Rev Left Radio - The U.S. Left & the Future of Capitalism w/ The Antifada

Episode Date: June 28, 2018

Jamie, Sean, and Andy from The Antifada podcast joint Brett to discuss the current state of the US left and the future of global capitalism!  This is a really fun and unique collaboration with some genuinely hilarious and good human beings!  Listen to more of their episodes here: https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-antifada/ Outro music: Slow Down Ghandi by Sage Francis Support Revolutionary Left Radio and get exclusive bonus content here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen and support their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

The Antifada is more than a podcast. It's a specter haunting the globe. It is the synthesis of the two most frightening things for the cheerleaders of this reactionary hellway. One ravaged by the unbounded savagery is capital in its states. Antifa super soldiers and interfaith. Bash to bash in a global uprising. Be prepared to enter the Antifada mindset. Revolution, Revolution, Revolution, Revolution, Revolution, Revolution, Revolution,

Revolutionary left radio now Oppose the system any way you know how Unite the left against the capitalist lies and liberate the proletary as mine Fight for all the working class Fight for equality Fight against the right free Fascist ideology

Took it in and turn it up loud Revolutionary Left Radio starts now Hello everyone and welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio I'm your host and comrade Brett O'Shea And today we have a very special unique episode So we are doing a collaborative episode with the Antifada podcast. Hello. I'm Jamie Peck.

I'm Sean K.B. And I'm AP Andy. And we are very excited to be doing this with you today. Yeah, awesome. I'm super excited about this. This is, I think, different and new for both of our podcast and that we're going to record this and release them on both of our feeds to our respective audiences. And we're going to do it at the same exact time.

So kind of cross-pollinate our listenerships, let people know about, one another's podcast, and I think have a really, really fun and engaging conversation. So I'm extremely excited for this. Thank you guys so much for agreeing to do this. Oh, hell yeah. It's like a crossover episode with all of your favorite sitcom characters. I think actually none of us can claim credit for it. There was a Twitter poster, right? Do you know, what that person's name was, Brett? I don't. Yeah, I've forgotten as well. I'm sorry. Oh, man. Well, shout out to that person. You know who you are. They made it happen. I would like to begin, if I may, by asking a question that we ask all our guests here at the Antifada.

And that is, how pure is your hate? You want to go first, Brett? My hate is so fucking pure. Hell yeah. It's concentrated distilled hatred. Now, you know, underlying all of my anger or political rage or whatever it may be is ultimately a deep sense of like empathy and I give a shit about other people. And so insofar as I do have pure hatred for certain segments.

of society, the fascist or the exploiters and the dominators and the oppressors, it comes because it comes out of a love for the people. How pure is your hate? Well, it's a real mixed bag today, I got to say, because, I mean, among other things, it is our anniversary. It is our anniversary. Nice. Congratulations. Thank you. It's a, it's a one-year anniversary of our wedding and the eight-year anniversary of us getting together. So that's nice. That's hard to hate. But, like, seemed like everything was stacked against us today when we got up and we're trying to prepare for this show

everywhere we tried to get sandwiches was closed for some stupid fucking reason either for or against pride that's my theory I don't know if it's a right wing conspiracy to deprive our brains of protein on the day when we're doing

this very important episode with Brett of Left Radio also I spent a lot of fucking money on our stupid cat this week and she does not even appreciate it she wasn't eating it turns out she has two broken teeth she needs to go to the goddamn cat dentist

fucking cat dentist have you heard of that before man a cat dentist who heard of such a thing I didn't even know that existed seriously yeah this is why after we get single pair health care for humans I think we might as well

just go ahead and get it for cats and if that has to involve some death panels then so be it cat death panels if you like your cat you can keep it if you want your cat to be drowned in a pillowcase, we can do that too. Exactly.

So, like, I guess it all balances out for our hate to be, like, you know, medium. It's like a high medium. Yeah, I feel that. I feel that. I've been having a pretty mixed day myself. I've been preparing to come on the show, had some roadblocks, some shit I'm dealing with. But overall, I'm happy to be here, and I think we can make something happen here. Hell, yeah.

It's funny because you usually start either of our shows, a revolutionary left, which I've listened to a lot of in preparation for this show, and I must say, Brett, I do like a lot. Thank you. It would be common for either, for us to welcome the other person, but in this case, we can't welcome anybody except for our awesome listeners and fans. Yes, welcome everyone to listening. I'm really excited about this because I think our podcasts, we have similar instincts and politics, although we'll get into that later, but I'm really excited to see what comes of like this.

I think we're both pretty unique in different shows, and so putting them together is going to be interesting. And I think our listeners will benefit from hearing both podcasts, and hopefully Rev. Left listeners can go and check out Antifada after they listen to this episode if they haven't already heard about you guys. That's definitely what we're shooting for is cross-pollination. And if we stand for anything, it's the free exchange of ideas. So we get both sides of the argument, the revolutionary left side

and the revolutionary left side of the argument. We got great ideas on many sides. True centrist's. That's right. So before we get into the beat of our discussion, I think Andy just wanted to give a shout out to the people who are occupying ICE headquarters right now. Yeah, if we have any listeners in New York,

there are people who are there 24 hours a day at each side of a ice processing center in office in downtown Manhattan at 201 Varick Street. It's being organized by an anarchist group called Mack along with the IWW and the DSA. And they're basically at times blocking ice fans, but mostly just keeping an eye out and keeping a constant presence on the building, letting people know that there's a lot of people in New York who hate ice and don't want to exist anymore. And I know that there's similar actions going on around the country. And you can find that on Twitter by looking at hashtag Occupy Ice, I believe. Fuck yeah.

Hell yeah. I also really like all of the actions where they make sure that these goals don't get to live normal lives in the world. Because that's really fucking important. When they went to the restaurant where Kristen Nielsen was eating and just like calmly but firmly called her out until she, left. That was pretty goddamn cool. Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked politely to leave a restaurant where some of the employees were LGBT and they also obviously disagreed, not just disagreed, but like really, really were not cool with her role in justifying the actions of ICE lately. So like, good job, guys. Keep up the good work.

It's essential to make sure that these people cannot just retreat to their suburban homes or they're in really nice apartments and live lives of comfort and luxury while the policies that they're actively promoting and defending are literally separating children from the arms of their parents. So anybody that goes out there and makes their lives even slightly uncomfortable, makes them leave restaurants. Good for you. Let's keep it up. And anywhere these people show up, there has to be somebody there to say, fuck off. That's right. Direct action gets the goods, even if that direct action is simply hawking a giant fucking lugie in a bourgeois politician's lunch.

Absolutely. It's funny that Sarah Huckabee Sanders thought that she could eat in a restaurant anyway these days and not get some extra ingredients in her burrito. Well, I think we should go ahead and if you guys are okay with that. Well, actually, before we move on, I do also want to shout out. You guys are in NYC. I'm in Omaha, but I do want to shout out comrades in Portland who over the last few days have occupied an ICE detention facility, have implemented a blockade,

disallowing vehicles to go in and out of the facility, and actually render the entire facility inoperable. They had to have the Department of Homeland Security come in and escort ICE agents out of the building safely. So great job to our Portland comrades, great job to our NYC comrades, and people all over the country standing up against this horrific agency

and its fascistic policies. Fuck yeah, folks. And right after this recording, Brett is going to do an entire guillotine episode on this ice issue. So do tune in not just to Rev. Left Radio, the antifato, but also the guillotine, right?

That is a healthy fucking diet. Lugie free. Lugie free. All right, let's go ahead and move on. I think an interesting way to sort of start this conversation is to talk about our personal political development. I know a lot of people that are new to the left are sometimes there's a facade, especially in online spaces where the people that are on the left and know their tendency

have been there forever. But in reality, we all go through developments and we're all kind of learning as we go. So I thought that might be an interesting way to start. Jamie, what was your personal political development? Where did you start and where did you eventually get to? Man, well, I'm actually working on a book proposal on this very topic right now. It's a political memoir of sorts. So I've thought a lot about this question lately, but I'll try to distill it down to just the brief bullet points

because anyway, we don't have that much time. So I come from the professional managerial class, shall we say. Both of my parents were attorneys who worked for the state of Connecticut. So, you know, fairly privileged, upper middle class upbringing, in an area that was fairly mixed between liberals and conservatives. Especially like when I was in high school in the early 2000s was kind of a conservative time, especially considering I went to prep school with a lot of kids who were at least as well off as I was to like the bourgeoisie of the Hartford area. So I was, you know, I was a left liberal.

My mom was a huge fucking hippie who at one point considered herself a radical and settled into a kind of like New Deal Social Democrat thing by the time I came along. Just to give you some idea of my hippie childhood, where do I start? My mom decided to turn me into a protest of the Gulf War when I was a kid. We had a 4th of July parade in my suburban neighborhood, and the theme was Heroes. And she dressed me up like the sun and gave me a sandwich board that said, Keep our heroes home, solar energy. Damn. Probably going to be in a history book someday.

That's about as lit as hippie. the left liberal moms could possibly get. And it's awesome. Pretty much. She was also big into environmentalism. She was in a really cute environmental group called Our Town, Our Planet. And we had a big sign on our lawn that said this lawn is pesticide free, which was fucking obvious because it looked like shit.

