trying to push my politics with them, I'm citing the Gospels to them. I'm citing the text that they hold very important to them to try to augment arguments for why a communist vision is correct. I think, you know, if we look at the mass movements that have a learned globally that have had success, the National Democratic Movement in the Philippines has done a good job of incorporating youth Christian groups in particular, who may not even identify as communists but are willing to come into a coalition with the cause for national democracy and articulate their cause along Christian lines. I see that as a very, very good example of what ought to be done here. So, you know, the history is important, but also in the

present, we need to be able to wrestle with Christianity and we need to be able to talk to working people who are Christians and try to show that the value system they subscribe to can lead towards progressive alliances with communists, if nothing else. Absolutely. And that's true for Jewish people, for Muslims, for Buddhists, for anybody engaged in any religion. We have to figure out how to talk to people like that. And I think something that hopefully we do on Rev. Left, and I think Allison shares this

with me, if not everybody here shares this, is that reclaiming of something important in these religious traditions, something beautiful, gorgeous, worth. keeping and not discarding or dismissing. And, you know, I came out of new atheism as an angsty, 20-something reacting to, you know, some early religious experiences that I had. And I can see the fault lines, the faultiness of that stuff today quite well. And I have a deepening respect for religious traditions in general. And of course, in every single religion, the political spectrum exists, right? There's right wing and left wing and centrist forms of all of these religions. And I think that's interesting as well. But I would recommend if you haven't already heard,

I've had on Adnan to Rev Left twice wants to talk about Sufism and wants to do an episode on St. Francis and I really, really am proud of those episodes and would highly recommend anyone interested in this religious conversation to go check those out and hopefully in 2023, Adnan can come back on and maybe we can do an intro to Islam

or talk about the crusading society. We've talked about having an episode on the Islamic mystic Rumi before. So there's lots of more work to be done on those fronts to be sure. All right, let's go ahead and move on to the next question and MSJG asks, and this is really interesting, why have Leninists turn to nationalism and even traditionalism and anarchists to nihilism? Is it just dumerism? So I think this is a very interesting point. I think Allison and I have discussed it a little bit, but before I open up, I'll let maybe Henry, if you have something particular to say on this topic, you can start and

we'll get to my thoughts here in a second. I think that what we have to remember, is that this is not solely, but primarily an online phenomenon. I think that if we're talking about Leninists and nationalism and anarchists and nihilism, if you talk to Leninists and anarchists in person, you're not going to find very much nationalism. And you might find a little bit of nihilism, but I think that you'll find much less of it in person at actual organizing, at actual activism and, you know, political work.

work than you would online. I think it's very easy for people to be, to play to these sorts of tropes online. I think that they play well to, you know, a not super engaged audience, somebody that is not going deep into the ideological and political theory that they're talking about, somebody that is not involved with actual movements in the real world. It's very easy to put out these very nationalistic clickbait things. it's very easy to put out click-baiting nihilist things. It plays well online.

Let's be frank about it. People that use these nationalists, the nihilist tropes online, they tend to get quite a bit of traction. It's really hard to get traction as a principled Leninist or a principled anarchist online. The traction that you get is going to be sequestered into, you know, a dark corner of the internet.

It's going to be the same people that you, you would expect to be interested in this. And, you know, their attention is split a hundred different ways because there are a fair amount. I know that sometimes it seems like we're all alone. There are a fair amount of principled Leninists. There are a fair amount of principled anarchists, you know, state whatever. I know I'm just bringing up these two because they were what we're asked about in the question. But, you know, pick your ideology. There's going to be many people that are very principally engaged in real world activity that share your ideology. And they're not going to have nationalist tendencies for the most part.

They're not going to have nihilistic tendencies for the most part. So I think that this is like the first thing that we have to understand is that the main place that we will see these tendencies of nationalism and nihilism is online because they play very well to people that are not actually engaged in struggle and movement in the real world. Now I know that we are all engaged in real world activities in our own ways, you know, the four of us. Unfortunately, I can't talk about much of what I do for various reasons off of, you know, off of here. But, you know, we all are engaged in real world activity, organizing, and struggle. I have not seen very much nationalism.

Now, in institutionalized parties, I will say that this is something that's going to be different in my context than in your context. The United States does not have a major socialist or communist party. there are socialists and communist parties, but not a major one. The context of Russia is a little bit different. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation is the second biggest party in the country. It's the largest, quote-unquote, opposition party, but it's an institutionalized opposition party. And so what we've been seeing, particularly in the last two, three years, and especially within the last year, is that there has been quite a bit more nationalism seeping into the messaging that's coming out from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.

And within the last year, it makes sense, given the current. situation. And again, I'm limited in terms of what I can say on that. But I think that we need to understand that when we're talking about people that are principally engaged in actual struggle, they're generally not going to be in institutionalized positions. And they're not going to be doing all of their activism online. If you're just tweeting your thoughts out there and that's the only work that you're doing, you are not an activist. If you're just tweeting thoughts out there and seeing how many lakes that you can get, you're not organizing. You can't organize. You're not an activist if it's solely online. You have to get out

and meet with real people. So I think that this is something that's really important to understand. There's a lot more that I could say. But, you know, the other people on this panel are definitely probably more qualified to talk on these issues than I am. Those are just my initial thoughts is that we have to look beyond online. That is, of course, easiest where it's, that's are you going to see most of it? And that's where we're going to be exposed to it. And, you know, you turn on Twitter on your phone. That's what you see.

