Rev Left Radio - They Called Her Rebel: Speculative Fiction, Revolutionary Art, and the Politics of Imagination

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

In this episode, Breht speaks with Jacob Dallas-Main, co-host of Workers' Lit and author of They Called Her Rebel; a dazzling fusion of fantasy, class struggle, and storytelling set in a world of debtors' camps, collapsing empires, and revolutionary possibility. The two discuss how speculative fiction can illuminate political struggle, not merely as metaphor but as a call to break the boundary between audience and participant. They explore what makes a work of art revolutionary rather than consumable, the dangers of reactionary storytelling in popular culture, declining literacy in the U.S., the threats posed by AI, the need for socialist transformation, and why imagination is a vital force in times of despair. From Le Guin to Kim Stanley Robinson to Lee Mandelo, they trace a lineage of speculative art that refuses cynicism and insists on transformation -- both political and personal.  Check out our episode with Kim Stanely Robinson on his book "Ministry for the Future" HERE Subscribe to Workers Lit podcast on youtube HERE ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have on the show Jacob Dallas from what used to be the Socialist Shelf podcast is now the Workers Lit Pod, which we'll talk about in this episode. On to talk about speculative fiction, art, film, television, novels, and the political components of them. This is a wide-ranging conversation. We start off talking about the literacy crisis in the United States. We talk about the importance of cultivating a reading routine, a writing routine, the importance of creating art for its own sake. We talk about, you know, famous works of speculative fiction from the dispossessed and Ministry for the Future to 1984 and zombie movies. And we talk about the political, ideological constitution of those works of art and how to critically engage with such, with such, with such. art, films, novels, etc.

We talk about Jacob's new book in which, you know, he world builds and integrates a political landscape from a Marxist perspective and really, you know, imbues that into the subjectivity of his characters and just has these layers of meaning that I find so impressive to see a friend write a book like this. The book is, of course, called, they called Her Rebel, linked to in the show notes and we'll talk a little bit about that. But again, it expands beyond just his book and talks about art much more broadly. And I think this is a fascinating conversation.

We talk about current events. What we want in a left-wing political leader and what we don't see in the ostensible leaders of the left in the U.S. today, how to get kids interested in reading, the importance of meditation for your attentional capacity and the development of your subjective evolution and the subjective forces of revolution. and how art itself can deepen and strengthen the subjective forces of revolutionary politics. So as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, we are 100% listener funded always have been, always will be. There are no ads, there are no corporate dollars, there's no black money. We are a DIY independent media outlet funded wholly by our supporters. And in order to keep the show going, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. I put out sometimes multiple bonus episodes a month on our Patreon

of me analyzing various things. We have a meditation group together. Whenever big news events happen, we have a community group where on a big Zoom call, we all come together and discuss and work through the meaning and analysis of that event. But if you don't like the monthly subscription model, you can also shoot us a one-time donation at Buy Me a Coffee

forward slash RevLeft Radio, BuyMea Coffee.com. links to that in the show note. And if you don't have money to share, you can support the show by sharing these episodes with your friends or leaving us a positive review on whatever podcast app. All right, without further ado, here is my wonderful discussion on speculative fiction, the creation of art, the importance of cultivating your own inner life and your own artistic voice and so much more with Jacob Dallas from the Workers Lit Pod. Enjoy.

name's Jacob Dallas with Workers Lit Pod formerly the socialist shelf where we do book reviews and weekly news roundups. It's me with my comrades, Lenore, and Aisha and Jen. And I'm here to talk about speculative fiction and also my book. I'm an author. So pretty excited, worker, author, revolutionary artist, organizer, and I'm really excited to be here. A big fan of the show and excited to talk to again, Brad. Hell yeah, yeah, it's an honor to have you back on. Obviously, I was on a socialist shelf.

Now it's the workers' lit pod. Congratulations on that. I, too, am working on my own book here in the background. It's actually been slow going the last couple of months because I got this new full-time job, and I've been involved in the union and stuff. So I've had to kind of put that on the back burner, but I know the kind of the stress of writing a book

and trying to put your best foot forward and balance it with the rest of the stuff you're doing in life. So it's quite an accomplishment in today's day and age. Before we get into the outline and the questions and your book and speculative fiction more broadly, I'm kind of curious about what happened with the socialist shelf and the rebrand of Workers' Lipol. I don't know if you want to talk about that, but I'm just kind of curious about what happened there. 100%. Well, we've been doing the socialist shelf for a few years.

We've been doing books. And, you know, we would comment on current events kind of as they were relevant. And we were just getting consistently people asking, hey, could you talk more about current events? They were like, well, it's just not really the scope of the show. Well, we made pretty good friends with Aisha Ufarah, who's just this absolutely amazing writer. She's written in video games. She's written, you know, in the Amplitudes anthology.

So we wanted to bring her on. And Gin Big Nasty of how the Red was won. I know y'all have collaborated with her here. We wanted to bring her on as well. These people were asking for all this. And we were like, well, it would be fun. We could do a couple episodes a week. We could do a weekly news roundup.

So basically we give just a quick summary of, you know, I put out even independent videos of here's all the news you need to know this week, trying to cut through it, trying to give a straight workers analysis on it. And then we do a longer form episode where we talk about it. And we're still doing the book thing on the side. We decided to make it one feed just for ease of sake. So honestly, just responding to things people were asking for that they said would be useful. And just because I do have the bug in my brain that makes me read all the mainstream media. I don't know why. I've just got, that's my curse. I do feel like I'm uniquely positioned to synthesize it, see where they're bullshitting, see where, you know, they are pointing towards something that is happening and try to deliver something that I kind of was wishing that I had in my life, you know, so I was like, I'm going to put it together.

I mean, I've got some great news sources. I love, you know, dropside, I love breakthrough, but something that quick and short and then we talk about it and we can kind of chop it up and have a good time. We're going to be having some good guests on, too. I mean, even by the time this comes out, I think we'll have released an episode with Josh Borman about what's going on in New York City right now and some fun stuff. So we're just really excited to get to expand the show as our listenership expands. And so a lot of fun. That's awesome. Yeah, just kind of expanding the topics you cover and the overall spectrum of what is addressed on the show, I think is a generally good idea and you have some great comrades doing it with you.

And my personal brainworm is listening to reactionary and right wing stuff. So I listen to a lot of like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson and even Candice Owens and kind of keep my finger on the pulse of where the right is going in this period of crisis. It's kind of clear where the center is going. It's just trying desperately to hold. But to see where the right is moving and the sort of civil war that has erupted ideologically on the right around Israel and what is America first, all that stuff. It's pretty interesting to follow. So I have a similar perversion of, I mean, we're news junkies in the end of the day. We're into politics. That's already a disorder in its own right, I guess. Hey, Fox is always on in my gym when I work out there. So I get to see, it looks like good news to me because they keep saying communism has taken the northeastern United States. I'm like, wow, I wish that was true. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I wish it was true as well. I saw a recent thing where, like, Jeff Bezos and his newspaper wrote an op-ed about, you know, kind of hand-winging and freaking out about Mom Dani. And I was like, Mom Dani is a bouquet of flowers compared to what we have to offer. Oh, yeah. They called him Generalissimo Mondan. I was like, what are we doing? So stupid.

So stupid. American fascism is cruel. It's evil, but it's also incredibly cringe and stupid. Oh, yeah. One thing I do want to, before we get into your book, which props to you, I'm excited to get into it. And I hope people support you through it. I'm interested in this because I'm also writing a book, but it's like this background where we have basically what amounts to a literary or literacy crisis. Yeah.

A declining literacy rate overall. You know, kind of you see these articles coming out that even, you know, people at the college level, even an elite university struggle with reading full books. And if I'm being completely honest, I've noticed my capacity to sit with and finish and follow through on books, which is something I use. used to pride myself on and used to come second nature to me. It's just now competing with all these other things that make it increasingly difficult, even for myself to get through entire books, you know, various times. And it's kind of frustrating and it's something that I rebel against internally or want to rebel against.

But what do you make of that as like the backdrop in which an author like you would write and present a book to the public? Well, you know, it's funny because I work in education too. so I see this firsthand. You know, I am on more of the more technical side with my job, but still I see the numbers and I talk to our teachers. And it's a real challenge that we're seeing, you know, in the classroom and certainly beyond. What I make of it is, you know, every socialist revolution,

even progressive government in history, has immediately pushed for literacy, right? That has always been a push. Even in the poorest, you know, the poorest countries that have managed to get some degree of autonomy. Literacy is first on the table. So of course, in a world that has becoming increasingly reactionary where capitalism is so dominant, of course, literacy is a danger to the ruling class. They want it to be a luxury. They would love that. They would love if literacy was a thing of the middle and upper class. I mean, it's why they want to hollow out public schools, right? And I say they want to. I don't think that necessarily even your average, you know, even far right person is

sitting there kind of rubbing their hands together thinking, oh, we're going to make these people not literate anymore. It's not that. It's just that this idea of, well, these people don't need to know all this. These people don't need to be engaging with these deep topics. It's why they want to make education more stratified. It's why they want to push out more short form video. It's better for the market. When you sit with a book, when you reread a book, when you spend time with a book, you know, you buy it once, but that's how much is that contributing, you know, contributing to the economy per se. It's contributing more so to this life of the mind, this culture, this richness. So even when it's not a political text per se, I would argue pretty much everything's political,

but even when it is something that is very much just sort of for pleasure, just for fun, you're still sitting there and you're making the world in your head. You know, I remember growing up reading, you know, just goofy novels, but it was, it was good for me to do, just as a kid to think, to imagine, to just have a mind of my own that my internal model, monologue isn't, you know, the TikTok AI voice is important. And so I think that's what we're dealing with. And I think it's also important for us to continue to put out books and encourage reading and struggle with our own weaknesses. Because like, I mean, I went to college for English.

I used to, I mean, in college I was reading three or four books a week just for my studies. And I deal with these challenges too, you know, nobody's alone. I think any of us that are even engaging with the internet are having our attention spans hit. And it's something that we need to struggle on. And I think we can, I think we will. And I think us even engaging with literature is fighting back against this like sort of culture of anti-intellectualism. And just honestly, like killing our capacity for critical thought. Spot on, dude.

I could not agree with every syllable more. I try to, I really, even like my work day I have to wake up very early before the sun comes up to get to work. And I set aside 30 minutes from the moment I wake up until I have to start getting ready where I sit down and I just engage in meditation, which is a, way of taking back your attention, which is a way of being in the present moment and honing your capacity to focus your awareness and your attention in the exact ways that you want to and strengthen that capacity. But now what I also want to do now that I've made that a routine is expand that, maybe wake up 30 minutes earlier, do 30 minutes of meditation and then 30 minutes of reading, and then go to my blue collar job where I don't get to do any of that, obviously, and just

kind of like carve out little parts of your day where you can engage your attention consciously and with intentionality because I think that is what's getting lost. And you're right. There's that imaginative capacity, that empathetic capacity to put yourself into somebody else's shoes. I remember reading a book like Kafka on the shore and like weeping at that one of the chapters in which a trans character kind of expresses their subjective experience. and that was one of the first times that I had, you know, engaged with the subjectivity of a trans person explaining, you know, and it was through fiction. It was through the magical realist work of Miracami. And, you know, I've read books like House of Leaves or Infinite Jest, which are really challenging in their own right.

