Rev Left Radio - The Worldwide Family of Militant Women

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

In this episode, Breht and Alyson sit down with Arlene Eisen to discuss her new memoir, In the Worldwide Family of Militant Women. Eisen reflects on her political formation across the upheavals of the 1960s through the early 1980s, her encounters with Black liberation and anti-imperialist struggle, and the forgotten history of militant women who built relationships of solidarity across borders. Together they explore internationalism, revolutionary commitment, movement fragmentation, and what younger generations can still learn from an era when women fought empire not from the margins, but from the heart of the struggle. The result is a rich conversation about memory, political development, and the urgent need to build durable anti-imperialist movements in our own time.   ----------------------------------------- Check out a great new resource for revolutionary education, Unlearning Capitalism: https://unlearn.capital/ Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio   Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello and welcome to Red Menace. This is Allison. As always, I'm here with my co-host, Brett, and we have, I think, a really exciting episode today that I'm very, yeah, I'm very eager to get into it. We are joined by Arlene Eisen, author of the Worldwide Family of Militant Women, which is a text that was just published by Iskra Books, and which I, well, not, cannot endorse strongly enough, honestly. I think this was a really fantastic read. It is both a memoir, but all. also a political reflection on movements that span from the 1960s to the 1980s that has some really important lessons, I think, for radicals today and for those of us in our generation, and the generation even younger than Bret and I's generation, who are now involved in struggles against imperialism, against patriarchy, and against capitalism. There's a lot in here to chew on. I think just up front, I want to say that I'm really excited for this conversation. You know, I was telling Brett before this, it's kind of a dark time in the world right now. the rise of reaction and of imperialism taking on more aggressive forms internationally can be

very demoralizing. And I think looking at a text that spans such a large scope of time and looks at the struggles of other generations who came before us and fought is remarkably grounding just for kind of providing perspective and for remembering that the situation that we're in isn't the first time things have looked bad. It is certainly not even the most intense that imperialism has manifested as perhaps. And so that perspective is really useful. And I'm really looking forward to diving into this. So I'm going to go ahead and pass it over to Arlene,

if you want to introduce yourself a little bit before we get into some questions about the text itself. Oh, thanks, Alice. And that's a great... Actually, one of my biggest motivations for doing this book was precisely what you took from it, which was some sense of history. and that this horrible period is not unprecedented and there is a way out maybe.

So that's wonderful to hear you say that. About myself, this is whole book. Well, apart from the book, I'm old. I'm actually going on 84, which becomes evident if you read the book is very much dated. I mean, every episode in the book is dated, so I don't try to hide that. I was inspired very much by both the Black liberation movements and the Vietnamese liberation movements in the 60s, and basically have been on the anti-imperialist track since then. Instead of spending a lot of time on my movement resume,

I mean, the things that I'm most proud of, actually, is having been a single mother of two wonderful sons. And also, in addition to having written two. two books about Vietnamese women. I also am the author of something called Operation Giddo Storm, which some of your older readers may know as the Every 28 Hours Report. Shortly after Trayvon Martin was killed, along with some comrades in the Malcolm X grassroots movement,

And I worked on a report to demonstrate that the murderer of Trayvon Martin and the impunity of his murderer was not an exception, but was systemic. And the Black Lives Matter movement that came in the wake of that basically took up the every 28-hour report almost as a hashtag. Well, not almost. It became a hashtag and appeared on posters. And I think one organization even called itself that it's still available on my website. And unfortunately, impunity that police and vigilantes have for killing black people is still the norm. And so it's still very relevant. and it's online. And I think that's all I'll say about myself,

except that this book got released in January, and it's a strange thing to have a book be distributed by Iskra because it's a wonderful publisher in that it makes all its books available online free in PDF. form so you can go to Instagram and get a copy. But I'd also love to hear from people because I don't get much feedback. And I don't know whether that means nobody's reading it or nobody bothers to contact authors anymore. But I am easily found on the web.

I have a website with my name. That's what I'll say right now. Well, yeah, absolutely. And we will link to your website and we encourage listeners who are moved by this interview or who can go get the book, either pay for it or, as you said, Iskra always offers free PDF versions. Either way, it's hyper-accessible. So people that like this interview, go check out the book. I know you've been on other shows as well.

People can listen to other interviews. And then I would love to encourage our listeners who are positively impacted by your book and your interviews to reach out to you through your website. So we'll make sure to link to that. We've already kind of talked about what the book is. It is kind of a memoir, so through the lens of your personal life, but through that lens is this sort of excavation of, you know, perhaps largely forgotten, though ever important anti-imperialist women's struggles in particular,

as well as lessons after lessons, as Allison alluded to, for younger generations that are trying to organize in the face of a new era of imperialist and capitalist and colonialist and colonialist violence, Many people listening will have been, you know, blossoming into political consciousness during one of the last several wars over the last 25 years. And I know that the genocide in Palestine in particular has left an indelible mark on all of our consciousness and inspired many people to deepen their political commitment to trying to build a better world. So having kind of that broad view of what the book's about, maybe you can say something a little bit more about how the book is structured. part by part, and just to let people who haven't read the book quite yet orient themselves to it before we get into the content itself.

Yeah, thank you. I really have a hard time thinking about it as a memoir because my main purpose is really not to talk about myself so much as to talk about events and developments that happened during that period, of time in a way that people can people who are not already self-consciously activists or organizers or anti-imperialists might relate to. So it's it's written almost in a novelistic form. In other words, I don't say this happened and this happened and this is what we did because of that or you should do this or that or the third.