So you have the impression that this is like a dominant tendency within this ideological movement. It's not. It's just not. Allison? Yeah. I'll follow up on that with a couple of things. I mean, one, I do want to kind of emphasize what you said, Henry, which is that this

content is easy to produce, right? Kind of the nice thing about nihilism and about kind of like trolley. traditionalism is you don't have to take your opponent seriously. You don't have to make real answers to them. You've already kind of thrown that out. And so it's very easy to push it in this kind of low effort way that then gets picked up by algorithms that favor controversy and high levels of engagement, whether negative and positive. And so the very like structure of Twitter and these other spaces, I think, is easily manipulated by these kind of things. So that's worth considering. And then the other thing, we talked about this on Red Menace a little bit, is that I do think these, attitudes, like, come from, like, a sort of, like, burnout or desire to give up a little bit, which is worth thinking about. If you're an anarchist, right, and you tend to be on, like, the very left, left side of things, one thing that can happen is that you will see movements continually not living up to that. I think often a thing that anarchists, especially the more organized anarchists I know

have struggled with, is seeing movements either move to forms of organization that they don't like after having been more anarchist and that being a defeat, or seeing movement. fizzle out. Leninism similarly, right? How many little micro-Marxist-Leninist parties have we seen in the U.S. that have fallen apart? There have been so many of them. And in both of these instances, one easy way to kind of deal with the frustration of that is, you know, to try to take a step towards nihilism on the one hand or traditionalism on the other. If you embrace nihilism, then those failures don't matter, right? The catharsis of it, just the lashing out was enough. And that's good enough. And you don't ever have to achieve anything. So it doesn't feel like you're

giving up because you're kind of reframing what the goal is, but you are essentially giving up. And in the other direction, with Leninists to have kind of turned towards traditionalism and reactionary nationalism, right? You get to kind of redefine things, say that liberalism is the main enemy. And hey, there's these forces that have all the status quo of capitalist ideology behind them that also, you know, superficially contradict with liberalism. What if I just throw my weight behind them? And again, you don't feel like you've given up, because you've reframed things, but you've completely given up the part of the fight that matters, which isn't just the fight against liberalism, but the fight against capitalism and liberalism as an

ideology that capitalism can promote in a political form it can take. So I think there is also a frustration, burnout, disappointment aspect that really is a part of it and matters. So I would say that is the other thing, too. But again, I think this is mostly online. It also probably is mostly online people who tend to succumb to that kind of cynicism and nihilism in the first place as well, because you're not engaged in struggles where you could actually be finding hope in the first place. Yeah, just one really quick thing before. I know Adnan and Brett probably also have things to say on this or perhaps we'll turn

to another question. I'm not sure. But one thing that Allison was touching on and is something that I've said before is that anti-liberalism is not an ideology. And this is something that many people make the mistake of is looking at what liberals are saying and then just flipping to the other side of the argument because, you know, we hate liberals. I think that most of the people that are watching this, maybe you don't hate liberals in terms of like, oh, this person is a liberal. I hate them individually. But we hate that ideological movement. Of course. Of course. We're not liberals on this show. The liberal ideology is not an ideology that we ascribe to. But your ideology cannot be anti-liberalism. Your ideology has to be for something, moving towards something. This is also, I mean, goes back to.

to what we were talking about at the beginning, or at least what I was mentioning at the beginning, that you have to learn things from people that you don't agree with. In the same way, we can't just say liberalism is not my ideology. Let me throw everything that they say out, that's throwing the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. Of course, most of what they say is not going to be conducive to building our political movements.

We have to be very clear about that. We can't rely on allying with liberals. Their ideological project is different than ours. We have a different end entirely. But on terms of issue by issue, there are many people that succumb to anti-liberalism as an ideology when they see some person that is a liberal or is representative of liberals, et cetera. And again, this is primarily an online tendency. And there's some people that I could call out by name that I won't because I'm a nice person and, you know, whatever. But basically what they do, they follow all of these big liberal accounts, you know, MSNBC, the individual MSNBC hosts, the people that write for the New York Times that have, you know, been favorable of Democrats, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And what they do, anytime this person puts out a statement, they just take the opposite position, even if it makes other things that they've said in the past, in contradiction to their current statements, because they are making anti-liberalism, their guiding principle, they're guiding ideology. You cannot have a negation of an ideology as your ideology because it does not have an end in mind. We have a definite end in mind and that end is a stateless classless society. We may disagree and I know that we're different people. We may not agree on every single point and you as the listeners. You may be coming from different ideological tendencies. Most of you are going to have that same end in mind. It's the mode of reaching that end that we're going to have differences on.

Those are discussions that are worth having because we have a defined. ideology with the defined end. Never, never fall into the trope of being an anti-liberal as your identity because this is just a negation. It's not actually building anything. And of course, bouncing off that exact point, fascism is anti-liberal. Being anti-liberal is not enough. And it's not a coincidence that in both the reactionary Leninists and in the anarcho-niallists, there is a lot of reaction and even pseudo-fascism permeating those movements because precisely as Henry has said, anti-liberalism in and of itself is insufficient. It doesn't tell you anything about what you believe in. And so that's a part of it. Other part, as people have said

here, people online are really more interested in a lot of situations in building an online identity than they are in actually pursuing learning and deepening their understanding of politics or of the Marxist tradition or the anarchist tradition, whatever. It's a lot easier to go online, make pithy comments, build a little following, build an online identity than it is to engage in real world politics. And a lot of people, of course, are also interested in brand building and opportunism, right? When the cultural winds shift a little bit and it seems like the wind is at the back of the right, you see a lot of these people start shifting their rhetoric and their ideas and their values over to the right because that's where the audience is. And so, you know, I really, you know, being online is fine. there's a place for it in everybody's life but i really think that like limiting your time being

online is incredibly crucial because i think if you spend too much time online it does something to you you're not changing the internet the internet's changing you and so i really see as like another thing i have to moderate in my life you know i might spend 15 20 30 minutes on social media a day and then call it quits and i think that is that is kind of healthy you can dabble in it But if you're in it all the time, you're going to be in echo chambers. You're going to be algorithmically pushed to see certain things and not see other things. You're going to start getting a distorted picture of how things actually are in the real world. And that is detrimental to our politics in general and probably to you as an individual and your mental and emotional health.

Adnan, do you have anything to add to this or would you just want to jump to the next question? Yeah, we can jump to the next question. I just thought it was a great question because it does get at this problem. I think I was alluding to, of the pessimism of the position we find ourselves in, it's possible to have all kinds of these deviations and unproductive things coming out of that unfortunate condition. So I would just echo what you've been saying. And God, I hate liberals, but, you know, that's not enough. I mean, emotionally, the whole temper of liberalism I find is deeply disturbing and annoying. and yet that reaction, that reactive approach, that's being polemical and reactive, that's

not going to get us anywhere. It just gets us down these rabbit holes that are unproductive. So I think we can move on to another question. Absolutely. All right. Well, let's go. Let's have a fun question really quick. And maybe we can be quick about this one.