And you're kind of going between characters and you're going into the footnotes and like House of Leaves is weird because it makes you turn the book upside down and you're like following the deterioration. of the character's mental state. So, like, there is so much there that is being lost, I think. And I do think the cultural pendulum swings, you know, so hopefully we do see. We're already starting to see the agitation amongst, you know, our generation and the generations coming up behind us. Like, they see what they're kind of losing. They have a sense that this is bad.

And so I would like to see sort of a cultural movement start to emerge that reembraces record players and reading long books. And, you know, putting your phone away when you get home every day. And I'm not saying I'm leading the charge on that, but it's something that I would like to see emerge. You know, I had a professor in college who I, he actually, he wrote one of the blurbs for my book. I'm very thankful to him. He's a phenomenal writer in his own right, Jason Allen. And he said once in class, we had a, one of my classmates came in.

She was supposed to read a book. And she just kind of, you could tell she was overwhelmed. She was working a job. And she just said, hey, like, and she was upset. like emotional and she was like between like my attention span and my job she was like I didn't read this book we were supposed to read in class which was like you know most kids won't I've not read books in class and I didn't admit it and and he like looked at her and he didn't like you know get mad whatever he just goes you deserve to get to read books something he said

that was like struck me he didn't like you know it wasn't like a oh we're checking off boxes or were academics or whatever it's like you deserve as a human being to get to engage with just another person's thoughts and it's I mean you know and it's same thing with like meditation or going for a walk or exercising it's like it's not just like um it's not just you know it's immediate effects like you know you got to feel like a fucking human being sometimes and when you feel like a fucking human being then you realize that you as a human being with other human beings deserve dignity um and uh that's what we're all about right absolutely i loved your point too about you know socialist revolutions the first thing they do is they get literacy rates up to 99% we've seen

that time and time again. What's different this time is you wouldn't expect us to have to do it in a post-industrial techno capitalist 21st century society. But sure enough, you know, it's like we have literally like, you know, literacy rates in the 70 percentile range in the, in the richest, most developed country, well, you know, in some ways, the most developed country in human history. And it's just like, Jesus Christ, like it's really stark to look it in the face. And you're right, though, the oligarchs, the elite, you know, they, they are. indulging themselves in these techno-utopian fantasies or this Kurdish-Yarvin corporate monarchy bullshit where they see themselves as these Uber mentioned and they literally do not think that

you and I and our families are fully human like we don't deserve access to education and to literacy we are here to buy to work to consume and to fight in their wars when we need to and then to die and for us to have a fully expanded inner life, a rich inner life, and a developing consciousness is not in any way, shape, or form to the advantage of the status quo and the elite who run it. And, you know, they think of themselves as the deserving ones. They think of themselves, again, as the Uber mentioned, which is an egoic delusion. And, you know, they ostensibly have a lot of time because they have so much capital. They have leisure time to read books and to engage intellectually with the world. And look at what they're

capable intellectually listen to a speech by peter teal listen to the three-hour podcast with elon musk on joe rogan listen to mark and dresen speak none of these guys have what i would consider rich inner lives or particularly insightful and curious intellects um but yet they are convinced that they are somehow above and beyond the rest of us yeah i would say uh you know um if if you're interested in knowing about these people's inner lives uh and you don't want to take the time to read one of their dog shit books. We do some of that over there on Workers Lit. J.D. Vance's book. Kamala Harris's new book.

Ben Shapiro's new book. Covered all that. You want to just get into just how like, it's not just that these people are bad people, you know, to put it in kind of moralistic terms. It's that like there's not a lot going on actually. And to me, that's one of the most encouraging things ever.

It's like, oh, well, these are honestly, I refer back to George Jackson who says, if we don't pull this off, he's talking about in the 70s. I'm not using this terms right. But he's like, if we don't pull this off as people's war now, we're going to have to wait. He says, but there will come a time where the fascists go into an uncharacteristic fit of madness, is what he says. And I'm like, well, you can kind of see that a little bit, can we? Absolutely.

Absolutely. Last thing I'll say on this, I'm a father, so I'm kind of wrestling with these things in real time and, you know, children. And how much screen time do you give them? How much do you shelter them? How much do you, you know, keep from them? and my 10-year-old son right now is in that range where a lot of his friends at school are getting phones and they take the phones to school

and they're on the phones. You see him walking home, just zombieed out on their phones. And we do our best, and he does not like it, but we do our best to be like, you can have a phone when you go for a sleepover so you can reach us or something.

But when you're hanging around the house, apart from some periods of time, maybe an hour here or an hour there, like you're not going to just be on your phone the whole time. And like he gets into Calvin and Hobbs. So he's red, As a 10-year-old, every Calvin and Hobbs book there is. And now I'm trying to get him into like more, you know, like slightly more mature comic books and keep him going in that direction.

And, you know, he starts to write his own little comics and draw his own little pictures and stuff. And, like, that's what I'm trying to cultivate. And it's not easy. It's not perfect. He rebels against it sometimes, you know, because he wants to be in the dopamine casino of, you know, YouTube shorts and a phone. But, but yeah, I'm like, that's a cool thing. And so finding something like that. to introduce to your kid that they really latch on to,

that hopefully can cultivate within them a love for the stuff going forward. Absolutely. Love that. I mean, like, yeah, you even saying that makes me feel emotional. I love that. Think about just a kid, just engaging with things that are exciting to be a kid and that aren't designed to, you know, like you said, dopamine casino that you're actually, you know, living. And even when there's that pushback and I get that pushback because I have it in myself,

it's like, well, it could not be more worth it. Absolutely. All right. Well, that's a good preamble. I think it's actually contextually relevant to kind of talk about the back of literacy in the country and encourage listeners to fight against their own sort of inertia in that direction and to cultivate their own reading routine if possible. It's really important. So let's go ahead and get into it. And we're going to start with your book, but we're going to zoom out and we're going to talk about the sociopolitical role of speculative fiction more broadly. But we're going to spend a couple questions kind of talking about your book because it is good. It's fascinating. I love what you're doing. And I think it's really cool. And you clearly come out of a tradition that you just said you were, I think you said that you were in English. Is that your degree? I did. I get it. I got an English degree, degree in English. I so studied some public administration and a little theater just just for the farm of it. Yeah. So you come out of that tradition and your reader, a writer, you're doing your podcast is focused. At least it was. And it will continue in some degree to be. focused on, you know, reading books and understanding them and engaging with them and the ideas within them. So it's awesome. And I applaud you. Before we zoom out to the broader themes,

can you kind of briefly lay out the core ideas driving your book, which is titled, they called her rebel? What political, emotional, philosophical questions were you kind of wrestling with while you were writing it? You know, I conceived of the book in 2020. I was in college still at the time, you know, just basically by myself with the lockdowns, by myself except for when I had to go to work because I was an essential worker, quote unquote, not that I helped my paycheck at all. And what I was doing in my free time, a lot of it was I had friends that I had made in doing college campus organizing. We kind of didn't know what we were doing, but we were doing our best to do something. And we were meeting up on Discord. you know, remotely to, uh, talk about books that we've been reading,

um, which is the first time I read Lenin, uh, changed my life, right? But, uh, also we started playing Dungeons and Dragons together,

uh, over remotely. And I, I was running this stupid, this stupid campaign. It was just so goofy of like this game we were playing together. Um, some of them might even be listening now.

So shout out to Harry, Trent, Sasha and Sam and Sydney, if any of you all are listening. But, uh, and, uh,

we were just playing together. you know, it was goofy. Like, our, bad, the bad guy for a while was the giant Bezos. I mean, that's how silly this was. You know what I mean?

Just like putting in, but we, but I was coming up with this like idea of like, okay, so what if there was this fantasy world, this like, that's almost in so many ways similar to our own. And that kind of got me thinking. And this philosophical is political questions from playing this game. I got thinking like if it feels, it was like a line someone said at one point. Like it feels so much stuff going on. Like it feels like any direction you punch.

There's a million reasons not to throw that punch. There's a million reasons why there would be somewhere else better to throw that punch. You know, what do you do? You know, that's a figurative or literal punch, right? How do we do something that matters at all? What is the right move when you are just surrounded by this system that feels eternal and unstoppable and that it feels like people are not questioning it, no matter how ridiculous it is? Or when people are questioning it, they're not questioning it on the correct level.

So I wanted to make a world that I could ask those questions, a fantasy world. well, partially because that's a thing I enjoy, partially because I felt like that's a thing people are more likely to engage with and enjoy. And partially because I felt like, oh, this is a, this is a sandbox in which we can think about our own problems without getting into the sort of the minutia of, oh, well, if you did exactly that or exactly that in a sort of rebellion situation, why that might or might not be an error. I'm like, okay, let's play with this in this fantasy world and just think about it on a larger scale. And what I also want to, you to want to to do was make characters who are politically going the right direction that like fuck up half the time.

That's something that I thought was like really important and that it was important that they were like doing something even if they were not necessarily making the correct choice because they were making choices, period. So that's something that I really wanted to do with the book. And I also just wanted to put in both on a funny level and on sort of an angst level, just things about our political system. So I wanted to just put in like stuff that's kind of satirical which almost feels silly in hindsight because of how absurd our politics are you know i i don't think i could have ever in this book predicted something as absurd as the president of united states posting an ai video of dropping shit on protesters right but like but like doing my doing my best to put all of that into there making something that's maybe

enjoyable to engage with that's like getting people thinking and if nothing else was just cathartic for me as a human to put together can you kind of introduce people to the basics of the book, kind of, you know, the protagonist, what's happening in the book, the basic thrust of the book, just to orient themselves to what you're writing about? 100%. So what I put together here is basically we're in a fantasy world that is not too dissimilar from us in the sense of technology. We're in a capitalist country that's, you know, ostensibly a democracy in the same way that the United States is democracy. But it is increasingly hegemonic. and you have a young woman who live in her early 20s in college who is living within it,

this woman, Alaria, whose father dies. She is in significant debt as a result of his medical bills. She's trying to get out of debt and she only gets deeper into it. She ends up being put in sort of a debtor's prison side situation, a credit camp. But because this is a world where a world where this is a world where this is a capitalist economy. We're not doing debtors prisons in this old school sense where there's all this different labor to do. I mean, she's just working in an insurance office and debtors prison because it's a bullshit economy. They don't really, they're still doing debtors prisons. They're still doing

essentially slave labor. But there's no actual like reason where it needs to happen. Their production is through the roof. They've got more stuff than they could ever imagine. They're really just following these old cycles because the economy tells them to because the line needs to go up. And she in that is able to make some connections with people and eventually when she, you know, I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say she breaks out. We do not spend the whole novel doing insurance claims. She is able to get into it. She is a situation where you understand why she wants to rebel, while she has no ties to the past beyond just wanting to make a better future. But she's got to put together in her own mind, like, how does history work? What am I doing? Who am I following?

