Rev Left Radio - The Current Political Moment, U.S. Imperial Decline, and Organizing a Revolutionary Vanguard Party

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

In this episode Breht sits down with Brian Becker, a longtime socialist organizer and leading member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), to break down the current political and economic crisis in the United States and the urgent need for revolutionary organization. As Trump-aligned forces consolidate power, billionaires tighten their grip over the state, and the feckless Democratic Party continues its self-imposed paralysis, Brian and Breht examine what this moment signals about the trajectory of U.S. capitalism and imperialism. Is the U.S. empire in irreversible decline, or is it adapting to sustain itself through repression and restructuring? Brian shares insights from decades of organizing, discussing the lessons PSL has learned in building a revolutionary party, the importance of anti-imperialism in U.S. revolutionary work, and the key weaknesses and strengths of today’s left. Finally, Brian offers concrete advice for listeners looking to move from political awareness to active participation in the struggle. If you’re serious about understanding and engaging in revolutionary politics, this is an episode you won’t want to miss. Outro Song: "Gangster" by Good Luck Chuck Feat. Rocky Rivera & Bambu Learn about and Join the PSL HERE Check out Liberation News HERE Check out Brian's podcast "The Socialist Program" on YOUTUBE or subscribe to the show on your preferred podcast app Learn more about the ANSWER Coalition HERE Check out BreakThrough News HERE ----------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left HERE

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev. Left Radio. On today's episode, I have one of the original founders and leaders of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Brian Becker, on the show to talk about the current political moment, whether this is an acceleration of neoliberalism or a new phase in sort of capitalist development, how to organize to fight back, the different lessons. that PSL and the Answer Coalition, et cetera, have learned over the years with regards to effective organizing, cadre building, how you can get involved. Because I always say that a core part of Rev Left Radio is not only to equip you with the inspiration and the knowledge, but to activate you and get you involved in your community. And there are many good organizations out there doing great work, and every community is going to have a different landscape of organizations to join.

But if you're a Marxist, if you're a Marxist, if you're a Marxist Leninist and PSL is in your area, It is a wonderful organization to join, to bolster, to contribute to their growth. I'm also, I just have to say, the sound quality on my end is a little lower than usual because I am recording from home. I had surgery last week, as some of you may know, and I'm still recovering. It's really hard to drive over to Dave's house to the recording shed as usual. So I apologize for that, but hopefully the dip in my audio quality isn't too distracting. And as always, if you like what we do here at Revelect Radio, we are 100%. listener funded always have been always will be you can support us at patreon.com

forward slash rev left radio and in exchange for five bucks a month you not only support the show but you get early releases bonus episodes and access to a back catalog now of over 300 patreon exclusive episodes over the eight years that we've been on the air but if you don't want to join a subscription service or you don't have the the continuity of income to do a monthly subscription you can also donate a one-time donation at buy mea coffee.com forward slash rev left radio it really helps Dave and I are fathers we're family men we're struggling like everybody else out there so if you appreciate what we do and you have the disposable income to help it is deeply deeply appreciated and it's even more

appreciated now that the medical debt is piling up for me so thank you to that but if you don't have money people are struggling we get it leaving us a positive review it's a great way that you can help us subscribing to us on YouTube, following us on Instagram. Those things really do help get our show in front of more people and help the show continue to grow, especially at a moment like this. We want to just contribute to the broader ecosystem of Prince of the Bold revolutionary voices that are on the rise. And as people are completely disillusioned by this rotting corpse of the system, they start

looking for alternative voices, alternative analyses. and if something like Rev Left pops up in their newsfeed, that can only be a good thing. So thank you to everybody supports the show. Without further ado, here is my wonderful conversation with Brian Becker about the PSL, the history of socialist movements, and the current moment in American political life domestically and the retreat and decline of the American Empire abroad. Enjoy. My name is Brian Becker. I'm a founding member and Central Committee member of the Party for Socialism in

Liberation, PSL, and I'm also the national director of the anti-war coalition, the answer coalition. Yeah, absolutely. And it's a pleasure to have you on. I know we were trying to get Gloria LaRiva on as well. Do you want to bring attention to the issue that she's working on currently and why she had to miss the podcast? Because I think it's important. This episode will come out in a week or so, but I'm sure it'll be an ongoing fight. Yeah, in the last 48 hours, we've been in full mobilization mode to try to win the release of Mahmoud Khalil, the graduate student from Columbia University, who was basically dragoon kidnapped from his campus-based housing on Saturday by Department of Homeland Security officers in order to deport him. They thought he was here

on a visa, but he actually has a green card. And when they realized, when his wife, his his wife, who's eight months pregnant, showed these officers who had stormed into their apartment that Mahmoud had a green card, they called back to headquarters and said, hey, he doesn't, he has a green card, not a visa. And they were told, well, the green cards revoked, and they took him away to an iced detention center and then to another ICE detention center. Well, in order to revoke a green card, there's a process. There is a due process. And I, Obviously, the Trump administration, even though it wants to play God, as do the officials in the Department of Homeland Security, they are at least so far constrained by existing law within the United States. So Gloria is helping to do intense mobilizing.

She's on her way right now to Louisiana at the detention facility where Mahmoud is being held. So we're trying to build support all around the country. The day we're recording this show, we're going to be in the streets in a few hours down at 26 Federal Plaza, the headquarters of ICE. And there will be a companion demonstration in Washington, D.C. as well. Yeah, absolutely. And on our Instagram, I've been spamming out the details of that event. Obviously, by the time people hear it, that particular event will have passed.

But this will probably be an ongoing fight, and there's many more people who are going to be victimized by this cruel and incompetent, heavy-handed, grotesque system under Trump. So this is a fight that we're going to be engaged in at least for several years, without a doubt. So hats off to Gloria. I totally understand why she couldn't make it today. But I have you, Brian Becker, I've been a long-time fan of your voice on the left, and of course, PSL's long time organizing the answer coalition, everything that you're involved with. So it's really cool to just get a time to chat with you. And what I want to talk about today is not only the PSL and it's organizing and some of its history and its ideology,

but just understanding the current political moment, the broader trends of U.S. Imperial decline, and then end it with a conversation about the importance of organizing, how people can get involved, lessons from decades of organizing that you've been involved in, et cetera. So let's go ahead and get into it. And this first question is actually, you know, a good segue from what? what we just talked about because we're seeing Trump and Elon openly gutting aspects of the federal government, pretending that they have a mandate, they're purging civil servants, handing even more power to billionaires while the Democratic leadership do nothing except praise Ronald Reagan and play dead

and talk about needing to move closer to the imaginary center. They just don't ever seem able to learn a single lesson from any failure, any loss, anything whatsoever. So how do you interpret at this moment domestically? And what does it say about where the, where U.S. capitalism is headed? Well, we and the PSL are operating out of a Marxist framework in terms of our analysis of class society. We see the United States ruling classes, the center not only of capitalism in the United States, but of global capitalism. It is the steward or manager of the global capitalist system, and it has been such since 1945 since the end of World War II. And within our sort of assessment of the moment and putting it into the framework of how U.S. capitalism as the center

of global capitalism has evolved, or maybe more precisely has devolved, we think that there is intense, a factional struggle within the ruling class itself. The ruling class should not be understood as a monolith. It's a ruling class, and all ruling classes have tendencies, factions. And as Mark said about the capitalist ruling class, that it is comparable to a warring band of brothers, always at war. And the capitalist system is, of course, a system based on competition. So the capitalists compete with each other. They want to destroy each other. They want to grab market share from each other. They want to move in the direction of monopoly. We see similar fights happening within the sector of the government. So there has been, we believe, a long-time,