All the other lawns were very lush. Anyway, did that. I didn't really know about anything to the left of liberal at that point in time. But that was my thing for a while. while. In high school, I got into Food Not Bombs. That was kind of my first exposure to leftist ideology, although most of the people in that group with me

were like a little bit incoherent about their anarchism, so I'm not really sure how much I did. I protested the Iraq War with Food Not Bombs. I got to college. None of the left groups at Columbia really grabbed me and I kind of sunk into this decadent party culture while I was

studying bourgeois art and literature. She's still not out of that decadent culture. Well, what are we fighting for. Anyway, as I grew up and tried to make my way in the world, I found it was actually pretty hard despite my privileged upbringing. I also met people from other walks of life than me through, mostly through suicide girls, actually, and my work as a naked internet model. I met a lot of sex workers that way and started to talk to people and learn more about their experiences. I met Sean about around the time of Occupy Wall Street, actually. So,

So it was probably Kismet, got involved in some activism related to Occupy, and then later Occupy Sandy. So that's kind of when I had my leftist awakening or epiphany, although I think it had been building for a pretty long time based on all the experiences I was having. I was a lady blogger at the time, which didn't really fit with by growing interest in left politics, although I did try instead of like ham-fisted ways to insert it in this. there and got in trouble for it quite a bit. And then in 2016, I was working at death of taxes and my horrible boss at the time, in perhaps the only good thing that he ever did for me, besides hire me in the first place, was he really pushed me to write about the primary and Bernie Sanders. And I was kind of hesitant to do it because I was like, I'm a woman and I'm a leftist and I'm still learning. Like, I'm going to get raked over the fucking coals and I'm not here

for that. But then I looked around me and I saw that most of the people who were getting paid to write about politics in the mainstream media did not know what the fuck they were talking about at all. And I was like, well, I know more than they do. And also, I'm right. So I might as well try. And then a little while after that, I joined the DSA because it seemed like that was where the action was. And they were a group that was actually doing stuff out in the world. And since then, I've gotten more and more involved with the DSA, put together some events. for them and I'm currently running for the organizing committee of North Brooklyn DSA. So if anyone in that group is listening, please vote for me or not. But like, I hope you do. I hope you find me

worth voting for. That's, that's my story in a nutshell. That's awesome. Super interesting. Sean, how about you? Oh, man. I feel like I came out of the womb opposition. A little bit of revolutionary blood running through my system. I grew up in the, metropolitan area of New York City. I come from a half professional managerial class conservative family and a half blue collar, you know, white working class, as they say, conservative family. So thankfully, like Jamie's parents, my parents were liberals. I remember during the Reagan era, my father telling me explicitly that Republicans are for rich people, Democrats are for poor people, so we're Democrats. I said, okay, that makes sense. So yeah, my teenage years, I felt a lot of sort of angst and suburban on Wii. I got into punk rock and I got into hardcore. And of course, if you were like an anarcho, a crust punk back in the 90s, you know, you got into some sort of weird, I don't know, anarchistic politics, kind of peace punk, anarcho crusty individualist type stuff. And I did that for a while.

I got into the ad busters thing for a long time. If folks aren't familiar with that, it might still be around, but it was like an anti-consumerist magazine. I got into eventually a very kind of shallow reading of the situationist through that. And really just sort of, and Noam Tromsky helped me with my anti-imperialism. But really for maybe 10, 15 years, I was just kind of a vague anti-capulist, anti-systemic sort of character until the

crisis hit in 2007 2008 when I did a deep deep dive into Marx and Marx's theory since then I've flirted with communism theory

I've flirted with libertarian communism I've flirted with left communism I've read my fair share of Trotsky I've read histories of the Chinese Revolution, the Russian Revolution and all sorts of anti-imperialist struggles. And it got to be where I am today, which is kind of straddling the border between a, I don't know, anti-authoritarian Marxist and perhaps a left communist. That's kind of where I'm at at this moment.

Awesome. How about you, Andy? Well, not a lot of people know this. You can't really tell from my accent. But I was born in Brussels, and my parents were anti-Zarist exiles. I spent my early political years in France with the illegalists, and I would, I wasn't like robbing banks myself, but I would like, you know, give them shelter and stuff. And for that, I was sort of wrapped up in the trials against them, and I was kicked out of France and sent to Spain, where I was involved a bit in the early Spanish anarchist movement. But when I heard the Tsar was overthrown in 1917, I high-tailed it to Russia.

And despite my anarchist politics, I got a job in the common turn as a journalist and a writer. And for a few years, that was pretty nice until, you know, Stalin took over. And then I spent a lot of time in the gulag. Much like my friend of me, Trotsky, was just kicked from country to country, finding, trying to find safe haven't. do my work and my writing until I ended up in Mexico. And met Frida Kahlo? Well, I'm never going to be able to match that, but I guess it's my turn now. Yeah.

Tell us about your political development, Brett. Okay. Yeah, so I grew up, like, very working class on the lower end of the working class in a pretty small home. Both my parents were kind of low-wage workers, but they worked their asses off. and you know childhood experiences when you don't have any political consciousness you just have kind of your personal life to deal with it you know there'd be times when I would come home and the lights would be off for the entire night or a couple days at a time or I remember vividly

one time coming home and my mom's new car that she worked so hard for and she was so in love with because it was like the first nice thing she ever had was getting repossessed in our driveway and so I had a lot of these early working class experiences that are kind of common to to people of the lower economic strata. And I didn't really know how to make sense of that as I grew up and I started getting jobs. I got my first job at age 15. I started being interested in politics, but just in the way that like most of us are pushed to either choose between like Fox News conservatism or like NPR liberalism.

And so I was kind of bouncing around there a little bit. And I had a really tough time in my late teens where I was struggling with like some mental health issues. And part of the reason I, or getting over that, I moved to Montana where my dad was living at the time to try to clear my head and get into a new environment and see if that helped. And I've talked about this in other places before, but I lived on the very edge of the Crow Reservation in Montana. And it was a really interesting, radicalizing experience because I got to see firsthand some of the poverty and deprivation and isolation that indigenous people have to deal with in this country and some of the sadness and despair on these reservations.

And I was sort of, I started getting some churning going on there when I could see that poverty up close and I was just sort of horrified by it. But the people that had grown up there, they didn't even, they took it for granted. And that was kind of an radicalizing experience for me. When I came back to Omaha, that was around the time where the economic crash hit. And that really got my interest in politics. I was like, what the hell is going on. I started reading a lot of like Chomsky and stuff like that and started developing a political consciousness. And I was also really into hip hop, like radical conscious hip hop and 90s hip hop. And that really helped also radicalize me and give me a perspective into what it's like for for black folks in

this country. And then obviously when Occupy hit, I think for a lot of us, Occupy was a foundational experience. And I was active in it here in Omaha. And so far, I mean, we had a pretty nice, you know, robust Occupy Omaha movement, but it wasn't anything like New York, obviously. But in that process, I met a lot of different politics. Like, there was like libertarians and social democrats and anarchists. And so you got to kind of get in that milieu a bit and see what different people's angles were on the situation. And I was really, I was not interested in libertarianism. I knew it was wrong. And I started like budding heads with libertarians around that time. And that really helped, you know, develop me politically. And then my early 20s, I gravitated towards the

DSA. I was a card-carrying member of the DSA for a year or so. After that, I was started getting more radical politics, getting into anarchism. I was going to college at this time, working on a degree in philosophy. And then over the past couple years, like when I first started Rev. Left Radio, I was identifying outwardly as a libertarian Marxist. And then over the course of the last year and a half, two years since I've started that show, I've been moving more towards Leninism and towards Maoism. I'm involved in an organization here called the Nebraska the left coalition, which is a multi-tenancy organization, doing really good work in our community here, trying to find ways to make inroads in a pretty conservative state, although Omaha is

the biggest city in like Nebraska, Iowa, and the Dakota. So it's kind of a little small hotbed of more progressive politics and a sea of more conservative reactionary politics. And so, yeah, that's where I am now. I'm just trying to stay organized. I'm trying to educate people through the different podcasts that I run and really try to promote people to get active and get involved in any way they can. So that's where I'm at right now. Cool. And what was the DSA like at that point in time? What years were that that you were part of it? It had to have been, it had to be after Occupy. I'm kind of blurry. I don't have a great memory, so I kind of forget the exact years. But it was, I'm 29, almost 30 now. So it was my

early 20s is when I was, you know, kind of getting into the DSA sort of thing. And I think it overlapped with Occupy. Occupy wasn't like a one-off event. Obviously, it lasted for a couple years and things were changing at that time. So it was around that time where I was in the DSA. God, you guys all make me feel so old. You're like 2930. Like, I, God.

It's interesting, I think, like. Hey, sorry to interrupt you. I had to explain what single out was to my colleagues the other day at the Jard more. So. I remember that. Yeah, that's the process of getting old, I guess, is having to explain references to younger people. Neither Matt nor Brendan knew what it was.

I would just say briefly, like, because we're going to move on in a second, but the generational thing, not that we're that far apart, I think is important because, like, there are these sort of formative events that happen in the world that really affect your life. And, you know, I remember, like, the Berlin Wall falling, you know, I remember, you know, I remember, you know, Waco was like a huge event. I remember 99, the WTO protest was a huge thing for me, too. And I really came of age politically like in the early aughts, late 90s, early arts. And that was like a really depressing time to be into left politics. And so maybe some of my cynicism and maybe even some of my openness to different tendencies comes from just having, I don't know, just

seemed like a lot of horrible crap. It was a depressing time to be a liberal even. Like, I got made fun of at school for that for like being against the war and against George W. Bush and stuff. That happened to be with the original Gulf War in 93, believe you or not. You and my mom. Go ahead, Brett. What were you saying?