It's basically scenes like from a novel. And that's probably one of the reasons why it's a little too long, I believe. But you can't make a scene without spending a lot of pages describing how it was to be in this situation. So it starts with a scene that was, it's a little embarrassing and was difficult for me to write because it's very personal, the first time I had sex. And the reason why I started the book with this scene wasn't because, you know, that was anything that super important. to me now, but I think it shows where I was coming from as a rebellious but naive and very, very much

victimized woman who was raised in the 1950s, actually. And so that sort of sets the state. for the development of the story, which is that I was not anyone special or specially situated, and something about why I might get angrier and angrier, basically, and more and more of have a mindset open to hearing and learning about imperialism. and the various experiences that weren't necessarily unique to me, although I did have some fairly unique experiences. But, for example, you know, the experiences of watching children be waterhosed in the South

or black children or being incarcerated in a mental hospital. spending time, well, I don't want to go into the whole table of contents, but what I'm trying to say is the story moves in terms of little scenes or minor or some major adventures, basically, and the political implications and lessons from those. And some of the scenes I curated specifically based on my connection to current political developments or seeing what my sons were involved with and cared about. So I know there's a lot of anti-boomer prejudice out there, or maybe some of it isn't prejudice.

Maybe a lot of it is merited. but I'm actually a little older than most boomers. But this is not a boomer memoir. This is more of a conversation between generations, I would say. Yeah, absolutely. And as you kind of pointed towards, you know, you do kind of start the book early in the book. I mean, growing up in the 50s and then living through the 60s and 70s, this is a transformational time globally and certainly within the context.

of North America. So we see you moving from personal trauma, you know, poverty, patriarchy, forms of coercion into political rebellion. I'm wondering if you can kind of talk about that shift from those personal experiences of private suffering and how they sort of eventually blossomed into revolutionary consciousness and kind of how that process of the awakening of political consciousness happened for you because it's an experience that all of us, us, me and Allison and everybody listening have presumably gone through, right? We have to sort of wake up into political consciousness. So I'm just interested in how that happened for you,

given the time period that you were living in. Yeah. Well, I went to Peru to the Sierra, to the highlands of Peru, not the coast, not the capital. in 1963 as basically a student doing field work. And our job was just, well, we were allowed to choose any topic we wanted to research. It was sort of an anthropology study. And because I was in the school,

of industrial and labor relations. That's a state school at Cornell University, which was free, which is why I was there. I didn't know anything about industrial and labor relations. It was just a way to get tuition paid for there. But that's how I learned a lot about trade unions there. So that was one move to the left, I would say. But then the topic I chose for my. field work was the political role of trade unions and in this town. And in the course of my research,

I developed a relationship with a man who was a leader of one of the local trade unions there, as well as a communist and not a communist party communist. a member of an organization that was modeling itself after what they interpreted as the Cuban Revolutionary model or the 26th of July movement and was planning a guerrilla, planning of the violent overthrow of feudalism in Peru, feudalism that served and was very much hooked into the imperialist system. And I didn't know anything about any of this stuff at the beginning of my time there. And all I knew was the poverty of the mostly indigenous people in the town where I was. And really, I had no idea of what third world poverty was like before I was there.

And that shocked me and bothered me tremendously. And also the very evident kind of caste system that prevailed. And so, you know, I was morally outraged, disturbed by what I was seeing. But I didn't have much analysis. So this guy, his name was Carlos, he sort of supplied the analysis. And also we spent a lot, a lot of time together, and we became lovers. And I ended up making a commitment by the, and I was there about three, three and a half months. I ended up making a commitment to

to marry this man, join the struggle as an urban liaison. I don't know how many of your listeners have ever heard of this one, but she was a real when Che went to play the role of an urban liaison funneling funds and resources and messages and so on

from the Capitol to the Sierra where they were operating. So I was going to play that role. And I was 20 years old and quite naive and in water way, way, way over my head.

I've never been actually sure of what happened. There are various interpretations, but I ended up in a mental hospital and was given a lot of shock treatment and tortured basically for several months. And I was incarcerated for nearly seven months. And when I was finally released, my doctor said, well, you should, I had to live with my parents and I had a lot of restrictions. But the main message that the doctor gave me was no sex and no political meetings. They seemed to upset you.

And the first week I was out, I violated both of his instructions and ended up, And you can read the book to find out how I ended up doing all this and ended up violating. But my boyfriend before I had gone to Peru was a guy named Danny Schaechter, who some people recognize the name. He became some sort of a movement celebrity later. Danny Schaechter, the news dissector. And he was good friends, not good friends, but closely worked with Malcolm X. And so the first weekend I'm out of the hospital, I go with Danny to a church meeting of an organization, which at the time was called No Rent for Rats.

And it was a rent strike in Harlem. And I met Malcolm there and had a brief conversation with him afterwards, which encouraged me a lot. So my introduction really to third world poverty, third world revolution, anti-imperialism was essentially in Peru, although it became something, what it was then was very, very, limited and and I didn't really understand what it meant and I never put it into practice. But being encouraged that despite the fact that I had been sort of forced into this vegetative state, I could still contribute to the struggle. that was something that I got from Malcolm X, actually. So I sort of lost track of where we're at.

Can you help me? Yeah, so I think Brett was talking about sort of that transformation from private suffering into revolutionary consciousness, which I think you hit on at the end right there, right? Very much that transition from the experience of institutionalization, to that political moment. I don't know if you have any other thoughts on what that transformation looked like,

but that moment feels like a key turning point from that suffering towards consciousness, right? Definitely, definitely. And then that process continues in a more traditional or more common that of experiences because eventually I became a graduate

student at Berkeley. I arrived in Berkeley in the spring of 65, which was really at the height of the militant activism there. So that's another story. Maybe you want to ask a different question. Yeah, so I actually think that leads into the next question that I had really well, the graduate student side. And, you know, I have a background in grad school that I dropped out of because I got fed up with it and kind of, you know, wanted to do politics. And throughout this text,

I think I see a similar attitude and complicated relationship to academia in the university. So obviously, you know, as you've talked about, like, the universities kind of acts as a jumping off point for you, your experience at Cornell, which then brings you to Peru. But also academia becomes very about like novelty and the pursuit of new ideas, right? There's a quote I actually pulled from one of the earlier parts of the book where you wrote that quote, I had a growing contempt for academics who spent their lives analyzing ever smaller segments of social issues. Their drive to make original contributions to a body of knowledge overtook any commitment to change the system, end quote. And yeah, I relate to that so strongly from my experience in academia and

as a motivating factor for leaving it. But I'm kind of curious. And my question is, do you think there's a way that academics can avoid falling into this trap of looking for originality and novelty? Can academics like meaningfully contribute to the struggle? And then I think are there specific academics that you think embody that approach to academia that doesn't just search for originality and novelty, but actually contributes to the movement? Mm-hmm. Yeah, thanks. Well, I'm very much against making generalizations across history. There may be certain historical periods when it makes sense, and it's very helpful to be in the university, in the university setting, which is what I think you mean when you say academia. Yeah. Mostly, though, no.

