Rev Left Radio - The Marxist Center: Base-Building Toward Dual Power

Episode Date: September 25, 2018

Sophia Burns (from God’s and Radicals and Seattle Communists) and Tim Horras (from Philly Socialists) join Breht to discuss The Marxist Center Network, Base-Building, strategic unity over ideological unity, Party Building, the four tendencies on the left, and much more! Check out Philly Socialists here: https://www.phillysocialists.org Check out Sophia’s writings here: https://godsandradicals.org/author/marxismlesbianism/ Outro Music: Prey'er (featuring Killer Mike) by Bambu, you can find and support Comrade Bam’s music here: https://bambubeatrock.bandcamp.com Intro music by Captain Planet. You can find and support his wonderful music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com Please Rate and Review our show on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use. This dramatically helps increase our reach. Support the Show and get access to bonus content on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, the Omaha GDC, Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everyone, welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. Today we have on Tim Horace and Sophia Burns to talk about the Marxist Center, base building, dual power, etc. At one point in the conversation, you hear little voices in the background. Those are Tim's children. He was watching them alone while he was doing the podcast. And so he's a dad and a radical, which we appreciate here at RevLeft. So when you hear that, just know that's what's going on.

And then Sophia had to drop out in probably about 80, 85% of the way through the interview because she didn't have any charger for her phone and she was out and about, et cetera. So those little things come up throughout this interview. But overall, I'm really happy with the interview. We covered as much as we could. I mean, we could have had a three-hour conversation about this stuff. But it is interesting. I hope people get a lot out of it.

And we will be updating people on the development of the Marksha Center as I'll be participating in their next conference, which we mentioned in the episode. So, yeah, we will keep you updated on that. we'll probably have Sophia and Tim back on, maybe in the spring, to talk about developments. And if anybody's interested, you could always, you know, track them both down on social media, talk to them more, et cetera. So, as always, if you like the show, go ahead and feel free to support us on Patreon. It's patreon.com forward slash rev left radio.

Every dollar helps keep the show going, and we really appreciate it. We're also going to have, as we mentioned, the last episode, a pretty big announcement coming at the end of September. So that'll pop up in your feed under the title, Big Announcement. And so tune into that if you're really interested in how we're going to restructure our Patreon account and take this entire platform to the next level. But with all of that said, let's go ahead and dive into this wonderful episode on the Marxist Center. Thank you very much for having me on.

My name is Sophia Burns. I am a communist in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. And I write for gods and radicals. articles.org. I've been one of the people involved in the, uh, the Marxist Center project and establishing a U.S. wide revolutionary Marxist base building tendency. Hey, everybody. This is Tim Horace, Colin from Philadelphia. I'm a co-founder of the organization Philly Socialists, uh, which is an independent, uh, anti-capitalist collective. have been involved in the Marxist Center network and in attempts to build that up. And I do also

sometimes write for our newspaper here in Philly called the Philadelphia Partist. Wonderful. Well, I'm excited to have both of you on. My organization here in Omaha, the Nebraska Left Coalition, is one of those organizations that is looking to join the Marxist Center. And I'll be attending the conference in November. I'm very excited about the ideas of the Marxist Center. and I really like the direction that it's going with reference to base building as a tendency, which again we'll get into as this interview goes on. I've read both of your works leading up to this, not only leading up to this interview, but even before I even had the idea of interviewing both of you,

I was reading your works and I really, really appreciated the approach that you take to communism, to building socialism in this country. I think it's a breath of fresh air, so I'm excited to have both of you on. We have a lot to cover, so let's go ahead and dive in with the first most basic question. What is the Marxist Center? What stage of its development is it currently at? And where do you envision it going in the best case scenario? Basically, the Marxist Center right now is a semi-formal network of, at this point, maybe a couple of dozen different local multi-tendency socialist collectives across the U.S.

Now, I say multi-tendency in the sense that one of the defining features of what the Marxist Center, represents is that it doesn't define itself according to one inherited tendency division or another. Rather, there's been an emerging sense that a lot of different collectives in different parts of the country from very different ideological backgrounds have all arrived at more or less on their own, based on their own experience and analysis, that what's needed is a kind of organizing that's based on strategic unity, but not necessarily unanimity in terms of a particular Marxist textual tradition, and that the primary task for Marxists in the U.S. today

is to develop an independent, organized mass base that is capable of helping to crystallize the dispossess the working class into an autonomous social force capable of contesting with other classes for social power. Yeah, so I think that's a pretty good summary. Our Philly Socialists, the group that I'm involved with, got started in 2010, 2011. We saw ourselves as very much impacted by the 2008 financial crisis, and our kind of conception at that time was that it was going to open totally new political space for the far left and that the kind of previous methodology of approaching anti-capitalist organizing

wasn't going to be sufficient or really work for the new period. There were different kind of elements that we'll probably get into about what we thought was important to put forward as kind of not necessarily brand new conceptions, but things that we needed to be trying that had been fallen by the wayside before. And then, you know, right after that Occupy Wall Street happened. There was a big upsurge. We saw like mass anti-capitalist politics, like that they come to the fore in a new way. And over the years, small independent local collectives have been popping up, which have a somewhat similar strategic outlook and have been slowly networking with these folks. Last year, we held a conference in Philadelphia with

about a dozen and a half of these groups. And the total number of independent collectives, is somewhere right closer to over 30 now. So more people have been trying this approach. The last thing I'll say on this is regarding what Sophie was kind of problematizing the multi-tenancy phrase or whatever. I kind of prefer personally to use the term ideologically pluralist or ideological pluralism because I definitely consider us to be a discrete tendency within the larger socialist or communist movement, but the folks that are involved in our organizations come from a whole

variety of ideological backgrounds and traditions, as Sophia mentioned. I appreciate, Tim, you referring to stuff that's not necessarily new, but has fallen by the wayside. There used to be a mass Marxist, a mass socialist movement in the United States. There hasn't been one for decades and decades though because of a combination of things including co-optation of you know radical movements by the ruling class and then obviously the suppression of the ones that they can't co-opt but yeah essentially the Marxist Center is an effort to save the left from itself so to speak because for a long time you've had a an activist left in the U.S. that's operated within this larger subculture that's oriented around

going to protests, that's anchored by the nonprofit industrial complex, by these elite universities, so on and so forth. And essentially, the Marxist Center is based on this recognition that in order for there to be a viable revolutionary movement, that that is not an adequate basis, that there has to be a mass scale revolutionary movement that you can't build by just going to the same protests with the different signs or the same conferences. And so the Marxist Center is saying, let's go back and let's look at these deep organizing methods, that have worked to develop those types of mass politics in the past and let's start applying them now.