long-standing discontent that arises from the most right-wing sector of the U.S. ruling class. that feels that the U.S. government, as it had certain features of expansion of democracy, meaning certain economic, political, and social reforms that were achieved as a consequence of the labor upsurge of the 1930s. And then even more profoundly, the civil rights movement or what we call the civil rights revolution, which was a detonator for a women's rights movement, an LGBT movement, a disabled movement, an environmental justice movement. Those movements in the 50s, 60s, and 70s changed the form of governance in a way. Of course, the same capitalist state exists, the same repressive institutions exist. That didn't go away. But there was an expansion of democracy. And this right-wing sector of the

ruling class, represented now most notably by the current makeup of the Trump cabinet, has wanted to change the form of governance in the United States, meaning they are unhappy with the current form of bourgeois democracy. They want to, quote, make America great again by going back to an earlier era, an era that starts about a century ago, right before the 1930s, where there was undiluted, unobstructed domination over everything in the economy and in government by the capitalists. And so Russell Vaut, who's this director of the Office of Management and Budget, who is the architect and principal author of Project 2025. He is the right-wing ideologue driving much of this,

but he's joined with Elon Musk, who admires fascism and this other clique of billionaires, they are basically at war against what they call the administrative state, meaning those parts of the capitalist government that were altered as a consequence of these vast, profound grassroots social justice movements. And their attempt is to smash that part of the government and create, in essence, a right-wing political dictatorship, because in order to accomplish their goals, they have to criminalize and suppress dissent, which, of course, they anticipate, but they're also preparing for it. Absolutely. And he makes explicit overtures to William McKinley, the first gilded age, is this era that he's trying to replicate. So, I mean, it's not even just speculation.

It's exactly how he self-conceives himself, I mean, despite his, you know, very, very minor understanding of history, almost certainly. But none of this could have happened without Democratic Party, complete betrayal of the working class, paving the road for this for decades upon decades, the whole bipartisan consensus of the neoliberal era. Do you want to touch quickly before we move on on just the Democrats' complete failure on this front and their complete connection to where we are now? Yeah, I mean, Trump is the logical extension of the Democrats' own policies over many decades. I mean, when Carter came in, he was chosen when the U.S. government,

was in a state of collapse and people were at that time in mid-70s talking about the empire being in decline and people thought it was on the way out, but of course that was premature. Carter came in as a hand-picked Democratic candidate who had no connection to labor, unlike earlier post-World War II Democratic candidates, actually since Roosevelt. Then you had Bill Clinton in the 90s who adopted Ronald Reagan's program. He said, we're going to end big government. We're going to going to end welfare, as we know. They eliminated 10 million people from public support overnight. Seven million of them were children. It was Clinton who implemented the NAFTA agreement, which was really codifying neoliberal policies, allowing jobs to be crushed inside the United States

so that capitalist corporations in the United States could make super profits by exploiting low-wage labor outside the United States. That was the beginning of the era of so-called free trade, which is a stand-in term for basically corporate looting, plundering, and pillaging, or what we now call in a vernacular term that's not fully understood, but it's neoliberalism. The Democrats did all that. When George W. Bush wanted to go to war against Iraq based on lies and everybody knew it was lies, the Democrats went along with it. And Bush sort of rounded up all of those Muslim and Arab and South Asian people after 9-11. The Democrats went along with it.

In the last years, right before Trump came into office, 25 million people in the United States, working class folks, lost Medicaid coverage. That was under Biden. It was under Biden that the $300 a month per child for families that was initiated as a COVID relief program, a program that, by the way, reduced childhood poverty by 50% in one year by giving families $300 per child. Biden got rid of that. So childhood poverty went up again by it doubled, and that showed that childhood poverty was a policy choice by the Biden administration. So doing all of these things and then waging war, unnecessary, relentless proxy war

in Ukraine and banging the door, the war drums against China, none of that is popular for the people in the United States. So it's inevitable, not to mention the feeble quality of the candidates themselves, but their policies are antithetical to the needs and interests of the working class in the United States. That's why they failed and that's why Trump won. Absolutely. Could not have said it better. And so when we hear Democrats and supporters of the Democratic Party talk about them being the opposition party, resistance, we have to stop fascism, we have to understand that they are completely complicit in this entire process that ends us right exactly where we are. And socialist, Marxist, communists have been pointing at this out for as long as I've been

politically conscious that this is where this whole thing was going to end up, and sure enough, we're here. You mentioned neoliberalism, and I think this gives rise to a very interesting question. Somebody like Verifakis, for example, talks about No feudalism. And I have quips with that because certainly there's no shift in the mode of production. This is still capitalism. But maybe it's helpful to think about capitalism or U.S. capitalism entering a new phase. Maybe it's not. So how do you think about this? Is this an acceleration of neoliberalism? Or would we, can we start to see the outlines of like sort of a new phase of capitalist rule? Well, I think it's definitely a new phase. I mean, when you think about the revolution in computer technology and electronics, and in transportation. That allowed the capitalist basically to set up enterprises anywhere in the world and basically export factories, the means of production outside the metropolitan centers, outside, say, the United States, where millions of manufacturing jobs were lost during this three-decade period, and those factories were taken overseas. And the capitalist could make

shirts in Bangladesh and sell them back in the United States for like $8 and still be making super profits. So the technology itself allowed capital to spread to all corners of the planet and to do it in search of maximum super profits. And so that had the effect of eviscerating working class communities and the working class writ large inside the United States, for instance, but also inside the other major advanced capitalist countries. They were less devastated in Europe because there was a wider social insurance net that provides basic things that people have there

that Americans could only dream of. So this is a new stage in a new phase, but it's still capitalism. It's still driven by the same sort of basic principle of capital, which is to seek maximum profit. It's only that the place maximum profit could be derived was, in the case of the United States, largely overseas. Then you had, as a consequence really of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp, the ability of

U.S. banks and Western banks to impose strict austerity programs on most of the formerly colonized or semi-colonized parts of the world under what was called by the IMF structural adjustment, whereby basically emerging anti-colonial countries or countries whose existence was due to the anti-colonial project after World War II basically sold their water systems, their sewage systems, their electrical systems, their natural resources to the highest bidder. Or in some cases it was even the lowest bidder if the bidder had a lot of state power behind it, which was certainly the case for American corporations. So we saw a sort of a redistribution of the way production takes place and the way distribution of goods takes place, but still under the domination of the U.S. capitalist ruling class. So a kind of a new cruelty based on their ability to maximize profits by creating a globalized sort of system of production and distribution.

