Rev Left Radio - [UNLOCKED] Alyson and Breht Answer Your Questions

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

Breht and Alyson spend over three hours answering your questions on a wide range of topics! Subscribe to Rev Left Radio on YouTube to be notified about future livestreams like this one HERE   ---------------------------------------------------- Check out our NEW REV LEFT MERCH with Goods For The People 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/

All right, hello, hello. So we're just going to go ahead and make this happen. Sorry about the technical difficulties. We try. We're going to launch a Patreon live stream for the first time, and that was an abject failure. But we are here. We're doing the live stream. And Allison and I have agreed to try to cover as many questions as we possibly can.

Starting from the first submitted. So we're going to take these in order that they were posted on our Patreon and work through as many as possible. And as things continue to smooth and out. We will also check the live chat. I just want to make sure I have the panel open. Okay, the live chat and we'll, as we go through, perhaps interact with our comrades and listeners in the live chat itself. So let's just go ahead and get into it. People will still trickle in.

I know this is not ideal. We had to kind of fly by the seat of our pants with regards to doing this over here, but it is what it is. So we can just take turns, perhaps, asking questions. Allison, I'll go first. Yeah, that sounds perfect. Okay. This is a week ago from Peraoero. Hello, Brett and Allison.

Could you please discuss the plausibility of the U.S. out of frustration and desperation to maintain hegemony in West Asia, actually launching some type of nuclear strike against Iran? Not only how plausible that may be, but also what could be potential reactions by the Global South, specifically by Russia, China, and the DPRK. I know it's a big question, but your dialectical analysis on the subject would be appreciated.

Thank you for the question. Allison, I'll let you take first stab at that. Okay. That is a big question. So I think, one, I don't really feel like super good at predicting international events anymore given the state of the world and how unstable things are. So I don't feel like I can give like a prediction per se. But I do think I generally in sympathetic to deterrence theory and the idea that nuclear mutually

assured destruction generally prevents states from acting aggressively with nuclear weapons. Now, the United States has broken a lot of other conventions that international relations theory tends to rely on within the last couple years. So obviously, I don't think that's any guarantee, but I do kind of still feel like a nuclear taboo exists and is somewhat meaningful in a way that would likely prevent the U.S. from doing that. In terms of what the response is, I mean, that's where we find out whether or not that taboo is based on anything, right? My honest read, though, is that I don't think third-party countries would necessarily respond directly to U.S. aggression against Iran if they were to say use like a tactical nuke. I don't know that that would

receive a nuclear counter strike. But one thing that I think is worthwhile considering in the context of nukes is that if we were to ever use anything other than like a plane-based tactical nuke, that would require missile launches that would go over the airspace of other countries, which creates a really high risk of miscalculation and then response there. So for all those reasons, though, I kind of think that mutually assured destruction probably does. just check back against the use of that. I also think the U.S. has pretty horrifying, conventional weaponry that it is willing to use, and does it need to use nuclear weapons in order to do some of what its goals might be in terms of just total destruction? So I don't know.

Personally, I don't think that it's highly plausible. I guess it's always a possibility, but that's sort of how I look at it. Yeah, I kind of, I echoed the sentiment. I don't think it's plausible for many reasons. I think it would be really unprecedented in the modern for any state to use it and I think any state would immediately become more or less a pariah state. I don't think the U.S. has to do it. It's not existential for the U.S. The time that they dropped it on Japan was, it was, I mean, a disgusting act of mass murder, to be clear, but it was an attempt to flex to the rest of the world, specifically to the Soviet Union that we have this type of capability. And it was obviously a way to just put a nail in the coffin of the Japanese who were already

going to surrender and with the fall of the Nazis, it was inevitable anyway. So I really don't ever want to downplay the unnecessary nature of those strikes, the disgusting, terroristic, mass murderous nature of those strikes. The fact that the whole world just metabolized to that and more or less moved on, I think was grotesque. I find it hard to believe that if those nukes were dropped on a white Western country, that the reaction would be similarly indifferent. But, you know, that's all historical, you know, stuff at this point. So no, I don't think it's plausible. I don't think anything could happen that would make the U.S. nuke Iran. I mean, things, I could be wrong. I mean, it is the Trump administration after all. I think the likelihood of Israel with its back in the corner

in some future unforeseen situation is much more likely than pretty much anybody else on the board to launch a first strike nuclear attack. But even that would actually also be the end of Israel. I think because the rest of the world would, you know, it would just speed up the trajectory by which this already rogue terrorist settler colonial entity that the world hates is now using nuclear bombs. I think that would be a situation in which hopefully significant portions of the world would come together to end Israel as it exists at all. But even that is so on is really just, it is the top of the escalatory ladder. and for somebody just to jump there, it would have to be extraordinary circumstances, and it would have just really unprecedented and really unpredictable consequences. But to your specific question, I do not think nuclear weapons or nuclear strike from the USA is anything like on the table. So, all right, let's go.

We have to kind of not linger too much on specific questions. Allison and I are long-winded, so we ultimately probably will do that, but we're going to try not to. So, Allison, yeah, you want to take turns reading the questions? Yeah, I'll read the next one, which is perfect for me to read because it starts with, this is for Brett. So when I found out that you were based in Omaha, I was pretty proud as I'm from the state as well. Nebraska is a pretty conservative state with some fucked up electoral politics as of late. I understand you're a parent, me too, and my question is this.

How do you reckon with that, especially raising kids as you developed politically? Did you ever consider moving to another more blue state? what made you decide to stay? Thank you. You are a huge inspiration to me. By the way, I love your podcast about parenting. Thank you. Thank you.

I appreciate that. That's awesome that you're from Nebraska as well. You know, it's one of those states where everybody thinks it's terrible, and obviously they're much cooler states. But, you know, I'm proud insofar as that's reasonable to be, you know, from Omaha, Nebraska, a little small city. I like that Rev. Left kind of puts Omaha on the map a little bit.

I'm proud of the things that come out, just because this is my home. This is where I was born. This is where I was raised. My whole childhood. This is where I'm raising my kids. I've never considered moving out of the state. I'm one of those stay and fight people.

Liberals will talk about if so-and-so wins, I'm going to move to Canada and all this is like, I don't know, man, I'm here. I'm not rich enough to move internationally. I love my community that I have, my friends from high school, my family, my extended family, new friendships that I'm developing at work.

So I have never had, nor do I have right now. and urge to move out of Omaha. You know, it is a, it's a progressive place relative to what's around it. Yes, Nebraska is a deep red state. Omaha itself. And, you know, Lincoln has a flagship university. Omaha has a university. It's a bigger city.

Omaha is the biggest city out of Nebraska, Iowa, South and North Dakota, Wyoming, and Kansas. I know there's Kansas City, but that's mostly on the Missouri side. So, you know, Omaha is sort of a big metro for the Great Plains region, which is obviously relative. So it does have progressive politics to an extent, but it is kind of moderate. It is conservative. There's also this amazing history of the populist party coming from the Great Plains. And the Gilded Age, right, I graduated from William Jennings Bryan High School, for example. And he was a populist figure that ran in the late 1800s and into the 1900s pushing an economic

economically very progressive politic that eventually gave rise to the progressive era and the New Deal. Lots of things to critique about that whole period of time, but I think there's something cool in that. And I kind of see myself in a tiny way as like the prairie populist or the prairie radical.

There's something to be said about that. So, no, I'm not moving. This is where my family and my friends are. I stay in fight. I love Omaha. I love repping Omaha. I'm in a union, an Omaha-based union. Rev. Left is always going to be Omaha-based.

So I don't really worry about that too much. Blue states have their own problems in a lot of ways. I just don't think that you're going to move to any place in America as a working class person and have everything be great. So, yeah, it is what it is. Allison, do you have any thoughts on that particular question, even though it is technically aimed at me? Totally. Yeah, I know. I mean, I think trying to proactively leave conservative states is probably a losing strategy for both like the far left and progressive generally in the U.S.

I think there are obvious reasons like people might need to leave for safety, but doing that proactively and ahead of time does kind of feel like seating ground a little bit. And then I think like the other thing is like, I don't know, I often feel like this, oh, let's get to a blue state thing is an oversimplification as someone who lives in one of the bluer states in the country. Still has a horrible cost of living, still has racist policing, still has one of the most horrific prison systems of any state in just horrific injustices that exist here. So the idea that that's just like a clean solution, I think is, you know, maybe not necessarily founded. Thinking about California, again, as like a democratic stronghold, it still has its own kind of brand of reactionary democratic fascism, I would say, and has all of its own problems. So I don't know. I just don't think like seeding territory in that sense ahead of time is the correct call. Yeah.

I'm a midwesterner, you know, for better or worse. And that's kind of like where I like living in the cost of living here compared to pretty much anywhere else in the country. is much more reasonable. You know, gas prices soar up, you know, in California and on the coast, and it still stays, I mean, it's still high for us, but it's reasonably in cap. So, I mean, there are benefits. I'm in a good school system for my kids, a good public school system, so I can't hate on that. So, yeah, that's why I decided to stay, and I will be here indefinitely, precisely because of the community,

comrades, friends, family, extended family. All right, the next question from Mickey Marks. Hello, you've mentioned you do a socialist night school in your hometown. Would you ever consider doing an online version of that course? I feel like we could help fund it. I've been eager for more trusted education on socialism, Marxism, and would help in inviting more to learn as well. Thanks for all you do, love and solidarity from Phoenix.

I've been to Phoenix. I enjoy that city quite a bit. Allison, I know this is technically geared toward me, but I think what we do on Red Menace, I mean, I think it's not a course necessarily, but it is in the vein of political education and the socialist night school that I've done. I taught classes on historical and dialectical materialism.

which you and I do on the show, right? Right. Do you have any thoughts on anything? Yeah, no. I mean, I hope that's kind of what we're getting at on the show generally. In terms of like doing a more dedicated, like, online class, I guess, I'd be open to the possibility of doing it. I think political education is something I care about a lot.

It's why we do this show. I also have done political education work just in terms of like in real life organizing and focused on that. So I wouldn't be opposed to the idea. I think the bigger problem is like, how do you make that scale for the amount of people who might be interested in doing that, which is always kind of the tricky part. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

I mean, again, not opposed to the idea, I think it would be cool. Maybe if Socialist Night School runs its course, I mean, maybe that would be able to be translatable onto an audio form because all the teachers are my friends, right? It could happen. But, yeah, it's an interesting thought for sure. But more than that, I would like people to run their own socialist night school versions

in their own communities. Because, you know, we reach a certain audience online, obviously, and sort of an already convinced audience doing that stuff in your community I think has a different impact that is worthwhile. Next question. Hi Brett and Allison, I'm a huge fan of the pod, but my question is about something I'm a bigger

fan of, and that's the history of losers. I'm fascinated by the losers of history that were smashed by progressive forces of history. The Confederacy, the Third Reich, MAGA. No, it's not crushed yet, but it's on its way out. My question is that we can learn from the new interest on the right of their imagined

promised land of Rhodesia, thankfully and correctly known as Zimbabwe. I have no love or respect for that former state. I'm very interested in how so many of the right ignore the disgusting nature of that country because I don't know people from England had farms or something. Anyway, thanks.