Yeah, and I had a question that was later in this interview, but I might want to ask it now because I think it might clear up some stuff that we're going to be tackling the next few questions. So, Sophia, you wrote a piece entitled, The U.S. left has only four tendencies. And in that piece, you argued for a way of analyzing different leftist base, not on their self-proclaimed ideological tendency, but rather on their. actual praxis. You open the piece by saying, quote, objectively, most inherited tendency divisions are obsolete. Nearly all 20th century tendency demarcations emerge from the contingencies of 20th century

geopolitics. There are differences between leftists that matter, but the nature of those differences has changed, end quote. Can you summarize your argument as to why ideological tendencies don't matter as much as many leftists think they do? And then maybe outline what you believe the four tendencies on the left are? Well, in 1930, your position on the Soviet Union mattered a great deal because if you had one position, then you could get not just money, but definitely money and material support from the common turn. Of course, that came with strings attached. So that force was necessarily going to result in a left that was, you know, defined by those geopolitical contingencies. But I guess the way that I think about it is if you talk to someone who is a member of an

independent fundamental Baptist church, and you talk to someone who's a member of an independent an holiness church. They'll tell you that their beliefs and what they do, that it's very, very different, that it's completely different, nothing in common. How could you even confuse them for each other? But when you step back a couple of paces and look at it from the outside, those differences in terms of doctrine or the specific ways that they govern their congregations mean a whole lot less, because at the end of the day, they're both promoting this very similar way of being in the world and of, you know, defining yourself according to your religion in a very particular way. And there's kind of a similar phenomenon going on with

the organized far left in the U.S. And now I'm a Marxist. That means that when looking at a social phenomenon, including the organized left, you don't start with what people say, about themselves, you look at that, but you start with what they actually are, what they're actually doing. Like, what is this organization who's in it? What does it do? What's the material reality of its life? And the left, you know, can be pretty good at applying that frame of reference to things

other than itself. The left knows not to take the police at face value when they say, oh, we're just here to protect and to serve, and the left knows not to take the religious right at face value when they say, oh, well, we just believe in religious freedom. But it's very, very bad at applying that same material frame of reference to itself. When you do that, though, you find out that there's three or four, depending on how you, where you draw the lines, different ways. of doing leftist politics and within each of those you'll find more than one organization and sometimes those organizations are bitterly at odds with each other but when you look at it materially

you see that them being at odds with each other like that is just part of the set of activities that they do and so that's kind of the framework that I think the left needs to take to itself because if you don't take that framework then you're not going to understand why left-wing politics works or doesn't work the way it is in the U.S. And you're also, more importantly, not going to be able to figure out what you need to do different in order to, you know, have some better results. Would you mind covering what the four tendencies technically are? Absolutely.

So I draw a distinction between what I call protest militants. And protest militants are people who tend to be very militant. in terms of their tactics in the sense that they're down to break the law, down to mask up, down to smash things, and that they tend to equate being really confrontational and angry and making a whole lot of noise with being more radical, even though in practice they're just going to the same protest, as the second tend to. that I'm going to mention, and I'd say some examples of protest militants today would include a lot of insurrecto anarchists in the neo-malist dread guard type collectives.

The second tendency is pretty closely related to the first one, call it the expressive hobbyists. And for an expressive hobbyist, being a leftist is basically about having these left-wing ideas in your head and doing something to express them so that you and all the other activists that you know can express your leftist ideas together or to each other. And that involves going to protests that involves forming these social media spheres that involves forming, I think, most of the established socialist organizations and campus organizations and going to conferences and start in journals for each other to read and whatnot. The other two tendencies, though, I think are a little different than the first two,

in that the first two have kind of been the default of the left for a long time now, for decades and decades. And while they're not going anywhere, they're not going anywhere in terms of growing and developing either. And there's, you know, obviously a big growth in kind of renters. to the left that's happening, but I would argue that that is primarily happening through the other two tendencies. And the first one of those is I'd call the government socialists. And for a government socialist, they look at what the Republicans say that more big government means it's socialistic or Marxistic. They look at that and they agree with that. They just invert the

value judgment, right? And they just say, you know, more big state programs, taxing and spending, not is more socialist, but that's actually a good thing. And so the way they tend to do politics tends to involve, well, you look at the electoral power structure and how do you get yourself into that power structure, whether that's through Democratic Party politicking or in a few unusual situations through third party politicking. And I would say that some in the more prominent examples of that kind of socialism would include most of the DSA, would include parts of the Green Party, parts of the nonprofit industrial complex kind of world, the CPUSA, and some smaller groups like left routes and the Freedom Road.org FRS. And then the last tendency there is the basebuilders.

And for a base builder, the existing political structures are not satisfactory. They're not adequate. So the base building approach is more about taking these methods of deep organizing and mass organizing and applying them to create these new structures and organizations through which the dispossessed can exercise power over their own lives. absolutely so just in recapping the four general tendencies are the government socialist who want to make inroads into electoral politics one way or another expressive hobbyists who are kind of concerned with just expressing their political ideas and tendency whether that takes the form of online sectarianism or book clubs or whatever protest militants are those who want to be confrontational in the street and their politics basically amount to to that sort of radicalism and then base building is actually going out and doing the oftentimes gritty and unglorifying work of organizing the de-politicizer, the apolitical, meeting their needs and winning them over through benefiting them materially? Absolutely.

Tim, do you have anything to say on any of that? I think the only thing I'd add is that, you know, Sophia, I think, draws our attention to the, you know, like every problem has a subjective and an objective side. And the subjective side is sort of like the mistakes that we make, you know, what we do right in our strategies and tactics and so on. And I think that's where we can intervene the most, but it's not the whole picture. And as all of your listeners, I'm sure know, you know, we've been in a period of deep reaction, neoliberalism sometimes called, for several decades. And the left has had to adapt to those conditions to continue to actually do anything.

And I think it's analogous, you know, Marx wrote in a couple of letters about the sex system, which existed, you know, before the advent of, like, the math workers movement. and what he said about that was that it was a historically necessary thing, right? And what he also said was that at some point, if it continued, it would no longer be historically progressive. You know, it wouldn't be a good thing anymore. If it kind of outlived its usefulness, what was good about the sector system was that it was able to kind of retain knowledge and experience and to act as a fertilizer for when the mass movement did emerge. And those are moments of mass movement are not really something that individuals, well, groups, much less individuals, can start on their own. They have to do with, you know, deep underlying socioeconomic conditions, material relations.