But when I think of globalization, I think about Christopher Columbus. 1492, the discovery, so-called, by European capital of the Americas, that was the beginning of real globalization. And then when we go through the introduction of other technologies, the compass, for instance, whereby people could navigate the seven seas or other technologies, which under a socialist system could be emancipatory, were used by capital to bring, a European capital to grab workers, kidnap them, enslave them in Africa, and bring them to a third country,

or a third location, North America, for a massive plantation, or South America, for that matter, massive plantation labor for a global capitalist market. So there have been these different stages and phases of capitalism. The problem isn't really neoliberalism per se. The problem is that the ruling class,

this tiny clique of billionaires, and they're not all billionaires, but they're very rich. They have a stranglehold over the resources. They decide where oil will be pumped or if it should be pumped, what should be mined. They now in the United States own, it's not just in Latin America, in the third world, they own many of the water systems. They decide if you haven't paid your water bill or your electric bill or your gas bill, whether they can shut off water or heat or lights, to your family. So it's, it's the same, the problem is the same, although we are in a different stage of capitalist production. Absolutely. That resonates totally, totally with me as well. And I like your expansion of globalization. That's why I always do the prerequisite or the

prefixed neoliberal globalization, because globalization's been happening. It's a certain phase of capitalist development that we've seen over the past 40 to 50 years, but by no means is, you know, the beginning of globalization as such, even though it's often talked about that, or talked about that way in mainstream media. But that leads into that really well into this next question, because kind of zooming out and looking at the American empire. You know, we hear a lot about multipolarity. We hear a lot about the American decline abroad. Certainly, you know, Trump is loosening and destroying bonds with allies. But what does that actually all mean in material terms? Is the U.S. Empire in a stage of irreversible decline, or is it still capable of violently restructuring itself to maintain power?

And where are the major fault lines at the moment as you see it? Yeah, we in the PSL acknowledge that while multipolarity is an emerging trend in the world and gives more space to emerging countries than unipolarity, where the U.S. was the single solitary hegemon, A multipolarity is not the solution to the world's problems, nor does it spell the inevitable demise of the American imperialist empire. Yes, the U.S. Empire is in a relative decline in terms of economic and social development compared to other emerging powers like China. If you look at China, China has 3,600 bullet trains.

trains, high-speed trains. The U.S. has none. 40% of U.S. bridges are more than 50 years old. There are 617,000 bridges. More than 40% of them are over 50 years old, which means that they're not safe. Nearly 10%, which is about 60,000 bridges are considered by the agencies in charge of bridges to be structurally deficient, which means they could collapse. You have, again, 3,600 bullet trains in China, none in the United States, and none are going to be built. So in one sense, you can see China's rise. China graduates STEM graduates, you know, science, technology, engineering, and math. The number of STEM graduates in Chinese universities is double what the United States is, and in five years it'll be triple. So you can see that there is a relative decline of American acceptance.

expansion and there's a stagnation within the economy. But the U.S. has, you know, this huge military. And the military is not going to be sort of passively on the sidelines while the U.S. ruling class loses all of its global power. No, they're going to use this military and they intend to use it. They are using it in order to maintain U.S. global dominance or at least a relative dominance. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, we believe the invasion of February 22, represented the end of the unipolar era, the era that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It showed that another major power, in this case Russia, was willing to openly, for the first time, really, completely challenge U.S. designs in Europe on its border.

the Russian invasion, whether one thinks it was a good idea or not a good idea, it was done in response to a sort of a demand by the United States that Ukraine be allowed to enter NATO and that the United States be allowed to put conventional and nuclear missiles on Russia's border with this long border in Ukraine, missiles which the Russians could not defend against, missiles that had like a six minute flight time. So the U.S. thought that they could provoke Russia into invading, that it would be like the Soviet Union going into Afghanistan, meaning part of its self-destruction. But it didn't turn out that way. In fact, Russia is able to do quite well. Their trade with third world countries or global South countries, their alliance with China remained strong. Their relations with India grew.

So that marked an era of the beginning of multipolarity. So we're in a new era. But before World War I was a multipolar era, and we had World War I. Before World War II was a multipolar era, and 90 million people died in five years in World War II. So multipolarity for us is clearly not the answer. The only way to get rid of the scourge of war is to get rid of capitalism, to get rid of imperialism. And that won't happen automatically just because the U.S. is in relative decline. The only way that will change is if people in the United States make revolution. Radical

transformation will come inside the United States, not from other parts of the world. So we don't think of multipolarity as a good consolation prize for the failure of the earlier socialist movement to prevail. It's not a panacea. It's not a solution. We understand why it brings some relief to people who want alternative trade options rather than just be dictated to by Washington. But again, the real danger in the world today is climate catastrophe, global war, the unregulated under capitalist control of imposed AI technologies that will decimate the workforce, multipolarity or America's relative decline don't solve and won't solve those problems. Spot on. Absolutely in agreement. And of course, the beating heart of imperialism, as Lenin

taught us, is Monopoly Capital. And if this period of this new phase of capitalist development is this unleashing of Monopoly Capital represented by the Trump administration and the oligarchs that he's stuffed his sort of administration with and surrounded it by, if that needs to be attacked. And that can only be attacked internally in some regards by the organized proletariat here in the U.S. as the U.S. Empire continues to be pushed back and resisted across the planet in places like Palestine, in the global south, throughout Africa, et cetera. So that's a huge responsibility we have here in the Imperial Corps. I'm interested as well in, because you mentioned, you know, working class people and the

need for a revolution, clearly we're not going to vote our way out of this. none of the two parties on offer are going to do anything but continue to entrench this system and heighten the contradictions and create more immiseration for working people as they've done for my entire life and beyond um work so but working people also can't live like this forever right like as as oppression cranks up as quality of life goes down as cost of living becomes unacceptable um you know medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy you know 50% of all consumer spending now in the U.S. is done by a tiny slice at the very top of the economic ladder here in the U.S. This seems unsustainable, and it also seems to be increasing, you know, general awareness and to some

extent class consciousness. It's never as fast as you or I would prefer, but it is happening. I'm wondering if over your life of organizing and being engaged in political and class struggle that you've seen shifts in this regard or just general shifts in American life, and kind of what do you think comes next because, you know, dialectically speaking, we understand that as repression and emiseration crank up, so too does consciousness and resistance. So what do you, what pathways do do you see as viable ones for the working class in general to fight back domestically? Yeah, thank you so much for that very crucial, most important question of all. we we think I think that socialism will take root in the United States that socialism which was

delivered a serious historic setback with the collapse of the socialist bloc countries in the USSR in 1991 and I say that recognizing that that socialist bloc and those countries and those governments had many defects but nonetheless the extermination or extinguishing of that that part of the world was a historic setback and strength in the hand of global imperialism. But, you know, ironically, it's right here in the United States that socialism, which was, you know, never as well understood because of the vicious anti-communist hysteria that basically criminalized socialism. It wasn't well understood in the United States, but there isn't great cynicism about socialism that may exist, say, in Europe, where socialism first took root and then the great historic setbacks

of socialism were also taking place in Europe. I think socialism is going to find a hard and long road in Europe. But in the United States, socialism is growing. The PSL is growing very dramatically. I mean, since the November elections, we've had about 15,000 people apply to join the party online. We, our actual membership has grown, you know, a lot. And it's growing quickly. You know, we, we started 20 years ago, and we were an organization in the small hundreds

for the better part of the first 12 years or no, maybe 10 years of our existence. Well, you know, that's changed very, very dramatically. Well, why is that? that's because the taboo on socialism has been partly lifted. The crisis of the working class has been sort of exacerbated. The destabilization of American capitalism for a number of reasons, the 2008, 2009, Wall Street meltdown, the fact that the Trump first election itself was a bit of a shock. The COVID experience whereby 60 million people,

lost jobs. Nine million, by the way, lost their homes, or were in foreclosure in the first 2008, 2009 meltdown. The January 6th insurrection that, you know, was really an unprecedented event where the capitalist Congress was dispersed by a violent mob. And then the person who was the architect of that action wins re-election to the White House four years later. These have been big shocks to the system. They destabilized the system. And the growing problems of immiseration, where you pointed out, one out of every two bankruptcies in America is from people can't pay doctor's bills. The combination of all of these factors, and the fact that the U.S. is involved in one losing war after another, one war of aggression that ends in defeat after another, all of these are contributing to a political destabilization. Now, we think that it really is a consequence of Bernie Sanders.