Allison, you want to take a step back. Yeah, this is an interesting one. So, I mean, I'm trying to like parse the question somewhat, whether it's can we learn something from Rhodesia or learn something from the rights interest in Rhodesia? But assuming it's the right's interest in Rhodesia, I do think there's some stuff there, right? Rhodesia, I think, like, fits this very specific far-right fantasy, both of, like, settler colonial racial supremacy.

but also, and I think you gestured at this towards the end with the question about farming, this like return to the land almost kind of like eco-fascist ethic that I think has become more popular on far right kind of like Twitter and Instagram in these places where it's not just selling like racial supremacy, but it's selling this reactionary return to almost like a pre-industrial way of living. And I think this is always what's interesting with fascism like in the proper sense is that it integrates a sort of like shitty critique of modernity that, you know, is populist in nature that can take into account the fact that alienated living in, you know, modern context can suck and promises this simple return to a previous time.

And I think Rhodesia as like a concept really gives that to the far, right? It does have this, oh, just go do farming, protect your land, fight for your people, white supremacy thing. But that doesn't mean much in the context of the United States anymore, even though the U.S. is also a settler colonial society. So I would suggest that the fascination is there. And again, it has the kind of like eco-fascist twist that I feel like fascists are more and more leaning on probably as a response to the fact that like environmental collapse is accelerating. There's something about that that I think they generally are interested in. So that's what I see bubbling up in the right-wing's fascination of Rhodesia, at least. What can we learn from like Rhodesia?

Probably how to, you know, engage in successful struggle against a suburbial state, given that they lost, right? There's definitely some military history to learn there. Yeah, that's kind of a basic shot at it. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I think of apartheid South Africa, and I think that Israel's next. You know, I said MAGA kind of joke of MAGA is sort of dead. I mean, there's only the cult left, only the 50 plus Fox News boomers left on that dying train. But Israel really, I think, is next up. There's no way they can survive long term.

I think there's something about fascist movements in general. That sort of this death drive accelerationism that is inherent to fascism makes them temporary flashes in the pan. And from the Leninist perspective, fascism is capitalism and decay. So when there's the restoration of a stabilized capitalism, there's no more need for the fascist movement itself. And dialectically, fascist movements always create and strengthen. in their opposition. The more your boot is on somebody's neck, the more they're going to want to get it off. That's true for settler colonial occupations and apartheids, and that's true for overt domestic fascist movements. And the promises of fascism are always a lie. Even the reactionary right

in the U.S., the whole promise of MAGA has been revealed to be an utter lie. It's all about the elite. They've captured that movement. The propaganda campaigns were just for the rubs to fall for. millions and millions of Americans fell for it. Of course, we did not. We were calling it out the entire time exactly how this was going to play out, and we've been vindicated by that, but that's, I think, the strength of a Marxist analysis.

But the right-wing populism is always a lie. Fascism is always ephemeral. Once capitalism has been stabilized, there's no more need for it, and dialectically, fascism and settler colonialism create and strengthen their own opposition. So I think they are doomed from the beginning. And even if the Third Reich

would have survived that particular war or the Confederacy would have survived in some way, shape, or form the civil war, they would have fizzled out eventually for a number of reasons. So hopefully that answers your question. I too am interested in that. But yeah, so Allison, you can ask the next one. Yeah. So hello, Brett and Allison. My question is for newer leftists who are looking for educational material. What are some resources for getting Marxist current events slash breaking news? I've been specifically looking for sources that cover the socialist experiments around the world without the Western propaganda like China, Cuba, etc. Yeah, I mean, I think just I didn't prep for this, so I'm just kind of coming off the top of my head, but there's like breakthrough news, there's Monda Weiss that I like. There's cradle. The cradle, I think, is interesting for certain politics.

Or I'm sorry, for geopolitics, I mean. Alison, do you have any that jump to mind? The person in the comments, by the way, said they recommended upstream podcasts. We love the comrades over at Upstream. They're friends of ours, great people. They do coverage of Cuba. Yeah. So I think upstream would be my other recommendation.

You know, some of it's like specific to specific things, right? So for Venezuela, Venezuela analysis is a site that I find very useful. But I would also say like you should read mainstream bourgeois news, right? Because you should practice seeing the ideology that's baked into that, trying to work through it, trying to parse through it. So I will be honest, like 90% of the current. events breaking news that I read is mainstream boucho perspectives. And I do think it's pretty good to engage with that and not just look for the Marxist perspective. But I think those suggestions on there are good. And

then to be honest, when I'm often looking for the Marxist perspective, that's what I see on fucking Twitter, right? Like there are Twitter accounts that post stuff that I generally find insightful. I take them with a grain of salt generally. But, you know, I don't think like current event publications from a Marxist perspective are very large right now, unfortunately. We got a lot of people writing theory, not so many people writing that angle. Yeah, it's kind of some thoughts at least.

Some other ones in the comment sections were the socialist program, the gray zone, electronic antifada, you know, there's things that you can go and interact with. But I too, am like you, is like I have the Marxist analysis as my sort of filter in my lens. So I can engage with any media,

right-wing media, liberal media, centrist media, take what's useful, learn about it, extract what I can for my own political project. So that's how I think about it. The way that I get my daily news, for better or worse, and there's plenty to critique about it, but is breaking points on YouTube. I find it to be kind of an interesting way of presenting the news. They have like the new right, Sagar and Jetty,

and they have Crystal Ball, which is like the Democratic Socialist Left, both dissidents against the status quo. So the New Right and like the Democratic Socialist left both have critiques, the Democrats and the Republicans and the elite as a whole. They're very good on the question of Israel in particular. So on a daily basis, I'm getting my current news actually from breaking points. But again, it's entering the Marxist analysis already.

So it's not like, you know, I'm not like taking that wholesaling. And I think at a certain point in your political development, you don't take anything wholesale. You engage naturally, intuitively, and automatically, you engage critically with everything. and so I think that's that's the right answer there's there is no this is clear there is no one spot where you can go and get the perfectly polished packaged packaged ready to go Marxist analysis on every single you know current event you have to bring that to your investigation of the full

spectrum of the of the news media so no easy answers there but but yeah that's kind of that's kind of my approach um all right let's move on let's see Hi, Brent Allison. Me and my girlfriend loved the pod, and it has shaped a lot of our political tendency. We are very grateful for y'all. We're encountering a very difficult situation involving one of our communities. We live in San Francisco and play Ultimate Frisbee as our main sport and community. This year, our club team, there is a player attempting to join the team who is a cop.

The person was previously on the team and is in very good standing with various members of the community. We and some others obviously take major issue with allowing a cop on the team. Any others do not and have a biased perspective because it's their friend, and while they are all lives living in San Fran. Many of them bring up very individualistic perspectives about how they might be a good cop or they join for good reasons. It is a difficult thing to grapple with because it's a community of people we care about and get a lot of joy about playing a sport with. We want them to learn. We are doing our best to educate and bring people out of their positions of comfort and privilege, but it's difficult.

We are grappling with what it means to be part of a community with such a political schism. Many of them simply operating from a completely propagandized and indoctrinated perspective. Do we just abandon them? Do we suck it up and say, okay, we'll play with the cop. Thanks for your guidance. Yeah, this is a really interesting question. So, okay, one, I think, like, it's probably worth trying to tease out a couple of distinctions about, like, what your concerns are. So, one, if the concern about having the cop on the team is, like, very practical, i.e., having a

police officer on the team is likely to put other people on the team in danger, legally, or in other ways, I would highlight that, right? That's, like, the material consequence of what having a police officer on the team would do. And so I would focus on that and really try to push that more than like even necessarily just I'm not willing to play with the cop on moral grounds, just in terms of that being more persuasive and then opening a discussion about the broader ethics and then the systemic framework of what police are. But trying to start with like what the concern is concretely is what I would try to do.

In terms of like, you know, playing sports with people who you do not agree with their politics on, this is weirdly something that I have like a lot of experience with because I live on a street with a park that is very popular for public sports. Almost every night after work, I play sports with people in that park who come from a whole wide variety of political spectrum, some of which I very strongly agree with. And I will say that in my experience, sports is actually a really good way to get to talk about politics with people, interestingly. You get to know each other. They let their guard down. And I've had some actually like direct conversations about Palestine, the war against Iran and all that with people in the park just from playing sports. So I

would say if people have different politics than you in the context of like a sports setting, that shouldn't be like a game changer, right? Because we actually should try to talk with people who have different politics than us and who disagree with us politically. And I think sports is an avenue that's under explored for doing that. But again, there are concrete safety concerns. Police aren't just like random people. They have a job that makes them a danger and a threat to others. And I do think drawing a line there can make a ton of sense. I guess what I would encourage is like don't abandon the league, don't abandon the sport. If you feel like you need to be on a different team, I think that would make sense. And I think, again, really concretely explaining what

your material concern is will create the space to then have the political discussion. So I don't know what the solution is, but those are all the things that I would think about. And I think like having these discussions in the context of sports is actually meaningful. And I think it's good that you are raising this question, wrestling with it. And it sounds like discussing it with the other people in the league as well. So I don't know how hopeful that is, but those are some broad thoughts at least. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think, you know, this, from what I can tell, this is not an organizing effort.

So this is a sports team, right? So you're going to just have people from different walks of life. And since it's not organizing, there's not the immediate concern about allowing a cop into a left-wing organizing space. Given Allison's, you know, really good point is like if anybody, like, is made less safe from that presence, of course, you should, think about that and not allow that in and that would be your leverage. But in lieu of that, there is no organizing. Nobody is particularly susceptible to police violence or legal troubles

by being in the proximity of a cop. I actually, I would personally see it as an interesting experience. I would take it as like, this is an opportunity. As I get closer to this person, I can like sort of ask them some thoughts on their job, get an inside perspective of what it's like being a cop, maybe put some pressure on it, ask them how they feel like, heighten the contradictions in their own mind about being in one. So, but that's, that's kind of my, you know, and I am a straight white guy. So, you know, I, you know, maybe there's obviously different communities have much different relationships and have much difficult, much more difficult time being able to do that or even

have the patience or the temperament to want to do that. I totally get that. But I'm surrounded at work and in my life by various forms of right wing people, not like fascist or Nazis, obviously, but, you know, just right-wing people, including cops. There's a young sort of guy in my family, my extended family. I'm not particularly very close with, but I've always liked, and, you know, we meet up at family events and stuff, and he joined the police force. I know from just knowing him growing up, since he was a little kid, that he is a good

person. He's not a racist. I mean, he's a second-generation immigrant. You know, he doesn't have a political analysis that would make him skeptical of policing as a whole, of course. he's not really a political guy. And, you know, so I could reasonably say that's a good person. I know him.