And I think that from, again, from our perspective, we're in a new period based on the changing economic structure, especially in North America, but I think globally, where more things are possible. So I'm like both critical of the existing left, but I also think that we wouldn't be where we're at without them. So for that reason, you know, it's sort of a double-sided assessment. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that that self-reflection, that criticism and that sort of theoretical development is necessary on the left. I mean, the left is growing not only in this country but worldwide. And these are the sorts of conversations that I think are utterly important so that that left can continue to grow in a positive and useful direction. So clearly the tendency that the Marxist center, out of those four, is focused on, is base building. So circling back around to sort of the Marxist center and how it orients itself, I was kind of thinking about, you know, you use terms like multi-tenancy and left pluralism. You haven't quite used a term like left unity, which is important.

So I just want to know what are the theoretical standards, if any, of the Marxist Center? And when I say that, I think of, you know, an organization like the DSA has virtually no standards for its members. you can join just by paying the dues. On the other hand, there's an organization like PSL, which has pretty stringent theoretical standard for its members. So how does the Marxist Center think about this? And it is called the Marxist Center. So does it claim any ideological or theoretical heritage?

So when you say political unity, there's really two different things you're talking about there. And they're related, but they're not the same thing. So there's ideological unity, which can run as deep and be as stringent as. as you like, in a group like PSL, you know, has very high ideological unity because it's united around, you know, upholding these extensive international and philosophical and so on and so forth, package deal of positions that you would call Marciite Trotskyism or post-Trottskyism or whatever. Then there's strategic unity. And strategic unity is a little bit more interesting to me than ideological unity, because ideological

unity just means that you say I agree to the same list of statements about the world, whereas strategic unity means that your practice, your engagement with the world to change it, is united. And the concept that's come out of the, you know, process of forming the Marxist Center network is that it's really important to have strategic unity that we have to share this orientation around base building, around organizing the unorganized, around mass politics as opposed to advocacy around class struggle and conflict with the ruling class instead of collaboration with it or trying to integrate ourselves into that power system. But that when you have that kind of strategic unity, this is not a time and place, the U.S. in 2018, where you need

that kind of strict ideological unity and insisting on strict ideological unity is, if anything, a mistake under these circumstances because when you do that, you kind of lock yourself into this expressive hobbyist mode of engagement because what you're concerned about is making sure that everyone you let into your group, people you work with, all have compatible ideas in their heads, whereas with strategic unity, we are more concerned about bringing a general revolutionary orientation to organizing and activities that are based more on a community of interest and more on developing a constituency and a base. And so as far as, you know, does the Marxist Center claim any particular tendency as its heritage, I would say no, just because, you know,

we're talking about like 30 or so different collectives and some of them are just completely started from scratch and some of them used to be part of, you know, different more established groups. There's some that used to be part of socialist, there's some used to be part of the CP and others. But basically, what's most significant for us is that we've come to the same strategic unity despite coming from very different ideological and organizational backgrounds. Tim, do you have anything to add to that? The first thing I would say is that, you know, from my perspective, the level of political unity is determined by objective conditions and the level of kind of like expectations for, you know, political education and membership is going to be related

to the real experienced life of people. I think that, you know, in a period where, when we started in Philly, when people were just kind of like starting to, a lot more young people were just starting to get involved in activism and they were like, you know, maybe I'm a social. There was like a lower bar for entry to the organization. And we still accept like people who consider themselves a socialist. I'm a democratic socialist or whatever. But at the same time, now we're able to push things more. Now socialism is really a mainstream conversation that people are having. And instead of kind of rushing to meet people where they're at, we can actually push a little bit further. So a couple other things I wanted to say on this was that sometimes our critics, which

we have, you know, many, kind of derisively revert to us as like having, you know, eclectic ideas, you know, like, God forbid that they, they both, like, read, you know, CLR James and Claudia Jones or whoever, you know, and like, how could they, but they're in completely different traditions. But I actually think that a lot of times, a lot of communist history has been trying to navigate the fact that there are, like, objective channels pushing the class toward unity. That's where their united front came from, right? They had engineered a split,

the communists had engineered a split with the social Democrats, and then they were in this position where it was not only like necessary strategically, but also every, all their, all their support base wanted to see unity happen, you know? So, I think sometimes like the question of unity gets

posed by historical forces or by like kind of larger forces than we do. And I would say it's interesting that a lot of people who would say, oh, I would never be like in an organization. How could I ever be an organization with an anarchist? But I'm like thinking, well, look, I saw you at the protest the other day and you all were there in the same protest. So like, obviously you are working with this person. You are objectively in the same place. You just sort of have different approaches and you have

different clicks within like that network and so on. And I think that we can have a recognition that we're objectively part of the same movement, but also try to like, argue in favor of a perspective. That's something I share with a lot of comrades on different trends in the left, is that idea that we be pushing for a revolutionary perspective. And maybe that's not like the majority opinion or what everybody thinks is like the best idea right now. But, you know, based on our analysis, this is actually like the way to go. Yeah, I think that that distinction between pursuing ideological unity and strategic unity is very interesting because I think it kind of works in the middle of two extremes that we

no don't work. So on one end of that extreme, I think you do kind of see this attempt where it's like, oh, ideology doesn't matter at all. So if you're to the left of liberalism or you even have like a gripe with liberalism or the status quo, then we can kind of all come together in this big organization. I think Occupy was an attempt to get a bunch of different people for with a bunch of different perspectives under the same roof and try to move forward. And it wasn't really able to move forward in part because you had way too many different ideas about what needed to be fixed and where to go from here. I mean, you literally had Ron Paul libertarian standing next to anarchist standing next to Leninist. And that failed in its own right, although it produced

some interesting things. On the other side of that, the other extreme, you'll see a lot on the online left. And I think this is what Sophia means in part when she says expressive hobbyists, which is this obsession with ideology and ideological purity. And when you try to put that into practice, what it often results in is little purity organizations that endlessly splinter off and get nothing done because they're so obsessed not with actually doing something materially relevant but the ideas that they hold and so I think Marxist Center for all the critics that it may have is trying to do something new and unique and it should be applauded for that but it does beg the question and I think Sophia hinted at it a little bit will there be a time at some point of you know leftist development in this country where