Judd asks, if you were to flee the imperial core, where would you go and why? Anybody want to start that one off? Well, it seems like exactly the kind of question you shouldn't answer. sir, if you plan on free. That's a good point. Yeah, I guess if nobody else is going to go first, I might as well. So as I've mentioned once or twice before, I try not to make too much out of it.

I know that it's very, I mean, it's a fact that I live in Russia now. And, you know, I could just be online all the time being like, hey, I live in Russia. No, this is not what I try to do with it. It's just the fact, you know, I have to acknowledge that. whether or not Russia is the imperial core some people would like to argue yes I think the vast majority of people who are looking at imperialism from you know the more traditional leninist sense or in terms of a dependency theory or world system sense it's not the imperial core per se and so hey I'm already here like I have already fled and I'm you know living here

engaging here, you know, my wife and I are happy here, don't have any plans of leaving. But if I was to go somewhere else, I know she and I have both talked about, you know, Cuba would be a very, very cool place that we would like to also get to spend some time. And if we did leave, that would be one of the places that we would consider going to in terms of, you know, having somewhere to engage with in actual struggle that. is like, like I said, it's not complete. It's an ongoing struggle, but it's currently a successful struggle. And so that's something that would be really interesting. Sure, I'll just jump in and say, you know, it's hard to think of a specific country. Cuba is an obvious one. Venezuela would

be interesting. I'm really interested in general in Latin America. And I have a deep, like, life goal of my family on my wife's side is Mexican. And they're actually descendants of Emiliano Zapata. And we have really fascinating conversations with them. and all of us talk about visiting various parts of Latin America. And I have a goal personally to try to learn Spanish. So I think in that general direction is probably where I would head south. But that's for other reasons, family and personal goal stuff as well as politics. I would just say, who says the folks in those other places outside the Imperial Corps need us or want us to flee the

Imperial Corps, join them when we have work to do here. We're here. We've had a lot of benefits of growing up, being educated in the Imperial Corps. What are we doing with the resources that are available to us? I think we have a big responsibility. So don't leave the Imperial Corps. Join others in struggle. and let's break it apart.

Let's take it down. Let's make a better world. I mean, we can do a lot more good by stopping, perhaps stopping the worst excesses of imperialism and corporate capitalism and destroying our planet and killing people around the world

by fighting here. So let's do it. Let's fight here. And then maybe, you know, you need a break or a vacation and some comrade. then like, you know, swim to Cuba. Somebody signed in the chat.

I myself would go to Turkey just because I, you know, speak the language a bit. I have family and I like the Middle East. And that's no endorsement of the regime there. But I think it's a very interesting place. So that would be fun to get away. Allison, you want to throw anything here? Yeah, sorry. I was trying to get that unneeded.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I really agree with Adnan's answer. It's not like a thought I even like to entertain because it feels like there is a responsibility as someone in North America to like consider that and the rest of the world, you know, does not need us to go and take that there. I will second real quick, though, Audubon's answered that in terms of like not fleeing, but getting somewhere else. Turkey is actually a country I would really like to return to. I had the opportunity previously to spend two weeks there. And it was an incredible experience and just absolutely wonderful. And pretty much since then, I've consistently really thought about how much I would love to go back and get a chance to visit again. So that is a place that's high on my list as well.

But, you know, fleeing, no, I think that's an abandonment of a responsibility. And a responsibility that's imposed by how much we all have, to a certain degree, benefited from imperialism and from our position within the imperial core. So me and Henry, trying to have a fun, nice answer to the question, and both you guys have to rain on our parade. I get it. I get it. But, yeah, let's go ahead. And I think karaoke computer speaking, I don't really know if that's a name, but kind of with the previous thing we were talking about, they said, thoughts on the notable increase in anti-capitalist rhetoric and themes in Western media and how it functions as a release vowel for capitalism to absorb its own critique. And I think that is a wonderful follow-up to that.

And I think that's part of the ideological adaptation and the resilience of capitalism is its profound ability. to reincorporate critique as a commodity that it can then sell back to you. And there is an aspect in which it does act as a release valve. You can go watch Parasite, the movie, right? You can go to a punk show, go to a hardcore hip-hop show. I went to a dead press show. It amps you up. On one level, it sort of deepens your radical politics, your revolutionary zeal and your

commitment to the cause. And so I think that can be helpful. It's not all bad. But on the other hand, I think it does largely work as a sort of, as a sort of, of release valve for those contradictions and that critique, and it kind of preempts anybody else from being able to do that through itself. Now, the people making these media products in particular are not doing this in a conscious way. I'm ideologically trying to preserve capitalism, so let me create a release valve. They actually are really ushering in genuine

critiques of it, but capitalism is so able to absorb those critiques and turn them into commodities to sell back to you. It's really one of its genius powers, if you, will. It's dark powers. But that is something that has always been true for the last, I mean, definitely since World War II in the rise of mass media. That has been a skill of capitalism. And I don't really see a way around it precisely because I think there is some benefit in that. When people watch Parasite, they might be introduced to a critique that they never had or, you know, hear a hip hop or or a punk song and be introduced to a sort of militant posture towards the powers that be that can be beneficial and a lot of people are radicalized through those processes.

So I know hip hop for me was absolutely huge in the radicalization of my politics. And so I wouldn't want to ever take that away. But it's certainly something we have to wrestle with. And I don't think anybody has really found a really good answer for how to get around that. I'll just hop in quickly. First to mention that karaoke computer is, of course, our friend Mikey from shut down Red Hill, Oahu Water Protectors. We have an episode with Mikey on the effort to shut up.

down Red Hill. And I guess I might as well, this will be the first time that we've publicly announced this, but guerrilla history is actually going to be launching a spinoff show in the next couple of weeks with people who listen to guerrilla history may remember that we had a panel discussion about how political education and historical knowledge is crucial for activism and organizing. And we had a great panel. And this panel is going to be like a rotating series of hosts for this other show, which is currently going to be called Gorilla Radio, which

kind of combines guerrilla history and revolutionary left radio. Mike, he will be one of the co-apportating Central and the Partisan Brigade, which I think is a pretty cool name myself. But in any case,

I do agree with everything that Brett is saying. One thing that we have to always remember is that there is a limit. in terms of what is able to prepare it master media. So while we may have things like Parasite that have what most people would consider to be pretty explicitly anti-capitalist messaging and critiques of capitalism at the very least, if not explicitly anti-capitalist, you know, you can't go too far out of bounds with that.