At the time that I decided to quit graduate school, well, first of all, I was in sociology. The sociology department at Cal was absolutely dominated by McCarthyite Cold Warriors. Right. I won't bother naming names, but the famous ones. and they were very explicit that if you were a woman, and I was one of two women in the department, if you were a woman or you were a Marxist,

you had to be a hundred times smarter than anyone else. But, I mean, that was a quote that I overheard from a faculty meeting. But my main reason, And so in terms of getting a mentor or having anyone to encourage me to stay or anything like that, that didn't exist. But more importantly, the quote that you, there was this guy named Dave Wellman, who some people may have heard of. He's done some good writing on racism. He was, he's dead now.

He was my mentor when I first got there. He was a graduate student a year ahead of me. And we were teaching assistants for the same professor. And he was a veteran of SNCC and the, and had taught at Freedom Schools in the Stows. very, he was the first one who brought me to a picket line in Oakland, where we actually confronted cops over integrating or getting employment for black people at this restaurant. So I have really looked up to him politically.

And as I watched him get deeper and deeper into the academic game of building his career off of compromising politically, basically. I got increasingly turned off. So that was one thing. And the other thing was I became a full-time, I don't like to use the word organizer or activist. I would say political cadre or military. Sure.

So I was working around the clock to make a revolution and studying for oral examinations was about the last thing I could imagine doing. And so I did end up quitting. But I've never regretted it. I never wanted to get a PhD. I always, because I did want to. teach and I didn't manage to teach in university. I even managed to teach at UC Berkeley for a minute. But I wanted to teach because I wanted to talk to students and I thought that was a great place to do it. But in terms of what passes as academic work or what they call scholarship these days,

is strictly careerist as far as I can tell. And that even with rare exceptions, I don't really have much hope for the academy these days, and even worse, since in the guise of the attacks on DEI and so on, And, you know, I know that a whole lot of anti-appealist scholars, Bikram Gilles, Helya, I forget her last name, the Iranian woman who was expelled from Yale and is now in Iran doing great journalism, actually. Right. So, but I think as the consolidation of fascism happens here, the university will be impossible to do any good political work, either in teaching, research, writing, wherever.

I mean, it's already pretty evident that it's the end of the line for people like that. Yeah, no, I appreciate your frankness about that. I think we've definitely seen, like, yeah, reaction within the university itself become more dominant and the sort of consolidation of power among really reactionary administration, really being used to clamp down on even those faculty who were still trying to maintain some sort of more militant orientation. So, yeah, no, I very much relate to that answer and appreciate the honesty about that assessment. Well, I tell you something, I mean, when I say, when I open by saying, I'm 83 going on 84. If I can't be honest at this point in my light, it would be pretty sad.

Totally. But I do think there are academic settings that make sense and that have produced good work and they're mostly in the global South. And like I know I'm in a study group now, that's organized by people who were based in Zimbabwe, actually, that, you know, I'm learning a lot from.

And they're most of the leaders of that, and the things we read have come out of universities of the Global South, and that's a whole different issue. Totally. But it's a place where people, can get intellectual stimulation and new ideas and analysis. And then I feel like there are thinkers and scholars whose work is accountable to, you know, organize practices.

And they have nothing to do with the university, but they're very important. And they always have been. I mean, look at Ho Chi Minh or Matzsche-Men. or Matzegung or, you know, Lorraine Hansberry, Claudia Jones, Kambay River Collective. I mean, there are plenty of people to read and learn from. Yeah, absolutely. And I also think there is a role for those that might find themselves in academia,

that there's always the possibility of taking what you've learned and what you've gathered from academia and moving into community organizing. and sharing that knowledge, but it almost always happens outside the context of academia proper, particularly, as you said, in the Global North and the Imperial Corps. And I find myself increasingly turning to scholars and, as you said, journalists in the Global South. I think, you know, the communicative technologies that we have access to today allow that in a really unprecedented way. But I find myself more and more turning to outlets from the Global South and scholars from the Global South to deepen my understanding of the world as such.

And so I resonate with that a lot. I would love to kind of move the conversation forward, but by talking about something that comes up in this book over and over again, you've already alluded to it a few times from watching, you know, Jim Crow apartheid violence in the American South to meeting with and being inspired by Malcolm X. And throughout this text, we really see an emphasis on black liberation movements and the major role that they play in played in your political education.

So I'm just kind of curious if you could talk a bit more about that and what you came to understand about solidarity, especially the responsibility of white radicals to follow black leadership, rather than simply claim allyship in the abstract, which we've seen so much of recently and throughout American history. But I'm wondering if you could speak to that in particular. Well, you know, I came a political age, not only when Malcolm X was alive, but when you had the Black Freedom Movement in the South, you had Watts uprising. And then, well, Watts was 65, yeah, 65. And then in 66, 67, you know, every city in the country was what was in revolt and amazing, basically armed uprisings. And then, of course, the black power movement. And since I was in the Bay Area, the Black Panther Party was literally next door. And so it was undeniable.

I mean, even in 1965, before most of the so-called anti-Vietnam war movement really mobilized. And before we talked about imperialism, SNCC was talking about imperialism. And I went to this rally. It was the first big anti-war rally. in the spring of 1965 in D.C.