ideology will matter and do you foresee that at any time in the near future or do you think there will be a time in the future where ideology will come to a point where, okay, now it's time to really kind of have to pick sides here? What do you think about that? Well, I don't necessarily want to talk in like the starkest terms saying either while ideology doesn't matter or it will matter. I appreciate a point that Tim made, which is that back a few years ago, using the example of his own group, when Philly Socialists got started, it made a lot of sense to recruit people who had any kind of vaguely socialistic or leftist inclination, and that my impression might correct me if I'm wrong, Tim, but that Philly Socialists today does have

more of a sense of ideological distinctiveness and ideological unity that, wow, maybe back in 2011, or y'all weren't necessarily talking about, well, there's an important distinction between a reformist and a revolutionary approach, that now you are talking about that, and now you are saying, well, actually, that's a line within this umbrella of self-identified socialists that we need to draw, but that in 2011, y'all were right to not be drawing that line, just as in 2018, you would be wrong not to be drawing it. ultimately it's a question of, well, what's the right level of ideological and strategic unity for the tasks that are at hand? And as the task at hand changes, so does the correct answer

to that question. You can't have an answer that's true for all times and places, which I think is the mistake that a lot of the expressive hobbyist sex make. They think that you can have one answer that's true for all times and places, but I don't think that's a very realistic way of looking at anything. And if I could add one more point, you know, the whole issue of eclecticism, I think something that sometimes it gets confused by people is there's a difference between pulling from a variety of traditions and agnosticism, like literally not knowing the difference between one thing or another or saying, who knows what's even right or correct in one thing or another. So we definitely advocate a methodology of saying, look, let's reopen

questions that had previously been, you know, closed. Sometimes people have referred to things called settled, you know, this has already settled. Let's like reopen those. And maybe we'll find that the the verdict that was previously made was correct, or maybe we might find that it's more complicated. But that doesn't mean that, you know, we sit around, talk to the point that we never actually engage in any action. At some point, your theory has to be good enough to be able to be employed. Sure. Absolutely. I really appreciate, Tim, you say in that word, methodology there, because we don't have all the answers. But that doesn't mean that no one can ever have any answers, which I think is what a lot of people might hear when you say, we don't have all the answers.

But these are questions that, you know, we got to be humble enough to admit that we don't know the answers to right now, but that doesn't mean that we can't learn the answers through practice because ultimately that's the test of any idea, but that's also the method that we use for finding some of these answers is, you know, let's be scientific socialists. Let's treat this idea as a hypothesis. And if when we put it in to practice the things that we think are going to happen are what happened, then we might be on to something. But we can acknowledge that there's a lot that we have to figure out, that we have to have the humility to admit that even if we do come to firmer conclusions in the course of what we do, that we don't start out with those conclusions and we don't have those conclusions until we've actually learned them. Yeah, and I really do appreciate and share your sort of interest in the idea of taking a scientific approach to these things and being sort of humble in the way that scientists are. I mean, experimenting and seeing what the actual results are,

as opposed to, you know, recoiling into your idea of how things should be outside the context of what actually is. And I think that's a lesson that most people should be able to get behind. But I do wonder, like, going into the future, the Marxist Center, you've described it so far as sort of a network of multi-tenancy organizations who share the idea that base building is the way forward. But is the Marxist Center at all concerned with party building in the traditional Marxist sense? Do you view the Marxist center as laying the mass foundation for a more proper Marxist party in the future? You don't get a party in the proper sense by getting you and all of your co-thinkers into a room and declaring yourselves the party. But that's been kind of

the dominant hypothesis to Marxist party building in the U.S. for a very long time, and that's one of those things. That's an answer I think we do have. I think that that has been amply proven over and over to be completely ineffectual at establishing a party in the proper sense, if by in the proper sense you mean that it has to have this mass base that it has to actually be in practice and not just claim to be and not just be in terms of its ideas, the leading organizational incarnation of the dispossess of the working class as a coherent organized social force capable of contesting for power. I, you know, do think that the Marxist Center is absolutely concerned with party building in a very different sense than the get your ideas right and

declare the party approach. But it's concerned with creating the infrastructure of institutions and mass organizations through which the class can become what Marx call the class for itself. And when you have that infrastructure, then you can talk about how to link together and cohere all the different institutions within that infrastructure. That's party building in the proper sense. But I would say that at this point, the Marxist Center is more concerned with, I mean, people talk about a pre-party formation as the organization that lays the groundwork to develop into a party. At this point, I think we're more talking about laying the groundwork for laying the groundwork, like a pre-party organization organization, if that makes any sense.

Absolutely, it does, yeah. You know, when we started, Philly Socialists, like we organized like informally for about a year and then we started organizing under our own name and then we had our kind of founding Congress in I think January 2012 and at that time we adopted you know a strategy which was that we were going to build the revolutionary socialist party over 40 years by organizing and organized and you know that doesn't mean that there's actually a 40 year plan in a safe somewhere as sometimes people have been disappointed to find out, but that there was going to be a protracted approach to this party-building question.

I think that, like, the first thing I'd say is that the notion of what is a party is a very different kind of question for Marx that means something different than I think the way that we talk about it normally, you know, like, oh, I'm in the Democratic Party or I'm in the Republican Party. I think of a party as like a thing that you, go and you know you pull a lever or push a button for you know every two or four years um you know voting there's an element of voting that's involved in it but it has more to do with what sophia's talking about which um you know was comes out of the out of this tradition which is saying like

organizing the class and um a class for itself and and i would say on the on the party question you know when we um when we were pushing this perspective you know in 2010 2011 The main focus was to be like, look, we need greater sustainable permanent organization of the class. And that was really not what was the dominant kind of perspective on the left. Most people kind of gravitated toward an anarcho-liberal spontaneous, you know, kind of spontinism or whatever, which was sort of like to tail after whatever's happening and then just like things will kind of like pop up. and a center of an emphasis on affinity group and so on. And Occupy was really the culmination of that strategy.