Who are the right people to be linking up with? How do I take these angry, rightful angry impulses and also turn them into something constructive. And that's something I want to do with it. And I have fun with having, you know, a magical element, with having, you know, sort of sci-fi like tech. But I also think it's fun that are interesting, maybe, that you've got magic, you've got magic healing that you might see in like, you know, Lord of the Rings or something like that.

But, you know, you got to pay health care prices for it. You've got, you know, we've got giant flying ships, but, like, who owns it? couple corporations on all of it. And honestly, it comes from me thinking about our own world and how much of our own world is, you know, in a lot of ways, borderline magic, the way we can communicate with each other. The fact that, I mean, the two of us are sitting here talking to each other simultaneously right now is as close to magic as I can conceive of. And yet, you know, we're forced to do it through these means that are owned by a few people

that didn't actually create those things. And so I also thought that that maybe can shake loose. some people thinking about, well, you know, that sounds almost absurd. We'd live in a world with magic where you could cure cancer and you, you know, you hold it back. Well, we're not, we're not living in a world too different from that. So, both again, exercising my own angst and also maybe getting people to think about it from another direction. I think one of the things that you did in this book that I really resonate with and am impressed by is you kind of, you explore the subjectivity of big political themes.

So, you know, a lot of Marxists as materialists, we look at the outward external world. We look at how history is moving. We look at external contradictions, internal contradictions within various movements. We're analyzing socio-political, economic factors and forces. But sometimes what gets obscured or left behind or disregarded in that analysis is the exact subjectivity that comes along with those objectives.

developments. And this is something I take quite seriously in all of my work and in the book that I'm writing is taking the subjectivity side of the object-subject-subject coin and trying to explore it and talk about how we can kind of, you know, engage on, in like an interior subjective revolutionary, evolutionary process through, you know, stuff like ego transcendence and certain practices that can, you know, cultivate that. But you take these huge political themes like late stage capitalism, the psychology of revolt, state violence, and kind of embed them within the protagonist's interiority. And then you build a world around, you know, these characters that, you know, world building can be kind of just throwing stuff, like kind of dumping information about this world without any real connection. And I think you did not do that, right?

you built the world that felt lived in because you have such a credible articulation of subjectivity, you know, of interiority as you're exploring this political, social, economic landscape. So I think you did a really great job at that. And the level of integration between real politics, right, not this watered down or diluted, naive form of political engagement, which sometimes you get when people try to wrestle with politics. but real politics, plot, and character subjectivity and integrating them all together, I think you did a wonderful job. Well, I appreciate that's what I was trying to do.

Absolutely. So your book blends kind of fantasy, class struggle, interpersonal love, and like a very intentional political way. So from a Marxist perspective, what like major contradictions within, you know, late stage capitalism or whatever you want to call it, were you most interested in trying to explore? through your characters and through your world building. You know, recently on Workers Lit, we covered the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. And something that we identified was so absurd about that book, right, was something that I get into in this book is abundance isn't the problem.

We have abundance. We have had abundance in many ways for a long time. I mean, the Great Depression in the United States was a crisis of overproduction, even as recently or as far back as the 1930s, right? So it's the hitting the wall. It's the going being forced into being put into forced labor, not just because the economy is, oh, struggling and, you know, the ruling class is making horrific choices, but they're making horrific choices because of the horrific situation. No, you're living in an advanced capitalist society with plenty and you're just not distributing it. And the absurdity that leads to, the heights of inequality that leads to. is a whole section of this book where they end up at a hotel that no one at the hotel is

having a good time, but it is for the absolute mega rich to, to just the next extent. And when the mega rich are looking down in the city, the city that they have essentially built, at least the, you know, the way the economics work is they've got a screen that makes where all the working class people live look like a nice community. They don't see, you know, homeless people. They don't see, uh, trash piling up. They don't see boarded up businesses. In fact, If they looked close enough, they'd see the business would have names like food store. And I forget exactly what. Really generic shit.

But they're not looking closely enough to notice. They just want to live in this ivory tower, literally, that they've created. And I mean, and in our own world, what do they do? They create algorithms and now AI to just see what they want to see. You know, I wrote that actually before Jin AI took off. And I remember just thinking, like, damn, I got to get this thing out before someone literally creates that screen looking out your car window. So I think it's like part of that. It's that absurdity that comes out of that.

It's in some ways almost funny. Like when you see it, I remember being a kid and going in a nice hotel for the first time. I mean, you know, I didn't grow up like poor, but I mean, we lost our house in 2009 the same way a lot of the people in this country did. I was never homeless, but, you know, it was tough there. And like going into a hotel and just seeing, I don't remember even why I was there,

but just seeing how these people were interacting with, you know, know, it was crazy. It blew my mind. I remember, you know, being a kid raised fairly conservative. And having not even been wronged by these rich people that I knew of, just hating them, just feeling that hatred, that then I would, you know, get a little older and be like, oh, I need to, you know, have a more complex for you and then getting a little older than that. And being like, no, actually, like, nine-year-old Jacob was like onto something. Absolutely. Yeah. Like, you know, go with that gut instinct. That class politic is actually, like, ingrained. And so it's some of that I really wanted to get into and just asking in a situation so absurd, what do you, what do you even do? You know, what do you, how do you even act? How do you even behave?

And it is, it is tough. And yeah, hopefully trying to create characters that are able to think of a world that transcends that. Yeah, I think one of the thing you accomplished and you kind of touched on it there in so many ways is exploring through your world building, right? exploring the core contradiction of our times or one of the core contradictions, which is, you know, in Marxist orthodoxy, the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production, where you have a society that has the techno capacity to really create a new society, create a society of genuinely widespread human flourishing and well-being, but that society is encapsulated inside the rustic. cage of relations of production that make that impossible. We live in a world right now where Elon Musk who just got a trillion dollar pay package from Tesla, meaning that in the next couple of years, we could see the world's first motherfucking trillionaire while people are getting laid off, you know, are being replaced

by AI. Homelessness is on the increase. Working families can barely afford health care, housing, the basic necessities of life. And one asshole, one rather unimpressive asshole, is going to be in command of a trillion dollars worth of wealth and assets. And so that kind of is the absurdity of the society we live in. And it's jarring for, I'm sure, folks like you and me and people listening, to live in that society and to see it normalized, that people just look at that fucking insanity and say, yeah, it is what it is. That's how life is kind of, you know. You can't blame on.

That's ideology. We're conditioned. We're brought up in a certain society. We're sort of indoctrinated with these ideas. And, you know, human beings born into almost any social order can more or less take that as the norm until they do the sort of, you know, critical work of breaking out of that ideological encapsulation. But that contradiction is in our society, but by framing it in your book in this kind of alternate kind of timeline, you know, where there is this magical. aspect and and there is this different. It kind of highlights a contradiction that in normal life can just be internalized as

normal. But when you see it in a work of fiction or, you know, in the form of a really good film, it brings that to life. And then it makes you walk out and look at your own society in that different way, literally raising consciousness through art, which I think is a great accomplishment in and of itself. I also think the thing I try to incorporate and it's hanging over this book is that this looming war with another great power in the distance.

And that's something I try to incorporate. And it is not a war that, you know, the traditional, we think of most of history, there were wars and they were fought over hubris and they were fought over the kind of things. But they were very often fought over things that were scant resources. They were fought over access to things that, you know, it could have been shared more objectively, but like people were trying, sorry, I'm thinking about like, you know, wars and human history like where people are fighting over actual resources after an actual scarcity of water, an actual scarcity of farmland.

And thinking about a world where we are in now where, yes, there are internation conflicts over scant resources, but somewhere like the United States is not going to war over resources, but is not going over to war, going to war over a lack of resources, but to drive up the GDP, to follow the imperial logic that Lenin laid out, you know, over a hundred years ago. And thinking about, you know, I make this country of Quetron that wants to go to war, with its neighbor. Its neighbor who, just because I thought it was funny, they don't even know the name of the country. They've never really bothered to figure it out. They call it the draconic empire. They have never interacted with these people. They don't know anything about them. Should I get a sequel greenlighted? Maybe we will. And this, this empire, they're not really competing over anything. It's just the logic of they have to expand or the ruling classes line won't go up. And therefore, you know, the GDP will flatten. up and then they will have a crisis. There was no inherent need for the crisis.

No one is having any shortages that are not artificial, but they have to expand, expand, expand. It's just imperial logic and absurd. But like we're seeing it in our lives as we speak right now. You know, the United States is targeting the government of Venezuela, right? And a large part of that is because of Venezuela's resources. It's also because of Venezuela's government's orientation. But it's like it's not that the United States doesn't have oil at its gas stations.

It's not that the United States doesn't have a big enough gold reserve. It's that the imperial logic says the line has to go up or this thing's wheels fall off. Absolutely. Absolutely. And in a world of rising multipolarity, the U.S. Empire has a real material interest in hemispheric hegemony. So if it's losing unipolar global hegemony, it wants to re-insure and shore up its regional and hemispheric, you know, hegemony a la the Monroe Doctrine. And I think that's a part of it as well. it can't have, you know, people that are anti-imperialist or organizing their economy in a different

way in their own backyard, especially in the context of a multipolar world. So, yeah, lots of factors going into it. But yeah, I love how you explore that idea and just the absurdity of not even knowing the country's name. I think it really hits at a core aspect of American empire, which most, you know, most Americans and even a lot of the people that are, you know, pushing for this war, they know nothing about the societies that they denigrate and topple. Like, you know, what is the base level of understanding of Iranian culture and history among the John Bolton's and the people of the world that want nothing more than to soak that country in blood? It's moot. It's irrelevant.