I like him. I know he's not out there being a racist bully. I think, I hope, maybe in the social pressures of being a cop, maybe some of those things do happen. I don't have any insight into that. So, yeah, I would, given that there's no danger, given that you're not technically organizing, it is just a sports team, I play on volleyball leagues,

I play on softball teams. I'm trying to join a BJJ gym. So I'm surrounded by just like people, that as our friends of friends of friends that make it onto the team. And while I haven't particularly dealt with a cop, you know, I've dealt with various forms of people that are obviously not an automatic political comrade of mine. But again, I find that as an interesting opportunity, not as something to necessarily run away from. So given the caveats that we said, I would encourage you to kind of like see if like this is an opportunity to like get a first person perspective

on what it means to be in policing, kind of kind of check them out, see how they, how they are as a human being, how they treat other people on the team, and kind of go from there. I think perhaps stepping out or making this a red line in the sand that ends the team or at least separates you from that community, I think that might be even more destructive than just staying the course and kind of seeing what happens. Things could change. It could be revealed that this person is an absolute asshole or a reactionary or unsafe in various ways. and then you could push the point. But from what I read here,

I don't think there's a reason to do that quite yet. Alison, does that make sense to you? Does that sound right? Yeah, I think the context is meaningful. Like, yeah, an organization versus a sports team are different things. So I think that definitely makes sense. I mean, for me, again, like,

I think the safety thing can be pretty concerning depending on who's on the team in the context, right? So the main thing is, like, have an open conversation, I think, which it does sound like from your question, you are having, right? It sounds like you're talking to your teammates. You're frustrated by their reasoning a little bit. Hopefully that's becoming a productive conversation where you can, again, ground these concerns like very concretely. But it is going to be kind of contextual. The line for who I would play a sport with versus who I would organize with is a very, very, very,

very different line. And I think that's a reasonable thing to point out. Absolutely. All right. You can read the next one. Awesome. All right. So the next one, this one says, need better strategies on explaining the three-way fight to family Democrat liberals. I'm not sure I need a more direct approach or something different. Yeah, okay, so the three-way fight is basically being very clear that there is the centrist ruling class elite. That's the Democrats, the Republicans, what we call liberals and conservatives mostly, although some liberals can be so far left that they might be closer to the meaningfully radical left, but, you know, there's a spectrum there.

And so that's one, so one block is the centrist ruling elite status quo, millionaire class that runs everything in the liberals that support them in both parties. There's the far right, fascist forces, reactionaries, et cetera, and then there's the far left. And a lot of times what happens is that from the right and perhaps from the center sometimes, although there's contradictions there, the left will get lumped up together. And there'll be an idea of like, you know, from a right-wing perspective, everybody to the left of, fucking, I don't know, Tucker Carlson are, you know, socialist, communist, they need to be defeated, et cetera, from a far right perspective, they lump us in together. So what I would assume by your question is that you're trying to figure out a way to talk to liberal, centrist, moderate, democratic family members about more or less why they're not

on necessarily your team. I would have to have more context to understand what about your strategy of explaining the three-way fight isn't landing with Democratic, with the Democrats and your family and what their response is to you putting that three-way fight on the table. So I'm just, I just don't have enough information here to answer a specific question. Allison, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, I think your summary of the three-way fight makes a lot of sense. I think, again, like in terms of it as a framework for understanding fascism, the other distinctive thing about the three-way fight framework is that it tries to understand fascism as having like a revolutionary component to it, right? So it does suggest,

that fascism does seek some sort of like rupture from the status quo in a way that is often underplayed in other theories of fascism. And that causes liberals to be in opposition there. I mean, the question of liberalism, I think, is a difficult question generally, because I think on the left, we tend to view liberals as like, oh, these are our allies who are yet to be persuaded. And the three-way fight framework does suggest something a little more complicated, actually, which is that they are not our allies who are just waiting and be persuaded. And they are another partisan faction with this conflict that are not necessarily on our side. Again, absent context, like what you're trying to explain to family, it's hard to say more than

that, I think. But that's how I would summarize what the framework is. If you follow up in a future AMA with like some specific examples of the conversation, we can try to tackle that more. Yeah, I mean, just given the lack of context, one thing I would argue for is like telling Democratic liberals like, look, you voted Democrat your entire life and here we are. Like, you know, clearly Democrats have set the stage for the rise of the reactionary right. What about the Democratic liberal policies, presidents, campaigns, branding?

What about that is obviously a failure? Because, you know, if you've been voting Democrat your entire life and we're here, then certainly that might be a way in to have them start questioning some of the foundations of their political commitments. at the very least the limitations of the Democratic Party and perhaps at the most the fact that capitalism itself is generating these crises, that the underlying economic system itself is ultimately the problem.

Once you agree to that, once you see that clearly, then you have to move to the anti-capitalist left on some level, some version of that. It's only by saying that there could be a version of American capitalism imperialism that could be good. Could you even stay inside the confines of the two-party system

and call yourself a Democrat and all of that? So maybe putting pressure on that would be more helpful than necessarily bringing a somewhat obscure political scheme of the three-way fight to a Democrat or a liberal that might not be ideologically ready

to really grapple with what that implies and what that might mean. Yeah. Do you want to skip ahead to Lana's question since these three were from the same person? And that way we just hit as many people's separate, separate people's questions as possible. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. And if we have time at the end, we can come. Well, actually, I do want to do this, I do want to do this data center thing, though, because I had a separate person asked me about it. So I can, you know, two birds of one stone here. Perfect. If this trillion dollar data center investment by the mega rich collapses, then the economy busts.

What strategies of survival can we do? Thinking rooftop food like Cuba and things that get food on the table fast, it's not just about saving oneself. We need our comrade, united, together. So that's a question about collapse, connected to a question about data centers, which I got from another person on another post, asking us just to talk about our take on data centers more broadly. So you can take any direction you want with that, Alison. Yeah. So in terms of one, like the collapse question, I do think the collapse of data centers

and the collapse of like the AI bubble is like a pretty serious concern right now. So I think some of you know that I work in software and I have pretty direct. seeing how AI has been integrated into software startups. My team is probably about a third of the size of what it used to be because of AI. They have let humans go. They've had these models come in. And it's being very integrated into like the tech economy generally, which I think poses a bubble problem for one because the cost of tokens is not actually profitable for these companies right now. And at some point, it's going to need to become profitable, which is going to have a pretty intense economic shock on the companies that invested into these models as replacements for human beings.

So in my mind, for both tech and non-tech companies where people have been replaced with these models, there's going to be a pretty big economic shot coming at some point. Then the other thing with the data centers is that there's this kind of circular funding loop between the different big players and AI that feels extremely unsustainable in the long term, paired with that need to become profitable and the shock that that will do to economic sectors that invested in this technology. I think the risk of collapse is real. What that collapse looks like, how big it will be, how society will handle that.

Hard to say, but I do think it's a real concern. In terms of what we can do in strategies for survival, I mean, it's hard to say. I think you've gestured towards like some of the horticultural work that's been done in Cuba with like Organiponikos, which are the urban farming system that really developed as a response to the sanctions and then the collapse of the USSR, which, made it necessary. I do think learning about those models can't hurt. I think learning about sustainability can't hurt. I think for those who live in urban contexts, it's a lot more limited than those who don't just because of the situation that we're living in. But I don't think

there's any difficulty to that or any reason not to look into that. My only thing that I always get worried about is like treating survivalism as politics, which I think is a thing that the left kind of has fallen into it. Various times in the last decade of like, oh, well, we can do like left, wing disaster relief or left-wing survival work. And I'm not saying you shouldn't do those things, but those are not the same thing as organizing the working class for, you know, actual struggle against the capitalists. And so I would suggest, like, we should think about survival. We should think about all these things, but they're not a replacement for the kind of organizing that builds class consciousness and that ultimately allows us to not just respond defensively,

but hopefully offensively against capitalism. I don't know if you have any thoughts there, Brett. Yeah, I mean, something I'd like to kind of push back on perhaps on the collapse narrative is that I do, and I've been, I've done this myself. In fact, I think back on my guillotine days in particular, and I was very much, I was very much on this, which is that collapse is imminent. And that in my mind, I had some foggy, vague idea that there is going to be a time when everything hits a brick wall and there's an acute event that we would call a collapse and that in real time would be recognizable as such. I'm less sure about that. I actually think that we're already in a collapse. I think it's slow motion. I think it's years and years and years long as it plays out and unrolls. And I think sometimes on the political left and the political right, anybody who's fed up with the status quo and sees that it can lead absolutely nowhere good kind of sees collapse or can begin to see collapse as not only inevitable,

but as the resolution of something that will then allow. us to make advancements. And when you do that, I think you create a mirage in the near future that will accelerate or force a resolution in a way that probably won't come.

I think what is much more likely to happen slow, continue de-legitimization of the ruling class, the rise, the continued rise of the surveillance state to try to maintain their dominance and their order. Imperial Lash, out abroad, as we're seeing with Iran, having different outcomes regarded to that.

A voracious ruling class that continues to strip the country for copper and accrue to itself, whatever it can. The continued assault and dismantling of whatever the fuck's left of the middle class, whatever that even means, that's just a strata of the working class after all. AI, I don't think it's a total bubble. I think they're probably. probably will eventually be some market correction. Something like perhaps the dot-com bubble when obviously the bubble bursting doesn't mean the internet doesn't exist. It just means the early players weren't able to be profitable in enough time.

The market corrected, we call that the bubble bursting, but then now the internet is infiltrated every aspect of our lives. We're on it right now. I don't know where AI is going. I know LLMs are limited, but they have frontier models that you and I don't have access to behind the scenes. They have a vested interest in hyping up those models. Even dystopic narratives of AI taking over can be seen on one level as market hype.

If they're that powerful, then we got to get in and invest. There's also the arms race dimension where China and the U.S. or at least the U.S. elites, specifically the techno oligarchs in the Trump administration, see themselves as racing China to develop AI because whoever gets their first as a business is going to become a trillionaire in their mind. And whoever gets their first as a country is going to have unprecedented economic and military advantages. Whether that plays out or not, we don't know.

But it certainly seems that the techno oligarchs out of Silicon Valley and the ruling class under Trump and probably the ruling class as a whole thinks this is real, thinks the arms race is determinative in some serious way of the China competition with the U.S. And are going full steam ahead. So there has, there's something there. And these data centers also aren't just about AI, right? Their cloud storage, their infrastructure for the 21st digital, 21st century digital economy, even if AI isn't a bubble that bursts and it never quite

lives up to its most fever-dreamish proclamations of what it could be. So all that is to say, does AI suck in a lot of ways? Yeah. Is it inevitable? In some way, shape, or form, I unfortunately think it is. do data centers suck yes they they are huge monstrosities now the the most charitable way of framing them is what i just did earlier which is calling them the infrastructure of the 21st century and the people building them think of them that way um but you know they could also be a huge bust they use up a bunch

of water they use up a bunch of electricity they cause decibel issues in communities um they're built on land that could be used for other things that are not being used because they're being used for these data centers. And we know that however the data center thing plays out, the benefits insofar as there are any are going to accrue to the top. They're not going to be spread out. And ultimately their goal is to displace workers writ large. You know?