I remember during the Iraq War, I was very young and I didn't really have any organizational apparatus to turn to by any means. I just remember like sitting out once and like during a hailstorm. like holding up an anti-war sign like in the middle of like a like a busy road in Omaha like standing on the median and like holding up a sign and it was like snowing and raining I'm just by myself just trying to do whatever the fuck I can and like people were going by and flipping me off but some people would like stop and hand me coffee I was still pretty young and naive about things but I still felt I was still starting to get politically active around the Iraq war and I fucking

hated it and so that that was that was even preoccupy getting my politics moving in that direction. Same, same. And I love that you realize the masochism that is being a leftist when you were standing in like a hail storm. Only reaching maybe like 50 or 60 people, whatever,

but you didn't give up. You focused your hate on the ruling class and you're fucking at it anyways. You're still on the left. It's a very, very resonant image. Yeah, yeah. And I very clearly remember old white men just fucking cussing me out when they drove at. That's what happened to you

for the rest of your life as a left. Absolutely. I'm used to it. Until the boomers all die, maybe Gen X will be nicer to us. That's how you know you're doing something right. Yeah, that's exactly right. So, Brett, speaking of our varied politics,

one thing that you do on your show that I really like is that you offer a wide range of guests. You have a lot of different types of guests on your show, including people that you disagree with, people on the left, people who aren't on the left. and you're always interested in asking these or engaging with these difficult questions and in general your politics seem to be very positive

towards a united front or left unity which is something I'm pretty skeptical of because I think first of all I'm not sure how much the left can do just on its own that's kind of where my politics are as some sort of anarcho-niallist post-trotskyist kind of person and we should say that we define different people to find the left in different ways

I would say that we define it broadly as everything from like social Democrats leftward. Sure. If we're being generous. Everyone to the left of the mainstream Democratic Party, basically. Mm-hmm. You know, my skepticism aside, all of us, I think, including you, you know, you said that you're interested in Maoism recently. Jamie's a socialist, Sean's left com, you know. But what unites us is that we're all very anti-dogmatic.

I don't think any of us are, you know, card-carrying members of a party or anything. like that where we're interested in working together and engaging with these ideas and learning new things so what i'd like to ask you is uh in this strategy of uh of left unity and the united front um how far do you see that going and do you see that breaking down at any point yeah i actually think that's a great point and honestly i've come to change my position on left unity since the founding of the show i remember in the beginning of the show i was very much about it and um if you've i haven't spoken out against it on the show, but I've stopped talking about it on the show precisely because some of the criticisms of the concept of left unity I've engaged with over the last

couple years have really been convincing to me. What is the left? Like what can we really say the left is and what do they have in common? And if all we have in common is like a general, vague, amorphous dislike of capitalism, a general dislike of oppression, you know, on what grounds can we really move forward? And I'm not sure that there are grounds. Now, that does not not mean that we can't work together, that we shouldn't work together. So I've kind of traded in the notion of left unity. I've discarded that, and I've kind of picked up an idea of coalition building around shared interest, but ultimately finding what your principle is, what your lines are, what your values are, and joining an organization that most fits that and pushing forward. So if you

truly believe that anarchism is an ideology and a philosophy and a mechanism by which we can make the most progress in this country, by all means, join Black Rose, join the IWW, and push forward on that front. If you're a Maoist or you're a Leninist or a left com, find organizations that are coherent with regards to what you believe in and push forward on that front. And you'll find, like, with this ICE detention situation, it's not so much that everybody's trying to promote this left unity.

It's just a natural organic realization that a lot of us care deeply about this issue and we're going to work together. We're going to occupy these places together. We're going to talk shit to the monsters that are behind this policy. when we find them out in public, and we can work together on that, especially when it comes to, let's say, fighting fascism. You know, in Charlottesville, you had the DSA,

you had anarchists, you had Maoist, you had Marxist. And that's a beautiful thing, and it does not require coming together and compromising on your specific values and trying to form a big group of people that just kind of agree on some basic stuff. But rather, it's having individual organizations coming together, but still maintaining their ideological integrity.

Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. And my, I add, you know, liberals hate Trump as well. Liberals hate what's going on with ICE and a lot of it's coming from a very good place. But who's working together to oppose ICE? Who's occupying the offices? Who's, like, shouting people out of restaurants? It's the left.

Exactly. So maybe Trevor Noah should be a little nicer to us the next time he decides to do a segment on the Daily Show. Yeah. Did you guys see that old, when Antifa was starting to pop off? that Trevor Noah segment on Antifa, it was disgusting. I did. That's exactly what I was thinking about. I'd never watched him after that. You should put Chris Hedges and Trevor Noah in some sort of, I don't know,

cage match where they have to fight and there's actually no, two men enter, no men leave. Yeah. At the very least, Chris Hedges has some class politics. Trevor Noah is just liberal centristism to the core. Yeah, that's fair. I mean, there comes a time in every millennial's life. life, I think, when they realize that the politics of their beloved daily show that they grew up watching are kind of garbage.

It was a weird experience when I realized that myself. Yeah. Well, it's, I want to kind of branch off of what you were saying, Brett, because I agree with you. I think most of these points. I think that the important, there's two very important things. And the first is, and you mentioned this, is practical activity that's built around not allyship, but solidarity with other folks. in terms of real world organizing to get the thing, get people the things that they need, and also to push forward a socialist, communist, anarchist, whatever it is, a vision of the world that brings more and more people towards us. And I think the other thing you said, which is, you know, find a party or, you know, a group that you find the closest to you, you know, even if it's just, you know, like I was saying on another show, if it was just a few of your friends, if you live in a very small town somewhere, if you folks want to start a study group or get together, be that person

standing out in a hailstorm, and just sort of come together and create your own thing, as long as you're in the real world and dealing with other people and sharing ideas with other people and learning with other people, that's one of the best things that we can do, which is part of the reason why I, uh, my group, uh, actually the, uh, internationalist, Bordigist armchair tendency is, uh, growing by leaps and bounds right now. We have probably, maybe less members, but more memes than I think, uh, anybody else on the left com left. It's a big armchair.

There's plenty of room on the armchair. That's right. That's right. You have seized the memes of production. That's it. It's a beautiful thing. Yeah, I agree with everything you said, babe. Oh, thanks, babe.

Including. That was my anniversary present to you. that's all you get. Ah, thanks. It's so sweet. Like, we are so far away from any kind of mass movement. Like, even in terms of liberal reforms or social democracy, like most of the stuff that's actionable in the present day

is stuff that most of us agree on from, you know, even left liberals to the left. So we can totally work together. We totally form coalitions. When it comes to having a big tent organization, some kind of umbrella organization that it comes to the entire left, it gets a little trickier. And this is something we've been talking a lot about in DSA right now because it's kind of trying to become that big tent umbrella organization. But, you know, the tent can only get so big in one direction before it has to shrink in another. Yeah, exactly.

Like, if your horizon is social democracy, it's possible that you would be more effective in a separate organization from the people with, you know, more anti-capitalist politics whose horizon is expropriating the means of production. So I'm curious to see what happens with it. And whatever does happen, hopefully will be, you know, some kind of consensus decision that works well. for everyone. I mean, one advantage the DSA has, I think, is that everyone is very comradly and reasonable in their discussions. So I have reason to be optimistic. Yeah.

And I think a lot of that, like, when you're actually, like, if you're on Twitter or Facebook, it can look very, very sectarian. Like, there's no way anybody can ever work together, ever. But when you get out in the real world and you start organizing, you find that it's not really like that in real life. Like, people are, when they're face to face with you, even if they're. they disagree with you, they're more comradly, your personality comes across, people have like social mechanisms by which they moderate their behavior and their tone. And that goes a long

way. But I just know that what's not going to win is attacking each other, is undermining each other, is spending all your time. If you spend most of your time online shitting on other leftists, that is not a recipe for fucking success. Put the mouse down and get out in the streets and try to do something of practical value because this brand building and this sectarian fringe fighting online gets us nowhere. It does not speak to the masses.

It does not win over recruits. It just creates smaller and smaller purity pools of like clicks. And that is not going to delete anywhere. Dead ass. Dead ass. I feel like 50% of what the left does right now is shitpost on various social media platforms.