You know, you can't show, imagine if we made a movie and maybe, hey, everybody should donate to Grella History Patreon, maybe we'll make a movie about the liquidation. of the landlords in China, for example. Like, is that ever going to be something that's going to make it in Western media? Like, are you going to go to the movie theater and watch a movie about the liquidation of the landlords and the redistribution of the land? I don't think so. It'd be great, but I don't think so.

Also, we have these other media narratives to obfuscate these points. So just think of when Parasite came out, which admittedly, I have not seen. I just don't have time for movies, really. But when Parasite came out and reading the synops, us in interviews with the director. I mean, it became very clear that it was a movie that was a critique of capitalism. But what were the first articles that we saw coming out? No, this is not a critique of capitalism in South Korea.

It's a veiled critique of the communism of North Korea. I saw multiple articles coming out from sites like, I believe that there was one that came out from the New York Times in terms of their, like, their culture section, but also in terms of other, you know, obviously Fox News is saying, similar things to this. I had seen multiple interviews, multiple pieces that have come out to obfuscate the point that, hey, this is a critique of capitalism and say, no, it's a, you know, like satirical look at like what North Korea is like, even though it's being filmed by a South Korean director saying, this is a look at what South Korean society is like, you know, hyper-capitalist South

Korea, which is essentially just a U.S. military base operating on the Korean peninsula. So there is going to be obfuscation and there is a limit in terms of what you can go and show. There's obviously the limitations in terms of funding. You know, if there's any billionaires that are watching this and are somewhat, you know, appreciative of anti-capitalist messaging, first of all, like, just what are you doing? But second of all, well, you can utilize these resources to try to get things like that out, like very explicitly anti-capitalist, but I just don't see that happening. you know, it is a release valve in the sense that it makes people think that there is that

critique out there. And there is that critique out there. Again, we're not criticizing the director of Parasite or things like that. That critique is out there, but there's a limit on it. There is certainly a limit. Yeah, following up on that a little bit too, I think that there's also like an open question in my mind to the extent to which these films are anti-capitalist, right? So I don't want to like be a hater here. Parasites like one of my favorite movies of the last few years. I think it's really exceptional. And these films express, I think, a real enmity that a lot of people feel towards the rich and the powerful. But the criticism in them is not quite anti-capitalist, right? And as much as it's not really a critique of the property

relations that produce that situation, which would be fucking hard to do in a film, admittedly. But it's not really a critique of that. It's a critique of kind of like the degeneracy of the rich, the moral weakness of the rich. It's very much like a focus on, um, you know, the way that rich people behave in particularly by a ways. Outside of Parasite, the other movie that just came out that I've been seeing a lot of people saying, like, oh, how did this get made in a capitalist society? It's Glass Onion, like the new Knives Out movie, which is sort of a satire critique on Elon Musk and on rich people generally. And again, like, the focus is always on kind of the incompetence of the rich, the moral vice of the rich, but never necessarily on how

they got there. That movie in particular, I think really, like the problem with the rich people and it is that they're cheating the system in some way. They haven't fairly gotten themselves there, which still leaves room for the idea that one could fairly position oneself as the owner of a large company and not cheat on their way to the top. So I do think there is also this slight misdirect

where what is called attention to isn't so much the system of capitalism that produces this, but the individual people who act monstrously or incompetently or silly on top in a lot of these films. So it is a release valve, and it also is kind of a redirect, an individualization of the problem to a certain degree that I think can take away

people's focus on the actual economic realities at play there. Absolutely. And you know, for what it's worth, you know, when there's a glut or an uptick in the amount of cultural production that fully or not,

half-acidly or not, critiques the basic structures of society or inequality or capitalism itself, I think that's signaling something in the general milieu of people's consciousness and minds that that is like things aren't working and it's going to come out in different ways different artists are going to give it different spins it's not always going to be as principled or as full of a critique as those of us on the Marxist left would want but i think there is something

being signaled in the cultural you know sort of collective consciousness that the way we're doing things is coming up against some some grand limit and you know and so on that sense i think it's at least interesting to see a rise in and that sort of media as as, you know, as weak as it can sometimes be. But yeah, let's go ahead and move on to a next question. This one's really good. It's actually very deep as well. Gary asks, how can we as communists develop a philosophy of law and rights

to supplant classical liberalism's grip on defining freedom? What would a bill of rights under communism look like? It can't just be a list of individual negative rights like we have now, freedom from government you know don't tread on me if the superstructure of law reinforces the base then a socialist jurisprudence will be crucial i'd like to know what you all think about this so the first thing is i really love your emphasis on negative freedoms versus positive freedoms because i think that's crucial and i think that is one of the main differences between liberalism and socialism so you know there is a place i think for the constraint of any power structures

and liberalism was concerned coming out of feudalism as it was with constraining the power of the authoritative state. So you kind of understand how those things would arise negatively. But then they get taken in all these different directions as time goes on in different cultures and histories take up these ideas. But I definitely, I love that emphasis on positive rights. What would a bill of rights under communism look like? I don't know for sure, but it would definitely include things like every human being has a right to a house. every human being has a right to health care every human being has a right to a clean safe environment you could even say maybe even during a socialist transition or even in communism itself depending on the

context everybody is guaranteed a job or an income or something like that so this switching over into positive rights and saying this is what people deserve and of course one of the core differences as well is liberalism is about individual rights and then the capitalist economic model is about the, you know, production of profits and infinite growth. The orienting philosophy of a socialist society is something like, in a communist society, to be sure, something like how can we use the collective resources at our disposal to create the highest quality of life for individuals in this society? That right there totally shifts your entire approach to these problems.