You know, it's just another chess piece on the board that needs to be toppled for imperial domination and interests. And it's grotesque in that way. And another thing that is, as I'm speaking, I think of, is like Israel's, genocidal onslaught, not only against the Palestinians, but bombing seven, eight of its neighbor countries, blowing up 900-year-old churches and mosques, destroying historical and cultural sites for this base, vulgar, ethno-supremicist, Labensraum ass land grab, and pursuit of short-sighted hegemony, and, you know, just this complete obliteration and indifference to these these gems of human creation, which are in that part of the world because, you know, human civilization

has been in that part of the world for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. All three major Abrahamic religions grow out of that soil. And so you have so much history, so much culture, so much religion that is gorgeous, architecture, you know, traditions. And it's just all just seen as something to be bulldozed in pursuit of the basest, sort of, you know, fascist Laban's realm, again, genocidal, land grab, hegemony,

whatever. And it's just, it's sickening when you really sit back and look at it and really think about it. You know, I was, I was, got the opportunity to visit Croatia not that long ago. And while I was there, I visited a church. And

one of the guides told us, the church, he goes, this is the oldest church in the world that has been continuously practicing. the saying they had some way of defining it. I'm sure there's contests, people that contest it. But continuously practicing for however many years, you know, the longest,

whenever we're continuing to do whatever. And he goes, and we're not happy about it at all. And I had to ask him why. I'm like, that's, you know, that's what a great thing to claim. You know what I mean? And then he was like, because the one that was the longest just burned down. And I was like, I, like, had to, I mean, I'm on, I'm on a trip, you know, to Croatia. And I had to go sit down. Like, you know, like,

so it is that kind of thing. And that is it is that war drive, that obliteration that that has that that that doesn't just come out of, you know, the hatred people hold, but comes out of the logic of capital, the illogical logic of capital because capital is so developed that it's outlast lived its historical usefulness. And in fact, it has for a long, long time. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. So let's go ahead and move forward. And I'm interested in this sort of, you know, label of speculative.

fiction. We all say it. We've used it. I've heard it. I'm wondering if you can, first of all, define speculative fiction, what makes it a unique genre in its own right and what, you know, distinguishes it from other genres. And then just kind of talk about why you're into it, why you chose it, and why you think it's a powerful vehicle for political storytelling in particular. Yeah, I think speculative fiction to me and people may quibble with definitions, but I think it's a genre that can explore possibility. And it is a genre that can explore possibility. And it is a speculative fiction. is creating a world that is in some way different from ours, whether or not that is set in our world in the future,

set in our world in an alternate past, or set in another world altogether. It is conceiving of another world, and it's trying to engage with how that world operates, how that world moves, and what's happening inside of it. So that is basically how I'm defining it. It is in some way interested in the politics or the way that world functions,

whether or not it is very good at that. I think that is what a speculative fiction story does. And it's great vehicle for political use because it gives us a sandbox. Because when we're writing a story, I write a story that's set in 2025 in the United States, there are a lot of things I have to engage with that may actually get in the way of making my broader point. There may be quibbles that come up. There may be details about would someone have talked like that here or done that here, that it can be difficult to make political points through fiction.

At least it can for me that when I go to another world, even if it's not so different from our world, I can make those points. I can play with that. I can think what would happen. What would be the reaction? What would be the action? How would the dialectic interplay? How would these rules that apply here, apply there? And it can kind of teach us lessons, not in some kind of morality play way, but in the way of here's how things move.

And if you look at something from another angle, it's very helpful. I have friends who are programmers. And a thing that programmers have long done is we, you have trouble with the problem when you're programming. The joke is you have a rubber ducky. Some people literally do it, a rubber duck. They look at it and they explain the problem to them. And sometimes, you know, you're just talking.

You're not talking to anyone. You're talking to a piece of plastic. But you understand the problem in another light because you've articulated it. And I think that something speculative fiction allows us to do in fiction. And why it's powerful is it's powerful because of that. But it's also dangerous because of that. Because if you're putting in the wrong assumptions or, you know, whether they're wrong assumptions or whether they're wrong assumptions or whether they're,

they're colored by a bad class politics or just an incorrect politics, it can then lead to different understandings of how the world works, which is why there is so much speculative fiction that is, you know, sort of liberally moralistic or counter-revolutionary or just outright, like, horrifying. And I think it's important that there are contributions to that genre that have decent politics that people can engage with, not just because of the, um, what we did out of it politically, but also because, you know, people deserve to engage with stories that, in my opinion, actually engage, like, follow the rules of the real world, even if they're in another world. And that includes class, like, whether or not you're trying to make a

political point. Absolutely. And you've kind of said that speculative fiction, and you're touching on it and alluding to it there, is kind of inherently political. It's kind of hard to imagine a speculative fiction that completely avoids politics. As Marxists, we understand that everything's viewed with politics on some level and ideology on some level. So that kind of, you know, is taken for granted on the, on the Marxist left. But can you kind of explain what makes a fictional world or speculative fictional world unable to escape politics by the very definition of what it's trying to do? Well, it's bound by the politics of the author, right? It's bound by the assumptions of the creator or creators about the way the world works. That creator may be making

very correct assumptions or working from a very place that's very grounded or they could be, you know, way out in left field about the way the world works. You know, to use an example from 1984, which is a book that frustrates me to no end because of how well written it is and also because of how, in my opinion, you know, kind of depraved it is and the way, or at least how it's been used. Orwell has at the time he writes that book, if you, you know, you kind of look into his own life in letters, kind of accepted. the depravity of man, has kind of accepted the failure of revolution and is more resentful towards imperfect revolution than he is against the system overall that the revolution emerges

from. And so, therefore, Oceania, this, you know, failed socialist revolution that turns into this sort of, he calls it, oligarchical collectivist dystopia, must follow those rules that Orwell has set up. And so he couldn't have written that book without following some sense. of assumptions on how the world comes into be. Even if something isn't described, even if a book doesn't or a movie doesn't give you how you got here, the creator, even if they don't haven't written out a timeline or something like that,

they have assumptions about how the world works and it's going to influence the politics. So I think that's relevant. And I think like on a counter example, one of my favorite authors of all times is Octavia Butler. And she writes things like Parable of Sower, right? Which is, I think, you know, the great American novel.

which sees how race, class, and gender interact in the real world. And because she gets that on such a basic level, she can't help but show you how it interacts in a world that's like ours, but not so different. And her other books that get even increasingly alien, literally dealing with aliens, maintain that same grounding because she gets it, because she's lived it,

because she's existing in the real world as a working class person that's engaging with working class people. So I think that's why that's relevant. And I think it's why, you know, as with everything, fiction that is, fiction that comes out of like incredibly corporate environments, you know, the bigger, the more money involved, the more likely this is, the more it is going to adopt the ideology that is prevailing in the society. And more specifically, the ideology of its financial backers. Yeah.

Absolutely. Well said. And I'm going to skip a few questions ahead and we'll circle back and cover the ones that I just skipped. But I want to get into, I want to get into example. I want to get into examples here because you're already moving in that direction, and I think it's very helpful to kind of zoom into specific examples that people will be somewhat familiar with, and you just did that with 1984. So we'll get to like the sort of reactionary things in a second, but let's go into first some positive examples. So what makes works like Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future? I interviewed him on that book, by the way.

I'll link to that in the show notes. or Lee Mandelo's queer revenge fiction, what makes them truly politically generative in your view? What are they doing that perhaps more mainstream works that people will be very familiar with, like Hunger Games or certain Star Wars stories, perhaps fail to do? Yeah, and I also want to know that I read Kim Stanley Robinson

for the first time because of that interview. Wow, awesome. So shout out, was listening to it while I was washing dishes. Beautiful. At Chili's my job. Hell yeah. So appreciate that. Yeah, I think those, I mean, I can use those examples specifically.

Leguins the dispossessed, I mean, not only is just a beautiful story, but it's a story about a revolutionary society that is imperfect. And the protagonist and the reader learns it's imperfect and it's good anyway. It's imperfect and it's worth defending anyway. It's a society that, I mean, like, there are you can list problems. And in fact, when I was reading it, I was like, how is this a, you know, people call this a left wing, left-wing fiction, isn't this just criticizing the society, the post-capitalist society these people have created? And then it's like, yeah, it's got this problem, this problem, this problem.

And we haven't worked out these interpersonal contradictions and humans are still selfish. And guess what? Let's now compare it to the capitalist society that continues to exist. Let's see why this is worth defending. Let's see why we got here in the first place. And let's rededicate ourselves to building, even an imperfect post-capital society. I don't use the word. socialist because it's a little more complicated in that book. You can read it yourself. Kim Stanley Robinson in a different direction. He is doing this, I mean just painstakingly researched Ministry for the Future and all of his works about like here's where the world could go. Here's where we're at. We are not mincing words about how bad the crisis is. And here is with

humans working together in all these different fields like with Ministry for the Future. Humans at every single level engaging both, you know, local political, scientific, large scale, economic, people working with the banks, people working with culture. Here's how we can forge a different future. Here's how we can push in a different direction. And it's not something prescriptive. It's just saying here are examples of human ingenuity and organizing and will that can go in a different way. Not one that's utopian by any means.

I mean, this is a book that starts with tens of millions of people dying and more people die throughout it. But a book that's like, despite that, I think he refers to it as anti-dispopian. that that's why that's useful. Lee Mandello, and I, you know, I should disclose that I am, I am friends with Lee Mandelo, which I am honored to be because he is, I think, one of the best writers currently writing. Lee is writing things like Woods All Black, which is a fictional story about a queer individual in the 1920s in the United States, which actually, I think there's a lot of parallels between now and the 19, and exactly what hundred years ago between the gilded age stuff, between, you know, the rising reactionary currents,

fighting against sort of a progressive currents, you know, vying for control and with the looming economic crisis. And Jacob, Jacob, but before you move on, remember that point? Not only is there a perfect parallel, but fucking Trump just had a great gas-be themed fucking party in his fucking ballroom mansion while on the same week that Snap benefits got cut for tens of millions of Americans. So first is tragedy, then has farce on full volume right there. Yep.

Somebody I know just posted on social media. How many days out are we from Trump posting the phrase the so-called food riots? Exactly. You know, it's in Lee's writing this story, you know, that's more timely than maybe he even could have predicted when he started writing it in the 2010s. That is about, you know, not only queer people standing up and finding community and finding connection in this, you know, know, incredibly fraught society and, you know, bringing in cool supernatural elements about self-sacrifice and whatnot and living harmoniously with nature. But also is able to say, you know, the, like, sometimes you do have to fight. Sometimes you can actually be, I mean, in this case,

revenge, like, there is actual cruelty that, like, that takes place on the side of the repress, the side of the downtrodden. The downtrodden actually have a right to cruelty against their oppressors. They have a right to fight back. And, you know, I think of the CLR James, black Jacobins, and yet they were moderate, right? Talking about the uprisings of the Haitian revolution, you know, the stuff that, you know, in abstract, we might be horrified by. That in context, you're like, this is, of course, what's going to happen. This is how human history moves. And as we are materialists, as we're not liberals, we're not going to moralize about, you know, when shit like that happens, you know.