And that's why I left the Spartacus League because they weren't good enough at shit posting. and I wanted to, you know, move on. Better praxis. So this actually, this kind of brings us to, you know, another larger question, which is, I think all of us having an anti-capist outlook on the world and some sort of, you know,

theoretical apparatus that we use to look at it, where do we see global capitalism heading at this point in time? You know, the ice, these ICE incidents, for example, is actually a reflection of, failure of global capitalism, which is not only creating all these, you know, this massive wave of refugees, but also, you know, the neoliberal order of free trade that allows capital to have free movement around the world, but imposes a nation-state structure on the movement of human beings or labor power. So perhaps, Brett, you can start this. What do you see as the big

tendency right now with where capitalism has been going since this crisis and where do you think we're heading? Well, when I look at the future, I'm not very optimistic about where capital is going. I think with the rise of automation technologies in conjunction with environmental catastrophes and the boom and bus cycles of capitalism, things are only going to get worse. And especially when you think about climate change, there are already parts of the world. And of course, it's always the poorest and least resourced parts of the world that face the brunt of climate change first and foremost, well, those things are going to continue to get

worse and worse, and they're going to create mass migrations, you know, like some massive amount of the world's population lives within 100 miles of the coast. I think it's like 80% of human beings on Earth. And so when you're talking about rising sea levels, when you're talking about tsunamis and super hurricanes and even droughts, you're talking about mass migrations of people. And what happens? Look at the Syrian Civil War. What happens when a lot of people start moving to other countries. You get the rise of fascism. You get the forces of reaction on the move. And so I think as capitalism enters this late stage of crisis, as collapses and catastrophes tend to pile up, as the forces of reaction strike out and the left fights back,

capital is going to have to maintain its order, not through the normal passive ideological mechanisms it's been able to survive on until now, but through more explicit forms of violence. and crack down on dissent, and we've seen that in J20. We've seen that with this latest wave of ICE child detention centers of the corporate capitalist states becoming more and more ruthless and more and more explicit in their crackdown and their defense of themselves. So I'm not optimistic about that. I think, like, if anything good is ultimately going to come, it's going to come through a transition

or period of a lot of hurt and a lot of chaos, and that's why the left needs to organize now and get ready for it now and have strategies that not only think about the next election cycle, but think about the next decade, two decades, the next generation. You know, our strategies should always have short-term, medium-term, and long-term aspects to them. And if we can't do that, if we can't get our shit together, then as Rosa Luxembourg said, it's going to be socialism or barbarism. And if it's not socialism, it's going to be barbarism. The rise of these right-wing reactionary quasi-fascist or proto-fascist groups cannot be

separated from what's happening in terms of the ongoing, in my opinion, crisis of capitalism or the issue of course facing all of us, the existential issue of global climate change. But if we can even abstract away from the impending climate catastrophe for a second, I think that capitalism is heading for some sort of definitive crisis, something that might look even worse than the 1930s. And And that's something that we need to get prepared for. I think that what you've seen over the last 30, 40 years or so under, you could call it neoliberalism or whatever you'd like, late, late, late capitalism is a sort of extensive movement of capital across the globe, globalization, they call it, right? But a lot of that has been basically, and you saw this happen in the 70s, 80s, 90s, up until today, factories being taken apart. in places like Nebraska, Ohio, New York, and elsewhere,

piece by piece, and sent first down south, where the labor was cheaper in the southern United States, and then to Mexico, and then now over to China. You have this sort of arbitrage of labor, you know, from place to place in country to country, which is absolute surplus value creation. It is basically going to where the lower wages are. And what that's led to, I think, is a world where,

there's no longer any real exterior to capitalism and capitalist social relations with the 1.5 billion people in China being increasingly proletarianized and urbanized with India, its peasant class declining, and again, wage labor becoming predominant there. There's really been the spread of capitalism across the entire globe right now. So when you're talking about surplus populations, one of the ways that capital has dealt with that in the people, past is through the movement of peoples through colonialism or through emigration, but there doesn't seem to be anywhere left to go. There's no more open spaces. There's no more, even Soviet block that had a different set of social relationships and productive relationships, whatever we may think of them. And then on the other hand, you've got, and you mentioned automation, you've got this intensive movement, right? So you have extensive and intensive. And in this, you've seen the

increasing commodification of more and more aspects of our everyday lives, what you could term social reproduction. You have the nuclear family, you know, as it arose under capitalism, now being degraded by those same capitalist forces. A lot of the things that had been done in the home are now commodities or goods or services that people can go out and buy. Automation, you know, is going to create through this, you know, raise in the, rise in the organic composition of capital, more and more surplus labor in the advanced capitalist countries

with nowhere to go. And I don't see there being a way for capital to get out of this crisis in the ways it has before, if that makes any sense. Yeah, 100%. It makes perfect sense. It's extremely well articulated. And I would even take it a step further

and say, there is still a liberal capitalist bourgeois compulsion to expand and that is like sort of solidified in like the Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos vision of going into space right there's like we're bumping up against our our earthly limits still capital needs to constantly be expanding and so what other way do we have except to go into space and that is the liberal delusion that are peddled by these by these neoliberal figures and that's something that we should constantly be on the guard for and constantly be criticizing every chance that we get because it's a very, very dangerous, dangerous mindset and we cannot let it take hold and spread. Well, I mean, it is true to

its own internal logic, right? Like, if you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet and capitalism requires infinite growth, therefore, the only thing left to do is to expand onto other planets if you want to keep capitalism going. And I would make one more quick point. There's a great book by Giovanni a rigi called the long 20th century. And it's a very long book, but in summation, essentially, he talks about the rise and fall of hegemonic capitalist powers. And he points to a signal crisis, which is where essentially that hegemonic capitalist power goes from the M to C phase, right, from money to commodity phase to the C to M phase of decline. And then you have what he calls the terminal crisis, which happens usually 30, 40, 50 years after that signal crisis that

leads to world chaos as there's no longer a unifying imperial body of capitalist power and rule of law across the planet to basically make that system continue to function. And I think that it's fair to say that the 70s and that crisis probably was our signal crisis. And what we're facing right now. What we have been facing over the last 10 years is the terminal crisis. And if the U.S. Empire is going to fall, which I believe we're seeing the process of that happening, if we don't organize the fuck out of things right now, again, those fucking barbarians, those fucking fascists, those xenophobes, and those billionaires who are not only trying to go into space, but putting a lot of money into fucking underground bunkers right now, not because they're scared of zombies, but because

they're scared of basically ecological and social collapse and hopefully someday will make them afraid of us by getting organized enough that they are fear to be expropriated. Yeah, I mean, I guess I should backtrack a little bit because some of the people who want to expand onto other planets, I think their vision for the future is not anything that we recognize as capitalism, right? like people like Peter Thiel and they see they see this crisis coming and uh you know I do believe that capitalism will end or at least change its form uh it's just like the internal contradictions are too great but like I said in a different episode what comes after it might not

be socialism it might be this like neo feudalist hierarchical hell world where you know the Peter Thiel's of the world get their beautiful Jody Foster plan planet and uh lots of baby blood and lots of baby blood and the rest of us are you know just basically uh blood cows for their uh delectation in which case uh i think uh the movie elysium would start to look more and more like a documentary and i would owe matt damon a big fucking apology for talking in that movie yeah i actually wrote down alisium as you were talking because you know sci-fi is a mechanism by which cultures try to struggle with their precarious position leading into the future

and we're starting to see the rise of sci-fi films that are explicitly trying to wrestle with this class society and the destruction of the planet and I think we're going to see more and more sci-fi films crop up as society heads more and more in that direction and that's kind of a fascinating thing to study and be aware of. Well, I've got a question along those lines if you don't mind me skipping the stack, Jamie.

Yeah, no worries. This is a non-progressive stack, go on. So on your other podcast, The Galatine, which I enjoy listening to, you and your co-host, Dr. Bones, have a few differences, and you don't really argue so much, which I guess maybe I'd like to hear here. So I've got a question along those lines. Dr. Bones before has described his vision of the future as being very catastrophist, often with the breakdown of industry and society, maybe environmental, maybe social. And he sees anarchists as being these, like, armed gangs defending, uh, defending their communities from, like, rival bands of fascists and that sort of thing. Whereas mostly you're talking about a more orthodox vision of, of revolution, um, either a Marxist feminist revolution or more along the lines of what anarchists have historically believed in is the social revolution. Um, so I guess my question is, why do you think that this catastrophist vision of the future is so popular,

right now and how do you think we could argue against it? Well, I think the position is, it makes sense given what we're facing, given these dark times that we're in and looking at the left, especially in the imperial core here in the U.S., and saying, are we really in a position to take power? It feels like we're often playing defense and we're not actually building up any power structures that can challenge the bourgeois forces or even the forces. I mean, we are challenging the forces of reaction in the form of fascism.

But at the end of the day, how built up are we and how much time do we have left? And I think when you really struggle with those questions, I don't think it's totally incoherent to think, well, maybe this whole project of actually overthrowing the government here in the U.S. is not going to happen. I mean, maybe. And if that's the case, then what is going to happen? And I think where me and bones come together is this idea that I mentioned it a little bit earlier, but it's the concept of if there is no real left movement that takes power

relatively fucking soon, there's going to be a situation in which not only do you have the possibility of an economic crisis, a total economic terminal collapse as Sean was gesturing towards, but that you really might have a building up of environmental catastrophes that get to the point where the U.S. government can no longer maintain order in those areas and actually pulls out of those areas. So you look at like Hurricane Harvey or something. Imagine that happening to the same place twice in one summer or three times in one summer. and happening, you know, on the Eastern Seaboard at the same time. At what point is the U.S. government not going to be able to adequately address these disasters,

and when they do recoil from those positions, who's going to take over that vacuum? And we've already seen recently in disasters where fascists pick up guns and start walking through neighborhoods, looking for looters, looking for people of color to harass, intimidate, and ultimately shoot and kill. And if that's the situation we're facing, you know, we're going to have to be ready to kind of play that fucking game. We're going to have to arm up and we're going to have to defend territory that the U.S. government leaves behind. And hopefully that doesn't happen. I think me and Bones would both argue that we don't want that to happen.