First, the Occupy Movement in 2011, then the Black Lives Matter uprising in 2014, which also had a very strong anti-capitalist current to it. And then the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016, where who would have thought Bernie Sanders would be a galvanizer of a mass youth movement that popularized socialism, even if it was ill-defined. Nonetheless, it kind of lifted the fog. it was all right to be a socialist. That allowed us a revolutionary Marxist party to begin to do massive popularization of what is socialism? What does it mean? Why is it different from capitalism?

Why it's a better system? And as a consequence, there's just immense interest in this. And I would say in the last 15 months, 18 months, the mass movement in the United States in solidarity with the people of Palestine and against the genocide in Gaza, that has had a very strong anti-capitalist overtone because people recognize that it's not just the regime in Tel Aviv, but it's imperialist sponsors who are responsible for this genocide, which people have witnessed. These are shocks to people's consciousness. We believe that the U.S. working class, there's 140 million people who go to work every day. It's a stratified class. It's not mainly industrial proletariat like, say, St. Petersburg in 1917, but it's a highly educated working

class. And by that, I don't mean people went to college. I mean, people know how to run the means of production. They know how the enterprises work. If Jeff Bezos or Musk went into a coma for the next year, God forbid, none of their, none of their, you know, Tesla, SpaceX, Amazon, whole foods, all of it would keep running because The working class knows how to run society. The bourgeoisie is a superfluous class. They're a parasitic class. So I just feel very optimistic that socialism is going to take off in the United States.

We're in sort of the beginning stages of it. We're one group, PSL, but there will be other groups. There will be other organizations. If there is a general flowering of socialism, which I believe will happen here, I believe there will be a very robust socialist movement. with many kinds of different iterations. And of course, we'll argue with each other and fight with each other, but also hopefully find unity with each other against the common problems that the working class faces. Absolutely. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more with that basic optimism.

And when I'm asked personally, like in these dark moments, how do you stay optimistic? It's exactly what I was telling you before, just a dialectical understanding that as things get worse, as repression ramps up, so too does resistance. And we've already, been seeing that i've been i'm i'm you know 36 years old i've been active on the revolutionary left in one capacity or another since the early aughts that iraq war and then i got really active during occupy i've been on air for eight years and i've noticed a shift in many different regards first of all young people coming up are less susceptible to anti-communist propaganda they have more information avenues and they understand that their futures are online are on the line here

You know, when you have a gerontocracy of super rich 60, 70, and 80-year-olds running the whole system, they're looking at short term, they're looking at their returns on their investments, they're comfortable golden years, et cetera, young people looking at climate crisis, not an inability to form families, hyperalienation, a mental health crisis. All of that stuff is horrific and creates mass suffering, but it also creates a deep, deep desire for radical change. And these movements that we see that, isolatedly, you can. could almost say they failed. Well, Occupy got crushed. Bernie Sander got destroyed by the Democratic Party. You know, Black Lives Matter eventually fizzled out. Opportunists took over, etc. They each represent an advancement in overall consciousness, social and class consciousness that then feeds into the next movement. Even the Palestinian movement right now, they're fighting for their lives, has raised the consciousness of human beings around the planet, and specifically has raised the

consciousness amongst young people here in the imperial core realizing how this system operates on a global scale. So all of these things do give me hope. When I was coming up politically in the early odds, the left was composed primarily of, you know, various versions of like lifestyle anarchists and social Democrats. And I see now a young movement of socialists coming up that are much more rigorous, much more interested in Marxism, much more interested in the efficacy, of organizing toward revolution how have they done it in the past how can we learn those lessons now there's a certain seriousness that has that has increased over the years um as well and it's really it's really inspiring to see that and so yeah that that all that all gives me hope yeah i'm i'm with you

i'm really with you on those points so let's go ahead and think about the u.s left as it exists today because we were kind of talking broadly about general social movements a general emiseration of the working class consciousness in various ways being being increased but the u.s left today and your experience not only in the PSL and answer coalition but you've just been in organizing milieus for so long we need to be self-critical and we need to understand our own weaknesses what do you think are the biggest weaknesses of the u.s. left today and what strengths do you think are present that we can build on well you know when we i want to go over a little bit of our experience about why we decided to form PSL, and that was in 2004.

And I'm of that generation who, you know, was active in the Vietnam War era. So, you know, people, the people who were close to me, and we've been doing this for a long time for more than 50 years, actually. So we came to the conclusion in 2004, having been lifetime Marxist, meaning since we were teenagers, that the existing U.S. left was not going to be able to sort of go through a new, as it existed, go through another sort of, I don't know what the right word would be, sort of a rebirth, that in fact the movements that were young and robust in the late 1960s, mid-60s, late 60s, early 70s, that they basically had contracted greatly and that most of the membership was quite old. It wasn't simply that the movement had gotten smaller. The movement got a lot older.

And really by 2002, 2003, I was the National Director of the Answer Coalition. We were organizing demonstrations of a half million every month or 300,000 and 200,000. Like every month, we're having huge demonstrations, and all of the left parties were, or pretty much, I think, basically contracting. And they weren't appealing to young people. In fact, anarchism, which had had like a temporary sort of surge around the anti-globalization protests in 1999, had basically been at least temporarily knocked off its feed by the shift towards the Iraq War in 2003. And so we decided, look, we lost confidence in all the existing socialist Marxist or Marxist Leninist parties. And we said, there's no sense like having endless fights with comrades who we've known for decades.

When we know at the end of the day, these organizations are just not going to be rejuvenated. So we decided a handful of us. There was less than 10 of us, really, who were the Corps, decided to start a new, Marxist and Leninist party in the United States. And, you know, at that time, we had no money, we had no name, we had no website, we had no publication. We had nothing, but we had a vision of trying to recreate the beginning, laying the foundation for the recreation of a Marxist movement based on the teachings of Lenin. And even though we recognize that Leninism and the third international parties that were formed in 1919, 1920 were during an era, during an era of

anticipated proletarian revolution. 2004 was not an era of anticipated proletarian revolution, just the opposite. We were still in what we call the era of counter-revolution following the destruction of the socialist camp, which impacted everybody ideologically. But we thought we have to start now because otherwise, if there is a crisis, of capitalism, if there is a revival of interest in socialism, if you don't have a significant credible organization that has experience and has tested itself in practice, it will be too late. You can't start in the middle of the storm. Build the ship before the storm. That's what we told ourselves. So we started in 2004, and the great benefit of having started over and recognizing

that it was going to be a long haul was we recruited young people. So if you look at the PSL leadership, there's only like five people my age. Almost everybody else is very young. And even the most senior younger generation are just now in their late 30s. And these are people who have been in the party for 20 years. So they've been in it since they were teenagers. So the benefit of that is that it really allowed us to recruit a different demographic. Young people, a lot of very working class and very multiracial composition.

And we put our primary focus, even though we were doing lots of mass organizing, we said if this thing is going to succeed, it has to have a robust internal life based on the principles of democratic centralism. And our definition of leadership was, can you help facilitate the leadership of somebody else? Don't be in your own head. Don't be egomaniacal. Like, we're really trying to build a party of new leaders. So we spent a lot of time training people in a lot of the organizing and political skills that we had amassed over many decades, again, more than a half century.