It's not a matter of getting these tyrants off our back, you know, the free market, the free exchange of ideas. what can you positively, what kind of society do we actually want? And that's where positive rights come in and certainly it would look something like that. Go to any liberal city in the United States, any huge liberal city and you're going to see blocks and blocks and blocks of homeless people, people without access to mental health care, people with addiction issues that society has tossed to the curb. And that's all perfectly in line with liberalism, right? And their belief about agency of the individual and of individual rights. So shifting individual rights

toward collective rights while still respecting individuals, right? Because healthy collectives are made of healthy individuals and vice versa. And advancing positive rights instead of merely negative ones, I think, is definitely a step in the right direction. But I'm also not knowledgeable about law and jurisprudence and all of that. So I'm very limited in what I can say here. Yeah, building on that a little bit too, I think is like if we want to ask the question of like, what would rights look like in a socialist context, the constitution of the USSR can give us a little bit of a clue to that, right? because it also outlined rights. And I think, interestingly, if we look at the Constitution of the USSR,

we can see that there were the negative rights that you would expect included in it. Those are still there. Freedom of worship, freedom of speech, et cetera, are still codified there. And we can have conversations about whether or not those rights functionally were enforced in the Soviet Union. But there were a list of positive rights as well. There was the right to education, the right to work, the right to health care in certain contexts, there was a whole set of positive rights that were put forward as well. So I think you're spot on, Brett, with that. And the other thing that I would say is aside from the question of rights, if we want to talk about, like, what is a theory of law that is not a liberal theory of law, but that could be a Marxist one, part of that, I think, is a matter

of, you know, thinking about law through a lens very similar to how Lenin thinks about the state. One of the difficulties about how liberalism conceptualizes the law is that the law is supposed to be an essentially a political entity that exists on a level above politics to regulate and intervene into it for the public good in some sense. And again, this is very similar to how the state can be conceptualized within liberalism as well. And one thing that we can do, you know, taking Lenin's criticism of the state, is also recognized that the law is a tool of class struggle. The law is a tool of class domination. In the United States, I mean, any critical assessment of the legal system here shows that what your class is affects how you get treated. It affects if you get

convicted in the first place in many instances and what your sentencing is on top of that. So stepping outside this idea of the law as this kind of mystified thing that stands above politics and class and governs it can be important. And that also means recognizing that in a socialist context, a law can be a, or the law itself can be a tool for proletarian dictatorship, right? It is a way through which the proletariat can wield power. You have to be careful with that, but it is a tool of class struggle as a tool of class domination. So stepping outside of a liberal view of the law, I think, requires understanding it in relation to class and kind of demystifying its function there. Yeah, I thought this was a very interesting

question. And my response, actually, I think Allison has essentially anticipated it. I mean, my sense is that maybe there wouldn't be a theory or philosophy of law and rights under communism maybe under socialism as a transition when you still are going to have a state the things that brett mentioned would be fundamental to it and essentially as many realms of social existence that can be decommodified that would be the goal it seems to me under a kind of rights regime so all of those rights that make it not a market function to provide you know the essentials of a quality you know of a quality life and that would have to be part of it but I think more broadly and fundamentally the fact is is that law is an instrument as Allison was

saying of class struggle I had a professor who once put it quite nicely said that law and jurisprudence was a science of property I mean it is a form of knowledge that is generated to ensure, you know, property rights fundamentally. It's a science that, in a form of knowledge that develops from not just capitalism, because, of course, there are conditions and traditions of law in, you know, pre-liberal bourgeois states, but fundamentally, I think, you know, under communism, We would have these principles, but we wouldn't necessarily have them in a legal sort of framework. I think it's hard for us to imagine it, I think. So I would like to think more about what that would look like. But I think the whole regime of law is tied to a form of state that I don't think would exist under communism.

Yeah, that's a really good point on, and I'm glad you pointed that out for sure. all right let's go ahead and move on we got a little bit longer here i think we maybe have room for a couple more questions possibly again thank you just so much to everybody that's engaged with the patreon and ask these questions are in the chat right now all of us are more or less reading this and we really appreciate you being here so one of the last questions here is what threats do increased automation pose in a capitalist organization of the economy and how does socialism address these problems i'll go ahead and start while other people sort of digest that question With just the one obvious point, which I always make in the automation discussion, which is that under capitalist mode of production and social relations, when automotive technologies come onto the scene, they're inherently non-liberatory. And what they actually do is make human labor compete against technology for jobs.

And there's certain ways that capitalists might try to, you know, grease that groove and iron out those wrinkles. A UBI is one of the ways they might do that. But fundamentally, the private ownership over the means of production in the age of automation is going to mean more and more inequality, more and more value being produced, but the products of that value, the profit of that value, going to fewer and fewer people, while an underclass of people grows and grows and grows. We're already started seeing that outside the context of automation, just as the natural imaginations of capital.

But I think in the age of automation, that's going to be increasingly the case. And so how a socialist society would differ is that we would fundamentally see automotive technologies as something to invest in so we can liberate people from the worst forms and the most degrading forms of labor. And the value and the resources and the wealth produced by those automated technologies would not go into the pockets of one person with some government handouts to soothe the rabble, but would instead be reinvested into society as a whole to make sure we have things like housing for everybody, healthcare for everybody, et cetera. And so just the very nature of the form automation

takes under capitalism is fundamentally different and it must be fundamentally different than a socialist approach to that same exact technology. You will never have liberatory automation in a capitalist mode of production and social relations. But the introduction of automation will also increase the contradictions between the private ownership of capital and private property and all these things as well. And that's going to lead to interesting. developments on that front as well. So those are some opening thoughts, but does anybody else have anything deeper to say? Yeah, just briefly, because I know that Allison and Adnan will probably have much better things

to say than I do. But, you know, sometimes we see, again, this is something that we see online, but I have heard it in person as well. Something along the lines of, oh, well, you know, Karl Marx was writing about capitalism, you know, 150 years ago. He didn't force the computers that could do the jobs of 200 people. Like, tell me you haven't read Carl Marx without telling me you haven't read Carl Marx because this is something that he directly addresses. You know, automation and mechanization is something that he directly addresses.