And that's a fundamental contradiction at the heart of 21st century neoliberal capitalism is you're going to get rid of your consumer base. And they think they can patch it up with the UBI. I think the contradiction is too deep to be managed with something like that. that. People don't like to, people don't like the idea of being in a permanent underclass where they depend on their obviously corrupt and deeply hated government to give them a check every month. So these are contradictions that will rack the system regardless of what trajectory it goes in. But there is a certain inevitability about all this stuff. They're being made. Thousands and thousands

of data centers are going up. AI is here for better or worse. It's getting integrated into everything. And it's really hard to see objectively how this plays out. There's pessimists, there's realists, there's optimists, but at the end of the day, we really don't know. But should we be critics of this? Yes, this is the techno-oligarchs playing their own game at our expense and the expense of the biosphere. And this is why you need socialism. You need a democratically managed economy that can put capital and society's resources toward benefiting the vast majority of people in that society and on earth more broadly, instead of just having this insane rat race where we don't know what's going to happen. It could be the end of the

world. It could just eradicate 30% of jobs, who knows, but all they know is that they're going to make trillions off this thing if it's successful, and they're going full steam ahead. So again, this is why we need an organized left, because we're not going to be able to do anything about any of this, except, you know, complain about it on podcast unless we have disciplined, high-level national organization with international connections. That is our only hope. So whatever your issue is, that's still the solution ultimately. Yeah, good reminder. All right, I'll take the next one for us, which is a fun one. So love AMAs. Could you dissect some of the ways that Buddhism and Marxism intersect slash align in the ways that they are opposed? And why, in your opinion,

or why not should Marxists embrace Buddhism? It's a great question. I'm writing a book that really covers this topic. I have the Dialectics and Liberation speech. I gave it ASU that I put up on the podcast. You can go listen to that in which I explore some of those overlaps. I think the philosophical intersection is basically a dialectical processual evolutionary worldview. I think that, you know, the dialectical approach to the world is something that is implicit in

Marxism and Buddhism. There's the materialist aspect in Marxism that isn't always present in Buddhism. Buddhists can be materialist. They can be idealists. But, you know, a dependent origination, for example, the idea of no self, the idea of profound interconnectivity, and the fact that everything is in a constant state of evolutionary change and unfolding very much aligns with core Marxist incentive. So as somebody that is sort of a dialetician in that my worldview is dialectical, I analyze things dialectically, I am interested in dialectical approaches to understanding the world. I would see Marxism as a dialectical approach to the sociopolitical, historical, outward realm of human society. I see Buddhism as a dialectical approach to one's own mind,

really, and one's own connection to everything else. So there's interesting, philosophical overlap there. Of course, they are posed in different directions. Philosophically or just temperamentally, lots of Buddhist communities are not Marxist, you know, for sure, and most Marxist communities are not particularly Buddhist. But you ask, in my opinion, why should Marxist embrace Buddhism? And here, which is, again, something I'm exploring in my upcoming book in quite some detail, is that I think we need to, and this is actually very in line with like notions of like you know chaguavara's new man or new person under socialism that there has that that the revolution in the outer is also requires a revolution in the inner that the inner and the outer

are deeply interconnected and we have revolution in the objective realm we also need revolution in the subjective realm and i think buddhism um in so far as it is an efficient path to the elevation of one's consciousness beyond ego identification represents the possibility of a truly revolution subjectivity, not just the subjectivity that has revolutionary ideas, but that relates to its own existence and to the rest of the world in a revolutionary way. And I always say, insofar as Buddhism is in part about dismantling or at least seeing through the machinery of desire, the egoic need to control, to dominate, to have certainty, even where you can't have it. The fear that drives the ego is a it creates a subjectivity that I would argue arose along with the material base of class society.

And I think we're still living in that. And I do think human consciousness evolves. I think if we go back through our evolutionary history, we've clearly seen an evolution of consciousness in the life of a single individual, from toddler to childhood to adolescence to adulthood. There is an evolution of consciousness. And I believe that what we now see, see as rarefied quote unquote spiritual advancements in the realm of consciousness might represent the egalitarian possibility of the next stage of human subjectivity. So in a stage where 99% of humans are still stuck in ego identification, we see the transcendence of it as religious, as spiritual. The people that convincingly do it are known as Jesus and Buddha and Lao Zhu,

right? These spiritual figures that are by definition incredibly rare. I would argue. I would argue that it points to a next possibility in human consciousness in the same way that we grow up from childhood and we look back on our childhood consciousness and we see how limited it is, right? We see how perhaps unreasonable it is or in some ways narcissistic it is. We don't look back and judge our childhood selves for being ignorant. We look back with compassion and understand we were children. And I truly think that given enough time, human consciousness, along with the material base of society. This is a historical and dialectical materialist account of consciousness will continue to

evolve. And I think by organizing politically as revolutionary Marxists in the outward world and by cultivating a serious discipline and continuous spiritual practice like Buddhist meditation that we can meaningfully contribute to the evolution of our species subjectively and objectively. So that's kind of that argument in a nutshell. Again, I flesh out a lot of the nuances in the book and I have lots of episodes where I talk about this more at length. So that would kind of be my rough and ready answer to those two questions. But Alison, any thoughts? Yeah, I think a few thoughts.

In terms of like where they're similar, I think you had at it. To me, like, Buddhism is just remarkably dialectical. And I think Buddhist emphasis on impermanence, on change, even like dependent origination starts to feel like this incredibly dialectical understanding of the world. So I feel a lot of coherence between Marxist understandings of dialectics and Buddhist, some of the ontological stuff. Now, of course, there's ontological tension because I don't think Buddhism is primarily materialist. I think you can do it in a materialist way. And that's a pretty controversial statement in contemporary Buddhist communities, I would say. But there are

definitely people trying to do it. But there is that dialectical overlap. For me, the tension really comes into play one in that I think Buddhism generally tends to be idealist in its orientation, like ontologically. Maybe in a way that doesn't matter so much, because I think by the time you're doing monism, which Buddhism gets close to, whether you call that thing ideal or material, kind of maybe it's just semantics. But, you know, that's kind of one side of it. I also do worry that sometimes Buddhism actually does kind of fall into dualism philosophically. Stephen Batchelor has like this concern about what he sees as a dualism smuggled into dependent origination that I find a fairly compelling critique of some of the articulations that I've heard

that raise concerns for me as a Marxist who approaches things from a more monistic perspective. And then I also think there's like one tension that I always feel the strongest, which is the Buddhist emphasis on nonviolence versus a Marxist understanding of the necessity of violence. And I do feel tensions there that I don't necessarily know how to navigate. But all that said, on the second part of the question, why should Marxist care about this? I mean, again, I don't know if I would call myself a Buddhist. My wife would insist that I am because I practice so many aspects of it. And, you know, it's not a label that I necessarily embrace.

But the techniques associated with Buddhism, some of its insights, I think have made me a better Marxist. I think meditation, building a contemplative practice, working on mindfulness, not as like a therapeutic ideal, but actually within like a Buddhist context and understanding of it, has had a pretty massive impact on how I really. relate to other people towards an ability to cultivate empathy. And like, to just be totally frank, like organizing is frustrating. You have to work closely with other people and sometimes they make you angry or sad or disappointed. And Buddhism lets you exist in relation to those emotions in a way where you are not controlled by them and where you do not necessarily identify with them and where you can have, I would not say I experience equanimity, but I'm trying to move towards an experience equanimity that I think make you a better person.

to organize with and a better person to be around. So I also just think practically the cultivation of mindfulness and some of the work you can get out of that is useful if you want to do organizing, frankly, because I think it will help you deal with some of the frustrations that that creates. Now, at the end of the day, I think, like, I'm not going to tell Marxists, you need to go be Buddhist, but I do think there's some stuff in Buddhism that is very useful that I have come around on. Yeah, those are some thoughts on that at least. And just to kind of, you know, add to that is just like, What I see most happen in left-wing organizing communities, and I've been in many, many, many, the number one reason that they fail are they are undermined systematically is by the, for lack of a better word, emotional immaturity of those involved.

When you look at dogmatism, you look at sectarianism, you look at the inability to navigate interpersonal conflict in a meaningful way. We see hurt egos dressing themselves up as if it's not about egos at all. It's about principled political disagreements. These are things that undermine the weaponization of identity when your ego gets hurt or instead of having to confront something that you might be wrong about. You can flip that around and turn it into an accusation against somebody else. These are all two human foibles that are not by any means relegated to the left or unique on the left. They're human. What Buddhist meditation in particular, I'm not talking about the ideas of Buddhist philosophy necessarily.

I'm talking about the practice itself as being an efficient way of becoming increasingly aware. of your own ego, your own defensiveness, your own insecurities, the way you replicate and play out your own traumas, the way in which other people can get a reaction out of you. These are systematic, time-tested ways of learning to become aware of that instead of automatically identified with that. And even if you never reach these super high levels of rarefied consciousness, that we call enlightenment or Christ consciousness or any of that, just doing the practices, making you a more mature person. And once you understand how your own ego operates, you understand how it operates in others. And what that understanding does is it dismantles judgment, harshness, and replaces

it with love and compassion. Oh, I see you playing out your hurt. I see in my own ways how I have this insecurity that I try to keep unconscious. And whenever it's poked or prodded, even indirectly, it gets this sort of response out of me. I'm going to be more responsible with that. I'm going to notice it as it's happening and not be carried away by it. You know, I'm going to be able to navigate interpersonal disagreement without allowing my ego to start getting flustered and defensive and I become reactive instead of responsive. These are all things that are just maturing in a lot of ways. And instead of just wanting to mature, here's an actual practice you can do every single day

that does it for it. It sort of naturally unfolds within you through awareness and through understanding. And I think that's crucial. And I truly do believe communism and even socialism requires something of us individually. It's not just that it requires us to go out and organize, although it definitely requires that. It requires us to become better people.

If you want to inhabit a communist world, are we going to be able to do it with a bunch of petty, petulant, emotionally underdeveloped egos? I don't think so. I think capitalism is great for that. Capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, colonialism, Zionism, You know, land grabs, occupation, racism, hypernationalism. These are products, or at least compliments to the human ego and ego identification.

I don't think that we're going to be able to move through socialism and into communism without doing serious internal work on ourselves, holding ourselves to an incredibly high standard of ethics, interpersonally, and developing our capacities to not be automatically identified with our base egoic instincts and trying our best to mature mentally and emotionally so that we can deal with the messy, complicated, scary world as it actually is, navigate it in as healthy a way as possible. And in the meantime, help work towards a subjectivity, a way of being that is commensurate and complementary to our outward objective vision of communism. So that's kind of how I square that circle and just encourage people to do it.

Do you have to do it? Of course not. But it's helpful to do it. You will enjoy doing it eventually, and you will benefit massively from doing it, even if you never reach super high levels of so-called enlightenment, whatever the fuck that means. All right. Is it my turn to ask the next question? Think so? Okay. I forget to. I think I've asked like two in a row before, but okay. This is from left-hand notes. Do you two have any advice for building up political education within a local socialist org? How much do you think we should focus on depth of education versus accessibility for those who might be put off by reading older texts? Not necessarily because they're against reading older texts, but just because they're harder to read. Thanks so much for doing this AMA.

Allison? Yeah, this is a good question. So, okay, one just very concrete, practical piece of advice that I have is that I do think the older texts are worth engaging with. I think it depends on your audience. but I definitely think for your like comrades, people who would also think of themselves as organizers, people who want to be politically united, not just like practically united in struggle. There's older texts have some stuff you got to get through in them. So I do think it's worth focusing on them.