Yep. You know, at the time, it was sort of like, how do we argue that there needs to be a more long-term approach, a more like coordinated approach. And, you know, after like Occupy ended, I think a lot of people came around to that conclusion, too. There's just to say that earlier in our history as an organization, just getting people to agree that there needed to be a party was itself a big hurdle. Now that, you know, you see things like the DSA, which is, you know, now like has like something like 50,000 members. People are

talking about, you know, how do we get left to select as a Democrat and so on and so forth. I think now the question is much more, well, what kind of party is needed? What kind of party is actually needed by the working class, by the oppressed? Again, you know, it's sort of like the awshuck's answer, but we're trying to. figure that out, not just only through, you know, a reading of history, but also through the practice of and applying these ideas, applying these strategies to the conditions that we're actually facing today. And if anybody who's listening to this is still kind of confused about what exactly criticisms of Occupy are or are confused about what we mean when we talk about

communist party building, I just refer folks back to our catalog where we interviewed Jody Dean, and that was pretty much the entirety of our conversation is discussing those concepts. So if you still want to learn more about that, you can go check that out. But we have been talking about base building and a big part of the Marxist Center, as well as both of your writings and Praxis, is a commitment not only to base building, but also the secondary aspect of that, which is dual power. These strategies are obviously deeply connected. I know we've talked about it a lot, but can you please define more robustly base building

and dual power and kind of lay out how they're connected? I'm really glad you brought that up because base building is not a strategy. Ultimately, when you get down to it, base building really just means recruit people to whatever it is you're doing that are not already recruited by someone else. And when you do that, have activities going on that are of enough intrinsic value that those people you bring in stick around. In that sense, every effective organization that builds up any kind of base of support is a, base builder one, whether that's a political group or a church or, hell, the anime club at your local community college. In that sense, to the extent that an organization recruits people that aren't already converted, and to the extent that it has activities of intrinsic worth that

keep those people around, it is base building. Dual power is something that goes beyond that. And one way you might think of it is base building is the tools that we have in our toolbox, but dual power is the schematic that tells us how to use those tools and towards what end. Because, you know, the same tools can build house that'll stand up to an earthquake and last for a really long time, or those same tools can build a lean-to shack that won't do anything. The difference is what do you do with them. Dual power is what we intend to do with them. Now, in the historical sense, one criticism a lot of people have raised at our usage of the term dual powers,

they say, well, you know, dual power is not a strategy. It's not something you do. Dual power is a historical situation. Dual power is when during the Russian, revolution, there was the official government, the provisional government, but there were also the workers and soldiers councils, the Soviets, and both of those were trying to claim sovereignty over the same country. You know, in that sense, dual power, like competing claimants to sovereignty is a historical situation, but socialism is also a historical situation. Communism is also a historical situation.

Communism is also a historical situation, but nobody, you know, would criticize somebody for saying, well, our ideology is socialism when it's actually no, your ideology is working to try to establish the state of socialism, but you're really an organization that exists when capitalism exists like that. That's pedantic, you know? Right, right. But in the sense that we use it, we talk about the dual power strategy, because using base building methods, to further that goal of communist party building and to get ourselves to a dual power situation in the United States as expediently as we can, that's our politics, which means that the institutions and the infrastructure and mass organizations that we aim to build, ultimately the intention there is to create the organizational basis to reject the claim of the U.S. government for sovereignty to establish a dual power to engage in this process of literal overthrow the

government revolution, to knock on wood, have that revolutionary dual power that we're trying to establish, then successfully claim that sovereignty and that control, having overthrown the capitalist government. Yeah, this is something that we haven't really been able to emphasize enough yet in the in the conversation and you know this is a sort of a tangent but also a really important issue i just want to kind of like take a short detour i think it's really critical for us that you know a shared perspective is that the current regime is incapable of reform like it's it's we're not going to be able to achieve socialism through like electing people to office and then we like

you know first we start with like one you know congressional representative and then we have a caucus of like five of them and then like eventually we have a majority and that's that's really not how it's going to happen i'm not i'm not writing that off elsewhere i don't really know but um in in this profoundly racist profoundly anti-democratic system um which is the heart of a global empire it's just not going to happen so thus like building toward revolution is the is the strategy and whether you call that dual power situation or whatever you know again, it's sort of pedantic. So then the question is, how do you get there, right?

And again, some folks are like, well, we need to kind of put our ideas out there. But then it doesn't really answer the question of, like, well, if you have the same ideas now as you had 10 years ago, but nobody gave a shit 10 years ago, but now people are suddenly turning their heads. And well, it doesn't seem like you can explain that unless you're going to refer to the changes in the underlying material reality, right? Right. Right. So one of the things I like to do, again, is like while respecting the, you know, the generations that, not just generations, but even our immediate predecessors, also recognizing how neoliberalism deforms the movement and how people had to make compromises in order to continue.

And so, for instance, one thing that activists are very, very familiar with is the idea of a single issue coalition, right? Single issue campaign. You know, maybe it's like, you know, get rent control. or it's, you know, abolish ice or it's, you know, whatever. It could be a lot of things, right? And people are very comfortable on the left. There's never any discussion about what that means. It's sort of like for most people, it's just taken for granted. One thing I like to do is to say what we need to try to do as much as possible is turn away from an issue-based organizing toward a constituency-based organizing. So the idea with the issue-based is the issues come and go.

For instance, if, like, we're organizing around, you know, withdraw all troops from, like, ex-country, well, what happens when we actually withdraw, if we actually succeed in that goal, right? Well, then the issue is done. Like, oh, you know, people go home, right? But as we know, that doesn't mean oppression is over. It doesn't mean the exploitation has ended. So another, a different way to look at it is to say, like, how can we do constituency-based organizing and say, you know, while, you know, while, you know, Issues may come and go. Interests, if not being permanent, have more longevity, right? To give like a concrete example, I don't like people kind of talking about like housing, justice, or like, you know, stuff like that. We're saying like, oh yeah, we're like a movement for rent control or a movement for like, you know, eviction, like into end evictions. Those are all great like goals. But what you're talking about is you're talking about a tenants movement. You're talking about a movement of people who don't own property. And whether that, whether the issue, the, the, the the biggest concern that they're facing right now is evictions.

Well, maybe the biggest issue they're going to be facing, you know, in 10 or 15 years is going to be lack of supply of housing, of like, you know, good housing. So, again, we're trying to build organization that's oriented toward oppressed constituencies. And the issue-based stuff may come and go, but ultimately those are, those make up the base of the revolution. forces. Those are the constituencies we're trying to weave together to build this revolutionary coalition. Yeah, I'm totally on board with that. I love that idea. And importantly, and I think this is part of constituency building, is connecting what people think are single issues to every other issue they care about it, you know, whether it's anti-fascism or environmentalism or, you know, higher wages for workers, or whatever the issue that you have may be, immigration, etc. These are all

deeply linked and you can't just address one in a vacuum because the nature of this system is that you have to address them all and you have to recognize their intersections. And so I think that is worth thinking about and any organizers should really put that into practice. But we are talking ultimately about building an organization. Right now, it's a network, but it's working towards being a more coherent organization. And when we talk about that, ideologies does kind to come in a little bit when it comes to how to structure any organization. You have Leninist who will argue for a Democratic Centralist organization. You have anarchist who will prefer a horizontal consensus decision-making structure. So what are the similarities and differences

between what the Marxist Center advocates and these other structures? So I'm just going to say right quick. My phone is going to be dead real soon and I'm not somewhere I can plug it in so I can answer this question, but then that's probably about as long as my phone's going to hold out for. Okay, yeah, no problem. Sorry about that, and thank you so much for having me on. It's been a pleasure. Absolutely.