And the only way that we can prevent that from happening is to get our shit together, but it's obviously easier said than done. And we're all struggling. Something is being born. Something on the left is happening. And something beautiful, I think, is coming to the fore. But it's just a matter of how much time we have left. And so I think Bones' catastrophic vision is on one hand,

reasonable. It's a reasonable possibility. And on the other hand, it's an implicit urge to prepare for not only that extreme conditions, but also organize and try your hardest to prevent that from happening. And so if you take that view of what my co-host is saying, I think a lot more of us can more or less agree with that. I see what you mean, but I'm just, it seems like they're opposed positions, the idea of revolution and the idea of catastrophe. And obviously catastrophe is a lot more plausible than revolution right now. What you're talking about is a strategy for thinking around it, like preparing for it, but maybe not expecting it. Well, yeah, I mean, it's kind of different. As you said earlier,

me and Bones come from different positions. So we're both kind of articulating different ways forward. And I hope that people that listen to us, like critically engage and they find some things that Bones says and pull it out and find some things that I say and pull it out and then just take it to their communities and try to figure ways forward. But ultimately, we're just, you know, historical subjects ourselves in our own context, trying our hardest to figure this shit out along with the rest of you guys. So that's kind of where I am on that. I'm not quite sure how Bones would answer that question. I don't know if he would have the same answer that I have, but that's about all I can say on that front, you know. Well, I'll have to have bones on

the antifada at some point in time. I would love that. Absolutely. Who is this Dr. Bones person? Is he a medical doctor or philosophy? Neither. I think he's like a fucking swamp wizard that is roadkill. Oh, shit. I assume his first name is doctor. Jamie is part of the DSA Goth caucus, so what you just said really got her hyped. Oh, yeah, and P.S.,

I really liked your episode about Gothic Marxism. It was right up my alley. Hell yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I loved it as well. That's with the Lit Crick guy who's on Twitter, and he's just a really good thinker and a good friend of mine, so.

Cool. So I have another question before I get to the, really juicy question that I wrote down here. And that is so much of like the Marxist understanding of the world is based around our system of production and of workers versus capital being sort of locked in this eternal struggle.

And, you know, that's still a really important place to be organizing around. But, you know, you talked about automation earlier. there are so many unemployed people and as automation increases I imagine there will only be more the private sector unionization rate I think is hovering around 7%

right now in this country and more and more workers are freelancers and members of the precarient who aren't legally allowed to unionize which is not to say they can't but it's going to be really fucking hard and like that used to be and still is to some degree our primary power

in the fight against capital, you know, the ability to withhold our labor. So how are we going to organize in the future as we lose more and more of this primary power that we have? Like, what's your take on that? Well, I think the strategy starting, especially in the 80s, with Reagan and through Clinton and Bush and Obama, is this sort of capital counter-revolution against the labor movements that were built up in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, even 70s in this country and what we're living in is the wake of that neoliberal onslaught against labor. And you're absolutely right. And it fits in with what Sean was saying earlier about the distribution of labor over the globe. It's a very difficult situation. And more and more workers are tossed into

precarious employment, temporary employment, the rise of the gig economy, which is just a disgusting attempt to try to find side hustles to just make it buy. Meanwhile, the three richest men in America own more wealth than the bottom 50% of us combined. I mean, this is a truly grotesque situation. So how do we organize in this basically kind of a new environment? And I obviously don't have the answers to that, but I have some inklings of what we have to do, which is we definitely still need to be involved in labor struggles 100%. But that is only a component of this larger fight.

We also have to find ways to organize oppressed people outside of the labor context and find ways to organize people who live on the precarious edge of labor, have to engage in the gig economy to some extent to make ends meet, that poses unique challenges. I don't really have any good solid answer here. I actually hope that you guys maybe have some input here, but I do know one thing, which is the solution to this problem, if we lived in a world where we could actually meaningfully implement solutions and not blocked by the ruling class, would be to have a robust, guaranteed employment, would be to embark on big social programs like restructuring the grid and making our entire economy.

me, more diverse, more ecologically friendly, et cetera, that would take leftism to some extent being implemented in this country. And as we talked about with the direction capitals going, et cetera, it's not looking like that's going to happen anytime soon. So this is a challenge for all of us. And what we're trying to do here in Omaha and people are trying to do around the country is find ways to go into these communities. Going into workplaces is good if you can do it.

But also going into the communities where you're going to have a very diverse range of people with the whole spectrum of labor engagement and try to find what their basic needs are and try to find ways to coalesce those needs into a political program that we can start systematically meeting. But beyond that, it's a very, very difficult question. What are your guys' thoughts on that? Well, Brett, I know this is a collaboration, so we're coming at this as equals, but there's really no reason for you to just, you know, completely, I don't know, sweetened me up with the idea of a national infrastructure program

since I am a building trades union member and that sort of program would pack our pension and annuity real nice. Jamie, I would be having that aristocracy of labor money. Hell yeah.

I would say I'd point to history again. I don't, if we had the answers to these large questions, then I think that we could probably just wrap this show up and just go and hit the streets and bring the gospel to everybody. Instead, we're just going to have to talk it out. But, you know, to go back to history, I think in the United States,

over the last 150, 160 years, you've seen the union density rate in the country rise and fall. You've seen eras like the 1920s where we were at about the same rate of unionization as we are right now. And if you were living in 1922, 23, you know, you'd say, oh, well, you know, the good days were over. The 1870s to 1890s, that's when we had it real good. Nothing's ever going to happen. And then by 1934, 35, you have massive militant industrial unionist fights all over the country.

And again, as somebody in the relatively reactionary building trades here, a lot of the folks that came and created, the Congress of Industrial Organizations and these communists and socialists that were very much involved in that did come out of the old traditional dying building

business unions, you know, reactionary trade unions. So even that 7% can have an incredible effect on our ability as working class people to recreate hopefully on a more diverse and more

more inclusive way, in a more inclusive way, a labor movement in this country that not only seeks to defend the gains that were made in the past, but also pushes things forward. And just the last thing I would say on that is it's super, super important that we always think of things from an internationalist perspective. So I think the thing that would scare the shit out of capital the most right now is if you were to able, you were able to perhaps put workers in China, workers in the United States or workers in Europe and workers in India in touch with one another and be able to organize across national boundaries and really become international labor fighting force.

I think that that's a very, very tall order, but I think that's one interesting way to look in moving forward. Hell yeah. Yeah, hell yes. Yeah, I remember actually reading something about just like one small example of this starting to happen in my socialist feminist feminist reading group shout out to that group

it's great everyone should join one we read about these women workers in the Makila zone over the border in Mexico who actually did some organizing across the border with women workers in the US and

you know they were up against quite a lot and they didn't get everything that they wanted in the end but I'll try to post a link to this because I thought it was really inspiring. So I'm sure some people will denounce me as reformist trash. Jamie, you're reformist trash. I love you, but your reformist trash.

But while you were talking just now, I noticed some non-reformist reforms in your outline for building class power. And personally, I'm not an accelerationist. it just seems like a pretty cruel way of thinking that sacrifices a lot of working glass people in terms of their quality of life, their livelihood, their ability to be alive. I mean, it doesn't feel like we have much of a choice

these days. I feel like we're all just riding that wave at this point in time. But like where do you see the role of, where do you see the role of like a New Deal social democracy or even to the, left of that in terms of building class power and increasing workers' ability to take control of their own circumstances. Stuff like, you know, single payer health care, maybe a UBI, a jobs

guarantee in terms of decreasing workers' dependency on their jobs and their ability to challenge the bosses. Yep. Yeah, I've been pretty consistent on this throughout my development and I still maintain this line 100%. And that is that radicals have always been and need to continue to be on the front lines of big, meaningful reforms in this country while we work towards revolutionary rupture with the system. I mean, fighting for health care, fighting for higher minimum wage, fighting against ice, fighting against fascism, all of this stuff doesn't overthrow the system. But what it does do is it gets material gains for working and poor and oppressed people. And it also allows you to engage with those communities.

engage with the masses, build up their political and social consciousness, help get them victories that will embolden them to take it further. So to sit back and be like, I'm not going to engage at all in meaningful reforms that will dramatically alter the lives of millions and millions of working class and poor people in this country is an absurd position and it's a fundamentally anti-revolutionary one. That does not mean that we need to put all of our energy and time and work into electoralism, but it does mean that we need to undergird any better. big fight with grassroots, radical movements in the street fighting for those things. And I think when we do that, that is the best way we recruit. We're not going to recruit by talking about

theory. We're not going to recruit by arguing with other leftists online. We're going to recruit more people to our side by going into communities and making changes in the system that directly impact their material lives. And so that is not only a good thing to do, it should be a primary strategy that we embark on in the meantime. We have to differentiate ourselves from mere electoralism. We don't get these gains by voting in the right politicians. We get them from radical street movements that are putting pressure on this system and forcing the system in certain directions. And I think you can absolutely engage in that activity as a radical and as a revolutionary. Yeah, I agree with you 100%. Well, I just dropped my Bordegas pearls and I fell out of my

armchair. You guys will say that as reform as trash. His monocle dropped right into his drink just now. It was crazy. To try to engage with the anti-reformance position a little bit. And by the way, Jamie, I think you're a reformist treasure. Beautiful. Beautiful.

It's real sweet. But yeah, I agree with what you say, Brett. The only caution I would have is like, for example, around abolitionist politics. Like, you know, we're starting to see left Democrat candidates. talking about abolish ice, which is good.