So by saying that he didn't foresee this, this is exactly what he foresaw. But the key point is what Brett already raised for me. And that's that you have to look at the social relations of the society that the automation is taking place in. automation there is you know always a tendency to drive for automation because there are jobs there is work that needs to be done that is not particularly pleasant work and so there is always going to be the tendency to drive for automation in these forms of work the social relations of the society is really the key component here because if you're in a capitalist mode uh capitalist relations within society and a capitalist mode of production as brett said the the value that is being extracted is going

into the hands of the few. You're creating a larger labor era stock. You know, all of these things that Brett was touching on, you know, these people are competing against each other. It allows the capitalist to drive the wages down. It allows them to pay less for labor. It allows them to extract more value from the material inputs as well as the labor that they are utilizing, just as a, you know, a sure factor of they're utilizing less labor and they have more competition for those places. Like, this is, this is inevitable under a capitalist mode of production and capitalist relations. Under socialist or communist relations, this is no longer an issue. The entire point is that we must go beyond the capitalist mode of production. We must go beyond capitalist

relations in a way that when there is value that is being generated, that value was being shared in an equitable fashion, that value is being shared societally rather than going into the hands of the few. I mean, this is just a very, and the decisions that are being, made should be made for the betterment of society. You know, we also have to think about not only where is the money going, but who is making the decisions. If we have, you know, big fat cat sitting at the top of a corporation saying, well, I'm going to automate this because it's good for the bottom line, you know, there are other externalities to keep in mind. How are the other people in that community going to get by if we're not equitably distributing things? What are the

environmental externalities at play with the automation and mechanization of very, processes. These are not necessarily insignificant, but they're things that are not thought about under a capitalist mode of production. These are things that under a socialist mode of production with socialized decision making and socialized distribution of value, these are things that can be considered. And this is just fundamentally different, right? It's fundamentally different. There's just one other thing that I'll say very briefly, which is that we also have to consider the imperialist side of things. Automation just deepens the contradictions between the imperialist core and the periphery. You know, under a socialist or communist, you know, state or, you know,

communist state kind of a, what's the word I'm looking for? Somebody helped me. It's still early here. Oxymoron. Thank you, Brett. That was exactly what I was looking for. Oxymoron. It's oxymoron. In any case, under those mode of production and those relations, you can begin to think about justice and equity for people in the periphery in the global south. But under a capitalist mode of production, this is not going to be the case. Automation is always going to push these contradictions between, quote, workers in the core and workers in the periphery to even greater heights. Okay, go ahead and none. Well, there's not really much to add other than just to re-emphasize the point that it isn't automation itself. You know, if we socialize the gains in productivity and the possibilities of production in automation, you know, democratically, then that's great.

I mean, less work for us to have to do. We can turn our, you know, talents and energies to other aspects. of, you know, fulfillment in life and what could be better. But the problem, of course, is that all the gains are being, you know, monopolized. So I would say that, you know, a lot of things would be automated, you know, if these were organized around, you know, human needs, right? like very poor, poorly paid labor, you know, if you actually had to, you know, do this democratically, we would find all kinds of ways to, you know, develop technologies to do all of the kind of

terrible and horrible work that people don't want to do if they actually had to, you know, pay for this. But because all the gains can be monopolized and exploited, automation is, being used to as part of, you know, class warfare, essentially. But in that process, it will develop forms of technology that actually could be used to liberate us from work. And that is a great thing. I mean, no one should fetishize, you know, working.

I mean, Marx would not believe that the goal was for everybody to have a job. that wasn't his goal full employment his goal was to liberate us from work and you know that's the difference i think it's fundamental it's not the process itself in fact capitalism in his view was a progressive force horribly exploitative exploitative but also creating conditions that could liberate us in a new way yeah one thing that i would want to add to you i think is that one thing i think to consider is automa occurs is also what that opens up in terms of organizing and labor. I think that's an important consideration. So just one thing I'll add because it's been on my mind a ton recently and in the news a ton is obviously like one of the big breakthroughs in automation that's occurring right now

is with AI, which is now able to produce art at very high fidelity in interesting ways. Also write copy, which will affect a lot of jobs and also write code, which will probably affect a lot of jobs. And one thing I think is interesting there is as scary as that is and as much as that, that is going to have a detrimental effect. I think it also has the ability to kind of push proletarianization of some jobs that kind of have escaped certain levels of proletarianization, right? One thing that Henry mentioned is that automation allows bosses to drive down wages, drive down a whole bunch of other things. And if we think about things like the tech sector, which I actually think is going to be hit pretty hard by automation with what we're seeing from like the GPT model's ability to write code,

you know, we might think about how this is a sector that has been hard to organize in because tech workers have been kind of given a petty bourgeois position within the economy in terms of how they're treated. And this could further push proletarianization in some of these fields that have kind of escaped it to a certain extent in a way that might open possibilities for organization as well. So, you know, obviously like when we're thinking about AI, you know, our automation on the whole, how that functions in capitalism and socialism is totally different. But we should say we are here under capitalism now. As automation transforms industries, how do we respond to it? interact with it. And I think that there will be openings into industries that have been harder to

get into because of its ability to potentially drive proletarianization. So I think that needs to be followed closely and, you know, considered tactically as well. All great points. Both Malcolm and DeWu in the chat have been asking for this question. So I'm going to make sure we touch it before we kind of go into the last question or so. And this one, I think, is related to what I said on the recent Red Menace at the very end of our recent Red Menace episode on Desert, by the anarchist, anonymous anarchist writer, about my views on climate change having shifted a little bit. So the question is, Brett and others,

can you elaborate on your shifted perspective regarding the climate change outlook and what information made you change your mind on the matter? I just want to kind of be clear here, I'm just saying that, like, relative to my position a year or two ago, where I was much more, I would say, hyper-alarmist and sort of like inevitable with the collapse that's coming because of climate change and I went through some

even rough mental periods of time where I really was like on the dark, dark end of doomerism when it came to climate change is just that I think it's not going to be as catastrophic maybe as we might have

previously thought and it's really relative to my own belief, not relative to any huge shifts in the environment. For example, the last IPCC report that came out had the optimistic note of clipping off the most extreme version of warming that was hitherto a real possibility. I also am seeing these developments, prices of renewables going down, people across the world

taking the issue more seriously being impacted by it and thus responding to it. And my point is that as the climate destabilizes and the impacts are more and more apparent, there's going to be continued investment and continued work and continued agitation, around this issue, meaning that it's not going to be the best case scenario, nor is it going to be the worst case scenario. And in the context of that Red Menace episode, I was arguing that some people on the revolutionary side of things can sometimes view the inevitable collapse brought on by climate change as their only hope for revolution. And I kind of wanted to push back against that. Okay, what if this collapse doesn't come? What if these states are able to

adapt or there is, I mean, we talk about climate leviathan and all the different trajectories that it could take. But my point there was not that it's not going to be terrible, not going to be apocalyptic for some people in some places. Absolutely true. But just that relative to my earlier deep existential crisis in the face of climate change, I kind of have moderated a tad and have seen some developments, which I view as somewhat optimistic. And so that was kind of my point there. But again, I'm not trying to downplay the seriousness of it. It's going to create a lot of tragedy. It already is.