And there was a speaker from SNCC talking about Vietnam and imperialism. And he was talking about it's white people's job to organize white people. And when I was in Berkeley, the same man who I said later became too academic. He recruited me to work on this newspaper called The Movement, which was at the time of Friends of

Snick newsletter. So I was very in touch with developments primarily in the South, but they were coming north. And that newsletter evolved into something called the Movement newspaper. and if people are interested, they could go to my website and get links to it.

But basically, by 1966, Snick asked the white people to leave and said, you organize white people, will organize black people. And so now, Snick had been an integrated news, the production of it had been integrated. But when that happened, we said, okay, well, you want your newsletter back? And they said, no, we can't handle it, not in San Francisco. And we got our own and it's fine. You keep doing what you're doing. And so our newspaper became a kind of nexus between the Black Liberation movement.

And primarily, first Nick and then primarily the Panther Party and the so-called New Left, primarily SDS. So I was personally in very close proximity to various developments of both places. And at that time, as we were understanding imperialism as the main enemy, black leadership was not an abstraction. It was not a moralistic obligation. It was, they were clearly, to use maybe a foreboughton term, they were clearly the vanguard of what was going on. They were the leadership of what was going on.

And there wasn't any question about following, not blindly, but wanting to join the cause. We had a common enemy. It wasn't a thing. about charity or anything. I mean, we really assumed that if they won, we would win. And so the problem was we didn't ever really figure out how to organize white people. It wasn't that we didn't want to.

And for a while, it seemed like we knew what to do. And in SDS, some of us, some people, there was this program called ERAP, Economic Research and Action Project, and actually went to poor white neighborhoods and tried to organize people, you know, for rent strikes, for mutual aid. Well, not so much mutual aid. That wasn't a thing then. It was more welfare rights, wage, decent wages. a lot of welfare work. And so there was that. But then when welfare became impossible,

a lot of people who had been influenced by the idea of organizing white people went to factories to try to organize in factories. There's a chapter in my book, by the way, called Graveyard Shift Blues, I think, that describes my couple of years in a factory in Chicago

which was a total bust as far as organizing is concerned but you know we tried various things and frankly I don't think we ever figured that issue out I mean how do you think of it continuing on as an issue today insofar as you have a constructed thoughts on that issue

Well, I still think it's important. But I think the main thing at this stage is so much of the movement is driven by moral outrage, a combination of moral outrage and individualism that takes the form of psychological analysis of what's going on. So there's, so there's all this stuff about, you know, Donald Trump's the problem, you know, Donald Trump's age is a problem, his, his ego is the problem, his corruption is the problem, whatever, you know, his megalomania. But it's usually in individual terms. And it's, you know, it's just a group of terrible people if it's more than one. But there's no analysis of a system, of a series of materially based institutional power arrangements. And I feel like, you know, what we call anti-imperalism. And I feel like until people who were mobilized on moral grounds and on just personal outrage,

understand that it's not like things happen as the sum of a bunch of individual minds or an individual personality quirks or failings. But that's this subtle colonialism that still exists today and has evolved into this system of worldwide plunder, et cetera, And that the system as a whole, including the Democratic Party, regardless of whether you're crazy or not crazy, functions. And the reason why I go on about that is because I feel like, if, in fact, people understood how imperialism functioned,

then making political decisions on the basis of who's my enemy, who's my friend, how do we work together, how do we work apart, what kind of unity can we build, would make sense. Right now, it's only small pockets of, unfortunately, academics who talk about imperialism, and then, you know, different isolated political groups in a kind of echo chamber. But, you know, and it kind of leads a little bit to what I... I don't know if this is a good place to talk about it, but interrupt me if you want to.

But if we take, for example, the Epstein revelations, right now, they're presented to the... the general public. And still, even after being in the news for months, they're hot news when they're released. And podcasters still get tens of thousands of views for them or even 100,000 views, whereas we pitil along with our few hundred hundred or a thousand or two thousand.

Anyway, but it's always the Epstein horror. oh, he's a pedophile, which I'm not trying to excuse pedophilia, although I was in a writing group with a man who did, or didn't excuse it, he defended it. But that's not the problem. I mean, that's not the issue. With Epstein, you have the nexus of imperialism,

Zionism, white supremacists, and of course patriarchy, especially rape. But that's not what's in the news about Epstein. And I mean, just to be a little more specific, I did a lot of research on this for this anti-imperialist article I wrote, is he got his career start partially by being appointed as an advisor

to the tripartite commission. and if people don't know what it is, it still exists. But back in the day, I think it was, I can't remember the date it was established. I think it was either the late, it was established by Kissinger. So Kissinger, Rockefeller, that whole section of the ruling class, set up this international commission to figure out how to most efficiently plundity, under the world. It was called the Tripartite Commission. It still exists. You can look it up. Today, sort of Davos would be the counterpart to it, I guess, although tripartite seemed to have

more power. Anyway, Epstein established a lot of his imperial contacts through the tripartite commission and actually stayed as a member throughout. And of course his Zionist context are indisputable, but there was a wonderful piece in Mundo-Wise that talked about how the Board of Peace, which is, I don't know if it's ever going to actually be able to do anything there, but it's planned to run Gaza for Kushner and Trump and them. And the guy who's in charge, the number one chairperson of the Board of Peace after Trump

is a guy named Rowan. And he is in charge of something called Apollo Equity, which is a big, you know, private equity, Vulture Capitalist Fund, very appropriate, Vulture Capitalist in Gaza. And he took over from Leon Black, who had been ousted as a chairperson of Apollo Equity

because of his exposure as an Epstein confidant. then, but in fact, this guy Rowan is as well, and he's been totally exposed on that level. So you have, and there are all kinds of Zionist connections that have been publicized, but nothing like the pedophilia. And then the most suppressed connection is the white supremacist connection, which is just starting to come out in the revelations about the problems that this ranch he owned in New Mexico where some women or maybe girls were apparently murdered,

because they were doing genetic engineering there to create a newly designed race of superior people. This is all in his note, in Epstein's notes, that had the athletic prowess supposedly of black people and the intellectual prowess of Jewish people. combined. And so, I mean, that's just the tip of the iceberg of his white supremacy. And then, of course, the most extreme forms of patriarchy you can find. So what I'm saying is rather than focusing on the sort of voyeuristic, titillating tidbits of what Epstein survivors went through.