And I think that's something that Lee understands well. And putting it in a queer context is something that feels very relevant. Queer and trans feels very relevant in the United States and having, you know, not to spoil too much of the book, but like a Lee's book, but like having a queer person who is like, no, like actually I am going to kill this pastor that is running this community like a, you know, like that is promoting literal fascist ideology in 1929 United States in that book. Like I'm going to kill him and the book is not going to like make us feel bad about it. actually like yeah like that that's what's going to happen is i think the kind of shit that like we need to engage with and think about yeah i mean and what is this process all this stuff that you're talking about what we're doing right now what these books do so well they deepen in some sense the subjective forces of revolution there's not there's not only the objective forces of

revolution right the the the the potentiality the the overall socio political economic conditions out of which revolutions emerge but there's a certain subject that is necessary. You know, this is what we talk about. Revolutionary and class consciousness needs to be raised in these moments. And there are incidences, and I think perhaps we could talk about the current situation being something like this where the objective conditions for revolution are not wholly unpresident, right?

There's real objective conditions that could give rise and should give rise to revolutionary energy, and to some extent it is. But Americans, because of capitalist realism, because of 40 years of neoliberal ideology, because the boomers in charge have an ideology that is just completely out of step with the current objective moment, the subjective forces of revolution still need to be developed. And really good speculative fiction of the sort that you just talked about does precisely that. It deepens those subjective forces in your show and my show, my book that's coming out, your book. Everybody that does, it makes music that's revolutionary, that creates any sort of art that's revolutionary,

that organizes in their community, that forms tenant unions, anything like that, is building up the subjective forces of revolution, which is utterly necessary. And the other point I wanted to make that you made so well, and like in the dispossessed, there is this imperfection in society, right, that you'll never be able to purge out. And I think it's, it behooves us as socialist, as Marxists, as revolutionaries, as communists, to not fall into the utopian trap that, if we just get these things into place that society will then function utopically, that will always have to deal with imperfection in ourselves and in the world,

that will always, no matter what we build, it will not be perfect. And that does not make it any less defensible. And I think there is a real strain of left utopianism that criticizes all real world revolutionary projects precisely because they are imperfect, as if a perfect movement could have. ever crop up, right? Like, you know, they'll criticize Maduro's Venezuela for this or that or Cuba for this or that. It's like, what the hell do you expect that in this world, under these conditions with this history, that we are just going to create a perfect society?

No, this is struggle. This is contradiction. There's always revolution and counter-revolutionary processes at play. This is struggle. And we have to accept the fact that we have to navigate contradictions tirelessly until we die, that we have to problem solve tirelessly until we die and hopefully present the next generations, not a perfect world, but a better set of problems to solve and really internalize that, you know?

Yeah, I think of another piece of speculative fiction and different genre, the video game Disco Elysium has a line that says, you know, this guy is in his country, which is capitalist, and he's looking across the ocean or whatever figuratively at this country that's communist or supposed to be. and he's thinking, you know, if you choose to be a communist in the game, he thinks, well, that country over there has built one percent of communism. Us over here, we've built zero percent of communism. But if me and all the communists in this country get together and put all our effort towards criticizing the people who've built one percent of communism, perhaps we can build 0.000, zero, zero, zero, one percent of communism in our country. I find that to be very funny and useful.

Yeah, absolutely. It's very like, you know, take the log out of your own eye before you look at the spec in your brother's eye. Absolutely. Absolutely. Do you want to touch a little bit on like Hunger Games and Star Wars and the mainstream versions of this and what they do or don't get quite right? Yeah. And I guess I should preface this by saying, you know, I'm not made of stone. I enjoy a lot of pop culture.

And I don't think that we have to self-flagellate, you know, and be puritanical about enjoying things that are not, are, don't in line with our politics. In fact, maybe I'm a freak for this. Sometimes I enjoy engaging with it and then being like, here's where I disagree with that. That was fun. You know, like, it's a mental exercise. I just watched a Yellowstone, for example. Yeah. A deeply reactionary show, but I enjoyed it.

Oh, yeah. I think Hunger Games is an example I point to so much because it was such a phenomenon. And because, in fact, there were real world movements that pulled from the aesthetics. In fact, Vincent Bevin's, friend of our pod, I don't know if, have you had Vincent Bevin's on the show? Unfortunately, no. I've always wanted to. I still mean to, but it never got around to making it happen. Let me. I can put you in touch with him if you want. That would be awesome.

He, uh, he wrote this book, if we burn that, like, is literally pulling a line from hunger games for people during the Hong Kong protests, which he's pretty critical of the way the Western media was not, you know, he's sympathetic to, but critical of. They have this big science as if we burn, you burn with us, which is a line from Hunger Games. No, he makes the point. That's not tied to anything. They're just making a pop culture reference, who's the ones burning that this isn't a reference to anything, which is kind of part of his point about decentralized movements. But it's also talking about the power of not just media, but Western media. So Hunger Against is this great example that I think, you know, it's fun and it's got

some stuff. And it's even got some good politics in the sense of like, you know, it's got a sympathy for the poor downtrodden. But on the other hand, how does the last book of it end? It ends with the revolutionaries who have been fighting for years and years when. they take power, they are just as bad as the oppressors. They say, we're going to have one last hunger games and we're going to make the rich fight each other is a thing that happens in the book. And I think in the movie too. And it's depicted as, to be fair, they're only doing one more. It's depicted as this is horrifying. Every bit as bad as the people have been doing this for decades for no reason. The evil, you know, the evil president when he's getting executed,

the protagonist, the novel chooses to kill the leader of the revolution instead because it says, oh, she's just as bad because she was willing to revert to tactics that were really brutal in the war, things like that. Things that are just kind of like, oh, well, we have to have purity in the way we fight the, you know, most evil motherfuckers in human history. You know what I mean? That's the kind of thing, the idea of, you know, there's no difference in good things and bad things, actually. That you can't engage with that imperfection, that you have to have this sort of moral purity. Or I think of something like Star Wars, which is, to me, I joke like Star Wars is if you had all the right political inclinations and then you like script the politics out of it.

You know, there is this natural anti-fascism. There is this, this idea that there should be a better future. But then you're actually stripping out the political process and you're reducing it to great men of history. You're reducing it to like one family. And then if, you know, somebody tries to make a movie where it's not just about that one family, the internet loses their minds. I think there are counter examples even within Star Wars. this show Andor, I think, is pretty good. But like, and I enjoy it. But like, it's interesting the way that it can flatten it.

The way it can be like there are going to be these historical actors that emerge. And we can all celebrate when these historical actors deliver us a moment. And every now and then maybe we can exist to support them. And then what does that lead to? Well, that leads to these like great man movements. That leads to something like the Bernie Sanders movement or, you know, no disrespect to people who are excited about New York City election. But I think the idea that, you know, Zoron by himself, is going to, you know, even if he was everything we wanted him to be, is going to be able to sweep away the system in his own individuality.

There are no Luke Skywalker's, right? There are no death stars. It's not how the world works. Absolutely. So these kind of, these kind of things can lead to. And also, I think there's a danger of massive companies selling you the revolution for consumption. I think there is a danger when there is no call to action, especially when the artists are not actually engaged politically, when they are disengaged people or they are just, boring liberals. There is a danger of that just being like you did your revolutionary politics for the day by watching a movie where a guy shoots someone who's called a stormtrooper. Well, that's cool, but then what are you going to do? And I think that's important as well.

Yeah, so many great points. One of the things that I notice in many different sorts of films and television series, and Bain and his sort of group kind of represent this as well, which is like the left or the revolutionary forces are presented as a disorderly scary mob, right? Yeah. Like an anarchic black block aestheticized sort of like smashing windows, and the mob becomes a figure of fear in and of itself. And so whenever you see a film or anything like that depict a revolutionary movement,

even with genuinely good ideals, you understand where a bane comes from in fucking Gotham. But they're depicting it as an anarchic unruly mob. That is a sort of psychological projection of reactionaries that they're always thinking of it. It goes back to the French Revolution, right? And the guillotines and the reign of terror is like associating left-wing liberatory movements, which depend on mass movements. So there's an element of like, yeah, we don't have just a great man that can go up and do everything. Even if those politicians we talk about, even if they're ideologically committed to what we are and they really want to succeed, their success depends 110% on mass mobilization.

They cannot do it by themselves. It will require something like street protests plus strategic strikes in certain sectors from labor unions that are so like that's the sort of thing that we have to build to make these figures at all successful. or Zoran is just going to get completely swamped by the political machine of New York City, the real estate fucking factions, the police, like, you know, the centrist in its own state Democratic party, they're all going to be working against him. And if Bernie would have won, I sometimes run out that alternative reality and think, it might have been worse because if Bernie ran with all this real genuine hope and authenticity that he had, and then he gets in and both parties and the media and the,

the deep state are all working together or in unison to stop and prevent him from doing anything, that could actually have a negative impact on people's imagination of what's possible, that we actually did the thing we got the Bernie Sanders type figure elected, only to see his administration utterly fail, because in order to dislodge the forces that would make that failure inevitable, that would require mass mobilization and revolutionary militant politics, which the social democratic, you know, process attempts to avoid. They attempt to avoid the very thing that becomes necessary for their success, which is like a fascinating element of it.

But, yeah, the mob relations are really important and just the idea that the revolution always devours its own children. You know, whenever you hear that phrase, you know, that we're kind of dealing with a similar politic. Yeah, it's like, okay, I guess I'm going to offer myself as one of the children to be devoured if that's what we need to do. You know what I mean? Like, if you know, like, if you know people who are committed revolutionaries or you study history, these people already were willing to die. You know what I mean? Like, this shit happens. I think of, when you talk about the mob, I think of this is not a piece of speculative fiction, but I think of a Takeshi Kobayashi's crab cannery ship, which is just this great 1929 novel.

Read my Japanese author, Japanese communist, who would actually end up being killed by the Japanese government. about in the character or the workers on the crab character cannery ship they don't have names they are an embodied they are an embodied mass working together every now when they identify as individuals for plot purposes but like the thoughts are communal the thoughts and it's not scary it says like actually that's like some of the coolest shit that can like possibly happen so another book that very short book too that i highly recommend but a way that you can think about this contrary but like yeah people want to be afraid of the horns and then, you know, of course, we get into right-wing media, then sometimes it's even, not sometimes, it is even worse.

Absolutely. One thing I want to kind of impose on people or at least advance for their consideration is the idea that when you're looking at a politician that is ostensibly representing us in our movement, I don't even think they need to be perfect, right? I'm not waiting around for the perfect figure with all the perfect politics with nothing bad in their past or nothing shitty or you know, or even like this idea that there's no way to strategically compromise or to shift your rhetoric to advance. Like I understand that you're playing a very sensitive game here.

And sometimes that requires, you know, tactical retreats or rhetorical shifts that that allow you to move forward and pursue a politics. So I'm not even against that. But what I do think is the most decisive thing is, is this figure fundamentally oriented to their own career advancement? Right? Has their ego convinced them that they need to be in these positions of power or somebody worse will be there? Because once you make that movement, you're fundamentally in it first and foremost for yourself. And that makes you step back from any confrontation or any situation in which you would have to self-sacrifice.