You know, maybe we actually will see the, like, get rid of ice in our lifetimes. Like, hopefully that's, like, a minimum thing that Democrats can come out in favor of. But we can't forget that if we get rid of ice, even if we get rid of the prison system, that doesn't necessarily change the way society is structured. So when people are against reforms, I think they tend to be cautioning against reform as, like, that's what we're fighting for. That's what our politics are. It's not just about getting rid of these things or making conditions somewhat better for workers, but actually changing the way society works and fighting for something else, which is communism. But we can do both.

Find you a movement that can do both. Right. Yeah, and it's worth noting that we literally, I don't think it's even possible to have abolition of prison or abolition of police. inside a capitalist system that will only be in a transformative socialist project can those can those questions be brought to the table and meaningfully address now there are reforms that we can make towards the police and towards prisons in the meantime but abolition seems it's only possible after a sort of rupture with the system and it can't be possible inside the confines of it because it's it's a fundamental core part of this system yeah I feel the same way about

the abolition of borders like I made this point on MR the other day that every border. Obviously, there are varying degrees to which this is true, but every national border implies the violence of maintaining it. And someone called in and asked, like, well, how is that going to work exactly? Like, if we just let everyone come into America who wants to, and I was like, well, this isn't the only thing that I want to do. Like, this is part of a long-term vision of the future. So... And a note for revolutionary left radio listeners, when Jamie said MR, she was referring to the majority report with Sam Cedar, which is the reformist trash podcast she also worked for.

Indeed. Just really quickly about prisons and borders, there's a way that liberalism does arc towards the abolition of prison and borders by just sort of like shifting them or changing them. Like in the Northern European model of prisons, prisons are a lot nicer. You know, they look more like an isolated, you know, dorm or something and then in a spa retreat and you know they're like it's you can go from

france to germany without crossing a hard border but then that those methods of controls are just sort of displaced elsewhere so when we say that we are against ice or prisons or borders we have to kind of point towards the larger question of revolution we can't just say we have to get rid of these things that we don't like the way that i the way that i think um i frame what andy's saying is that no matter what our practice is, you know, day in and day out, and no matter what, you know, reformist programs we might want to fight for and attach ourselves to because of not only their practical advantages, but also because they help us to build class power, we always have to have our daily practice, but also keep our horizon in mind. And our horizon should never just be

the end of borders or the end of ice as radicals, as anti-communists, or anti-capolis, rather, our horizon should always be the overthrow of the capitalist system and its states. So, again, you can do both of these things at once. And I would say just lastly on this in terms of reforms, people talk about UBI and they talk about federal jobs guarantee. Folks don't talk about what was actually a leading edge that the IWW was on and the CIO and even the AFL in the 30s, which was reducing the work week.

Hell yeah. You know, the French got the 35. hour work week, I think what, 25 years ago? And it's sort of been taken away from them. But I think that's a non-reformist reform. And I think that could change a lot to be a positive force in a lot of people's lives because every second, every minute, every hour that we spend at work is not only exploitation, but it's dead time where we are basically controlled in a hierarchical environment and exploited. And if we can do less of that, that's great. Exactly. And with all the critiques of the UBI taken into account, which I have plenty of critiques myself,

but it would fundamentally take a little bit of pressure off working and poor people. It might give us a little bit more time to organize and to fight this system. And ultimately, it might be a beneficial thing. It's only a stepping stone. It's not a final solution to our problems of capitalism. But at the same time, I think we could fight for those things precisely because it puts a little more power in the back pocket of labor. And it gives us a little more free time and a little more of a cushion to fight back, and that's important. Oh, yeah.

So speaking of fighting back, uh-oh, uh-oh. I had a question for you about revolutionary violence. A few episodes ago, we did an episode with Natasha Leonard that was themed around the idea of violence in a very broad sense.

Natasha Leonard, for people who don't know, who don't know, is a rosé anarchist. Mm-hmm. Good friend of us. Gin and Tonic anarchist in the summertime. She, you know, she tends to switch back and forth. Um, but like, we talked a lot about the status quo violence of capitalism, you know, like people talk about how many people communism has killed, but capitalism has, you know, probably a higher body count at the end of the day if we're keeping track. Um, but then like, obviously if we tried to have some sort of violent revolution now, uh, it would fail fucking miserably. Like, we're heavily outgunned by both the, uh, U.S. government and the, uh, right. wing, which you know has a ton of militias and are very into guns. So like when is violence

appropriate from our side? And when is it tactically smart? When is it ethically justified as we seek to overthrow the current system? And yeah, I wasn't really quite satisfied with how we left it at the end of last episode. So maybe you can add some insight here. Well, as a gin and tonic Maoist, maybe I have something to say here. protracted people's war in Appalachia. That's right, that's right. So, yeah, so the question of revolutionary violence is a fundamental one, and it's a difficult one, because on one hand, we do what we don't want, especially at this point in history, is to fetishize violence or to ask for an escalation of violence with the state and with the forces of reaction precisely because of what you said, Jamie, is that we're outgunned, we're out trained, we're out resourced, there's no way that we can do it. the stat, and I don't know the exact numbers, but it's something like 70, 75% of all guns in

this country are owned by like 3 to 5% of the population. And that 3 to 5% are not communists. I'll tell you that. Nope. I mean, we're outgun like materially as well as culturally, right? Yeah, exactly. We're the only side that's even asking these questions about it. Exactly right. But violence is an everyday part of this system. This system is premised on and perpetuated by daily acts of brutal violence, and the only way that they can maintain that is to kind of keep it out of view. And so they push it to the global south. They do coups in other countries to maintain imperial aggression and domination in certain parts of the world. But at every single second that capitalism and imperialism continue is a second where somebody is being subjected

to brutal amounts of violence. And so to think that we can overcome this system without the use of violence or by pacifistic means only is a total delusion and it actually serves to continue and perpetuate the system. At the same time, as I've said earlier, we don't want to fetishize it. We don't want to make it the core principle of what we're going to do and we don't want to go out on adventurousic violent episodes just for its own sake. And so we had to think deeply about this. And I think what we can do at this point in the historical situation that we're in is at the very released insofar as we're organizing all these other things we have book clubs we have feed the people programs tenant organizing all over the country resistance to ice and fascism we should put

into that arms and physical training not because we're trying to ask for violence but because when violence inevitably comes to our doorstep we better be fucking ready to defend ourselves by employing it and in the recent you know recent years recent months i've garnered myself a fair amount of weaponry legally, and I've been working on training, and we've been setting up training programs with some comrades locally for not only arms training, but fitness and theory training. And these things are essential. We have to be ready to defend ourselves and our loved ones and innocent human beings when push comes to shove. And since we don't know when push is going to come to shove and it could happen at any time on any part of the country or any part of the world for that matter, we are way better

if we're prepared in as much as we can be, rather than just totally disavowing it because it makes us uncomfortable or because we don't like to think about it. And I think that's how I think about violence currently. But I'm super interested to hear what your thoughts are. Yeah. I don't, I don't disagree. I think the big takeaway from what Brett said is, uh, you got to hit the books. You got to hit the gym people. You got to fucking wail on your pecs and you got to read some fucking capital. That's right. And the pex will whale right back on you. The swolotariat. Oh. Oh, my God, that reminds me of a tweet that I saw from some, I forget which socialist organization that said a Nazi worked out today, did you?

There's actually a left book group called Lift Communism. It also reminded me of that video that I saw of, I think Gavin McGuinness was fighting some... Was that when the butt plug came out of his ass? Some anarchist. And, yeah, it was very erotic. No, and like, I hate to say it, but he kicked the guy's ass. Yeah, dude, people were saying, like, oh, Gavin McGuinness, he's all talk or whatever. Like, you could see when he put hands up that he could fucking throw.

Like, dude's been in fights. You're talking about outside of the pluribal when he, like, had his, has proud boys, like, fake hold him back? I don't know. I don't know what circumstances it was in. But, like, he's rich. He probably has a fucking fight trainer. No, I'm saying the way that he works with every day. The way that he squares, he's squared up in that fight, you can tell he knows that he's been in fights before he knows how to fight.

Yeah, he's a Scottish alcoholic. So I'm sure he's been in plenty of both of months. He clearly knows how to throw a sucker punch at somebody who's not expecting it. I don't think that's anything to brag about it. Well, listen, we threw that sucker punch at Richard Spencer's face, and that was cool. So maybe we just need to get really good

in sucker punching in a revolutionary way. And I'll challenge Gavin McGuinness to a fist fight right here on the Oh shit! You heard it here first. Come at me, bro. You are called the fuck out, Gavin McGinnis. You don't even know, Brett, the history between Jamie

here and Gavin McGinnis because it does go deep and I think she'd want nothing more than for you to go to his fucking Westchester mansion. Shirts off. Shirts off of course. Ask him to come off of his lawn. Man to man. And throw the fuck down. It'll be like if Melanchone and Le Pen had been in the election, you'd have a true sort of left, right battle on your hands. It'd be like that that video going around about when a leftist argues with right winger, you know? It's just like a karate video and the... Yeah, I love that one. I love that one.

The leftist is kicking ass. Only like in physical form. No, yeah, Gavin, among other things, has called me an obese five. She is a Zafting nine, okay? Thanks, babe. It's real sweet. I'm not sure that the people that don't speak Yiddish in the audience will understand Zaf. It's an obscure reference.

Is that a Yiddish word? It is, yeah. I don't know. See, you're in such a New York bubble, you don't even realize what Yiddish and what is it. I will slap you on your Togis later if you don't learn that, though. Oh, my. Oh, my. TMI, babe.