Well, not even rather than, because that section of the media is going to do that regardless. But why can't we build an outraged anti-imperialist movement based on an understanding of what Epstein demonstrates? I mean, we've just made a joke of him almost. A meme of him, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So to get back to your question, though, in terms of building or following black leadership, I think we could organize a lot of white women

to support black liberation. just based on pulling that kind of thread. And because, you know, imperialism is the enemy of all of us, you don't have to look or dig very deep to pull those threads if you really try or if you really are committed to doing it. But you do need an organization and you do need an ideology to do it. Absolutely. Right.

Yeah, no, I think your point about Epstein is well taken, that there's the, I mean, genuine criminal behavior and obviously the hyper focus on the possibility of pedophilia, of rape, of human trafficking that I think feeds into a preexisting strain in American politics and perhaps even reactionary American politics, going back through the satanic panic of the 80s. I mean, even just a couple years ago, there's this obsession on the American right about groomers and grooming and the wayfair conspiracy theory and safety. the children. And so I think that is an easy thing for people to lock in on. And as you said, it gets a lot of views. It's very sensationalist. And it's a genuine part of the story here that deserves some focus. But what it hyper fixating on that does, as you said, is it obscures the fact that Epstein is kind of a fixer for a global imperialist, Western ruling class elite that is deeply tied in with technolog, like the new tech oligarchs, which, with Zionist settler colonialism, the Greater Israel Project,

with the attempt to topple multiple governments, anti-imperialist governments throughout, particularly West Asia, but throughout the global south. And by not talking about that, by 100% of the oxygen in the room being used to discuss the human trafficking aspect of it, and that aspect of the criminal behavior, it does kind of obscure the other stuff.

And it leads kind of nowhere because if you don't have the imperialist connection, if you don't have the anti-imperialist analysis of what this is, then it just seems kind of like, you know, a cabal of people at the top that are kind of eyes wide shut engaged in, you know, these weird ritualistic behaviors. And it kind of feeds into reactionary conspiratorialism more than internationalist anti-imperialist solidarity. It's much easier to go in that direction. It's much harder to explain the anti-imperialist politic necessarily to regular people. But I do agree that if we're able to successfully highlight that component of it, that we could take some of that energy and move it into a much more productive realm. Is that right based on what you were saying? Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Well, just to the crossover, there's another piece of this organizational proposal, which is Project 2025.

And, you know, people think, oh, it was this crazy book that was put out a few years ago. and it's a MAGA thing and, you know, what's happening with it. Well, it's actually a blueprint that has been largely implemented. And it claims to be a moral document inspired by Christian morality. But it's really right-wing Christian, not just fundamental, But it used to be called dominionism, which is this branch of Christianity, best represented by Opus Dei, that's about Christians taking over governments, the end of the separation of church and state, you know, to have a the theocracy based on Christians' fundamentalism. And now they're calling it Christian nationalism. It's changed its class base a little bit.

Christian dominionism has been around for several long decades, but never had a strong working class base. Now it does. And that was the one thing that happened in the whole MAGA wave. And so what this is. document does is set out a very, very careful blueprint, department by department of how they're taking over the executive branch of the government. And there's a scorecard online. They're 44% complete. And in terms of the issue, say, for gender oppression, when I first heard,

read some articles in the corporate press about it, I thought I sort of shrugged and thought, oh, well, you know. But actually, it amazes me how much restoring the heteronormative, patriarchal, nuclear, one-man-bredwinner-type family is one-of-the-main-of-the-man-bedwinner-type family is one of the main thrusts of the of the book. And they have very specific

prescriptions for how to do that. You know, what's going to get funded, what bureaucracy is going to be eliminated, what bureaucracy is going to get more money and so on. And so, for example, all the money that used to go into birth control education, real birth control, education is now going into Christian, you know, indoctrination into the rhythm method of birth control and stuff like that.

I mean, I won't take any more time going into the details, but just to summarize, you know, here's that German Nazi slogan, Kurchkechich. I don't know how to pronounce it, but the Translation is Children, Kitchen, Church. And that's where, you know, good Nazi women are supposed to be, basically, barefoot, and pregnant. And anyone who deviates from that goes to prison, basically. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to hand it over to Allison and take up the next question about the worldwide family of militant women. But just to bounce off. Sorry. No, no, please don't.

because I think what you're getting at is a crucial pattern within fascist and reactionary movements, particularly in times of capitalist crisis, wherein they lean into nostalgic images of masculinity. They demonize women, demonize, you know, trans people, LGBTQ people, as we're seeing now, as we saw with the rise of the Nazis, and this sort of cultural idea that if we can just somehow restore the patriarchal family structure, that the largely material issues of living in our failing capitalist society can somehow be resolved. And it's an alluring image and an alluring narrative, specifically as we've seen in our own society, to young men who are materially sort of increasingly obliterated and emiserated that have no hopes of building a family or owning a home or having a viable career. We don't even know what a viable career looks like in the age of AI.