A real leader of the left will have to rise up on the shoulders of a mass movement, a grassroots movement, and fundamentally be by and for that movement. willing to sacrifice themselves, their own careerist ambitions, willing to take on hard fights that might end their personal careers in order to advance the ball for the entire class. And that is what we so rarely see. Bernie Sanders, right, backs down and gets co-opted and absorbed back into the Democratic Party apparatus. AOC is sort of beleaguered and beaten down by the Nancy Pelosi's in the elite, make strategic, you know, not even non-strategic retreats that basically put her in a position to advance.

her career quite well, but at the same time comes at the cost of a robustly pro-Palestinian politic or whatever we want to say. And so that is the trait that we need in a leader. The left needs leaders. We need people to go out and fight for us on the electoral stage. We need people to articulate our values and our ideas to combat reactionary denigration of us, but they need to fundamentally not be oriented to their own egoic advancement and be willing to give up everything themselves for the advancement of the class as a whole. And that is rare in American politics and American society. Yeah, I absolutely agree.

It's something that we kind of identified on workers lit was something that we were thinking about where we were like, hey, I'm not even, I'm not mad that, you know, Bernie and ASC are going on this fight, the oligarchy tour and people are showing up. That's exciting. Interesting that they're not saying join the DSA or whatever organization, right? Like, you know, I would even, with all my disagreements with them,

like that was awesome if they were like telling people to get involved in a type of way that they're simply not doing. Absolutely. And that you can tell the difference. And I just want to shout out, you know, comrade here in this city, Kelsey Bond here in Atlanta, just got elected to Atlanta City Council, the first socialist ever get in Atlanta history, to my knowledge. And they are every single speech.

This is a mass movement. You need to get involved. You need to talk to your names. And that's why a socialist in Atlanta whose opponents were in a five, you know, way raise whose opponent was backed by a mayor who did win got 63% of the vote here in Atlanta, Georgia in the heart of the south. So, you know, big moves coming on that front too. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. So let's go ahead and move to the other side. So we kind of talked about the, you know, left wing, well done versions of speculative fiction that are liberatory

at their core. We've talked about some mainstream versions of it that sort of compromise core issues or subtly sneak in, you know, anti-liberatory or reactionary elements. So let's go all the way to the other end of the spectrum. You mentioned 1984. There's other examples, you know, zombie media broadly, The Last of Us, Warhammer imagery, Punisher branding. I'm sure you even have more examples at hand. So, you know, these reactionary versions of speculative fiction,

what makes these narratives so easily weaponizable by reactionaries and what themes and tropes can we see in these reactionary forms of speculative fiction? that should set off our critical alarms. Well, one thing about reactionary culture is, you know, until it's dominant, a lot of times it has to hide the hand. It's why dog whistles are such a big thing, right? One thing that's become a huge dog whistle, both online and in-person, you know, fictional forums and whatnot conferences,

is like the Warhammer Space Marines. And I'm going to admit ignorance as the whole Warhammer thing. I've never played a game or read one of the books. We did cover one of the books on the pod, but I wasn't on the episode. But I know for a fact, though, the Marines in it, which are like the foot soldiers of this horrible empire in this game that is basically trying to spread this like religious cult across the universe. The Marines in it are despite, you know, maybe the creator saying, oh, well, they're bad. Most of it is focusing on how cool these Marines are. Even if the creators, you know, objectively they're just having fun, whatever, they are creating these characters that are supposed to be badasses.

they're spending all this time hyping up how cool these protagonists you play as are. So, you know, it leads to these people in these spaces using the Warhammer Space Marine as a symbol of, you know, politics, as a representative thing, as online, as a profile picture, as a way of signaling to other right-wingers. But also as a thing, if called out, you're like, what? It's a guy with a space suit on. You're being ridiculous. You know how they love to do that shit. You have things like SM Sterling, the domination of Draca,

where he's writing this series about what if alternate timeline where South Africa, white South Africa, became like the global hegemon or whatever. A book series that, like, you know, in some sense, I don't think S.M. Sterling thinks that's necessarily a good thing, but he's writing this series that then all these fascists glom onto and they think is great and awesome. Or you have things like zombie media,

which is very much like just depicting the unwashed mash of literal zombies versus the handful of, you know, strong, independent, often hyper-maskilling individuals who are holding back the literal tide. And, I mean, the most famous pieces of zombie media, first we've got the Walking Dead. I mean, the Walking Dead is literally, it's literally a cop is the main character.

And he's a Georgia, he's a Georgia Sheriff's Department guy with the Georgia State Patrol. I could promise you, first of all, Georgia State Patrol piss their first of them. pants if they saw a zombie. They piss their pants. They piss their pants if they see 30 Black Lives Matter protesters together. But that that's the kind of guy that we're putting as this, oh, he's wearing his

cowboy hat and he's shooting these zombies. And again, it's dangerous because if you say, well, no, come on, look at this. They're going to, they're going to say you're overreacting. You know, it's just fiction. You've got something like The Last of Us, which I have not seen the TV show, but with the games, you very specifically have Neil Druckman, a guy who is a, uh, you know, out and out, very rabid Zionist, who's from Israel, who is talking about, like, his characters,

he literally is doing an Israel-Palestine conflict, he says, in set in the United States with one of the fighting with the backdrop of zombies, and he's trying to introduce, you know, moral complexity into it, or who can say which side is good and which side is bad, and this, that, and the other. And then it always depicts the oppressed as bad, you know, and then it's, you've got, I mean, we already talked about 1984, you know, Punisher branding. You have this guy who's this vigilante who in the comic books is walking around shooting criminals doing the things that the police aren't willing to do. Well, who's glommed on to Punisher imagery. It's the police who are like considering themselves the rogue officer who's fighting against the system. You know, they're simultaneously part of the system and oppressed by the system. And they're able to think about themselves in this way. And you know, I have like, you know, the government of the United States playing to this. I mean, I'm in the gym the other day. They've got an ad to join ICE. They're saying, Atlanta police.

officers, you're wearing, you know, they have all these rules that are controlling you. Don't you want to just fight for your country? Join ice. You can take the gloves off. And they like flash a skull on the screen. And I'm like, that's a fucking Punisher reference right there. You know what I mean? They're doing the so they're referencing this media,

so they're able to use it. So it is this sort of a thing they can unite around, a way they can conceive of themselves, because to carry out the to be the tip of the spear of fascism or to support the most egregious acts of fascism, of imperialism. You have to have some self-conception of why you're superior, of why your

project can be carried it out, why you can do what type of violence that's okay to do when you do it. And you have to conceive of your enemies in a certain type of way. And so this media is extremely useful for them to think of their enemies as unhuman and dehumanize them. Last example I'll use here. And I'll confess, I love Lord of the Rings. I grew up with Lord of the Rings. But I mean, I just read for the podcast of Ben Shapiro's lines and Scavengers where he quotes extensively, from Lord of the Rings about these blonde guys riding horses with swords killing the orc hordes. And Ben Shapiro says in it,

you know, who would say the orc hordes have a superior culture to the riders? That's not racist. That's just saying one of them have a, it's, you know, it's obviously he's just being fucking racist. But it's a way people think of it. It's actually part of why in my book I had an ork, and he's one of the coolest guys in it. And he's normal and he's smart and he's complicated.

Because I, like, intentionally wanted to be like, I grew up loving the shit. But you know what would be great if like these people that like the whole their whole thing is that they're, you know, racially inferior in Tolkien and so much other media that, you know, uses these subhuman imagery for different creatures. If you know, you do lift them up and you make them noble and a member of the working class and someone you stand shoulder to shoulder with. So I think that's also a thing that we contend with. Tolkien is a little more complicated because of like, you know, he's also like anti-capitalist in certain ways. But God, that we would be here all day if we got it to.

that shit, but certainly useful for fascist aesthetics, that's for damn sure. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, the Ben Shapiro thing with the lions and scavengers, it's so fucking infantile, such a silly, childish, nonsensical,

ostensible analogy by which to understand society, it is so fucking stupid. But what's interesting is, you know, these blonde writers going in and beating down the orcs, and it has all these racial, this racial subtext, and stuff. And what's going on in the right right now is that a huge faction of the right,

you know, organized around like the America First and the Nick Fuentes factions of this civil war are now putting people like Ben Shapiro by virtue of being Jewish on the wrong side of that dividing line. And so there's a lot of anxiety now from figures like Ben Shapiro who has pushed this racialist, you know, politics, this hierarchical politic his entire fucking life as a, you know, born and bred member of the mainstream conservative right, he's now finding himself being

placed on the outside. And isn't that funny that that's always how it goes? That if you are a part of a minority community of any sort and you throw your lot in with the reactionary elements thinking you're one of the good ones and they'll interpret you as such, and that movement continues to evolve and move in that

direction, you're eventually placed outside the fence. You know, people like, Ash Patel and Vivek Ramaswamy can't even post on Twitter anymore without a whole bunch of right-wing attacks on their ethnicity. J.D. Vance is one of his most, you know, serious issues right now with this crowd is that he married, you know, a Hindu, an Indian woman, and he's supposed to marry a white Christian woman, and, you know, now he's forced into saying things like, I hope my wife discovers Christianity,

like all those weird shit. Jesus. where now you have to sacrifice your wife on the altar of this insane racialist, white identitarian politic that you've helped foment and ride the wave on in order to run into, you know, in the next presidential election, you have to now shore up your support with these freaks. So it's just,

that's a lesson, you know, and on the opposite side of that is our universalist human project of, of uniting around our common class interests and our common human global civilizational interests, bringing everybody in to say we are human beings, we are the working class, and our politic has a vision where all of us can live in harmony and we organize society around widespread human flourishing. And reactionary politics is just the exact fucking opposite. Absolutely.

So, yeah, they're eating their own in that regard. And Ben Shapiro, he's being thrown on the pyre as well. You know, I was hanging out with some friends last night and one of my dearest friends in Chi is Jewish was mentioning Ben Shapiro. We were laughing about that book how absurd it was and she said and then then Shapiro recently having this reaction and nick flintas being like why are they accepting this guy like he hates me and she said you know tokens always get spent what happens them happens them sorry like fuck you you know what i mean like that's literally like you know he's made his millions of this and i'm sure he'll continue to be comfortable for quite some time but um um and we'll continue to mock him relentlessly but as the as the as the right

says fuck around and find out you've made your bed this is this is what you get for for crawling in bed with those types. Yeah, well, this is, he wrote his book where the final chapter, he says there's three countries leading the world right now. Trump's America, Netanyahu's Israel and Malaise, Argentina. And I'm like, just kill me now if that's the, that's the future. But thank you for highlighting clearly the enemies of humanity, because that certainly are the top three leading spear points and everything reactionary. But yeah, the last thing I want to say is just on the zombie point. I love zombie movies, you know. Oh, yeah, they're fine.