To answer that question, like, tell me what democratic centralism means. You know, tell me what horizontalism means. Tell me what leadership means. And I feel like a lot of the time, a lot of the people with the most rigid opinions about what, you know, specific model is the correct one for every time and place, can't necessarily give a particularly good answer to that, or else they'll give an answer that's so vague, it's useless, like saying democratic centralism means majority rule, or horizontalism means everybody counts. That said, though, I think that there are some general principles that you can kind

of apply to different situations to figure out what type of structure is going to be the most effective for allowing you to do the things you need to do and setting yourself up to grow in the ways that you need to grow. One of those is that leadership is always going to happen. You can't have a perfectly leaderless or structureless organization because so long as there is someone there who is convincing somebody else to do this or not do that, leadership is happening. It's just a fact of human beings you can't opt out of it that you know everybody should read the classic essay

of the tyranny of structurelessness by Joe Freeman for some more in-depth investigation of what happens when you have groups that claim to be leaderless which is that you have leaders they're just self-appointed leaders and they're just unaccountable leaders

that are not accountable to the people that they're leading and that lends itself to all kinds of abuses I think that as far as you know the Marxist Center itself goes. I think that what we're going to have to be looking at is this question of organizational feedback loops, like what practices set up a dynamic within an organization that allows for, you know, rank and file membership to have a meaningful say in the decisions the organization makes and that allows for leadership to be accountable, democratically rather than, you know, unaccountable and tyrannical. And I think that what's probably

going to come out of the initial process of like forming a national organizing center and a website and whatnot is probably going to look a whole lot like a federalism between largely autonomous local organizations, although I suspect that the, you know, next few steps after that are going to involve more and more the Marxist Center functioning as more of a unitary organization with, you know, multiple local chapters. But it's going to be a process getting there because if we, you know, all got together, you know, in Denver and said, well, okay, we're the Marxist Center. We're going to be a unitary organization. And we've adopted bylaws that we're all going to use. Like, there's, there's no basis for that, not yet. But we can get to a point where there,

will be a basis for something more like that. But I think that we're going to have to be willing to ask ourselves, well, what is our current functioning? What are the goals that we have? What ways do we want to set ourselves up to grow? And then, based on that, probably have this trajectory of changing a lot of our specific governance practices over the course of, you know, a few years. as the work develops and the organization develops, you know? Sure. Before I hand it off to Tim, I just want to, because I know your phone's about to die. So thank you so much for coming on, Sophia.

I really appreciate your work. I love reading your articles, and I hope in the future that we can meet in person and, you know, work together to get this thing off the ground. Thank you so much for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much. I appreciate your having me, and I hope that we get to meet in person soon as well. Absolutely.

Take care. You too. Bye. Thanks, Sophia. oh man she's leaving me all alone that's right we'll just do a few more questions and then we'll wrap it up

did you want to say anything about structures before we move on I'll just be very brief in this and say that I think that like the that the idea of democratic centralism as currently understood and the ideas of horizontalism

are both I think you're right to point out that both flawed and at the same time has things to teach us right I'd say about like really briefly about democratic centralism. You know, I think that there's the hope among a lot of folks who are in organizations that purport to be or, you know, democratic centralist, that if they follow this model, right, like there's this model that was like, that was like, you know, codified in the 21 conditions and like in the common turn.

and if the model is followed, then you're basically guaranteed success if you just keep at it. And that's like a very tempting, you know, proposition, right? Is that if you just apply the model, then you get the results that you're looking for. But, you know, history is proven that that's not actually the case, that there's all kinds of twists and turns, and that local conditions are very important in determining how how these like how socialism is implemented how revolution happens and so on on the flip side the horizontalism thing i think that there's like a you know i think that a lot of folks come from a very sincere desire to prevent abuse of power to prevent you know some mistakes

that they see made in the left historically the issue that i have is that um We can't necessarily, in advance, prevent ourselves from making, like, every mistake, you know? Like, we can't write into our Constitution. Like, we will never degenerate as an organization. We will never, you know, like, sell out. We're never going to become reformists. The thing, the truth of the matter is that at every stage of struggle, those, those fights happen. and how the results of those fights actually, those internal struggles, determine what happens.

So there's no real way to, like, prevent and advance a lot of that. That, you know, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have, like, a firm commitment to democracy and accountability. We should. The whole democracy question is, like, really important and something I think is, like, you know, one of the reasons why I, for instance, never joined, like, like a democratic centralist organization is like outside of the civil war scenario i just couldn't imagine you know that that that level of discipline would would make very much sense so uh yeah i think for like for now um sophia like laid it out like really powerfully we're moving at with the level of structure that makes sense for where we're at um last year when we had the conference

of the independent groups we didn't even talk or or vote on points of unity. Somebody brought that up, and overall the consensus was like there was not enough unity on whether we could adopt these questions, and I think over the last year, we've continued to be in dialogue, political developments have been speeding along, and we're at the point where we can say, okay, let's figure out what our baseline level of unity is now. And I'm of the opinion that that process isn't going to be a fixed state after December, and then we're never going to have, you know, we're never going to move beyond, like, just having points of unity. I think that, that, you know, the class struggle is going to continue to prod us toward

creating an even more coordinated form, maybe a party. But what that looks like, I think we'll have a much better idea, the closer than we get to it actually happened. Yeah, absolutely. And I like, I really, again, I like this open-endedness and I like this commitment to seeing how things develop. I think it's a good approach. I'm excited to see how this plays out.