It's going to create a lot of opportunity. And it already is in some sense. And people that are the least responsible for it are going to suffer the most, and that's unacceptable. And, you know, I'm not trying to downplay the issue as a whole. But especially in reaction to some things I see online and stuff where people say things like, I'm not going to have kids because why would I, you know, have kids when civilization is going to be done in 30. years. You know, my kids won't even grow to be able to see adulthood and the anti-natalism that can sometimes come out of the most extreme versions of apocalyptic climate change ideas. And I kind of

wanted to hedge a little bit against that, fight against antinatalism and those things. So it was really relative to those issues and not me saying like, oh, a new thing has happened that I totally didn't see coming and now we don't have to worry about climate change. So I just wanted to make that clear but i would be very interested to hear all of your thoughts on climate change where you think it's going are people adapting to it is it going to continue to adapt is it going to get very very ugly for everybody is it more catastrophic than i'm letting on etc so kind of how in this time and place because all these things develop right two years ago i felt different about it than last year and i feel different about it this year and next year it could be more dire and i could

retract this statement right it's an it's an ongoing process so where all of you at with regards to the climate issue. I'll be really brief. So I again, going back to one of the first things that I said, I try not to think of it in terms of wins and losses. I think of it as trends. I think that some of the trends that we've seen in the last year have been slightly less bad than they were, you know, looking a year or two previously, but I still think that they're looking quite bad. We also have politicians, including the president of the country that I am currently in saying things like global warming is going to open economic passages, shipping routes through the Arctic, which is going to be very good for Russia.

You know, they're going to be able to ship over the top of the globe instead of having to go, you know, through the Atlantic or the Pacific. Like, this is a very worrying statement from a very leader of a very big country. And I know that it's not only Vladimir Putin that is saying this. I've also heard some U.S. politicians say similar things like, you know, the thawing of the polar ice caps is going to open new shipping routes and it's going to make inter-country commerce much easier, much more efficient. I mean, this is a very worrying tendency to look at, oh, what are the silver linings that we could

that we could find from absolute catastrophic environmental degradation and climate change? This is not very encouraging for me to try to find a silver lining because it assumes that you're going to have very negative consequences. And the thing that we have to keep in mind is that these negative consequences are not going to be equitably felt. They're going to be disproportionately felt by people in the global south, particularly places like Mozambique who have severe flooding and increased typhoons that hit them as a direct result of global warming and study after study have shown that the severe weather-related disasters

that Mozambique has been facing in recent years are directly attributable. to, you know, global warming, climate change, whatever you want to call it. We also have things like the thawing of the permafrost, which is releasing massive amounts of methane here a little bit to the east of me in Siberia. But, you know, the permafrost there is thawing at record rates. There are very, very worrying signs still. So while we have had some trends that have started to look not quite as bad in the last year, for me, things are still looking quite negative and we need to have major societal shifts. in order to go past this. And this needs to be led by the countries that are already developed.

You know, we can't just say, hey, I'm Duke University. Let's look at how much we can reduce emissions if we switch all of the wood stoves in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to gas stoves, which is literally a study that Duke University put out. And I mentioned in the upcoming episode with Jason Moore. Or maybe it was one, we have an upcoming episode with Max Iyle on guerrilla history as well. It was in one of those two episodes I mentioned that Duke had the study come out where they were like, how much emission can we reduce? If we switched all of the wood fire cooking methods in the Democratic Republic of Congo to gas

or natural gas cooking, it's an absolutely moronic suggestion that this is going to be something that is going to in any way impact the climate for good. Change needs to be made in places like the United States. Continued advances need to be made. in China, which has made some advances recently, but needs to do far more. All of Europe, particularly Western Europe, needs to make major advances. So we need to keep that in mind that, well, things may not look quite as bad today as they did one or two years ago. Things are still looking pretty bad. Yeah. And, you know, having been on that episode where Brett, where that

discussion came up, I will just briefly say, from my perspective, I don't think it's so much that I don't think climate change is as bad. And more that I'm just more pessimistic about the idea that the capitalist state is going to find a way to hold on, right? I think that for me is more what the shift is. Reading climate biathan, I think, had a lot to do with that of just pushing back against the idea that even catastrophic climate change means something like a singular collapse scenario, which you often hear talked about on the left. That's more kind of where I'm coming from. And as Brett talked about on our episode on Desert, like, that can be a kind of defeatist utopianism in itself, right? It's kind of a way of saying, like, we don't have to do

politics because this collapse is coming. So I think it's also worth pushing back against that as well in a really important way. So that's kind of where I'm coming from. It's not I think climate change is less bad. It's that I think that capitalism and capitalist states might be more adaptable than I was previously assuming. Yeah, all really great important points. And I see many great points in the chat as well. Love that we have such intelligent listeners and audience members for sure. But I thought we had one final question. It might be kind of a fun way to end, a rather serious discussion, which is, do you believe in New Year's resolutions? Like, do you put any stock in that idea at all? And if you do, what are your New Year's resolutions for

2023? And I guess I'll answer first just to give everybody else time to digest that question and come up with their answer. But I actually, with my family and my kids and stuff, we did it this year. I was like, you know, just something to work on. It doesn't have to be a very specific goal, but just something you're going to work on. My 13-year-old daughter really impressed me by saying that her self-generated goal is to read six books for fun this year. And, you know, I really got a little moment of pride that that's what my daughter wants to do, so I'm very happy with her. My wife's a New Year's resolution is to develop yoga, get better at that.