And as a consequence, even though it's a very complex, perhaps the most complex task of all to build a Leninist-type party in a number. non-revolutionary period, that was the task we set ourselves for. So there was no guarantee of success. Most people thought we were dreaming. A lot of people on the left mocked us for even thinking that we could potentially succeed. But we took a very step-by-step approach. And, you know, luckily for our endeavor, it has coincided, one, with a crisis of capitalism, two, a rebirth of interest in socialism and an interest in Marxism, which frankly didn't exist for three decades. There was a two-generation skip where basic elementary Marxist conceptions gave way to what was

essentially post-modernistic politics that were developed in academia that basically extinguished Marxist concepts of organization building and movement building. So that's what we've done. That's been our priority. And we feel even now, even though we've grown a great deal, we've only just laid the foundation. You know, to be a real mass, to be a real party, you not only have to have cadres and experience, you have to have masses with you. And that is, so we're never, we never try to get ahead of ourselves and think that we try to avoid any grandiosity. And at the same time, have a very optimistic outlook towards the prospects. Yeah. That's fascinating, fascinating history. And, you know, hats off to you for all the work you and the comrades

have done building up the PSL I do, and I have for a long time thought it's one of the most promising organizations in the United States by far. It's organizing capacity. It's mobilization capacity. It just really is incredibly advanced in comparison to a lot of other organizations as well-intentioned and, you know, as they are. And, you know, I love so many different organizations popping up, but yeah, I really have a certain respect for PSL. And that kind of leads into this next question, because in Lenin's terms, you and I would agree that a Vanguard party is important. It's meant to organize and lead the working class and revolutionary struggle. Your point about having it to be a main priority to raise up leaders, teach them how to

be revolutionary leaders is obviously a core concept of the Vanguard party. What does that look like in a country like the United States where repression is high, working class has been atomized and weekend, gig work, remote jobs, stuff like that. The old factory floor style organizing has gone away in a lot of instances and in a lot of communities. And how does PSL and you in particular view the process of building a true vanguard party? Because as you said, a core component of that is mass support. And I think that's this phase that the revolutionary socialist left is in is trying to build this mass support. So can you talk about the Vanguard party and what that looks like and how we can work towards it? Yeah. And, you know, the concept of a Vanguard has been frequently interpreted to be

this sort of self-appointed elite group that, you know, says we are the leaders, we are the Vanguard, everyone else is a follower. Well, that's clearly not how we think of the term Vanguard Party. What we think of is that what Lenin's contribution to this process has to be studied very carefully. And there's many, many misconceptions about the Leninist conception of a Vanguard party. We just wrote a book, by the way, about Lenin and the Leninist approach to party building. It's not out yet. It'll be out in the next couple months. But what Lenin, when Lenin broke with social democracy, which happened decisively in August,

1914, when most of the socialist parties supported their country's war efforts in World War I, he came to the conclusion that in order to have a party capable of leading a revolution, the party also had to be aware that within the working class, the larger working class, there would be different trends, tendencies, and factions premised on different elements, but one of them based on how privileged or not privileged sectors of the working class were. And he came to the conclusion that the Social Democratic Party's capitulated at the beginning of the war, not simply because of a war hysteria, which accompanies at the beginning of every war, where social pressure is very intense to go along with your coworkers who are whipped up into a patriotic pro-war sentiment at the start of a war.

He said it's really based on the fact that the proletariat is cleaved into different strata. And if the socialist parties represent the upper strata of the proletariat, that part of the proletariat could and would identify with sections of imperialism or policies of imperialism or it's certainly not be, you know, militantly opposed to imperialism. And so you had to build a party understanding that it had to have the broadest possible reach to reach the greatest number of people. And at the same time, not just have everybody join the party regardless of whether or not they believed in the political program, the revolutionary program of the party. So Lenin said the revolutionary program is, in fact, the key to the unity of the party and the thing that retains its revolutionary characteristic features at a moment of crisis,

like at the beginning of a war. So we've built PSL on the basis of a Leninist conception of a party that is very firmly rooted in a revolutionary program while recognizing that we are a revolutionary party and paradoxically in a very non-revolutionary country. So this requires tactical flexibility and suppleness so that you retain the ideological orientation and revolutionary character of the party, but not devolve into sort of sectarian, self-isolating political positions. That's a tension that can only be worked out in life.

There's no, you can't read a book and figure out how to do that. But we spent a lot of time thinking about that, theorizing about it, and so on. And also, a party isn't a vanguard until people in the working class believe you are the vanguard. And they can only believe you are the vanguard by having experienced the party both at times of ups, like when there's an offensive, like when the mass movement is high, but also when the party knows how to conduct itself when it's in retreat, when it's under attack, when it's being repressed. And Lennon in the book, Leftman communism and Infantile Disorder, says to the young leftists who loved the Bolsheviks because they made the revolution,

he said, don't appreciate us and think you want to be like us because we made the revolution. Think about all those years when we were facing repression, when we were isolated, when we were on the run, when we had to make compromises with social Democrats and even liberals, like study our entire existence if you want to understand Leninist type tactics or Bolshevik tactics. So we sort of, you know, we focus on that a lot. We want to reach the masses. Like right now we have the, we have a labor department. We're, we're, our comrades are working in industrial places, warehouses, transportation hubs, you know, places where the proletariat is amassed together and where there's also union organizing drives. We have comrades who are in the armed forces. We,

We have comrades who are, we have a new department that's organizing GIs and military veterans. We have a department, of course, that is working on other, you know, sectoral organizing. So reaching to the broadest possible mass of the people with language that's understandable, not rhetorical, with a political program that's militant, but at the same time not jargony, And at the same time, having a very robust internal life where we discuss, we debate, we theorize, we study together so that we realize that Marxist theory, which is our guide, is nothing more than the generalization of earlier class struggles. But you can't, if you just do the generalization without the study behind it, you don't really understand it because you don't understand context. So this is a multifaceted sort of system that we've worked out for party building, and we've done it very intentionally and very consciously. Absolutely. Just more reason why I think PSL is so advanced and so wonderful. And I think every organization should take notes. And yeah, we have to figure out ways also to work together because one of the problems I see on the U.S. left today is that there's a lot of disconnection. There's a lot of organizations. There's a lot of attempts to kind of reinvent the wheel instead of joining and bolstering already existing organizations. There's a lot of, I mean, especially online, but this is just the nature of online communication. A lot of

infantile sectarianism and egomania, as you talked about earlier, something that on the show we're always railing against. So I think PSL has really nailed the template, has made real forays into the working class more broadly. And you also have an apparatus of, like, political media. I know you run your own podcast. Can you talk about some of the political education networks that are sort of connected to or affiliated with PSL? Yeah. And a number of them are not party institutions. We're trying to, you know, support and in some cases anchor, but certainly support non-party, both educational and media operations to build sort of a united front feeling and attitude and orientation for anti-capitalist pro-socialist organizing. So in the case of my

show, I have the socialist program. It comes out several times a week. Basically, I'm the host of the show. Instead of doing a lot of talking, I actually usually ask the guests. I'm doing in my show what you're doing in our show today. Because I also, you know, I have something to say, of course, but we also want to provide a platform for as many people as possible. And I think that we have to try to have very high professional production standards so that when new working class folks come to our media, they feel they're dealing with serious people. And the presentation has to be,

we try to make it really jargon-free. And we're training people. How do you talk? How do you talk as a communist, as a Marxist, as a socialist, without using rhetoric and language that people won't understand or talking in shorthand so that people don't really get what you're talking about. So we spent a lot of time trying to think about that and implement that. In terms of education, we have, when somebody applies to joining the PSL,

everyone goes through a candidacy program. That's a six-to-eight-month program where you come into the, the party, your function as a full party member, but there are actually 17 different classes that we teach for new people that go over Marxism, go over our orientation towards the Soviet Union, towards China, towards women's oppression, national oppression, the black American question in particular, this struggle against special oppressions of all types. What is Marxism, what is Democratic centralism. What's the difference between communism and social democracy? You go through a lot of classes. And, you know, we've worked on this a lot and we just revamped the entire 18, it's two hours,