Since Sophia left us, I'll just ask one more question on the Marxist Center, which you kind of touched on in your last answer, which is this Marxist Center conference is coming up this winter. Can you talk about this conference and basically what we hope to accomplish with it? I know you talked a little bit about points of unity, but if you walk away from this conference in the winter, what do you hope that we achieve? Yeah, so, you know, as I mentioned, we really started the, you know,

We, Philly Socialists have been looking for allies in the movement since basically started. And, you know, right after, in the years after Occupy, we had hoped that more independent collectives would spring up. And really, like, very few did. We only were able to connect with, like, one or two in the beginning. And it's only been really since, like, 2015, 2016, that we've seen more collectives. And then now, as like the ball has gotten rolling and the left as a whole is like growing, we're seeing more of these independent collectives, either develop or kind of come along to a particular strategic vision. So the conference is going to be held in Colorado Springs, Friday, November 31st through Sunday, December 2nd.

As I mentioned, there's going to be at least two dozen organizations present. the hope is that we're going to have a conversation about how to like what's the basic structure that we want to set up for now we're going to be talking about you know what does it mean to be affiliated with the with the network right as an individual as a collective like as a local collective as maybe somebody who is a member of an existing organization like you're a member of a socialist group but you like what we're doing and you and you want to be affiliated with us as an individual or whatever. What does that look like? So that's going to be a conversation setting up this like structure where we can actually begin to have a tighter dialogue with

each other. So for now, you know, unfortunately like conversations across the country have to happen through social media or through like, you know, email or through phone calls. One of the things that we're hoping to do is set up a unified website where um the the articles that get published by people like sophia by myself by the philadelphia partisan by folks um in your neck of the woods um you know the triumph which is um you know a product a project of um comrades up in um and other parts in Nebraska actually getting those in one place where they're dialoging with each other more. And then we're going to be touching on other issues. You know, a lot of us do work, deep organizing work with renters. So that's, there's going to be like an element where we can

share experiences with that. And tackling the whole question of like organizing workers as well, which is something that, you know, we're finally getting to the point here in Philadelphia, a Philly Socialist, where we can start to say, you know, we have the forces now. We can, we can intervene in the labor movement. What do we want to do? So my hope is that at the end of the conference, we have, you know, a handful of groups that have agreed on some levels of political unity that are willing to engage in dialogue, you know, on this website and, you know, through other mechanisms, and then really, really commit themselves to this idea of base building and mass action in building a revolutionary left. And if that happens, then I think we'll be in a place

where we can offer a very different perspective, a unique perspective than, you know, what people on the left currently have. And hopefully it helps steer the movement in the right direction. Absolutely. And I'm here for it. I will be there in Colorado this winter and I hope to contribute meaningfully to this project. I like, you know, we talked earlier about left plurality and experimentation and seeing how far we can take new ideas and testing new ideas out. And I see this as really a wonderful experiment that needs to happen in the U.S. and really sort of marks a new stage, at least I hope, a new stage for the left, which

really turns away from some of these more narrow, subcultural, gatekeeping, online nonsense and more towards mass work and building up an actual consistency that has the numbers and ultimately the power to confront this imperial death machine with climate change, the clock is ticking. And so, you know, these things are essential. And even if somebody out there doesn't 100% agree or even mostly agree with anything that we've talked about today, surely, you know, running this experiment, having this organization, try these new things is a good thing for the left. and whatever happens, there'll be learning material that we can take and move forward to the next stage.

But you mentioned Philly Socialists, you mentioned the Philadelphia Tenants Union. I know we have you here for a few more minutes. So do you just want to talk a little bit about that? Maybe plug the organization, talk about some of your victories that you've had in Philadelphia, etc.? Yeah, sure. So, you know, we didn't start doing tenant organizing until maybe like three to four years after, we'd started the organization, we were just, we felt we were just much too small to take on any class enemies directly in, in like political struggle and, and beat them. So we, we did mainly

like what we called serve the people work, you know, we organized a community garden that was like, we expropriated vacant land that we took over with people in the neighborhood. We had been running free English classes for, yeah, like seven years or maybe longer. those were like projects we felt that we could handle with a small group and that's what i always tell people when they're when they're saying like look i'm i'm i have a small group of people in my hometown i want to start something i usually tell them you know do something that you think you can do with a small group so that's what we did and then we get to the point where we had you know wanted to actually take on class enemies directly we started doing um fliring and trying to just

pick individual, like renters fights against slumlords. And we ran through a couple of those, able to do things like get people's security pods us back, get repairs made, that kind of thing. But the idea was that we were never going to kind of stop in that level of just doing individual fights. We were going to move to creating a master organization of renters. And, you know, I don't want to take up too much time here. but we had a plan to go about doing this from when we were already doing the individual fights

to building the city-wide organization for about a year, where we were trying to build up local working-class institutions at the neighborhood level, at the level of, like, an apartment complex, and then those would be federated together into a city-wide tenancy union. And that organization, after like, you know, about two years, three years of doing this, was founded in 2016 the philadelphia tenants union and it pursued like a uh what we call like a dual track approach to strategy this is strategy so on the one hand there's direct action directly confronting landlords eviction protection physically like you know actually blockading

like and uh helping to organize renters to confront um landlords and get like you know their demands met whatever those may be and then on the other hand we wanted to hold up a political vision like a renter's bill of rights which was to actually like push for reforms that would affect lots of people in the city because even in our thing with our with direct the direct action fights is that even if you're organizing an entire apartment complex you know you're maybe like helping out a couple hundred people at most whereas there's like I guess something in the order of like tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of renters in Philadelphia. Philadelphia is about

like 50%. It's been gaining and moving toward like 50% renter in recent years. So there's a lot of people that, you know, are dealing with absentee landlords, dealing with rising rents, dealing with snap evictions, and all this bullshit. And we need to show them that we can make changes that's going to impact them too. And we feel that will give people confidence. So our kind of first policy fight was around good cause eviction protections. And this would just mean that if that is passed, then at least on paper in Philadelphia, it's going to be more difficult to evict people.

And through like this year period that we were doing, The run-up to the introduction of this bill that got put forward, we were doing, like, a fighting app, a mass eviction. This developer bought this building, kicked, unceremoniously, like, gave eviction notices to everybody. People who've been living there for decades, and it was, like, 180 units or something like that in the building. And this actually, you know, got the attention to the media because it was such a flagrant displacement that was happening. And gentrification is something that's on everybody's lines in Philly and probably in a lot of places. So with the media attention and with like, you know, the kind of mass interest that had developed in the building and among like renters, there was actually like politicians started responding to this and being like, look, we're on your side and introduced a bill that was pushing for good cause. So what's happened with that is it's like, and this is kind of like, you know, more insider baseball, but the, there have been like several co-sponsors for the bill, but the thing is about politicians is that since they take donations to be able to get their position, then most of them are reliant on the real estate industry, the developers and the landlord lobby.