And here's just like a pedagogical thing that I will suggest that I have had success with in some of the polyhead work that I've done here in L.A. and with people I organize with in the tenants union, which is like taking them paragraph by paragraph as a group actually can be really useful. So we did some reading groups on on contradiction and on practice where people did try to read the text ahead of time. But like if you've read on contradiction and you're not super familiar

on Marxist philosophy, it's not the most accessible text, right? And what we ended up doing was like over the course of several hours like paragraph by paragraph breaking it down, talking it through, making sure we had a shared understanding of what each one meant, and then like working through the flow of the text

together. And that I think can be kind of like painfully slow-going work sometimes for people who just, like, read avidly and really enjoy these kind of philosophical texts. But for doing group political education, I actually think it is, like, one of the most effective techniques I can recommend. So I would say do tackle the old text, but recognize that it's going to be a slower process that it might require, like, this practice of collective close reading to build that skill together and really begin to work on that. That would be kind of my bit of practical advice there, just for my personal experience in, like, the last

year. What about you, Brett? And you can do different levels, right? You can do like a 101 course that is that is made for accessibility. And then you could have a core cadre perhaps that is interested in advanced classes and frame them as such. Obviously, we make podcasts because we understand that in the modern world, it's hard to sit down and read through any book, let alone a book that is out of time and cultural context. It can make it very hard for people. Obviously doing it together in the way that Allison describes, it can be challenging, but is incredibly rewarding. And you actually reading it in community and reading it closely with others, everybody involved

will come out of it, you know, more educated and have deeper understandings of the nuances of the text. And it's really worth it if you can do it. But yeah, I would say political education is absolutely necessary. If you don't do political education in the context of organizing, the default is to tend towards a sort of liberalism, a sort of unquestioned status quoism of some various sort. And to combat that, you have to really put in the work. You have to study and research to break out of the liberal realism, if you want to put it in, you know, fishering terms.

So it is essential. The Black Panthers realize this. There's that great clip of Fred Hampton explaining why political education is utterly necessary. And there's ways to do it that can emphasize accessibility and ways to do it that can emphasize depth. And those two things don't have to be at odds with one. one another. In our socialist night school course, we are taking non-Marxists for the most part, people that are engaged in liberal, left liberal, social democratic or democratic socialist

organizing in many cases. And we are walking them through the Marxist critique of political economy, historical and dialectical materialism. In the first half, we go through the theory of stuff. And in the second half, we talk about organizing efforts in our communities that use that theory and put it into practice. And we've had great success. People become interested, right? I had like an elderly lady in our community reach out to me wanting my script on historical and dialectical materialism so that she could reread it again and understand it even more.

That's incredibly rewarding to hear that. And you might think, well, that's exactly what I mean by not accessible. There's ways of making it accessible. And it's challenging. That was the biggest challenge of doing that class is how do I make dialectical and historical materialism interesting. How do I convince people that this is worth knowing in the first place, which is the first thing I kind of have to establish? And then how can I introduce these concepts that make them accessible to people who've never even heard these words before without

compromising clarity on what these things actually mean? And I start my lecture saying, like, I know these words are intimidating, they're just words. When I explain what they mean, they will make sense. And they truly do. And the feedback we got from those classes is that I was right about that. People like understanding that. Historical materialism. They like understanding, oh, I've heard of ancient Rome slave societies. I've heard of like medieval monarchism and feudalism and serfs and peasants. Oh, that's how all these things are connected. Oh, well, that means capitalism is also kind of a stage in historical development, not the end all be all. And once you can convince somebody, capitalism arose historically out of these previous modes of production and that it itself is leading somewhere else and that it is by its very nature, like all modes of production, ephemeral, that in and of itself is a huge sort of ideological win.

People start thinking about capitalism differently from there. And then I think dialectics is pretty kind of intuitive. Once you can really explain it to somebody, people can say, oh, I can kind of see how that works. So that makes sense. Intuitively, that is actually an interesting way of understanding how reality unfolds. Right. So, again, there's challenges there, but it's really rewarding when you can do it. And again, those accessibility and depth do not have to be in contradiction with one another.

You can have intro classes and advanced classes. And I think people should. Awesome. All right. I'll take us to the next question, which is one that I really love. So hi, hi, Brett and Allison. I got into fine arts a few years back, especially oil painting. I've been painting a lot lately and listening to Rev Left while painting,

and I just wondered if you all have ever dabbled with any arts. Even if you haven't, are there any artworks that really resonate with you? Art periods. Honestly, I would just love to hear for you all riff about art. Thank you. So I've never been an artist myself. It's one of those skills that I wish I kind of had. Never learned an instrument, never learned how to paint.

I used to kind of write like lyrics and poetry as my sort of artistic outlet using words because that's kind of, I guess, my thing. But, no, I love art. The first thing I do when I visit any city, any city in the world, if I go to visit any city, I check out their best museum and I check out their botanical gardens. So, you know, kind of get a feel of the sort of plant ecosystem in that place, especially.

I love going to, like, deserts and seeing, you know, those botanical gardens in particular. But I've been to, because of a friend who paid for my flights or else I wouldn't be able to afford to do so, but I've been to Paris and I've been to Vienna. Two capitals of art in the world, and I've been to the Louvre in Paris, this huge world historical museum and walked through that. And in Vienna as well, the home of Gustav Klim and that whole art movement. So there's a lot of art stuff there. Always found it beautiful, fascinating. I love Impressionism and post-impressionism.

So, like, I went to a museum that just featured Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh painting. the originals. Absolutely love that. Another thing I really love is the kind of like Byzantine or medieval religious paintings. Some of the like hardcore religious Christian iconography out of like medieval Europe and the way that human suffering is portrayed. I've always loved the iconography of like Catholicism in particular. Christ on the cross is like a deep. moving metaphor for human suffering writ large and you know the fact that Christians kind of worship a God that was brutalized and tortured by the state died in such a horrific manner and that the the symbol that persists as a Christian is literally a man outstretched on a cross

suffering to death something deeply deeply moving about that I love classical art increasingly I've been interested in architecture for Gothic cathedrals in Europe what's the, what's the Gilded Age architectural thing? I always forget the name. Oh, Art Deco, Art Deco, there's lots of, there's lots of Art Deco buildings in cities. Like I went to Tulsa, and Tulsa is known for having a lot of buildings that are in the Art Deco style. One of our main downtown buildings here in Omaha is Art Deco style. So I'm getting more and more into architecture in particular.

I find that fascinating. Whenever I go to, like when I went to Europe, not only would I go, to their art museums, but I would also spend at least one day walking around and seeing their churches, their Gothic cathedrals. I walked inside of a thousand-year-old Gothic church in the heart of Paris. And it was fascinating walking up the tiny little circular staircase

to the top where they would give church services for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years and feeling myself walking on the same footprints as like a priest, you know, 900 years ago walked and that historical stuff is really interesting. to me. In Paris there's also this painting of the Paris commune. I forget the name of the painting or the artist because it's been a while, but it's like kind of a post-impressionistic backdrop with like dead communards on the street, you know, with bricks taken out of the street that

you could tell they picked up and through. And I stood in front of it and I kind of wept because I felt not only the enormity and the beauty of the art and the depiction, but knowing the history, it was incredibly moving to me. And whenever I'm provoked into tears by any work of art, I immediately and automatically have a deep appreciation for that and for art itself. And the very last thing I'll say is, I always loved Schopenhauer, his philosophy. We have an episode on it if you want to dive into it. But, you know, he talks about the world as will and representation and that we're all driven forward and we're endlessly dissatisfying. because of this deep striving and this desiring within us that never gets fulfilled and never

gets satisfied. And you'll strive and desire until the day you die. No matter how many desires you meet, there'll always be a new one waiting for you to fulfill. And he says the way that you extract yourself from that striving and that desiring and the will, this blind will that is, that animates the cosmos is by just extracting yourself from it and immersing yourself in art. so he would just talk about it's like diving into to literary fiction or you know contemplating works of art as a way of kind of stepping outside at least for a moment the current of the will you know this thing that he saw in a negative context and i always thought that that is interesting and there's something beautiful and necessary about engaging with art for the human experience and i sort of pity

people who don't have any desire to cultivate an appreciation it doesn't mean become an art critic or understand all the genres and all the artists, but it just means going to museums and looking and loving and immersing yourself in humanity's creative accomplishments and the creative urge that is within all human beings. You feel better when you create things, genuinely. And that speaks to something deep in our nature. And if you go back to the beginnings of humanity, there's caves with handprints on it. There's caves where people spent hours and hours, sometimes days drawing life-like animal figures. This is something deep in human nature that even when we were hunter-gatherers, we took time out of our days to go draw things on walls. And so I think there's

something deeply human about art that I deeply appreciate. Allison, yeah, I think, so in terms of making art, art is like not, I would not consider myself an artist, but I do really enjoy wino-cutting and printmaking. So that's like the medium that I've dabbled in. I, really, really, really find it an incredibly enjoyable pursuit. I think linocutting in particular, because, like, you do all the planning up front and then it's this very tactile with tools, carving, execution of the thing. And then the print process itself, I really, really love it. So that's what I do in terms of making art. I also have been dabbling in painting miniatures, which I would only loosely call art, but it's the first time I've gotten really hands-on with paint as a medium,

actually, and starting to work in terms of, like, building technique with acrylics. that I'm finding very enjoyable that I'm considering maybe trying to do some painting on paper, not just on little pieces of plastic, honestly, because it's been nice to really get to learn how it works as a medium. So I enjoy art in that way. And then in terms of like artworks or movements that have affected me, I mean, I think a very interesting experience that I had when I was like 15 was visiting the Getty for the first time and seeing a Rembrandt in person. It was my first time seeing like just a beautiful work of oil painting and seeing the texture of the paint just layered on top of each other kind of just completely refrained what painting is as a medium for me and to see

again with rembrandt often there's almost an impressionistic aspect to it even though that's not really the movement that his work falls into and the tactiveness and building up of the medium i don't know a really profound aesthetic experience that i had with that that has developed a lot more love for painting as an art, I think. And then I think some similar themes to Brett, unsurprisingly, I find religious iconography to be very powerful as well. For me, it's less Catholic iconography, but Eastern Orthodox iconography, I find just absolutely stunning. I had the opportunity to visit Istanbul when I was in college and to see the Hagia Sophia in person and some of the just unbelievable iconography in that building. Both of the ancient Christian iconography and the

newer Islamic work that had been put up in terms of calligraphy in there. Just a very beautiful and profound experience. I find Islamic geometric art really fascinating and to be a really interesting expression of Islamic theological norms about depicting images of living creatures having spun into this whole other geometric and calligraphic tradition. I find that really cool. And then in terms of artworks that have been like super impactful, I think it's a Sergei Luchin painting that I think probably a lot of people have seen of a Bolshevik Red Guard standing in

the throne room of the Winter Palace, kind of looking up at the ceiling in awe as the throne is behind him. And that is like a painting that has genuinely driven me to tears, I think. It is just such a beautiful expression of this moment of proletarian triumph and awe and wonder of like how impossible that moment seems. And yet it happened. I don't know. I find that painting, really incredible. I find a lot of the Soviet paintings that depict aspects of the October Revolution to be quite beautiful in that way as well. So in the art end, yeah, those are broadly where I'm at with it again, kind of all over the place. Yeah, one of my favorite paintings that always really impacts me is Christ in the desert. I just had to look up the name of it by Ivan Kromskoi.