18 classes. So when people, we want people who ultimately join the party to really know what it is that they're joining, to really understand the politics and the program. And also where people get a chance to really work in the party is basically, even though they don't have voting rights, they have all the other responsibilities and work that a full party member has. So that at the end of a week, the people can say, yeah, I know what this is and I want to be in it. I want to really be committed to it because ultimately we're a Cadre-based organization. Not everybody has the same time availability. If you're single and 21 and you don't have kids, you're going to have more time than if you're

25, a single parent with three children and working like an industrial type job. So we're very sensitive to different time possibilities that people can commit. But we want everyone to have sort of an equally serious orientation to the work. Yeah, I absolutely love it. I agree with all of that. And yeah, putting Marxist political education up front as people enter an organization is essential and then having people that can go out and just speak not only in ways that are accessible to regular people but also like from the heart like you know emphasizing the actual what's that stake here why does this matter what is it what is our vision for a better world how does this rotten disgusting system negatively impact your life and the people that you love

most life um and yeah you guys do a great job of that and i hope you know we play our small role here at rev left radio and doing something very similar another thing that i really appreciate about PSL is, of course, the centering of anti-imperial struggle, the building of international connections. Can you talk about how revolutionary organizers in the U.S. can and should make anti-imperialism a central part of their work and how PSL is an organization has worked on that front to kind of strengthen the bonds and put anti-imperialism more or less at the center of their work? Yeah, it's a key question. And for us, our view, is that you can't really be an authentic, viable, genuinely socialist movement if you don't

understand and put as a priority the question of imperialism in your program and in your day-to-day work, not simply in words, but indeed. And the reason for this is that twofold. One, socialism has always been an international project from day one, you know, for the last hundreds of years. Socialism has always seen as an international global movement. But when you're in the center of imperialism, what the imperialist apparatus does to the oppressed working class and nationally oppressed people around the world is of direct immediate political relevance to everything that we experience in our day-to-day lives. If you go to work right now, let's say you're, we have a comrade who's working in auto, working in an auto factory.

And the issues that mainly concern the workers on the line are how fast is the line? What's the pay? What are the benefits? How strong is the union? Getting ready for the next collective bargaining set of discussions? Like, that's what most people are thinking about. But if you're in the middle of a genocide and you only want to talk about wages and benefits, and not talking about the genocide imposed by the ruling class of your, quote, own country

against an oppressed people, in this case the Palestinians, then you are not educating the working class to the things that they're going to be confronted with. If you have a working class that's soft on imperialism or going along with imperialism or ignorant about imperialism, then that working class is in the clutches of the bourgeoisie. They are the pawns of the bosses. The only way to really arm the working class with genuine class consciousness is to make the working class be anti-imperialist by educating people who you're in contact with and educating people on a mass scale. You know, if we said, and there are periods where PSL has been horribly isolated because of a principal position. I'll give you, like in the Iraq war, it was easy.

You know, we were leading hundreds of thousands of people, as I said, millions altogether. And then, you know, seven years later, on March 19, 2011, the same day that the U.S. invaded Iraq, the U.S. began the bombing of Libya. Well, we went out and we were like condemning the bombing of Libya. We had demonstrations. We worked just as hard as we did for the demonstrations that had hundreds of thousands. And we would get hundreds, not even thousands, just hundreds, because the demonization of Gaddafi was so complete by the imperialist media that we were completely isolated from the same people who had marched with us about the Iraq war. And then after Gaddafi was lynched and Obama sort of adopted the Hillary Clinton neocon position and decided to move on with Syria and the Assad government as its next target, we started having protests.

against the Obama administration's open incitement for war against the people of Syria. Again, we were completely isolated. People on the left, other left organizations, I won't mention them because why not necessary? They condemn this. They wrote polemics against this. They said, you're an apologist for Qaddafi. PSL are cheerleaders for the Assad dictatorship. PSL has the idea that my enemy's enemy is my friend, so that if,

the U.S. hates Libya, then that's going to be the PSL friend, as if that was the essence of our analysis. Our analysis was the U.S. imperialist ruling class wanted to overthrow Syria and Libya and Iraq and the resistance forces in Lebanon and the Palestinians and, of course, the Iranian government, not because these were communist governments or proletarian governments or socialist governments, but they were taking advantage of the change relationship of forces in the world following the collapse of the Soviet Union, such that they could go in and destroy every government in the Middle East that owed its existence to the anti-colonial project.

And that this would be a historic setback for Iraqis and Libyans and Syrians and the people of the region. And look at what the region is now. Look at Libya now. And some of the same leftists who condemned this for me an apologist of Gaddafi. They now come on and say, well, look, slavery has been returned to Libya, or look at all the terrorist sectarian violence in Syria. Well, yeah, we anticipated that would be the outcome. So it wasn't us being apologists for a bourgeois nationalist regime in Syria.

It was like against a counter-revolutionary overthrow of those regimes by imperialism such that it would hurt the people in the country and people everywhere. So that's been, for us, standing up, like, there are times that you have to be willing to be isolated. Like, let's say Cuba, there was a counter-revolution in Cuba, you know, because the suffering is so great, a counter-revolutionary demonstrations that became very violent. And the Cuban government used its force as a state to try to stop the counter-revolution, which maybe had arms in hand. well a lot of people would immediately jump on the bourgeois demonizing bandwagon and say look Cuba is a brutal dictatorship etc etc we would stand with Cuba we hope something like that doesn't happen but we would stand with Cuba because the alternative would be so bad the counter-revolutionary overturn of the Cuban revolution would be a historic setback

of huge proportions so sometimes you have to take an unpopular position as Lenin did at the beginning of World War I, but a position that ultimately he was vindicated for when the masses of people learned through the bitter experience of the war itself that they had been hoodwinked by the bourgeoisie. Yeah, I mean, perfectly said, and I've taken on Rev. Left Radio the same positions, I think broadly that PSL has taken on all of those and received the same sort of really shallow, silly accusations, and then the hypocrisy is revealed and, you know, the things that we said is going to happen, they eventually happen. And then, you know, those, yeah, those same people that were, you know, launching accusations are now squirming and trying to justify it or just going completely silent on the issue, which you see often.