And so if the landlord lobby and the developers don't like something, then politicians try to shy away from it. So it's been kind of like hung up. It was like introduced, but it wasn't voted on. And then the city council went on break over the summer. And then they're going to be like back. And then it's going to be a question of like, do we have the forces to push this through? Can we like galvanize people in the city around like the issue of preventing evictions, which is like a huge crisis not only in Philadelphia, but around the country. For sure.

Finally being recognized as like, you know, a mass phenomenon that's on the rise and, like, destroy people's lives. So that's kind of where we're at now. And, you know, we've taken, like, a pretty strong line that we don't do endorsements of politicians. And we've been able to get as far as we've gotten with that in contrast to, like, you know, what people told us who are more reform-oriented. and, you know, we'll see how things go, but, but, you know, I, I think that the work that we've done is very important. I think, like, in addition to the kind of goals and stuff, you have to understand that the base building is also, like, about the process, too.

And we've just seen, like, so many, you know, working class folks renters who have come up into leadership roles and really develop into their own through this, like, mechanism, you know? and I'm of the opinion that that's just as important as like whether or not at the end of the day we end up like winning this reform because those people as I mentioned with the constituency you know point is those people are still going to be down with the struggle in five years yep you know even if like this good cause thing never goes anywhere the fact that the tenants union is around and that you know capital is still screwing everybody over they're going to have learned value lessons, they're going to have learned skills, and they're going to have gotten a political education about how capitalist politicians were. Yeah, that's kind of, we're at the beginning of that. It's cool because when we started doing tenant organizing, it wasn't something that was like socialists did as much, but since BSA has become like really big, a lot of folks in VSA have taken on tenant organizing, which is great. We've spoken to people from different chapters and stuff. People, a lot of the Marcus Center collectives do tenant organizing, and so again, that's

going to be kind of like something that we come together and talk about in Colorado. Yeah, absolutely. And I love that. That trajectory is fascinating and people who are organizing at whatever stage of development to see where you started and how you built up to where you are. And I think it's the best way to end this interview because we've talked about base building throughout and then we end it with a concrete, you know, in-depth example of what that actually looks like on the ground. So before we let you go, though, can you let listeners know where they can find you, your work, maybe Philly Socialists and the Marxist Center online? Yeah, definitely.

So our organization's website is just phillysocialist.org, phleasocialist.org. The, our newspaper is called the Philadelphia Partisan. You can just look it up on it from your whatever search engine you use. Most of my writings on there. And by the way, I'm not like in the editorial collective or anything of that. I'm just like a contributor. I'm not, I should say like, full disclosure, while I was a co-founder of a fully socialist,

I was really adamant that we have term limits. I'm not in leadership anymore, and I'm not on the editorial collective. We've been, you know, we focus a lot on leadership development, and we have, like, a great crop of leaders who are both running the organization as a whole and, like, the newspaper.

Nice. And then as far as, like, the Marxist Center, you know, our, we have to first get approval to launch the new website although several of us have been talking about it and like kind of like looking through running through designs and stuff and our goal if the proposal passes at the conference would be to have a launch date of January 1st 2019

and do kind of like a new year's like a new year's theme to it so that those people just have to if they're listening home, they're just going to have to wait on and wait with bated breath. I put the new website. Absolutely. And, you know, as I said, I'll be in this conference coming up, so I will keep all my listeners updated on the progress of the Marxist Center. And the moment that that website has launched, I'll let everybody know on social media

and probably in my intros to whatever episode I'm recording at that time. Thank you, Tim, so much. I do want to say, though, I know Sophia mentioned it earlier. She wasn't able to finish this interview, but if you Google Sophia Burns, if you look on gods and radicals you'll be sure to find her and you can follow that little rat hole down and find all her different writings

and her Patreon and stuff like that so definitely support Sophia if you can and yeah Tim thank you so much this has been incredibly enlightening I hope people get a lot out of this and I look forward to hopefully meeting you in a couple months yeah thank you so much

and for the opportunity and yeah I'm just really excited to be able to chat with you all like you've got a great program and I also love your social media presence. It's like, you know, it just strikes like the right balance between being like, you know, pushing in like a revolutionary line, but also being like very open and engaging with folks from all different backgrounds, which I think is very

important. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. All right, keep up the great work. Talk that shit, man. Talk that shit, homie. Talk that shit for black people, brown people, yellow people, beige people. Talk that shit for poor people. Talk that shit for the worker class, man. Yeah. You trooped up, homie. We got your motherfucking back. You can say whatever you want to say about whatever you want to say.

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Yo shut the freeways down I give a fuck if you were stuck sitting in traffic right now It's my motherfucking bro man you don't give a fuck if you stuck in traffic You gonna hear us or you gonna motherfucking fear us but the system coming down If everybody don't get their fair share, motherfuckers. Talk that shit, bam. Talk that shit on the behalf of the people. Ha ha. Yeah.

No color. All these my motherfucking brothers. Worker-class, motherfucker. Villas. You're fucking bastards. I hope that it went off well. I, um, you had a little bit of my daughter. I changed her diaper before the, uh, the podcast.

But then she comes over to me with poop on her hand. And I don't love it. And I'm like, oh. fuck so i just like pick her i walk i wipe her down i pick her up take her over into the the bath and uh gave her a bath in the middle of the podcast wow seamless i don't know any of that will like come through if like i my my my thoughts come off across is very scattered but um you know just being apparent and i i just doing the best that i can with it but um yeah i think it's great i'm disappointed that sophia had to had to piece out early because i really like um you know she

she's so sharp and I really like being able to kind of like bounce up you know kind of piggyback on her but hopefully the ending was was eligible too oh definitely and you know we'll always be able to have you both back on in the future especially after this conference after the website launch so you you guys can come back on and and get people updates and as a father of a three-year-old and a nine-year-old I feel you and you did it very well because I couldn't even tell I heard the kid talking a little bit and in the intro I'll probably make a reference to like that's Tim's kids in the background Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were actually pretty good for the most part.

It was just the unexpected diaper issue, but yeah. The trials and tribulations of father. From one revolutionary parent to another, you know, doing our, you know, our reproductive labor while also our revolutionary labor, you know. Exactly right, exactly right. All right, man. Well, you have a good night. Get back to those kids.

Yeah, we'll do.