But it's just Jesus, you know, and is sort of in the desert being tempted by Satan, going through a dark night of the soul in spiritual terms. And the way that his hands are clasped, He's sitting on a rock. His face is just distorted in a way that just speaks to the emotions he's going through. Like, how can you present such a profound, complex, subjective state in an objective third-person view of the person from the outside? And then the implications of Christ kind of overcoming that dark night of the soul, overcoming the egoic temptations of Satan,

and emerging as this spiritual figure, which resonates with the Buddha under the Maya tree being tempted by, under the Bodhi tree being tempted by Maya, both of these classic, you know, spiritual figures going through their dark nights of the soul and having to overcome them in order to come out the people that history knows them as. I love Zen Buddhist art, the way that the Zen Buddhists in particular play with the space behind the images and this sort of dialectical relationship between foreground and background is gorgeous. And then the poetry of, you know, the Sufi, Persian poet Rumi

is deeply moving to me and even the contemporary poetry well she's past now I believe but Mary Oliver her nature poetry is deeply moving to me so if I had to go into one art I don't really have the skills of drawing or painting or anything like that

but I certainly have an itch and always have for poetry in particular so if I had to dedicate myself to kind of cultivating some sort of artistic outlet now going forward I think it would be it would be poetry. And in the past when I've done poetry, there's a deep satisfaction I get with putting words in such a way that that can evoke emotion and that can be a unique constellation of

linguistic structures that that can move you subjectively. That's always been a cool thing to think about. So yeah, hope that scratch the itch of what you were looking for with that question. All right. Am I next? I can't remember. I think you're next to read. Yeah. I'll read the next two because the next one is super short. Cats, cats dogs are both. Yeah, I think definitely both. I'm mostly been a dog person, but when I started dating my now partner, she had a cat that I felt absolutely in love with, changed her mind about cats completely. So very much both now.

Nice. Yeah, I went on, when I turned like, I think 33, I went on like a little solitude meditation retreat by myself into the woods for a night or two. I think it was two nights, three days. just by myself in the woods. I meditated a lot. And for some reason, I'd never had this compulsion before, but for some reason, I just got this really strong urge, like, you need to adopt a black cat.

I don't know why, but I came out of that little solitude moment. And I told my wife, and I went to the Humane Society to adopt a black cat. And there were this brother and sister black cat, who they had found in the street and who had stuck together, you know, in the streets together. And so I adopted them both and kind of surprised my wife with two cats instead of one to, you know, her ambivalent response. But, you know, their cats and I, of course, they've been with us for years now and I love them. And then I also have a great dane.

I love taking my dog camping. As a puppy, I would always take her camping to the point where she learned from a very young age. She doesn't need to be on leash that she can just go around the campsite. When the sun goes down, she comes and huddles by the campfire. I've taken her winter camping many times as well. And I love doing that. So the dogs and the cats, they play different roles. You know, having a cat climb up on your chest while you're relaxing, watching TV is very nice. Having a dog going camping with them. So I have both. I like both. Probably to some degree or another will always have both in my life.

So that's my answer to that. The next one, which I'll read again, is thank you for hosting this Q&A, comrades. My question is around your respective organizing efforts. I know Brett is involved in political education through the night school he teaches and has shared that he has been involved. Well, this person says with the DSA locally, and to some extent, yes, but I've never, I was in the DSA many, many years ago, but have not worked with them directly. And it doesn't matter. And that Allison has been heavily involved in tenant organizing in L.A. What keeps you both motivated to maintain your organizing efforts in spite of everything that you both have going on in your lives? And how do you make time to read Marxist theory or the books of your guests before their appearances alongside your organizing efforts, careers, and other life obligations? Yeah, good, very practical questions.

on the second half. I'll start with the motivation part. I mean, the motivation is that I'm a fucking communist, right? I believe communism is achievable. I believe it is the only solution for humanity and our continued existence. And I believe that organizing is the only way we're going to get there, right? You know, there's a conversation I've had with some comrades. There's some people, I think, who, like, really love, like, organizing. And I do love parts of organizing. But, like, the broader politics is a huge striving motivation for me. For me, like, my commitment to communism is really, like, a thing that drives things forward. But then on top of that, honestly, just, like, in organizing, one of the things that I think is, like, under-talked about sometimes is watching, like, struggle transform people.

Like, there's tenants that I've seen going from being, like, oh, my impulse is to defend the landlords, to, like, militantly, like, I'm going to protect my neighbors and I am ready to fight. One tenant I can think of who basically, like, after quite a long time of struggle, was like, I'm ready to be like a warrior for our people in this fight. And this is someone who had been much more like, I'm going to be the first person to defend the landlord when we're talking about it. Seeing those transformations, seeing that like the development of consciousness is possible. Like, I just honestly fucking believe that. We can build revolutionary class consciousness. That creates a huge motivation for continuing to keep going, I think.

So that's, I think, one of the big drives for me is the politics and then seeing that transformation concretely and that reassuring me that the thing we're trying to build is achievable. Then in terms of how to make room for the reading, it's hard. I think reading is always like the thing that I want to push off, even though I really love reading. It's just like it takes concentration, it takes work. Reading requires setting aside a bunch of other stuff and really being intentional about it. And in order to do that, I honestly, when I know, like, I have a text that needs to get done by this time, I schedule in. These are the times I'm going to read it. I'm going to get off work. I'm going to take an hour before I do or think about anything else, and I'm going to do reading then. And I think being intentional with the scheduling side of things is actually very, very helpful and work wrestling with. And then I think the other thing, too, is like for Marxist theory, like, I like I like theory, which I know not everyone does, but I really find that reading theory helps me understand the work. better and I want to understand the world and how to interact with it and how to transform it. And so that just creates an additional motivation to read as well that I think if you can

tap into that does make reading like a little bit less of a chore. But also like, I don't know, scheduling in reading time sometimes is what it comes down to. And I would recommend that as a practice, honestly, because sometimes that can be quite helpful. Yeah, I mean, how do I do it in spite of everything that I have going on? I don't know half the time. Like I do feel like I have zero days off. I feel I'm going all the time, right?

I have a 40-hour work week. I have classes from my apprenticeship. I have three children. I'm in various sports leagues. Yeah, I just, I have a lot going on. And of course, the podcast is a huge thing to me. But kind of like Allison, I think it's like this deep, like I like it. I am a communist.

I've internalized the fact that I have responsibility in this life to do what I can. I don't have to do it all. I can't always be actively organizing. You know, I kind of come in and out of organizing at different periods of my life when it's more or less capable. The Socialist Night School has been a great thing that I've been able to do over the past couple years, and I've gotten a lot out of it. I help locally with organizations when I can. There's been times in my life before our third child was born where I had more time, you know, and I founded organizations and co-founded organizations. years and years and years ago,

I was involved in trying to get an Omaha chapter of the DSA. This is like in 2012, 2014, something like that. So before like modern growth of the DSA as such, and I was a card-carrying member or whatever, never really came through with that in particular, but I tried to get it a PSL chapter many years ago. That never manifested at the time, but now it has PSL Omaha is doing great work

and they're close comrades of mine. So I do what I can. I'm motivated deeply that this is my life. This is my responsibility. This is what gives my life meaning. And that prevents me from being burnt out on it. It's not something I have to force myself to do. I like talking to people, for example, with the podcast.

I like learning from people. I like reading their stuff and wrestling with it and deepening my own understanding of the world constantly. I think it's incredibly important to take on the mindset that one should always be learning. You know, to that point, I'm 37 years old. I'm just entering the trades. I'm entering an apprentice program that there are some people that are my age. But overwhelmingly, there are people in their 20s that are going through the apprenticeship course.

So I'll often find myself being taught something by somebody much younger than me, having fourmen that are much younger than me, telling me what to do. And it's kind of weird because in this realm of my life, the political realm, I've kind of achieved some things. I'm relatively well known. I'm well respected. I have a voice. I have a platform. in that world. I go to this other world

and I'm new as a baby. Like, you know, I'm learning stuff from people much younger than me, showing me how to use this or that tool that I've never even seen in my life. And there's something deeply humbling about that, but also something invigorating. I like re-embodying the students' perspective.

And even the idea of me getting into Brazilian jiu-jitsu is like an embodied practice, an athletic thing, a workout thing. but it's also very high skilled and I would be going in as a complete noob as well. So now I'm actively seeking out possibilities in my life where I can be the new person where I can learn a skill from the ground up and not shying away from that. And so that kind of speaks to the lifelong learner aspect. But I really don't know how I do it.

I don't know how I avoid burnout. But I'm just driven. I'm driven because this means something to me. I'm driven because I want to make my tiny, humble contribution. to building a better world. I do it because once in a while I'll get an email from a high schooler or from somebody in their 70s telling me that I've helped expand their political consciousness and deepen their worldview or people telling me that they've gotten into Buddhism

because of stuff they've heard on Rev. Left, high praise. And so that keeps me deeply motivated and deeply going. Not that I think that I'm changing the world or anything like that. I always think about it in these terms. I am doing my tiny, humble contribution. to this long historical, beautiful movement known as socialism, communism, the liberation of humanity from class society, the liberation of humanity from all forms of oppression.

And I'm just going to use my life to contribute what I can to that. And that's, I think, the way to think about it. You're not anybody's hero. This is a collective movement. Nobody has to do everything, but everybody has to do something. And that keeps me going. I enjoy learning. I enjoy learning new skills.

so I'm never quite burnt out, at least not yet. So that's kind of, I guess, how I do it. And then your question about books for guests, obviously I can't read every single book. Over the years, I've honed in an approach where I look through the table of contents. I can read the intro, the introduction to the book. I can read the last chapter of the book

and piece together an understanding of where that person is coming from, maybe do some online research about it. Maybe I can listen to another interview to get enough. but I just don't have the time. Like last week I did three interviews. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, we're each an interview. And I have interviews the weekend before and the weekend after multiple.

So there's just no way that I'm going to be able to fit in reading an entire book. But I've learned ways into a text, learned to extract things from a text without having to read the entire thing over years and years and years of doing that. And I think it's been successful. But that's a skill honed in over years of having to kind of, having to kind of do that. All right.

Or anything else? Also really quick. Yeah. I noticed that Arlene left a question in the chat that I do want to respond to as a follow-up about tenant organizing real quick

because I think this is a question we've seen pop up before that I want to talk about. So it says, Allison, how do you integrate international solidarity, especially with Palestine, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela

with tenant organizing? Which I think is a really good question because it's not immediately obvious how that overlap would exist. So one thing I will say is I think like in a lot of major cities in the U.S., if you do tenants organizing, the tenants who you end up organizing with, by and large, are a pretty international group of tenants to begin with. That's been my experience here in Los Angeles, where we are largely working with immigrant tenants,

many of whom have a very complicated immigration situation, and who already are thinking more internationally than your average American, right? Because they have a more international experience of coming from one country to another, and for whom international concerns are already on their mind. And so I think the connection is very possible to make in that regard. In terms of like what does that look like practically, the Tenants Union has done quite a few solidarity trips to Venezuela to look into the Kumuna system there,

to learn hands-on from some of the organizers within the comunas and to build those connections there. The union has done a ton of poly-ed work around Venezuela as well on that side and to talk with members of our base that we organize about the comunas, the Bolivarian Revolution. So there's quite a bit of that plugged in. I mean, questions like Cuba and Palestine actually do come up because, again, a lot of the people we're organizing are thinking, I think, already about the international situation more than maybe your average non-immigrant American. And we get questions about what's happening with Iran, what's happening

with Palestine, what's happening with Cuba even. And it gives you the opportunity to talk about it. We've used Cuban socialism in our poly ed and talked about the Cuban socialist project in very explicit terms and people bubble up the, you know, the anti-communist stuff they've heard, you wrestle through it, you push through it, you discuss it. So we do really try to integrate that. And I think it is possible to integrate those international perspectives into kinds of organizing like tenant work where it's not immediately obvious how it would relate. But you just have to be really intentional about it. And I would suggest like whatever kind of work you're doing, if you are doing that intentionality, you can get that in there. So I did want to address that

briefly because I think it's not immediately obvious like how that fits with tenant organizing. And just looking at the chat too, somebody said a while back, I agree with Allison that communism is achievable. But anytime soon, that's a different story. And the way I think about it is, you know what, like communism is a global state of affairs. It is the liberation of humanity from class society. I'm sorry, that's just communism is not going to happen in our lifetimes. Our fight is socialism. We have to develop socialism as the bridge to communism. And socialism very much is alive and well in our lives. It's on the table as a live political option. We've seen socialist experiments over the last hundred years, current social experiments still fighting for their lives. Socialism is here.