28 days later is one of my favorite movies of all time. But earlier we're talking about how the mob, whether that's a stand-in for immigrant hordes or left-wing mass movements, zombies are the ultimate way in which the mob is fully dehumanized, right? Because it's not even

like regular people with pitchforks and masks anymore, like in the purge or in these other iterations. They're fully dehumanized mob. That a lone figure, almost a cowboy-type figure, you know has to rise to the challenge and take on the mob in the form of it being fully dehumanized a la zombies and so there are just you know frontier western settler colonial individualist defend

my property it's only me and mine versus the entire world narratives that are almost you know inexcapable when you start framing it in zombie terms it's um why i really respect uh danny boyle and alex garland's film 28 years later that came out this year i love that movie yeah because zombie movie, but it's like, well, look, the society that's like basically made like a mini Brexit to fight off the zombies is not coming to realize, one, these zombies can actually be like lived with and dwelt with in a certain type of way. Two, they're the product of, you know, human action. We would know from the first movie with like, you know, humans fucking around with this, you know, this science that maybe is they shouldn't have pharmaceutical testing.

And three, actually there is a humanity that can be found in this like in this other. And I, I, I hope they stick the landing with some of the sequels and actually like delivering on that kind of promise. But I think that there's, there is a way these things can be inverted. You know, these genres are not inherently bad. And I also wanted to add that I don't think someone is bad for depicting, you know, badass evil guys. My point, my point is that.

My point, or using zombies or using whatever. My point is just, you know, what politics are we bringing to it? What is our perspective? And are we infusing this with? And is the worlds that we're telling these stories, are they following the rules of the real world, when they're following the rules of the real world, when they're following dialectical materialism,

when humans are acting on a class basis and on the basis of their identity, you're going to have things play out in a very different way, even if these are complex characters, even if you have a lot of these tropes. It can work. I'm not scolding people and telling them to get rid of the cool shit and sci-fi they like.

It's just like, let's think about what we are representing here. Yeah, and when you get in these discussions sometimes, you'll hear the refrain of let people enjoy things. And my argument to that is, you and I are both fully admitting, we enjoy a lot of this stuff. I love all this stuff. It's fun.

But in fact, coming to it with a critical analytical lens, enjoying it in its own right, and then applying critical thought to the art you're engaging with actually increases the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic enjoyment of the film. You know, and walking out of a theater

and thinking deeply about the implications and the subtleties of, of it and the sort of ideological baggage that came along with it and parsing all that out is one of the best things about engaging with art. So yeah, let people enjoy things and even have more enjoyment by bringing this sort of deep thought and thinking to it instead of just a completely passive, you know, consumer of a thing. You can actually be a participant in it in some way. And I think that actually leads quite well to this next question I have, which is that you've

kind of suggested that revolutionary art. breaks the boundary between consumer and participant. I was hoping you can expand on what you meant by that and what qualities make a novel or a story or a film, push readers toward agency rather than, as I was just saying, merely totally passive consumption. Yeah, I often go back to Tony Cada Bombara's quote, as a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people,

my job is to make a revolution irresistible, is what she said. And I think there's something to that. I think there is something to this idea of when you are making, revolutionary art, breaking the boundary, it needs to tie into the real world, into real feelings. It's impossible to miss, you know, those real feelings if you're using your own experiences properly,

you know, following the real rules of the way the world operates. And I also think it's important that breaking those boundaries is possible when, one, we live in a world where, you know, you can, as the author, also speak to your audience that you built. But I think it's meaningful that Boots Riley, after creating, you know, sorry to bother you, is posting on social media about, here's how you unionize, here's how you get in contact with things, here's what we need to do. You know, that kind of thing. I think that's meaningful.

Oh, and I also think agency, you can give, you know, your reader's agency or your viewers' agency by showing characters that are not unlike them that are not superhuman. I mean, maybe they're superhuman and like powers in a story, but they're not, you know, Uberminsches, even if they're like, you know, Uberminsches of the kind that have, you know, good politics. They're not, you know, Luke Skywalker's or whatever that just have the powers and they're inborn and they're perfect and they're whatever. No, these are imperfect people like you who do working class jobs who come from the muck and they're going to make things different and they're going to screw up and they're going to exist in the real world. And the way they interact with

the world is going to in some way mirror the way you interact with the world. And things only change when people take action and take agency. Things do not just happen. They have to get involved. And I think it's doubly important too that just in the book itself, find a place in the book to, you know, link your, you know, link your readers to a fucking website where they can get involved or something like that. Just straight up say, hey, like, this is not a drill.

We've got real work to do. Let's be very clear about, you know, what we're ascertaining. Because, you know, as much as, as fun as it is to imagine, you know, work existing independently of the media around it. People do tend to see that. And I think that's important of like hammering down, no, here is what I mean and here is what we need to do. And if you thought this was cool, okay, next step.

I think that's also important too. Could not agree more. And that speaks to all of our point that art is transformative. It can deepen the subjective forces of revolution. It can make you engage more deeply with your world and with your own inner life and with your imagination, but ultimately it should propel, it should not act merely as a release valve for pent-up energy that you can go and expend and then go home feeling a little bit better about yourself, which, you know, sometimes films and stuff like that can do, but it actually should propel

you forward to go out into your real world and do something different, right? Your imagination is expanded, your consciousness is expanded, take that expanded consciousness and put it to work in making an actually better world. And so I love your idea about pointing people towards more resources and Boots Riley, you know, pointing people on how to get organized. And, you know, defending his film and what he actually meant by it and perpetuating a radical militant, straight up communist politic on the heels of that really great fucking film, which I loved. I was actually at a conference, I believe in Denver, where Boots Riley was present. And the whole conference watched the film and then had a Q&A with Boots Riley afterwards.

And I was sitting in the front row. It was actually a great memory. But another thing that I would also say between, you know, not merely being a passive consumer, which so much of social media, so much of the scrolling culture we live in now, puts you in a position of being, you know, more times than not just a completely passive consumer. And in regards to film and novel making and art more broadly also create, right? Like if you watch a great film, if you read a great book, you can also be inspired to go out and create. and when you are creative in the world, I think there is a sort of existential satisfaction that you get, not because it sells,

not because, you know, people love it or it's validated by the broader culture, but in the raw, mere act of creating itself, there is deep, deep enjoyment, especially if you can detach that creating from any other thing. Like,

I'm going to make this song or I'm going to write this book. And then I'm going to try to sell it. and whether or not this is successful will determine how I feel about this piece of art and the final analysis. No, forget all that. And practice creating things for the sake of creating them with no further end, you know, in mind as an end in and of itself. I think that is something that is so, so important, so existentially fulfilling and really, again, breaks down that merely consumption orientation towards an active participant in creating art and creating culture and being inspired by other people's examples.

Yeah. You know, that sounds great, but I have been reliably informed, Brett, that without a profit motive, people won't create art. That's true. That's a shame. Good point. It's crazy that art didn't come into existence until a few hundred years ago. Exactly.

Exactly. All right. So I'm going to zoom in here towards the last few questions. We had many questions. I think we addressed a lot of those in this organic conversation, but these last two questions are kind of, you know, the reflective aspects of it so far. You know, given all the dangers we've talked about,

what responsibilities would you say artists have when creating political works of art or world building political and social worlds? What principles or guardrails do you think help keep political art from sliding into liberal moralizing or reactionary messaging or even the idea that you can create a wholly non-political art in the first place. Well, honestly, part of it is just being involved yourself, right? Getting involved.

And I'll say this, for those of you that are listening to this, it's clearly because you are trying to, you know, learn. You are trying to, you know, even if you are, I hope you're entertained by a discussion, but you are just purely, and for entertainment, you are trying to learn something. You are trying to engage. So you've taken a first step, right? trying to educate oneself actually engaging with things that are not just for pure enjoyment. Don't be a writer who only scrolls on Instagram. I don't know if that's possible, but every now and then I read a book and I'm like, wow,

does this person read? Like, you need to read. You need to read way more than you write. You need to be engaging in your community, both politically and just as a person in the world. You need to be thinking about your place in the world and your perspective of how you can talk about things, right? I'm able to write in this book, you know, you can determine whether you feel it's effective or not. know, there's no accounting for taste, but I am able to write about this character who's worked these bullshit jobs, who's crushed under the weight of crushing debt, who has fears about

medical issues, who has anxiety about, you know, gender and sexuality and whatnot, because these are things that I, people I know and people in myself have dealt with. This is a thing that I engage with in the real world. The difference in us in somebody that is writing in an ivory tower who is disconnected from the world, who is trying to imagine, oh, what does. the poor's, what are the poor people like, you know, how do they engage? Is those, is that real experience? So stay plugged in. No matter, you know, I don't expect great financial success from this because that's not why I write. But even if you, someone is listening to this who has experienced great financial success, you know, from their work, Boots Riley, if you're listening

to this, continue to engage with these communities, continue to do political work, continue to challenge yourself. And I think that's also the beauty of class politics. You know, you don't have to write and abstract morality play about the fundamental unequal nature of work, housing, health care, and debt if you've lived with it. And that's what makes, you know, working class art so important. It's why we need to continue to create art, whether we have a profit motive to do it or not, whether or not we're being properly compensated for it. We're going to fight to get properly compensated for it. We're going to fight to get it out there. And it's why it's important that it comes from our class. It cannot be a thing that comes from, you know,

an intelligentsia, the later of intelligentsia that's just tied to capital. And it cannot, for the love of God, come from these fucking AI algorithms, which I think is, you know, I don't really believe in the supernatural, but that is the closest thing to heresy and blasphemy I've ever seen in real life is like the creation of art through artificial intelligence, which is a whole different conversation. But it is something that I think is worth noting to. So also think about that.

Like you are also fighting back against this fucking techno-fascist slop world that they want to create when you are creating her own art. Even if it's bad, like I love bad art. Make bad art, dude. Just do it. It's awesome. Yes. Absolutely.