and the main thrust of the reactionary forces in our society have been precisely what you're pointing out. And I think that level of solidarity with particularly women and centering, you know, proletarian and internationalist feminism is a core component of how we're going to be able to beat back this new wave of reactionary fascism. So I just wanted to kind of put an exclamation point on what you're saying and then I'll hand it over to Allison. Yeah, well, I mean, I think maybe this can transition kind of nicely where we're talking about this like, you know, increasingly reactionary social project being pushed by finance capital being pushed by imperialist interests that wants to return to this kind of traditional, again, like you said, heteropatriarchal nuclear family. And I think, you know, maybe not to put too much on the word family, but there's another idea of family that comes up in your book that is in the title of the book as well, which is this worldwide family. of militant women, right? Which could not be further in some ways from this horrific fascist image that they are trying to build on the other side. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit, you know, the worldwide family militant women, you introduce this as you discuss your experiences

in Vietnam and the idea that this family extends beyond any one place and there are political formations across the globe where worldwide militant women are fighting in this family. And I'm curious if you tell us a bit, what does that look like? What, were those political formations in your time? And then somewhat related also, you know, for you, you traveled and you saw this firsthand. I don't feel like we see that kind of internationalism and a lot of young comrades today going and seeing these struggles. Do you think there's something being missed there that you got access to by getting to go internationally and see other militant women's struggles firsthand? You want me to deal with the second part first? Sure, yeah, that might be

easier? Yes and no. My travels were solidarity travels. In other words, I had a specific project to do there that related to actually a political organization and building solidarity. So it's, I think there's a different. between, you know, that and basically political tourism, with which sometimes I sort of interrogated myself,

is that what I'm doing, you know? And I worked very hard not to do that. So, of course, but every time I wanted to stay abroad, because I was always pretty alienated from what was going on. here in many ways. People would say to me, you have to go home. In the same way that, you know, black people were telling white people, organize white people.

They say, you know, bring what you've learned home, be home. And I think most of what I've learned can be easily gotten from media, particularly now when there's so much multimedia available in terms of movies, videos, etc. I mean, it was later outside the book, for example, that I spent some time in Palestine picking olives on the West Bank, you know, part of the... Well, it started with the International Solidarity Movement,

and then I went to some other organization, but, you know, they... They recruited people from mainly Europe, United States, Australia, to serve as human shields during the olive harvest because the settlers, I shouldn't put this in the past. It's much worse now. I mean, this was in 2005. Anyway, there's that kind of solidarity.

But the most important thing is when you come home and share your experience. And what I noticed, so when I was there, was no matter how much I had read and thought I knew about Zionist atrocities, you know, it's nothing compared to being there. And this was 2005. So you can read about checkpoints, but until you've gone through a checkpoints, point or waited or seeing the 15-year-old.

They were older than that. You know, teenage Israeli defense force, often women poke their guns at older Palestinian women screaming at them and they don't, you know, the Palestinian women don't understand Hebrew, you know, giving them instructions to move there, move there after standing in the sun for three hours or, you know, just that kind of visceral interaction and experience. Of course, if you can experience that, it does change, well, maybe it doesn't change you. It doesn't matter what you learn if there isn't an organization for you to plug into or a project for you to plug into and use it back here.

So that one response said. The other thing about the Internet is, yeah, I mean, it's indispensable for learning what's going on. But the main point is, does it give you a point of view that doesn't make, that breaks through the U.S.-centric point of view that we have? Like in my book, I quote Asada Shakur where she says, she had no idea how much she had been lied to and how North American, U.S. centered she was until she got to Cuba. And to be in a society that operates on a whole different principle where human relations are very different,

where the view of the world is totally different. No, probably there isn't a way to break through that simply by spending a whole, whole lot of time with, you know, the channels you can only get on telegram or something because they've been censored off of all the other places, the mainstream internet. Yeah, the context of this world, worldwide family of militant women, which is, you know, again, so central that it becomes the title of the book.

What was the political formation of this and what made it different from mainstream or liberal feminism as existed in the United States? Perfect question. The world, first of all, it says in the worldwide family of militant women, I'm not trying to describe the whole thing. I'm just saying the parts I was in. But the term, I think, I should mention that when I was in, and I was in Kronk Tree Province, which was south of the 17th parallel, at the time Vietnam was still somewhat occupied,

South Vietnam was still somewhat occupied by the United States. it was before the victory, and they were still bombing. But Kwongtri, which was the northernmost province, had been liberated theoretically. I say theoretically because they were still bombing certain places and violating the ceasefire agreement. Sounds familiar, right? Yeah.

So I had taken a Jeep trip, from Hanoi to Kwonkji, which if every bridge had not been bombed out and the roads hadn't been totally gutted, might have taken a few hours, but it took us four days because, you know, to cross all the rivers, they were pontoon bridges, and we could never drive more than a couple of kilometers. There's an hour. It was another thing that I should mention that because there was a slogan everywhere. I mean, the land was moonscape,

much like you see in Gaza. But there was a slogan everywhere where Ho Chi Minh says, our mountains will always be, our rivers will always be, when the U.S. imperialists are, gone, we will rebuild our country 10 times more beautiful. So that we're leading to worldwide family of militant women that made me think of it because

where that term comes from was I was in Kwongtree and the woman who is my host there was this wonderful woman who was part of the leadership in the south of the Vietnam Women's movement as well as the National Liberation Front. And she was escorting me back to the Jeep as I was leaving. I think we were there a couple of days. And I was very sad. And she saw that I was very sad. And she grabbed my hand and said, don't be sad.

We are part of the worldwide family of militant women. we will meet again if not in Hano. No, she didn't say Hano. If not in Ho Chi Minh City, then in New York. And to me, that encapsulated so much in terms of recognizing the importance of an anti-imperialist women's movement

as well as their abiding optimism and confidence that they were going to win. Because remember, there's bombing in the background as she's talking, right? So that's where the title comes from. I don't know that there's an actual worldwide family of militant women. But I just use that because, you know, it seems. Like, to me, it's more resonant than saying anti-imperlous women around the world or something like that. So in terms of the actual question about the form that this family takes, say, inside the belly of the beast, you know, SNCC had a woman's caucus.

There was something called the Third World Women's Alliance. The Black Panthers had a women's caucus. So I would put those organizations, and they were, well, SNCC was early 60s, or the women's caucus, I think, was formed in 64, maybe 65. So you had those. there was a whole movement of women's unions in every city. There was a San Francisco Women's Union.

There was a Chicago Women's Union there, L.A. and so on. And all of these women's unions had anti-imperialist caucuses. So either you had, then you had SDS that had a women's caucus. There were sometimes very specific organ. Like in San Francisco, we had something called Women Arise, which began as women for the seven points. Seven points was the Vietnamese proposal for their peace plan. And it evolved into Women Arise. So there were those kinds of organizations.