And you can look at the Syrian situation right now. And it's another prime example of exactly what, you know, organizations like the PSL have been pointing out is going to happen, not because you're some huge fans of Assad or the way he runs his government, but because you know the material link in the chain that Syria plays in the forces of anti-imperialism. and the exact future that U.S. and Israeli-backed forces want to see in Syria. Now we're seeing sectarian massacres across Syria. We're seeing Israeli land grabs, all the things that were completely predictable if you had a basic anti-imperialist education and understood how these things play out. So absolutely correct and incredibly important because I think on the anti-imperialist front is where a lot of confusion, even on the so-called principled left,

can really flourish and can create huge division. divisions and can weaken movements and can, you know, just bewilder entire organizations and render them more or less useless or, you know, find themselves completely in line with the U.S. State Department. Right, right, exactly. I was just going to move forward a little bit and talk about PSLs internationalist connections. And I interviewed Gloria Lariva many years ago on her many visits to Cuba and her personal relationship with some of the Cuban revolutionaries over the years. And Latin America, South America, Central America, there's a huge tradition of socialism in these places and ongoing struggles against imperialism, the people of Venezuela, the people

of Cuba, Nicaragua, we can go down the line. But PSL has formed connections with a lot of these countries. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that and what lessons organizers, socialist, anti-imperialist in the U.S. can learn from the successes, particularly of revolutionary and anti-imperialist movements in Latin America? Well, you know, the Cuban Revolution was an inspiration to people all over Latin America, but indeed all over the world. And the fact that this little tiny country, an island of 13 million people is such a major factor in global politics and has been so for 60 years, it says so much about the Cuban

revolution and the leadership of the Cuban Revolution, because it's not accidental that that's been playing in this oversized role in global politics, it's because of the inspiring work of the Cuban Revolution and its leadership in its internationalism, sending doctors and nurses all over the world to help other poor people. Sending, in the case of the, when the Angola was fighting the CIA back South African regime, counter-revolutionary assault on the MPLA and Angola, in the mid-1970s, tens of thousands of Cuban young people volunteered. They were genuinely

volunteers, went to fight alongside Africans against the South African government. And their victory in South Africa, their victory at Queen de Knaval, the last battle where the racist, bashesed, and seemingly omnipotent South African military was defeated by the combined efforts of the Cubans in the MPLA Angolan revolutionaries, spelled really the end of apartheid. Apartite's days were numbered from then on. Those things inspire support. So when Nelson Mandela got out of jail, who did he go see first and foremost? Fidel Castro. He was condemned by the United States for it, and he was like, well, your enemies are not my enemies. And then he explained why Fidel and the Cubans were with South Africa.

When Africa called, Cuba answered, that's what he said. Well, that's, you know, when you look at and read about the experience of other revolutionary processes, what Chavez did and the comrades in Venezuela are still trying to do in spite of all of these difficult obstacles, very inspiring and very, you know, a sign that the socialist future exists, that it, you know, in practice. practical terms. People are fighting for it. What happened in Vietnam and the victory of the Vietnamese communist-led mass national liberation movement against imperialism. So inspiring. Anyway, we think of internationalism and our connection to the international movement as being

very, we want to learn from other people's struggles. We want to be in solidarity with them. The one thing we try to not do is put anybody else on a pedestal. You know, we can have great respect and admire the achievements of revolutionaries in other places. But there was a tendency to conflate socialism's successes with communist parties that were ruling parties. So, for instance, during the Soviet era, the success is economic. and military achievements of the Soviet Union, the defeat of fascism, that really, to the extent that the worldwide communist movement was conflated with the achievements of the Soviet government, that was a big plus. A lot of people made that, for them, made communism very credible.

But when there's big retreats or upsets or backward developments in these states, that can also have a negative impact on the communist movement. So we feel that it's important to retain political independence and not be sort of looking somewhere else for leadership. Instead of having a political center in some other country, we think that there should be sort of an understanding that each country has to find its own path. You can have great respect and admiration for the achievements of other people without putting them on a pedestal. And also a recognition that all of the states where communists are in power, they have a foreign ministry, and that foreign ministry has to carry out diplomacy.

The nature of international relations is that a socialist-led state is still a state within a system of states, as London pointed out, and that their foreign ministry, might have to make all kinds of compromises that a revolutionary party would not want to make. So instead of like sort of following the direction of the foreign policy of another country, we think it's very, very, very important to have political independence on that score. Absolutely. Critical and important. And that leads into this last question here. And then a couple more questions at the end of just how people can get involved and find PSL. But I want to ask a dual question here about.

leadership and electoralism. Obviously, the PSL runs electoral candidates, not because they want to win, but because it's galvanizing. There's reasons that Marx and Angles and Lenin talked about, you know, running in electoral systems, but not reducing your movement to mere electoral campaigns. And there's also this interesting question that doesn't get really wrestled with a lot that I've heard of on the Marxist left, which is there is a role for certain leaders. And these leaders aren't imposed on people, they arise organically through organization, but almost every successful revolutionary movement has had a sort of leader, a figurehead, of course, would not exist without the masses and the organization that create those leaders. But there seems to be a role

for leaders, right? Castro, Chavez, Ankara, Rosa Luxembourg, Lenin, Mao. In almost every instance, these leaders arose through the ranks and organically because of their discipline and their commitment to the cause and their contributions. So I'm just wondering if you can, and you can take either side of this question, but what is, how should we think as Marxists in the U.S. context about the rise of leaders and their ability to galvanize movements? And then how does PSL think about the electoral terrain as a site of struggle, but not reducing itself to merely, you know, a third party or a merely electoral organization? Yeah. We, almost from the beginning of the the existence of the PSL, we ran presidential campaigns. We started in June 2004. In 2008, we ran a

campaign, which was kind of a, not kind of, it was a very significant challenge to get all the signatures, to get on ballots. We were a very small group, but we did it because we wanted to adhere to the Leninist principle that when masses of people have their attention turned towards the bourgeois elections, the communists and socialist, where possible, should try to intervene not in order to sort of reform capitalism or to lend credence to this flawed rigged electoral system, but to be the voice of the working class and the voice of socialism and the voice of Marxism in an arena that is familiar to the masses, that is the electoral arena, and in which case, if you're a candidate, people tend to listen to you.

If you say, I'm running for the U.S. Senate in the state of Ohio, well, your people are more likely to, you know, say, oh, okay, really? You're a third party running for the Senate in Ohio. What do you stand for? So it's really a way, it's in a way just like a demonstration. You're intervening into an arena in order to bring out the program, the program of anti-imperialism, the program of, the program of socialism. So we run in that way. Now, we feel, you know, there's a big difference

from what Lenin was coping with and when he wrote left-wing communism or the other initial documents in the first five years of the third international, all of which are very worth studying if you're a Marxist. They were dealing with the problem of parliamentarism in Europe, whereby communist or social democratic forces could have very substantial representation in bourgeois parliaments, and it had the impact of creating sort of a prejudice, a parliamentary prejudice, as if the parliament or the electoral arena would be the avenue through which change could happen, through which socialism could be achieved. So in Germany, for instance, in 1910, the Reichstag, the parliament, the socialist party,

had 110 delegates. They were the biggest party in parliament. So Lenin made the point, this is spreading illusions because they actually thought if they could only get the majority in the parliament, then they could legislate socialism in. And Lenin was like, no, the only way you're going to have socialism is revolution. So he was fighting against the parliamentary prejudice, but at the same time insisting that communists intervene in the parliament in order to, as I said earlier, so the masses could hear what the socialist stood for. Now, it's different in the United States because we don't have a parliament. We are banned from participation. The socialists who go into the U.S. Congress, like, say, AOC, she was a member of DSA, or maybe she still is,

but she ran as a Democrat. So as Kurt Vonnegut once said in one of his books, you are what you pretend to be. So be careful when you pretend. If you're running as a Democrat, if you're in the Democratic Party, you're going to be under the discipline of the Democratic Party, or they will crush you. So even to the extent that there's a handful of people who personally say that they are socialists and who are in Congress, they're not functioning really as socialist. They're functioning as the Bushaw Party that they're part of. And I'm not part of the group that like constantly heaping abuse on these people. I consider them to be liberals. So, you know, there's many far worse people in Congress. But my point is they're not revolutionaries.