TMI. That's kind of hot. Yeah, let's cool it down a bit. You're going to make Andy all mad again. Andy does get mad when we do, like, lovey-dovey things on here. I have kind of down. Well, actually, this is another question, actually. It brings us to another question.

organically that we had, which is, you're in the Great Plains right now, organizing, podcasting, working out, you know, going to the gym and getting ready to fuck up Gavin McGuinness, which I think is not only a different, you know, economic and cultural milieu, but also probably has a different sort of relationship to progressive and left forces than we have here in New York City, I think that we're, at the Antifada, we're trying to kind of get out of this bubble that we live in, this cosmopolitan bubble where, like, left forum and historical materialism come to town all the time. And we have all these universities with these great Marxist professors you, like, run into up the street, you know, famous leftist podcasts,

have just like private parties, up the street from your house. And it's just like, it seems like it's normal to us, but it's actually really not normal. So do you want to talk a little bit? bit about what it's like being in the Great Plains area. Not that Omaha is like, you know, completely backwards. Soutre Creek Records is awesome. And they've done some great work. But just talk about that geographic split and what it's like maybe trying to organize and what they would stupidly call a red state as opposed to a blue state.

Yeah, it's nuanced because on one hand, we are less diverse. And we're obviously much more conservative, just socially and culturally. There's more radical, I mean, there's more reactionaries and less radicals. We don't really have a huge pool of people to draw from on the radical left. So we're kind of forced into this situation where we should try to get together any forces on the left that we can. Now, a lot of people here in the Midwest, you know, we're kind of known for being hospitable and nice and concerned about other people in some sense. And that's true, but also there's like that notion that Midwestern racism is more concealed, but it's just as virulent and just as ever present. And that's also true.

That's true of the Northeast as well, but yeah. Yeah, for sure. The police here don't really have any serious history with radical left-wing movements. And we've got to see firsthand the local police adapt to us. Like at first, like when Trump was elected and we were hitting the streets, they didn't know what the fucking do, you know? We were like kind of running shit for a while. And then they realized that what we have to do is just crush these motherfuckers.

And there was a particular protest in which, you know, the left showed up and they were brutally sort of mass arrested, pepper sprayed and brutalized by the police as a way of saying not here, not here, you know, not here. They must have had your mayor call our mayor and they gave good instructions on how to watch street protests because they're really good at that here. But sorry, go on. What were you saying? Yeah, I mean, they just, I mean, it's just, it poses unique challenges. but at the same time, you know, people are getting fed up, people are being forced to choose sides. And so I think our organization, the Nebraska Left Coalition, is making inroads and we're trying to reach out to communities and move it to the left. But, you know, it's just a different set of circumstances.

It's a different geographical and demographic situation that we're in here in Omaha compared to bigger cities. And there's unique challenges, smaller pool of leftists because we have smaller populations generally. there's also a lot of there's a certain culture here you know like especially montana Nebraska it's a gun culture it's um lots of open space um you know Omaha is like I'm sure it takes it takes a lot longer to get around in NYC because of how populated things are but like our cities are more spread out and I could drive like pretty quickly and be in like the sticks like woods and rivers or drive drive yeah or drive the other way and be right in the middle of downtown in the same amount of time so it's interesting

it's different it's challenging but at the same time it's it's kind of like anywhere else in the US we're just we're just fighting you know yeah I mean I was going to ask sort of to piggyback on that like what are the pros and cons of organizing in a red state versus the quote-unquote blue state like I know there's a definite strain on the left that hates liberals and coastal elites more than it hates it it's fetishized vision of the white working class and you know there are people who think like obviously if someone's liberal they're closer to being leftist than someone who's a conservative so like i don't know what's your take on that yeah it's hard it's hard to say i mean i think two things that i pop out about

the pros and cons of being here it's not really a pro or a con it's just a reality and that is we have big rural areas around us and there have you know issues that are very specific to rural people that we're struggling to deal with, right? Omaha is like the 40th biggest city in the U.S. So it's a medium-sized city. It's not tiny, but it's not huge. You can Google it. We have a skyline, but at the same time,

at the same time, we're surrounded. We'll put it in our show notes. Yeah, please do, please do. Just make sure it's a pretty one. But, you know, we're surrounded by rural territory, and right now we're in the cities, we're trying to organize. But eventually, you know, we're going to have to reach out to these people that live in places that are less populated,

and they're right on our doorstep. You know, as I was saying, you can drive very quickly. quickly be in pretty much rural territory. And then the second thing is we don't have the luxury of being able to have multiple parties in one location. So we don't have PSL and a Black Rose and, you know, all these different organizations that we, ISO, that we can go based on our tendency and engage with. So we have just radicals and we have to put them all together in this organization and try

to figure out how to structure our organization, try to figure out what strategies we should pursue and when you have people ranging all over the left from you know social democrats to anarchists to Maoists to Leninists it's difficult um we've been able to manage it pretty well so far and I think we're pretty lucky in that but you know that's a unique challenge where I think in like bigger cities like NYC or LA you can pretty much find organizations that fit very well with what you believe in and and pursue that and so I don't know it's it's pros or cons I'm not sure but it's just different I agree with you. I wanted to just point out the one word that you said, that was really interesting to me, you said that because it's a somewhat more remote part of the country that folks have to come together in a sort of coalition. But they don't have to, right? In maybe, you know, maybe 10, 20, 30 years ago with how being down the left has been, people might not have come together and decided to form an umbrella organization. in Nebraska in order to bring together leftist groups.

And I think it does show something actually kind of positive and something that we should cherish, but also work towards increasing, which is this sort of movement, this openness that we have to play on right now in the left in terms of reaching out to other people, creating new forms of organization, and really pushing our project forward. Yeah, great point. I actually totally agree with that. That's a wonderful point. So, Brett, I know you are a, in addition to being a podcaster and activist, you are also a dad.

And, uh... Anti-Fod is usually anti-dad, but we'll give you a pass. Thank you. Anti-father. Nice. That's what... That's some edible shit right there. My stepmom actually thought that that's what we were getting at, but, you know, that might say more about her than us.

We should just call this, we should just call our podcast, Oedipus left. Oh, yeah. So, yeah. But, you know, we'll entertain you being a dad for the sake of our collaboration here. Cool, cool. This is something that Sean and I have been talking a bit about lately, especially since getting married. Everyone wants to know, when are you going to have kids, when are you going to have grandkids? When are you going to make the babies?

I want a grandchild. Whatever, whatever. And I know that you have already made that choice. He's procreated. And, quote unquote, choice. He is neither in cell nor vol cell.

We know that. He's quoted choice his way into having babies. Yes. You know, at least once it's happened for him. So Mazel tov for that. What's your philosophy

on having kids in these dark and horrible times? Like we've all been talking about the way things are breaking down, the way things are getting worse, our, you know, murky outlook for the future. And yet having kids is such an optimistic thing

to do. And future-oriented. Yeah, like, where do you come down on that? Well, to be honest, I'm still super confused about how babies are made. I keep making them, and I don't know fucking why. I don't know how. I'm taking in all theory, so if you have an idea, please let me know. Both sides, people.

But in all seriousness, when I had my first child, it was not by choice. It was by teenage recklessness, and so I didn't ever have any real thought put into it. I certainly wasn't hyper-political or thinking deeply about the future in the way that most late teenagers aren't thinking about the future. By the grace of God, go I. Exactly. No, I was lucky to get out of it with just one. But yeah, so I didn't really have the choice.

And so I'm just presented with the fact, the brute fact that I have kids and what to do now. And on one hand, it is extremely scary. It's challenging. And part of the reason why I am so or try to be so active. and I try to actually get shit done and I try to educate people and I spend so much of my life engaging in this revolutionary activity

in so far as I can is because I care about my kids and I care about their kids and I care about the fucking future of this planet and the people on it. And so on one hand it's an inspiration when I had my first child it certainly spurred me on to

I was working at a gas station just barely getting by pretty heavy into drugs at the time and casual sexual experiences just kind of lost. But when I was working at a gas station, When I had my first child, it really did inspire me to educate myself because I remember getting the call and I remember thinking about, fuck, I don't even know who I am.