Then there were more other sort of ad hoc organizations like, defense committees for black women who had murdered their white rapists or would-be rapists. You had defense committees. There was a defense committee in New York from Matulu Shakur, which was mainly white SDS women who became a prairie fire organizing committee, who later became May 19th communist organization. It was all women. So there were lots of formations like that.

But there was not one unified national anti-imperialist women's organization as far as I know inside the United States. How our theory and practice were different from bourgeois feminism or liberal feminism to, It's sort of implied in the description I gave, but also basically we rejected the idea that we could somehow benefit by getting a bigger piece of the imperial pie, basically, because we understood that our oppression was totally linked to imperialism as a system. And so, you know, for example, you can see the difference best saying in the different treatments of rape, for example, where we had hotlines and self-defense groups for would be targets of rape, whereas the Buzuel women's movement ended up basically being clearing house for police and had this idea that

you could put all the rapists in jail and give individual counseling to rape victims kind of after the fact and same way for domestic violence. So I don't know if you want me to talk more about that, but that that gives it some sense of the difference there. Yeah, no, I appreciate the attention both to like the political formation aspect and the difference in practice, because it takes this from like an abstract question of like, oh, types of feminism, bourgeois feminism versus some militant revolutionary feminism and gets it to the nitty gritty and the concrete, which I think.

often gets lost in these conversations, so I'm very thankful for that. For the sake of time, I think I'm going to move us to two more questions, just jumping ahead a little bit. But this one, I think, has to do with that practical question as well, which is a theme that I felt like comes up over and over again in this text, both in your experiences in Vietnam and in the U.S. is the theme of criticism. And from my personal experience, like very directly, criticism is like one of the most difficult parts of organizing, I think. It's this really incredible gift and practice that can also go wrong, you know, both in how it's delivered by someone and how it's received. And one of the things that I really appreciated about this text was that you talked about your own

difficulty kind of making criticism productive rather than being harsh or judgmental. And so on a just like very concrete level, do you have any advice for younger comrades about how to approach criticism productively or any advice about how to overcome the impulse for criticism to be harsh or judgmental kind of rather than productive? Yeah, I thought about this question. You're right. It's very, it's very dicey and important. Well, it's called self-criticism criticism officially or traditionally. And, and but I think it has to start from a shared political

framework. And very often, you know, it happens these days, and in my day too, it happened in the context of groups of people or even individuals

that were coming together around some moral outrage but really didn't have a shared political analysis, didn't have shared goals or objectives. And I think, you know, one of the reasons why I ended up writing so much about myself was because that's what I knew.

And I think for people to learn, it is important to be concrete. So if you don't have shared goals and objectives and that level, of political unity. What's the point of the criticism? What's the point? Then it just becomes about trying to settle scores or interpersonal conflict or form of therapy. I mean, it's not a political process to build solidarity, to build the effectiveness of, frankly, a fighting group where the enemy is outside the group, not inside the group. So I think it's especially a problem because so much of the movement, I'm including myself here, it has been petty bourgeois, somewhat idealist, romanticists,

you know, we want to be perfect. And so to me, the yardstick has to be, the yardstick and the context has to be that political unity. And specifically, there's a section in my book that describes a self-criticism criticism session that I ended up having in Vietnam with two leaders of the Women's Union in Hanoi about my first book. And it was incredible. I mean, I have never felt so.

it was a revelation for me, how they conducted it, and what my response was, which I wouldn't have expected and certainly wasn't typical for me. And I don't know if you want me to take time to read it or describe it. It would probably quicker if I try to abstract from it, but do you want that level? If you want to take a second and describe it a little bit, I think that would be really valuable for our listeners. Okay, the first time I was in Vietnam as a guest of the Women's Union, I brought with me the first edition of my book about Vietnamese women, because the trip had been delayed so much and we thought, you know,

we should get it out even if it wasn't, didn't have the benefit of the information I would bring back. So when I arrived in Vietnam and met the women's union people who became my host and my family, I gave them a copy of the book and I asked them for their feedback. And, you know, I was there for like six weeks before I didn't think they even remembered I had asked. But shortly before I left, I did get together with them. And what happened was that they started it by saying, well, they opened it to page one. And they say, here you do this, and this is very good.

And this chap, page two is this. and they went through it page by page, basically praising. There was a little bit of overview of praise, and then they went through praising each, not every page, but almost every page, or every point. And then they made minor suggestions like,

oh, I had gotten the date, of one thing wrong or, you know, just very, very, and then the first significant criticism they came to, they said, we think maybe because you put this movement in the, that you separated what was going on in North and South Vietnam, it's a little confusing about your, this movement. which was what they called the three responsibilities movement. And the three responsibilities movement was they have, they have what they called emulation movements. They were sort of campaigns.

So they were having, throughout the war, there was this campaign that the women's union organized. And the three response, responsibilities were for fighting, production, and the family. Those were women's responsibilities. And, of course, being overly influenced by bourgeois feminism in the United States, I kind of downplayed that campaign because I didn't like the fact that they were assigning women the family role. Right.

And so when they said, well, we think you got this a little wrong, and they were trying to give me the benefit of the doubt of maybe it was because of the way I organized the discussion, not any real substantive criticism. And at that point, I swallowed, and I said, no, it's more serious than that. Sure, yeah. And, you know, I confess, you know. Right. I explained what this much more serious problem was.

And, you know, that essentially I didn't use this language at that point, but that, you know, I was afraid that the women's movement that I was trying to talk to wouldn't like it, so I left it out, basically. I mean, or I gave it short shrift. And so then they gave me another lesson, which was, you know, trusting the people and, you know, being honest and all of this. So my point, the point was it was a very loving scene

and it was a very, and the content. of the discussion, the content of the feedback was very loving and very positive and exclusively dedicated to making this book and whatever political organizing and education I was going to bring back to the United States as clear as possible. So, yeah, no, thank you for walking us through that. I think, again, concretizing it with what this looked like in practice is so useful. And yeah, again, it's so difficult. I think the emphasis on the kind of necessary political unity that you need to have in order for criticism to be a useful tool and self-criticism as well is a very important reminder.