I like that goal as well. And mine, I've gotten recently into weightlifting myself. And so my big resolution for 2023, my personal resolution, is to advance my strength and cardio, my conditioning, get better at lifting weights, get good at the techniques and the forms involved, and just try to be a fitter person all around and to set a good example for my children in that respect as well. So my personal New Year's resolution is really centered around that development for me this year. So yeah, what are all of your resolutions? Well, it might be a bit of a cop-out, but I'm a bit older than the rest of you, so I've had

more years of failing to live up to my resolutions, and so now I no longer believe in the resolutions, at least for myself. And I like to kind of rationalize that by thinking that really isn't about this sort of individual kind of personal goal. I need the social conditions to transform in order for myself to make the kind of progress in life. But, of course, I would like to read more and exercise more. And I feel after the health discussion earlier, that there is really a politics around sort of health and fitness that is quite interesting.

And, you know, we should take care of ourselves. So if I were to have resolutions that I thought I could keep, it would probably be to exercise and so on. So, yeah, but my cop-out is that I don't believe in resolutions anymore from personal experience of my own weakness and inability to keep to them. Adnan Hussein, no improvement needed. He's perfect as he is. True, I agree with that message. I guess I'll go.

So I also never really make New Year's resolution. I never did, but I do have things that, you know, I guess some people could consider them like resolutions, but for me, they're like eminently achievable and planned things that were, that I'm planning on having come out in the near future. So like I mentioned, I have the book, the new translation from the original Italian with a new forward of Domenico La Sordo, Stalin, history and critique of a black legend. I already know that that's going to happen. Like, this is a resolution that I'm, we're already well along the way of the, forward is already written several chapters have already been completely edited uh translations have

been finalized the rest have been roughly translated and are just going through editing right now so this is something that'll be out in like a month you know i don't have to worry about not achieving this goal uh keep your eyes peeled for that by the way it's an excellent book and one that we'll definitely have to talk about when and when it comes out um otherwise you know like my wife and i were planning on uh not eating any processed foods in the month of January, we've been, I mean, we cook dinner for ourselves every day anyway. We never eat out or anything like that. Like, it's always home cooked food, but we tend to snack a lot outside of meal times. So this was something that we were planning on doing anyway, but since

it's starting in January, I guess you could consider it a New Year's resolution. But other than that, it's just like, you know, read more, engage more, get out more in, you know, engage in my community, more, these sorts of things. Things that I've already been doing, just try to do more of them. That's my resolution. Awesome. Yeah. So I do believe in New Year's resolutions. I feel like they're good to kind of like give some focus.

And I usually don't hit them, but every once in a while I do. So I usually try to think of them. You know, my big one for next year is this year I got super into rock climbing. For me, it's really important to have a physical activity that especially one that is like very mental helps keep me grounded, helps give me a break from reading and thinking about things and just kind of like physically connect with existence. and that's been super important for me. So my big resolution is just to keep, you know, moving forward with that,

learn to lead, climb, get outside more, spend more time in nature climbing it. That's kind of the big one. I feel like, you know, just really emphasizing exercise, physical activity, super important for me. But one of the biggest things for helping me, both mentally and physically. So just kind of leaning into that more in 2023 is definitely the goal. I absolutely love that. That's great.

All right. Well, I think we're going to end it there. Again, thank you so. much to everybody in the chat, everybody that showed up to this. Thank you so much to anybody who submitted questions to be discussed here. I hope we didn't let you down. From the bottom of my heart, I'm deeply appreciative of Henry, Adnan, Allison. You're all friends of mine. I love you all dearly. I hope you have an absolutely wonderful 2023. And a huge love and solidarity to everybody who listens to any of these shows and gets anything useful out of them. We are here just to

hopefully create content that people find useful, informative, and maybe even inspiring. And we're going to continue to work on that as hard as we can in 2023. So love, solidarity, stay safe out there, and we'll talk to you on the other side of this calendar year. Good night. And I would also, I would like to just take the opportunity also to express my appreciation for Brett, because I know that he's thanking us for doing all of this, but I think that most of the people that are watching this are also realizing that you're kind of the nexus of this entire thing, like Rev. Left, Red Menace, Guerrilla history, you are the common denominator between these. You are the foundational block of all three of these shows.

And without it, none of us would be able to do these shows. And I know that the listeners, and I was a listener from very early on, we've learned a lot from you. So I want to express my appreciation for you as well, Brett. But why don't we, as we close out, tell the listeners how they can find us on social media. Brett, you can go first. Okay, yeah, you can find everything I do at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. You can find all the socials as well as all three shows at that website. Awesome. Yeah, you can find Red Menace at Red underscore Minnis underscore Pod on Twitter, and you can check that out.

Yeah, you can find me at Adnan A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N on Twitter, and check out the Crusading Society course. I mentioned it on the stream and seemed like in the chat some people are interested. You can find a link to join the Google Meet and past episodes or past. sessions are recorded and available, you can find out about all of that at at www.adnhussein.org slash courses. Hope to see you in a future week. As for me, as we get ready to go to work now, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-1-995.

You can follow Gorilla History on Twitter, which is collectively run by me, Brett Anadnon at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-S-Core-Pod. I will just remind everybody that we have a guerrilla history spinoff show that'll be starting within the next couple of weeks called Gorilla Radio. We'll be advertising that via the guerrilla history Twitter feed. So if you want to know how to subscribe to that

and where to listen to it, be sure to just follow guerrilla history. Again, Gorilla underscore Pod on Twitter, and you'll get all of those updates. and you can support guerrilla history on Patreon at patreon. at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. I know that times are tough. You know, inflation is hitting everybody hard,

but if you appreciate the work that Brett does at Rev Laugh, or Brett Nelson at Red Menace or myself, Adnan, and Brett at Gorilla History, you know, consider dropping a couple dollars in on any of those three. A little bit goes a long way for us, and it does make it possible for us to do. do the show. So thank you very much for everybody that turned out and thank you for supporting the show. So on that note, Brett, why don't she close us out? There you go, Henry. Thank you for keeping me grounded. All right. Red salute to everybody. See you in 2020. Be safe out there.