It's going to stay. Capitalism is going to get worse and worse. We're working towards communism. But over, if you study the development of modes of production over time, you realize this happens on historical timescales. It doesn't happen in the single, you don't jump from ancient slave societies to industrial capitalism in one life. Why would you, not that you are thinking this, but, you know, why would anybody, assume that we could jump from capitalism all through socialism really quick, 30 years, and then being like international communism.

That's just not how modes of production developed. It's not historically anything that is reasonable on any time scale and any example from past. Our struggles for socialism. And we can be very clear about that, knowing that socialism is the step towards communism. And without it, we don't get there. We get barbarism. So, you know, generationally, our time in history, you don't get to choose when you're born. You don't get to choose what your task is.

Phelan says, you know, generations rise in relative opacity and they fulfill or fail to fulfill their generational obligations. For some people, that might mean anti-colonial resistance to get their land back. For other people, it might be fighting imperialism just to live. For other people, it would be preserving their indigenous self-determination inside of a hostile nation state. And for other people, it is the pursuit of socialism. All of these fights are actually pushing in the same direction. but where you find yourself, what period of history you find yourself, you don't choose that. But it's given to you. This is your generational obligation. Will you fulfill it or will you or where you fail to do so?

And that's how I see it. So yes, communism, it's not, that's not on the plate for us in this life unless insane radical life extension happens. Right. So just to be clear about that, I don't know if that helps anybody. I don't know if anybody had that idea, but that's how I think about it. Yeah, no, I'm on the same page. All right, I'll read the next one, which is also for you, Brett. So it says, hello from California. I have a question that's mostly directed at Brett. I recall in an episode that Brett had mentioned that he looked into becoming a firefighter.

I recently just finished all my training to become a firefighter, and I'm now a wildland firefighter for the state of California. Part of this process of training has been learning about the culture of firefighters, and at least in California, it's very conservative. I find that odd because my values as a socialist are what drew me towards firefighters. and protecting the environment. Do either of you know of any resources? I can check out that intersects as a radical tradition with firefighting.

I feel like there has to be some literature out there, but I've struggled to find much, much love from San Diego. You both have been integral to my own personal education, which led me towards firefighting in the first place. Yeah, I mean, I don't have any particular insight there. I failed at becoming a firefighter, actually because I couldn't get into the program because I had too much unresolved student debt,

and so they weren't able or willing to give me any more loans, which I needed at that time. So I'm a failed firefighter. I'm a failed philosophy professor. You know, and embracing the things I failed at. I tried to learn drums once and failed. And I make no bones about that.

I think we should all embrace our failures. You have to fail a million times before you succeed once. So just having that mentality, I think, is helpful. I don't have a lot of insight into firefighting in that way. The fact that it's very conservative isn't particularly surprising because I join a trade union, not starry-eyed, not naive about it, a trade union in a deep red state. These are working class guys. Most of them are not college educated by any means. And so, you know, there's constantly, I'm dealing with conservative guys of various sorts and working through that and, like, advancing my politics.

And I find it fun. I think it's cool to do that. So I'm not really, and there are obviously lefties and progressives. And the union itself is absolutely to the left of. center, even like anti-democrat, left of center. And the class consciousness is absolutely there. But there's the union. There's the amount of people that actually go to the union meetings, participate in the union events, carry on the union mentality. And those tend to be lefties. And then there are the people that just pay their dues and get the benefits of the union,

but don't really fuck with it as much. And those guys tend to be on the right wing of the spectrum. And there's more of them than not. So I find it as, I find it fun. I find it in a opportunity to engage with people who do not agree with me. I don't shy away from my actual politics. People find it interesting and amusing. I think the thing that I do in the context of the trades is you have to be liked before people give a fuck about your opinion on anything. You have to be respected before people give a fuck about what you think about the world. And so, you know, I'm generally likable. I can engage with anybody in a respectful way. I try to work hard and prove to people that I'm here to learn. I'm not here to slack off or put shit on

anybody else's shoulder. People kind of like and respect me and then we can talk about politics. So in your situation, yeah, you might be surprised at first, but I would say embrace it. Embrace it. Find ways of being respected and liked among your co-workers. And then your political opinions can sway people, whether that is just the low bar of humanizing. I find myself just having to humanize socialism and communism to people who have dehumanized it in their mind. And in other ways, I have a lot of leeway. There's a lot of younger people in the union and in the trades, 20-somethings, that will start talking.

And they're still blossoming into political consciousness. And they're very interested in these politics. I've had several people check out the podcast and listen to episodes and be like, oh, wow, this is interesting. I've never heard of this, you know. So I think there's a lot of opportunities there. but just don't shy away from it. Like, I'm sorry, we live in America.

We're going to be surrounded by various forms of conservatives and reactionaries. And for me, it's just like it's a wonderful opportunity to see what a regular working class person thinks, how they make sense of their own life, and to, you know, kind of have a back and forth with them about our politics and theirs. And so, but yeah, as far as the resources on radical tradition within firefighting, I unfortunately have none. Allison. Yeah, I don't have anything either on that specifically. I mean, one, I shout out for getting into this type of firefighting. I think it's Southern California in particular.

It's like a really important job that I think is also very dangerous and wildland firefighting is probably going to be increasingly important in the future of this state, unfortunately, as we're seeing. So one just like shout out for that because I think it is a very cool direction to go in. And then, yeah, I mean, I would just echo what Brett said. Like in the context of employment and work in particular, you're not going to find people who are ready-made, on you this the time and maybe not even ready-made progressives. And that is part of where being able to build relationships and get your ideas across once you already have that baseline matters. I think like this is a hard thing to pitch on the left sometimes because it's like,

get along with people, be personable, build relationships, then do your politics. It's not always the most like appealing pitch. But there are contexts where that really is what it looks like, I think, and where that really is the foundation. And being someone who can kind of just be normal, about stuff and have the politics at the same time, I actually do think is important. Now, I think people take that be normal thing in weird directions that are kind of often homophobic and shit like that. So I'm obviously not suggesting that. But being personable, being friendly, being able to build a relationship with someone who you have huge differences with. And I think like being empathetic in terms of like wanting to understand them, wanting to understand

them and how they landed where they're at and being able to see how that empathy is actually a way that will then allow you to tailor your own political intervention towards their own values that are underlying where they come from is just kind of important. That sort of, you know, is again, not like a super fun pitch. It's not flashy. It's not, here's how you debate someone into believing anything. But I think in a lot of context, that is how you build kind of the political inroads, honestly. So,

yeah, I would second that advice. And just disabusing yourself of self-righteousness can help a lot. Nobody wants to be moralized at. Nobody wants to be made. to feel like they're being, they're being harshly judged for their opinions, listening to people, even when you completely, I've listened to shit that is just so off the motherfucking wall, so fucking crazy and insane. And I'm just like, okay, this is a human being. I'm listening. I'm here. And then trying to find the inroads, it's a challenge, you know. Yeah. But it's, it's fun. And at the end of the day, we're humans having human experiences. And on a job site,

whether that's in the trades or in firefighting, you're just with a random group of people for eight hours a fucking day. And so, you know, things are going to come up. You're going to talk about every fucking topic. You're going to learn way more than you thought you would about this other person over time. And that's just human connection. And then that connection is the basis from which you can, you know, maybe push on some parts of their politics or open them up to some new ideas or whatever. Maybe a follow-up question in the chat is, hey, Brett, what do you think about the role of trade unions will be with the rise of data centers across the country? I plan to join the IBEW, but I have some misgivings about constructing data centers. I would first say, join the IBEW. It's a great move in your life.

Highly, highly recommend it. It's the limits of trade union consciousness, but the IBEW overall is very strong, very healthy as a union. It's international and scope. It's not perfect in every way, but it's good. It will change your life for the better. You'll learn a socially valuable skill. And sometimes you'll be working on data centers. Sometimes you'll be working on hospitals. Sometimes you'll be building schools. And so there is this moral, you know, this moral oscillation where, yeah, you might be on this project right now and it's not ideal. They're going to be built with or without you, you know. But then you'll be transferred over and you'll be, you know, building a hospital next or working on a high school, making sure that, you know, the kids there have, you know, electricity and lights.

So I wouldn't let that stop you. You know, you not joining the IBEW isn't going to do anything to change the fact that that. are being constructed around the country, but around the world as well, given all of our critiques of data centers, of course. What are the role of trade unions with the rise of data centers? This is the limits of trade union consciousness. They will often be on the side of them. For obvious, just straight material reasons, hundreds and thousands of jobs for tradespeople, straight up. So there's no world in which the unions are going to come out against data centers. unfortunately, but on one level you can understand it.

That's the paycheck. That's how tens of thousands of people around the country support their families. They want work. They want these huge data centers that give them stability, they give them overtime, that give them massive amounts of work. The data centers themselves are putting pressure on the United States electrical grid, which could even some of the tech companies are pushing for an update to the entire grid, modernizing the electrical grid.

which would obviously be a boon for the trades. So this is a contradiction. I'm not trying to say that that's not a contradiction. Often unions, they have this myopia. They are interested, and you can't blame them. They're leaders of a union, right? They're interested in jobs for their union. They're interested in advancing the interests of their union.

Some people have a broader perspective. Some people see the unions as vanguards of the working class. You know, some people, you know, think outside. of the box and align themselves with progressive and even internationalist movements for liberation. But at the end of the day, you can't be surprised that for the most part, trade unions would be like, yeah, let's do more data centers because that means years and years and years of work for our trades. Now, once the data centers are built, that pool of labor shrinks dramatically to maintain a data center. Yeah, you still need some electricians.

You still need some steam fitters in there once in a while. But those are dramatically reduced. So the construction of data centers is one thing. The maintenance of them is quite another when it comes to jobs. That contradiction will play itself out over the years to come. But unfortunately, that is part of it. But please don't let that stop you from joining the trades or joining the IBW if you want. I truly believe that union trades are one of the last areas where a regular working class person can make a decent fucking life for themselves and their families.

And that's sad. But if you go into that environment, you provide for your family. you are also a progressive left-wing voice. You participate in the union. You vote in the union votes. You convince people in the union leftward in your politics. I think you're doing something meaningful. And that's good.

And there are communists and socialists and anarchists in these unions. You've got to find them. Being on the job side is it can be hostile to those of us on that side of the thing. But in a red state, I've found plenty. Not as much as I'd like, but more than I thought. So, you know, you have comrades already in these unions and you got to get in there, I think. So, yeah. All right.

Is it my turn? I think so. I'll ask you that every time. Okay. How have you been, how have you been, this is from Cassidy, how have you been able to overcome ideological differences in organizing with anarchists? I'm always curious about how Marxist Leninist and Marxist-Leninist Maoists resolve differences with anarchists to work together for the benefit of the community.