I think I'm going to go ahead and move us on to one last question. That kind of relates back to some of what I said introducing the episode at the top. But in the really, I think, fantastic epilogue to this book, you write that, quote, As the struggle of the people of the world weakens imperialism, the enemy becomes more desperate, dangerous, fascist. Again, we must plan for protracted struggle, end quote. And, yeah, this really resonated with me. I feel like we're living in a time where we're seeing reaction rising kind of globally, and we're seeing the explorers of the world really grabbing what wealth and power.

they can before the long-term consequences of their destruction of the planet really come crashing down on them. And I know for me, like, it can be hard to find hope in the face of this. And yet, as you say, we must, quote, organize as if our lives depend on it, end quote. And I think, again, myself and a lot of younger comrades I've talked to as well, are feeling some sense of despair in the face of this, or feeling some sense of just like being overwhelmed by the situation. But I think, obviously, we can't give in to this despair if we actually hope to survive. And so I guess a question for you is in the present moment, where and how do you find hope that, you know, in order to keep struggling? Hope. I wrestle with that, that word a little bit. But, but our hope in this,

I have to say that we will, we devoted ourselves 24-7 to organization and, because, committing our lives. I mean, we didn't necessarily believe we were going to survive. But we were going to do what Che Guevara said, create two, three many Vietnams, build an organization inside the United States capable of waging war inside the belly of the beast. And I think our hope, and our hope then was based on a certain of victory. You know, Vietnam was winning or had one. Cuba had won. China had one. You know, liberation struggles in southern Africa were winning. And we really believed we were going to win. And we also thought that because we were in the belly of the beast, we had an extra importance to this struggle. And I think that was the part that was really fucked up to tell you the truth.

I mean, it represented a level of, you know, arrogance. So that's the negative part about it. On the other hand, one of my mentors was this woman named Marital Lissour who had been a communist in the 30s. She actually had become a rather famous writer. And she once, probably more than once told me, you know, in the 1920s, we never expected the upheaval of the 30s.

And in the 1950s, we certainly didn't expect the upheaval of the 60s. So I think about that a lot, that it is really hard to predict. But today my hope still comes from the global South, as it did 50 years ago. It's hard to say that 50 years. But it still comes from the global South, but it comes from more of a conviction than a hope, I think. There's so much loss on the way. It's clear that whatever victory comes, there's going to be more destruction than we can imagine.

But I still think that the anti-imperialist forces of the world will defeat imperialism. They have to. I mean, the other thing that I think is that, unprecedented evil, which seems to be a concept that drains people's hope, actually it's not new. Unprecedented evil has happened over and over and over and over and over. And somehow people have survived and we've learned. And I think that's why the Vietnamese victory will always be kind of my guiding light. I mean, it's dimmed a little, frankly, because it's had a lot of difficulties.

Sure. Since its victory. But, you know, that was a genocidal struggle. I think it was two or three million people died of famine when Japan occupied Vietnam. And during the whole period of French colonialism, French occupation and then the war against France and the war against the United States. I mean, that all went on for 30 years.

Right. And yet, I know you know a little bit about Dienbn Fu. Dienfou was considered this impregnable French fortress. And the Vietnamese really defeated what would have been the equivalent to the United States, $1.5 trillion a military machine. And I think we're seeing a tiny hint of that now with Iran and how Iran has been maneuvering.

But I'm not saying Iranian victory is going to be immediate or anything is going to be immediate. it, but I do think it's inevitable. We may not be the center of it, but we can be part of it. Yeah, no, I think that's a useful framing, and I think that realization that we might not be the center of it is a useful corrective to, I think,

the potential arrogance of that belly of the beast narrative that you were talking about, right? That can maybe overemphasize our role. But, no, I find that a very useful thought. And I think, yeah, the fact that this is not all unprecedented in some sense that we have seen these escalations before is really for me, I think, really one of the key takeaways from this book that made it so valuable in just being, you know, a reminder that like our generation and the younger generation who are fighting now are not actually, you know, in some situation that cannot be defeated, that we shouldn't give into that defeatism and that we shouldn't just assume that our enemy is, I think you say, the epilogue like omnipotent right like we really can't concede to that so i find that to be a really useful reminder thank you thank you yeah absolutely and i am so appreciative of your insight and your time here today a true veteran of the movement a life dedicated to you know the cause of

liberation playing what role any one individual can but linked into a really a global movement a proletarian, feminist, socialist, anti-imperialist movement. And I think so we have so much to learn today as millennials and those coming behind us, Gen Z and then Gen Alpha have so much to learn from the elders of the movement and the veterans of the movement. I think this book is a perfect quintessential example of exactly that. And importantly, I try to convey this to my listeners that a meaningful life does not consist in, you know, acquiescing to what the status quo tells you as a meaningful life,

which is status and success and the accumulation of wealth and all those other things. A meaningful life is joining the human species in their increasingly desperate attempt to build a better world. And I think, you know, your life is a genuine testament to that. And the thing you said about the 20s, not being able to foresee the 30s and the 50s, not foreseeing the 60s actually does fill me with a strange a strange hope as well it's like you know things can change very quickly lennon himself said you know there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen and i still believe that is true and history history truly bears that out so you know there's not there's nothing we could we could never cover the entire book in one

interview um so i highly encourage listeners please um go buy the book support the book if you can't There's a free PDF on Iskra's website. I'll link to it in the show notes. Also, contact Arlene. Arlene made it very clear up front that she is more than willing to engage with listeners who want to learn more or ask follow-up questions or cover something we weren't able to cover in this interview. So I'll link to Arlene's website and encourage people to do that as well. And just from the bottom of our hearts, thank you so much, Arlene, for this book and for being so generous with your time today with this discussion. we deeply appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you very much.