So that's not an avenue that's really available to us because we don't have a parliamentary system. So we run candidates for the purpose of demonstrating to a larger audience what our political program is. And as you could see in the, or you might have seen in the 2024 campaign with Claudia Dela Cruz and Karina Garcia, a huge number of people met the party or learned about socialism for the first time through that campaign and many of them joined the movement afterwards so it was very impactful in that sense also we all learn we learn how to speak better we learn how to communicate better when we're when you're running as a candidate it's a kind of a school so the more comrades get to run as candidates they their own ability to

articulate the program increases in terms of leadership You know, if you had asked who the leaders were of the Russian Revolutionary Process, if you had asked most workers in St. Petersburg or Moscow or anywhere, even in the beginning up to 1917, not that many of them knew about the Bolshevik leaders. The first wave of leaders in the revolutionary process were essentially from the elite sections of society. So we knew their names, or the people then knew their names. We learned the names of Lenin and the other leaders of the Bolsheviks later because of the victory of the second revolution. And there's some instances, like in the case of the Cuban Revolution, it was a project by Fidel.

It was a cross-class alliance at first with the July 26th movement, and he was really the maximum leader of it. but in most cases the people who are who we consider historically the greatest leaders they're not necessarily playing that role at the time at the beginning stage even marks by the way in the first international or let's say the paris commune where the bourgeoisie blamed marks for the commune the communards themselves didn't look to marks very few people in the paris commune identified with Marx they identified with other socialists it's only a later when the social democratic parties become mass parties and Marxism as a theory and as a guide to action becomes embraced, it's in the second and third stage that these people become

prominent. In the case of PSL, we don't have a position of general secretary, which a lot of communist or socialist parties do. We don't have an identified official person by title. We basically are pretty not cool about titles. Not that they're always a bad idea. But even Lenin, he wasn't the general secretary or even the chairperson of the Bolsheviks. All of those titles came after they succeeded and made the revolution, where you know, you had to have titles for different official functions in a division of labor. So we emphasize the collective labor. There are leaders in the PSL. People know who they are. People know who the central leaders are. but for us, the party is first. We're not trying to build around a personality. Matter of fact,

we've discouraged that. That doesn't mean that there can't be individuals who, like Claudia and Karina, were stand-up candidates. So in a way, maybe they're right at the moment the most well-known face of the party, or Gloria, who you talked about earlier, because she had run for president several times. But that's our view of leadership. It's collective. It doesn't mean there aren't like more central leaders. There are. But it's not the thing that we emphasize in a formalistic way. Yeah. I really appreciate that insightful historical analysis, two of these leaders and the second and third phase. And in retrospect, and after revolutions are successful, that certain leaders, we look back on and understand them as such. But these are fundamentally and always have been mass

movements and the party itself comes before any particular personality, which I love. Well, you've been incredibly generous with your time and I've really enjoyed this discussion. A core part of what we do at Rev. Left Radio is do the political education, inspire people, touch people's hearts, try to get them, you know, motivated and then always and every time point them in the direction of getting organized because you could have all the theory in the world. If you're not out in your community, putting it into practice, it's pretty much meaningless. And that's why I also have such respect for the PSL, and I want to use this as an opportunity to push people in that direction. So for people who want to get involved, how can individuals transition from merely being politically

aware to becoming organized? There's an active revolutionaries. How can they get involved specifically with the party for socialism and liberation? Well, you can go to the website PSLWeb.org. That's one of our websites. You can see the party program where We have branches. We have organized presence now in over 100 cities and towns. Nice. Our publications, if you want to make a donation, if you want to join, right when you open the thing, it says,

For the planet to live, capitalism must end. Join the PSL, apply now. When you apply now, that doesn't mean you're automatically a member, but it means you're starting a process where you're going to learn more about what membership means and somebody will get back to you. We also have a news site. It's called LiberationNews. and that's where we're our large amounts of our communication, our articles, our statements,

our political presentation. So that's liberationnews.org. We have something called liberation school.org. That's where we have a greater emphasis on educational programs. We, of course, are on Twitter or X and our Instagram or Facebook, you can go there. Just look for PSL, PSL National. There's PSL local chapters, but PSL National on Twitter slash X, or the same with Instagram. We have a very active communications team, so there's constant information that's being posted by the PSL communications team. Wonderful. Yeah, I'll link to all that in the show notes, and I really encourage people that if you are not active in your community, if you're not organizing yet, and you live in one of the many, many communities.

where the PSL is active, and you like what was discussed today. You like the general ideological thrust and analysis of the current situation and of history. This is a great opportunity for you to get involved, to reach out, join your local PSL chapter, help bolster it, help continue its growth, because organizations like PSL, I think, are going to be absolutely essential in the probably dark years to come in the short term, especially, because things are only going to get, I believe, worse before they get better. But also I want to make sure that people know. where they can find you specifically in your podcast online as well, Brian, before I let you go.

Sure. My podcast is called The Socialist Program. You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, in fact, on all the streaming services. It also every Wednesday at 7 p.m. Eastern, the Wednesday show comes out as a YouTube video on Breakthrough News. Breakthrough News, and you can go to Breakthrough News. org to see that or on their social media pages as well. So every Wednesday, 7 p.m. Eastern, that show comes out as a video as a YouTube show. We have lots of other content that are hosted on different non-party media sort of platforms. Many of them, there are many of them. And Breakthrough News is a great site. It's not a PSL site. But my show is there. Some other PSL leaders have shows on it. So that's another place to kind of check us out. Wonderful. All right, Brian,

keep up the amazing work. Thank you for all you've done so far. And I really have nothing but the best feelings towards the PSL. And I really wanted to continue their growth. And I've had on many, many, many organizers from the PSL over the years. And I'll absolutely keep doing that. So thank you for everything you've done. And I really appreciate it. Thank you. Great to be with you. N-G-S-T-E-R Love it G-A-N-G-S-T-E-R

Love it My feminine wild Ready to set up a trap And they're so predictable Especially when I'm a naked can rap I'm into an alley And pull at my 45 A wicked smile that's starting to cry

I blow him a kiss goodbye And by the grace of all that's holy Fuck out my face you pony Don't let my ideology get the best of you home me You can catch it direct All that piece shit I rep Go flyin out the window you should have took off and you heard the click clack boom off of the heads

the head it's a queen of hearts a witcher glow we're in a rose red it's a doggy dog every man from himself who got my back when the animals attack was the haps that's a rat that's how you know that the pistol holders in the venue i just spray the fucking room because i got baby laundry to get to cannibal tattoos where actual cannibals reside pigs molested island style and we might bury you alive go g-a-n-n-g-s-t-t-st-E-R-G-A N-G-G-S-T-E-R Love it G-A-N-G-S-T-E-R

I'm a fighter for freedom Make a dynamita Beautiful mind, love for the pain like I was freeda Out of pocket like Peter Scandalous Signorita In the poncho, rapping and salty like Margarita I'm a killer for higher Aiming I'm spitting bullets

Itchy palms I scratch Trigger fingers I pull it I'm more than just an assassin I'm plotting I'm politicians Leaving them in the gutter goodbye A fucking rid. A retired freedom fighter I'm such a lie

I ain't leaving till every juvenile prison on fire gasoline strike a match Yeah get that pick off my back Like Bobby Hutton come back to life Every time I rap All you talking is trap Cooking and bagging crack I know that for a back

Rocky seen more chill than you rats Now I'll sit in your class Until your teacher to sit down Cross your hands in your lap And don't make a fucking sound Yeah I don't think they have understand, you know what I mean?

I'm not to demonstrate that shit for you real quick. Ben, you got me? Yeah, let's go. Uh, what?