When I was younger, I would make albums of music that I suck. There's no audience for it. I never even pretended or even thought that I was going to give it to anybody or tried to make it a thing or upload it on any platform. I seriously, literally just made it for myself. I would be the only person that listened to it. I would get immense, immense satisfaction out of it. And so you really can't underestimate the role of just creating. to create and the existential, you know, just the existential satisfaction that comes from not worrying

about the market pressures and the validation that comes with it. To liberate your art from that, I think is so important. But you ended that on an incredibly strong note. I'm almost hesitant to bring it up. But I, you know, we talked about AI, maybe having you back on to do a another episode on it. But what I have noticed is like, yeah, the AI seeping in everywhere. I mean, I'm sure you see this in education even on like YouTube you know people that I like a lot that I've followed on YouTube now that AI's come you can tell that they're

starting to write their scripts with AI and there's some total gives like if you hear somebody say and here's the kicker right that's that's a give one of the other gives is it's not because of this it's this it's this it's not this it's that like whenever you see

that pattern of speech I know immediately it's chat GPT and the people like in the in the comments and stuff they'll totally believe that this is this person creating something and it's just the it's brought down it's diluted to like this minimum bar and you know AI does not write well it has these sort of gives and and these these giveaways that are so obvious and it's just you know people are now starting to think and write in the cadence of AI and it's like what a what a poison that is you know yep and I also think it's worth noting it doesn't

write well and should it learn to write well I don't necessarily think it will because of a variety of factors but should it learn to, it is still every bit as heinous that we are giving up that agency to algorithms, that we are even if it could replicate your style of voice that you are giving up your own internal

model like I said this earlier as a joke but you know do we really want our internal monologue our innermost self to sound like you know the voice over AI shit on TikTok like no we want to have our own agency, our own ability to think, even if that's imperfect, our own

ability to engage with others, and we do not want to outsource that to anyone. Certainly not to these fucking algorithms that, you know, cook the planet. I was joking with a friend yesterday where he's like, oh, I took a really long shower and I'm like, oh, but chat GBT need that water. Like, how selfish

of you? I do have some, I do think that the bottom may fall out on this AI market sooner or rather than later. We'll see just on the financial level because this is an absurd capitalist expenditure that is making no money for anybody yet the money continues to flow but even if it doesn't um yeah this is some shit we have to fight back against and by the act of creating you are fighting back against it and also

you know being discerning in your own tastes last thing i'll say on that is uh one thing that makes me really mad is i like to put uh i like to put a lot of dashes m dashes in my writing me too i does that i know me too they do it poorly And I'm like, no, they take the M-Dash for me from my cold dead hand. You can tell the difference in a human M-Dash and an AI M-Dash. At least you still can. And I like to think I always will be able to. I always use semicolons and dashes.

I always have my entire life. I like these long, extended sentences that encapsulate multiple points. And so, yeah, seeing the M-Dash be being robbed from us by AI, we have to fight for it back for sure. But ultimately, and I leave people with this note, when it comes to AI and what we called earlier, the dopamine casino, constant distraction and consumption is there's a couple main ways that I would say that you can protect your interiority and your subjectivity and your inner life from being colonized by these algorithmically enhanced corporate fucking platforms. And that is a few simple things.

And this is not exhaustive, but these are some things I always like to remind people to do. Spend time alone in nature without any device. Yep. Read as much as you can, even challenging works of philosophy or literature that really make you have to reread a passage two, three, four times. to understand what the fuck's going on. Write and create art, whatever that means to you, write lyrics for music, write poetry, write prose, you know, write essays, anything that where you can get your own voice out on paper.

And actually in the process of doing that, you create and cultivate your own voice. That's so important. And then finally, I really do recommend meditation because meditation is a way for that observing function of your mind to grow, where you can watch and become aware of your inner life. Instead of being completely identified with every thought that goes through your head, which is its own type of prison, meditation allows you this radical capacity to expand your awareness beyond automatic identification with thoughts, emotions, and sensations, and gives you this internal space by which you can observe those functions. And by observing that within yourself,

your understanding of other people's, psychologies, and emotional worlds deepen and compassion naturally flows out from that. Wisdom and compassion are the natural byproducts of consistent meditation practice. And it's a way to cultivate and to take back your attentional capacity from a world that is increasingly fragmented and increasingly invested in keeping you distracted 24-7. So those are just some things that I would put out there to really take seriously and try to carve out space in your busy week. And I know how busy our lives are just to keep our heads above water.

we have to constantly be moving. But if you can carve out any time in your daily week, your day, your week, your month to do those things, I think that is genuinely constructive and helpful. You know, Brett, there's a lot of lies about Marxist professors at university and how radical left they are. But every now and then you do get one when you go to school. Most of, I have very few, I maybe had three professors to the left of Mayor Pete.

I did have one who taught me a religions class and he's a Buddhist. and he is from China and I actually since returned to China but was spending some time here. And he said to me, we got in a conversation about it where he was talking about meditation. He was like, look, you don't have to buy into some of the religious principles of Buddhism. He's like, but he said something along the lines of, I sincerely think we will not see socialism. We will not see justice in a world without meditation. And I thought that was a really, really powerful thing that I was told then that I didn't really get the full weight of. I was like, okay, yeah, sure, man.

But now I'm like, oh, I totally understand what he's saying. Even if it's not necessarily the Zen Buddhism style of meditation, certainly can be. Just sitting and being with yourself and thinking and breathing and being in your body and realizing you are flesh and blood in a world. You are part of an ecosystem. You are part of a broader, something broader, something grander. You know, there need be no more than that for you to realize that this world is too precious and you are too precious to live with the kind of injustice and a,

degradation we face every day. Absolutely. And it's so funny you say that. And I agree with it so much. And my book is really centered around that is highlighting the need for the objective need for socio-political economic evolution and the corresponding evolution of subjectivity that comes with it because ego identification, I think, is the subjective aspect of the objective components of class society. You know, completely being one-in-one identified with your ego. is it feeds in so well to the dynamics of class society and certainly the dynamics of of of capitalism. And if we want to build a socialist world and then a communist world, we have to at the same time develop a new subjective capacity. And, you know, that goes along with that. And why wouldn't we need that?

You know, in a dialectical frame, we understand that the inside and the outside, the subjective and the objective, they're not separable. They are in process together. The one influences the other, turns around and influences the first. And so, you know, if we can fight for the objective evolution of society and at the same time cultivate within ourselves this subjective evolution, which like the principles of dialectics, transcend and includes. So you're not like getting rid of your personal sense of self or killing your ego or something and going to like a pre-self, like a infant or an animal that doesn't, that hasn't cultivated a self. You go through having ego, you go through that identification process of a separate individual personality, and then you transcend it. And you include the parts of it that are generative and that can stay fresh and that can

keep being progressive while expanding your capacity to see beyond it. In a very similar way that when we become adults, we look back at our childhood selves, we don't look back at our childhood selves with disgust or disdain. We're kids. We didn't know. all the silly things we believed, all the naivete, we look back actually with compassion on our younger selves. And more than that, our childhood selves are also fundamental in forming our adult selves. So it's not actually separate.

We've transcended childhood, but we also include it. And in a very similar way, the next stage of subjective evolution is to transcend ego identification, include what it means to be a self and an individual, but then be able to cultivate an awareness that can transcend and go beyond it. And that is a dialectical internal subjective process that mirrors an outward political, social, and economic dialectical process at the same time. So that's what I'm writing my book on. And I'm hoping to be able to articulate it in a way that resonates with people. And it's interesting because the protagonist of my novel, Alaria, has any connection with sort of the thrum of everybody. And she can only get that when she meditates.

Yes. And I've had some early reviews. My early reviews have been positive, but I've had some people be like, where does this come? from exactly. Why did she have that? Well, I actually do kind of hide the hints in the novel, so I won't drop it completely. But if anyone who does end up reading it wants to check it out, take a look at the timeline of when there are different, when it points out there have been different people's movements and then trace it along the Alaria's life and you may figure out why she is able to check out the sort

of soul of the self. And if I do get a sequel, that I'll just spell it out. But actually, all the clues are in the book. If someone wants to see if they can figure it out. So a little hip there. Nice. Yeah, I like that a lot. That actually helps. Yeah, I encourage people. Go get through.

If you want to start reading, start with this book. It's a great way forward. But with all that said, I really, really appreciate you, Jacob. I appreciate your organizing work, your artistic work. And you're just a great guest. And I could talk with you all damn day. You know, we've done a few collabs. And I hope that we have many, many more to come.

Maybe when my book finally gets finished and released, I can come on yours and we can talk about it. But, you know, you know. As we wrap up this conversation, can you just please let people know where they can find you, your book, your podcast, and perhaps your organization or any organization you would recommend to people online or people listening who want to get involved? Yes. So I am going to recommend, well, first of all, I'll say the book is they called a rebel by Jacob Dallas. You can get that on any number of websites. I would also recommend if you've got a local bookstore, please ask them to order it. Please buy it through there.

That is something that I believe in. Um, you know, but also you can get through Barnes and Noble or Amazon or wherever you want to. But, you know, there, there's a whole variety of ways to get it. I'll also say, uh, for anyone listening who has, uh, financial need, um, if you're my publisher right now, don't listen. But, uh, if you so, if you happen to send an email to workers lit at gmail.com, maybe a PDF will find its way into your inbox. Uh, yeah, you can start listening again if you're my publisher. Uh, I didn't say anything. Um, but, uh, the, uh, it, And yeah, so there's that, we're workers lit on Instagram, on blue sky and on YouTube. That's where we're at.

And on substack. That's where we're at right now. Trying to do a little better at our game on those and workers lit on pretty much every podcast app you can find. Yeah, and as for organizing, what I'm going to say is it depends on where you're at. But so I would say find, this is the thing that I've been telling people because I've, you know, I've run to a lot of people who have been kind of burning out just trying to join the right organization. And in quotes, what I would recommend people do is think about an issue that absolutely burns you the fuck up and find somebody in your area that's doing work on it. And if they're not, then that means you're going to have, it's on you to start the organization.

I would recommend, you know, there's any number, and there's any number of great national organizations you can get involved with on all kinds of levels from PSL, the DSA to FRS. So they're doing all kinds of work. We've, you know, had people from behind enemy lines on the show. I respect what they're doing. There's a lot of great folks. Find something that burns you up. Get involved in it and talk to your neighbors about it. Have a conversation with the people who live close around you geographically about the kind of work you're doing, the kind of thing they're interested in.

Keep those networks alive. It's going to be increasingly important. I mean, I think maybe the spearhead of the fight right now is kicking ice the fuck out of our communities. And the only way that happens is win just neighborhoods. activate. If you've got some kind of neighborhood watch against ICE, some kind of network, you can join some rapid response network. A lot of states and big cities have them.

I think that's maybe the best thing you can possibly be doing. So that's what I'll say. You've got to find a way to get plugged in in some way. That's going to be different for every single person. But we've got to make it happen. Maybe by the time I'll come back on, there will be a declaration of the Grand American

Communist Party where every force has united as one. Until that happens, find the one you can link up with and, you know, keep an open mind to working with others. That's what I say. Amen. Well said. I'll link to as much of that as possible in the show notes so people can find the book and the podcast and all that stuff easier. I totally endorse everything you said about organization and how to get involved. And yeah, keep up the amazing work and I'm guaranteed. This is not the last time you and I will speak together. Thank you so much for coming on today.

For sure. Thank you so much, Brett.