Like, I don't even know what's going on in the world. I'm just like going from lackadaisical high to lackadaisical high, from partner to partner without even really having any concrete idea who the fuck I am. And so I started reading very, very heavily, precisely for the first time because I had a child. Really lit a fire under your ass. That's some powerful shit, man. It really was. And it still is and it remains to be. And I am a revolutionary parent and I don't hide that. And so there's a question some people would be like, well, don't indoctrinate your child with your beliefs. Let, you know, let them find their own way. But the truth is, if you don't teach your kids how and what to think, society will and society fucking sucks. And the last person you want teaching your children, how to think about race, how to think about wealth inequality, how to think about the future of the planet, how to think about themselves, especially when you're talking about having daughters and a patriarchal.

misogynistic world, you better step the fuck up and teach your kids how to think and what to think because you can't let society shape their forms for them. So I've always brought my children to protests. I've brought them to organizational political meetings. I do not hide the fact that I am a communist at home with the paraphernalia and the radical literature that's around and the way that I talk about police and racism. I'm explicit and I don't hide it. And my children, I think, benefit from it. I mean, my, one of my children is a little older, and they are very much against, like, they stand up for themselves. They defend other people. They don't take shit from bullies. One time the girls were being picked on, and my daughter organized the girls at recess

to go and confront the couple of guys, a couple of boys on the playground that were picking on women and being like, you know, we're not going to take this anymore, leave us alone. My daughter doesn't stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, not because I told her, but just because she's in that, she's in that environment, you know. And so, I don't know, it's challenging, but it's also an opportunity. And if this struggle is generational, then having kids and teaching them is a revolutionary act. And that's how I think about it. That's a really, really great and poignant response. Part of what kind of brings us, you know, why Jamie and I talk about that is because my comrades right now are popping out Rugrats left and right, basically creating

a red diaper cadre throughout the five boroughs of New York City. Um, our one anarcho communist friend, uh, has a young child named Nestor. Imagine who he might be, uh, named after. And, uh, our other friend told a really sweet story the other day where his son said to him, daddy, uh, who, who built the world? And, you know, you could have answered, oh, it was God or it was this, that, the other thing. And, uh, our buddy said, the working class. And the kid said, you're four year old. Okay, daddy, the working class built the world. So, uh, we're definitely, uh, we're definitely. feeling it on that, you know, red diaper baby kick and, uh, raising children with, um, the violent propaganda of, uh, communist revolution and the destruction of, uh, you know, everything existing. It's equal parts terrifying and inspiring. And I still feel that way after what you said. It's like the revolution in your womb.

It's equal parts. Oh my God. Um, yeah, like today you're talking about, um, uh, saying who built the world the working class. Like, I listen to like radical hip hop a lot in my car. my kids and like today we were driving and I was listening to the the Marxist rapper Bamboo and one of the one of his songs is like power to the workers and like me and all my kids and my fiance had our fist in the air and we're all streaming power to the working class

hell yeah so um I guess related to that I have one more question and it comes from our discord community oh do we have to wrap it up soon I guess we do don't we yeah yeah all right we're wrapping up this will be the last question I wish this could go on forever that's the reason I know. Well, we'll have to do it again sometime. Indeed. Definitely. So, I have a question from a great member of our Discord community. Best member, maybe? Shout out to Brian Diamond. Best member. You rule. Sorry, everyone else. Which is, uh, the idea of hopelessness. Like, uh, I know once I came around to my Marxist

understanding of the world and the utter enormity of the task before us and the fact that it might not ever happen within my lifetime or at all. It was like pretty fucking daunting. And I think a lot of us on the left have to deal with feelings of hopelessness or being overwhelmed. And I guess my question for you is how do you deal with it yourself? And what's the role of alternative media or of your work in all this? And yeah, where do you come down on that. Well, I'm somebody that, um, has struggled mightily with like existential crises in my life periods of time where I become like morbidly obsessed with death and, and lack of meaning in life. And, you know, that kind of is something that I've always struggled with. And on one hand,

this political stuff, it gives my life meaning, along with my family, of course, but like, on one hand, it does provide that meaning. Like, I really view myself in a historical context as carrying on a torch that so many wonderful, dedicated, loving, caring human beings for centuries and centuries before us have spent their entire lives fighting for. And so that gives me strength and motivation. But of course, you hit periods of just disillusionment, of hopelessness, of even like literal depression, which, you know, I've wrestled with myself. It's fucking hard. And I think we all have to find ways to get past that. I do have an eternal source of inspiration in my children in my family but not only my kids but all kids like i give a fuck deeply about other people

and so i'm constantly pushed to keep going precisely because i believe i truly from the bottom of my heart believe that we're on the right side of history and that somebody has to fucking fight because if we don't fight we don't have time to wait on two three generations later to do the fighting for us and so in that broader you know sort of sphere of thoughts there's also an important place for taking care of yourself and having compassion for yourself and finding ways to balance your political work with your own mental and emotional well-being and everybody's going to have a different answer to that i turn to stand-up comedy or meditation or camping alone in the you know the woods to kind of get my mind resituated and reoriented to nature but i think everybody has to

make those decisions for themselves and figure out what works for them but it's a daunting sad heartbreaking fucking task and this is a tragic fucking world it like is tragic, the state of the world is tragic. And so if you're a human being, it's going to weigh on you. It's just a matter of trying to find those connections and those sources of inspiration that you can draw on. And when you can't, finding ways to take care of yourself and to disengage for a while to make sure that your mental and emotional well-being is taken care of so that other people can be taken care of by you. But what are your guys' thoughts? How do you guys deal with it? I mean, I could say more than what you said, but I can't really add to that. I think that that was beautifully put and,

you know, self-care and change of the world have to go together. Yeah, we really need to take it back. Sorry, babe. We really need to take back the idea of self-care from these apolitical hippies. Definitely. We need to be doing that. So many leftists that I've met just like treat their bodies like garbage cans and have sort of a nihilistic perspective about things but like we need to take care of ourselves so that we can take care of other people and take care of each other and take care of each other exactly and also to you know this goes back to way back when we're talking about violence and you know revolutionary violence and the posture that people take and the purity that people take if we are not represented to others if we

don't represent ourselves to the world as a movement that ultimately is based on hope a little bit a hate, but also a lot of hope, then people will not be drawn to it. Our hope is not just to make a better world for ourselves, but as you said, you know, make a better world for our children, our children's children, and also even to live up to the standards that, as you said, dead generations set for us and brought us to this moment in time. So revolutionary hope springs eternal. I think if there's any takeaway from the revolutionary anti-fata radio episode that you just listened to, it is probably that. Thank you guys so much for having me on and for doing this collaborative effort. Let's absolutely do it again. You have a friend and a comrade here in Omaha, Nebraska

anytime you guys need it. And you have friends and comrades in New York City. Beautiful. Brad, it's been a real pleasure, man. Thank you so much. Thanks, Matt. Absolutely. Thank you guys. All right. Have a good one, man. You knock, I was pistol whipping cops for hip-hop. I'm a soapbox, yelling into megaphones, killing hard rocks using carcasses of stepping stones. Had a promise that I stopped holding my marches, the day that Chris Columbus got crucified in golden arches.

My pedestal was too tall to climb off. In fact, that's the reason for the high horse. And from up here, I see marines and hummers on a conquest. Underdogs with wonder bras and a push-up contest. All for the sake of military recruitment. It fell against stake the way they targeted the students. I gallop off whistling Ohio. The rest of them stuck to in Stan Nevada Cricket Convention.

Who would they die for? Who would they die for? Is it the same machine that leaves the quality of top for? And abominable colony is divorce, clocking up the property that I want with eyeballs. That clever ad campaign ain't birth, the time taken from minimum wage labor. I don't care how half naked how a fake she looks. She smells like dirty cash and age paper books. So when she's die for, slow down money, you're killing them.

Killin'em. Slow down, Ron, you're killing them. Now it's whistleblower versus the pistol holder. Case dismissed. They'll lock you up and throw away the key witness. Justice is the whim of a judge. Check is chest density. It leaves much room for error, and the rest left to destiny.

The West Memphis three lost paradise. It's death penalty versus suicidal tenancies. All I wanted was a fucking Pepsi institution. Making you think you crazy is a billion dollar industry. billion dollar industry. They could sell sanity in a bottle. They'd be charging for compressed air. Their marketing health care. They demonized welfare. Middle class eliminated. Rich get richer till the poor get educated. But some of y'all still haven't grown into your face, and your face doesn't quite match your head. And I'm waiting for her brain to fill the dead

space that's left. You're all, give me ethnicity or give me dreads. Trust a funding and rebel without a cause for alarm. Because when push turns to shove, you jump into your four father's arms. He's a banker. You're part of the system. All, The dreadlocks, in comes the income The briefcase The sickness, the symptoms When the cameras start rolling Say the fuck out of the picture pill

Briefcase The sick, the scy, the scymp When the cameras start rolling Slow down, God do you're killing them Mist to save the world Sparish the details Save the females from losing interest And miss save the universe

You're a damsel in distress Tied down to a track of isolated incidents Generalize my disease I need a taste of what it's like Living off the fat of kings I play the scab at your hunger strike Hunger strike Slow down Gandhi, you're killing them One love, one life, one too many victims

Republican, one party system Media goes in a frenzy They're stripped of their credentials, Presidential candidates can't debate over this instrumental Let them freestyle, winner takes all When the music's dead'll have Ted Nugent's head hanging on my wall Kill one of ours, we'll kill one of yours With some friendly fire, that's a funny term, like civil war

Six in the morning police at my crib Now my nights consist of two days of two toothpicks and eyelids, the cruis are fixing vitamins, music that is pirated, new flavoring food made of mutated hybrids. They tell me that it's not that bad. It fucks you up good, but it's not that bad.

They hold onto these tails till it's the dog that wax. God save us all if he lets the cat out of the bat. Who's the one to blame for the strain of my vocal cords? Who can tend to hateful thread but can't hold his sword? It's the same who complain about the global war

but can't hold it through the local joker that they voted for. They call the shots, but they're not in the line. fire. I call the cops, but they break in the line of duty. Let's call a stop to the abuse of authority. The truth keeps calling me, and I'm a live to tell the story. So look the truth, quit seeking forgiveness. You need to cut the noose, but you don't believe in scissors. You support the troops, don't wear in yellow ribbons, just bring home my motherfucking brothers and sisters.

Because they don't call the shot, but they're in the line of fire. I'd like to call the cops, but they break in the line of duty. It's time to call a stop. The abuse of authority. The truth keeps calling me, and I'm gonna let to tell the story.