I'm an anarchist, really more of a bookshinite, to be honest, Murray Bookchin. And I have many MLM. comrades I adore and have great admiration for the work they do in my community. But inevitably, there's shit talking on both sides and it really bums me out because it's really unproductive. I wish we could spend more time engaging in good faith dialogue about how to create well-being for all. Allison. Yeah, this is a good question. So, I mean, I think the first question that you need to ask yourself is like, what kind of organizing are we doing? Because that's going to contextualize this. I do tend to organizing. That is mass work, right? It happens

in a mass organization that we, the organization we call ourselves socialist, but we don't have a more specific definition than that. So unsurprisingly, there are people within it who would consider themselves anarchists, people who would concern themselves Marxist-Leninists, a broad spectrum. But in the context of mass organizing, like, the main questions are often practical about how we're structuring things, what our actual practices look like, what our poly ed looks like. And there, I often find that like these very abstract questions that anarchism or Marxism can get into about what does a future society look like are super secondary and actually don't need to be thought about or shit talked about very much. Like oftentimes the anarchists that I work with are

people who come from like a more platformist anarchist perspective who are really open to organizational models that are very similar to what Marxists want to use. And I think we don't argue about a lot of the state stuff because the practical organizational models that we're interested in have similarities that make sense in the context of a mass organization. And so I think oftentimes, like with the anarchist versus Marxist thing, it becomes this debate about some future society we want to build. And in most organizing context, that debate is not what should be primary. And it should really just be like, what does organizing look like practically? And then obviously we have our own ideologies.

I subscribe to a Marxist-Leninist and maybe Maoist perspective that does argue that, like, politics needs to be in command, that we do need to have political unity. But that's among cadre. That's a very specific concept. context, and I do think that contextual distinction really matters. So where you're organizing, what kind of organization it's in is going to be important. But ultimately, like, I don't know, there are anarchists who I work alongside quite well because we don't shit talk about those bigger picture questions when there's practical works to do that advances both of our ends. If the left ever becomes like a hundred times larger than it is today, maybe those will start

to feel more pressing. But at the moment, I don't think they are remarkably pressing when there's less tension around the concrete organizational side of things. And then when there are divergences on that more concrete side and organizational model side, just honest discussion and struggle through it where you don't, you know, try to be like, oh, you're a shit lib anarchist or you're a tankie or whatever. Avoiding those kind of online framings should be doable, especially if you're really organizing with people and treating them like comrades, not just as we share the same ideology, but we are trying to build something together. Hopefully you can center that in those disagreements. That's kind of how I look at it.

I feel like often these tensions get overplayed because of the internet and people arguing online. And in actual organizing, they are sometimes less pressing. They do happen. You know, even in organizing context, MLs and MLMs can sometimes bring up some differences I've come across. It is what it is. I want to say, welcome. It's really cool that an anarchist is listening to people like Allison and I. I think it's good.

It's useful. It's fruitful. Even if you ultimately disagree with some of our Marxist positions, understanding where we're coming from, not dehumanizing us as red fascists or, you know, tankies or something I think is obviously a mature thing to do. And I don't really do that to anarchists. You don't ever hear me talking shit on Maoist or anarchists.

It's so useless. It's so irrelevant for the reasons Allison said, perhaps when those contradictions are relevant, we can talk about them. And I hope they do become relevant because that would mean that we've advanced so far where those fucking issues of how to wield power actually matter. We're so far away from that. They really are irrelevant. They're fun to discuss. I love discussing it. I know the anarchist positions. I have many anarchist friends. I'm a Marxist leninist to the core with deep malice sympathies. And that's just, that's how I came down. I was an anarchist at one time. And I've evolved in this situation or in this direction. And I understand that other people have different trajectories, different paths. Do you want to liberate people from oppression? Do you have a vision for a post-class society, human,

civilization. Do you oppose settler colonialism and imperialism vociferously? And if we can agree on those points, on the big picture, that's enough for now. And then on the small picture, even those are sometimes irrelevant. What are we going to do to solve this exact problem? The organizing that I partook in years ago, that was the most anarchist influence was anti-fascist organizing, where I was working with a lot of anarchists around identifying outing and combating, um, rising fascists in our, in our area. And there were instances where I got singled out. I got doxed. I got they, you know, the neo-Nazis and stuff spread me around to their insane websites and doxed me and flired cars in the parking lot of my workplace. So I had to be called in by my boss. Um, you know, I'm in a left

wing extremist. They called the FBI and said that I was going to do infrastructural terrorist attack. so I had the FBI showing up at my house and all through that process, which was horrifying and scary and I didn't know what was going to happen. I had comrades who were different than me, tendency-wise, who had my motherfucking back to the core in ways that are deeply moving to me still. You know, from staying guard at my house with a firearm overnight so that me and my family could sleep to doing stuff on the back end to identify who was attacking me and resorting, making them feel the pain as well.

Those were anarchist comrades in a lot of instances. So I will never hate on them. I have deep love and respect for them. And when it comes to fighting fascists, anarchists are great friends to have. So no hate. And I wish we could have a left-wing culture where we could have these debates without getting fucking weird about it. And I think that's where the ego stuff comes in.

Because what happens when you attack somebody's tendency, their sense of self is so wrapped up in it that they take it as an attack on their being. They can't separate out an attack or a difference of opinion on a tendency to an assault on them as a person because of that confusion about their sense of self being so wrapped up in that thing. And then you have these explosive, dogmatic, sectarian splits, which have plagued the left all throughout modern history. and certainly the American left have been plagued by it. So can we like set aside our egos? Can we realize that people have different trajectories? They come across different text and different influences at different times. They're predisposed to perhaps going in different directions with regards to this thing.

But if their heart's in the right place, if they're willing to put in work and energy and time to solve a problem in their community, if they're going to have your back when the fascists come knocking, like what are we doing arguing with each other? You know, and insofar as we do have arguments, can they be fun? Can they be in good spirit? Can we, can we have a back and forth where we have our positions, but it doesn't mean anything about how we feel about one another? I think that's important. Now, there are wreckers. There are sectarian freaks all along the spectrum that will come in and use those differences to create drama that doesn't need to be there, create interpersonal conflict, undermine a community's ability to organize effectively. and they don't even do that cynically or consciously sometimes it's just the sort of person they are. That does happen. You've got to deal with it. But overall, I think it's really not, it does not interest me at all to rehash those arguments.

Awesome. All right. I'll take this next one. So, hi, Brett and Allison. I'm wondering if you all have any thoughts on the role of music and revolutionary movements and or suggestions on how musicians can be more principled and effective in contributing to the movement, whether it's songwriting being used as effective propaganda or how people interact. with each other in the music scene or how local music scenes can connect better with the organizations, etc.

I've been struggling to figure out how to bridge these two worlds and have also felt discouraged by the individualism that seems common in the music world. But I also see so much potential in today's underground music. I mean, it's almost standard at this point for bands to say fuck ice during their set and free Palestine to a lesser degree. How can we harness that energy and channel this moment into effective organizing? Yeah, I'll leave it there as a little parenthetical at the end, but we're not give in the question, so it's your own.

Hold of it. No, I'm, you know, just straight up, I said earlier, not everybody has to do everything, but everybody has to do something. If you already are musically inclined, if you're in a musical community, if you're making music that people listen to in any respect, having a revolutionary edge to that stuff is impactful. It's operating in the cultural sphere. And I know that I have been deeply, deeply profoundly shaped in my politics by music in

particular. You know, I was talk about dead press. is let's get free album, which just blew my brain out. Like it really, it radicalized me. Through the course of listening to one album, I moved staunchly left. And that's a fascinating impact to have. So there's a lot there to be had it. Yes, no community is perfect.

We live in America. You're in the trade. You're in the firefighter. You're in the music scene. You're in the art scene. You're in the spiritual communities. It's going to be mostly non-Marxist stuff. It's going to mostly be individualism.

There's going to be a lot of reactionary ideas. this is America. That's what it's going to be. But, you know, that shouldn't dissuade us from struggling in those areas. And music is one of those countercultural spaces. They should be screaming fuck ice. They should be screaming free Palestine. They should be fucking talking about bringing out the guillotine.

That passion, that countercultural movement, that aggression in music should be put towards revolutionary ends. And so if you are in the musical world, that is something that you can contribute. tribute. One of my greatest album, or one of my recent albums I really loved is Haley Hendricks and Max Conover, Garcia Conover, I believe. What of our nature? And it's like a folk indie album. The whole thing is drenched in politics. And I fucking love it all the more because of that. And having a musical artist that you like and finding out that they're a lib or that they're conservative or something is a huge blow. That sucks. I like that person less now. So yeah, do it. Do it.

there's always a role of music in every revolutionary movement. There's been musical aspect to the counterculture more broadly. And it is the duty of artists. Not to everything they do needs to be put in service of the revolution, but at least having some chunk of their art being pushed in that direction, I think is important and actually is your responsibility if you have those skills and you're in that milieu. So I would encourage you to just move forward and, yeah, not be discouraged. by the individualism and the nonsense you come across in every American community

because that's unavoidable. You see it as an opportunity, embrace it, that expect it, and then do your damn thing. Yeah. I think very similar thoughts on the whole. I think for me, music was really important for prime politics. It was more like punk, honestly, that had a huge impact on me. And like the punk scene, I think, has less politics than it thinks it has. But it definitely has some politics that I think does end up pushing people.

towards more radical politics, actually, oftentimes. And so I found that pretty valuable. I think, like, yeah, in terms of getting plugged into a broader movement or plugged in with organizations, make yourself available to the organizing efforts that are happening in your areas. Fundraiser shows in, like, small music scenes, I actually think are really cool. I think it is a way to get people out, raise money for organizations in your community. One example I saw that was really cool was, like, during the kind of campus protests and

encampments around Palestine. one of the encampments at a college out here in East L.A. ended up just having a bunch of local punk bands come up and take up space as part of them occupying part of the campus and also doing some fundraising show, which I thought was really sick. East L.A. right now has like kind of a really awesome blooming punk scene that does have some overlap with the political movements that are happening in that part of that city. And I think it's really cool. I think it's really healthy.

I hope to see that continue to develop. I think punk in L.A. looks like so different than it used to. It is so much less white. It is so much more working class, actually, than it used to be. And it's in a different part of the city than people imagine. And it is getting plugged in with that stuff. So I don't know. I think like making yourself as a musician available to the organizations around you for fundraising,

for just being at events, for adding to the ambiance of the events they put on, all of that actually matters and can be important. So I do think these music scenes can, you know, plug into the politics around them. Absolutely. Well, we are already two hours over. Allison and I agree that we're going along anyway. So we're down to keep going. I am going to skip some.

I've answered some. Sure. I've answered some in Patreon. And some I might not have great answers to. So I'm going to be a little bit more picky going forward. Totally. But yeah. So let's just keep going, though.

This is from Carly. Do you have any thoughts on the pressure to feel partnered in this current economy? I get so depressed that it's just so much easier financially to split a one bedroom with the partner than paying double that on your own. Of course, I just live with the roommate because it's impossible in my city to afford that for myself. But I get so sad sometimes. that I don't want to feel pressure to find a partner. We'd love to let this happen on its own timing and be the right person. Nonetheless, I do feel that thought in the back of my head going,

if you only had a boyfriend to live with, etc. You could have it easier financially and a more harmonious living situation, but you don't, despite not wanting to think that. Ways to combat this, is this the wrong way to look at things? Either way, thank you so much for your contributions to knowledge and teaching. Then I can't express how much I enjoy and I'm grateful for Rev left. Thank you, Carly. Allison.

Yeah. So this is a very good question. I mean, so I think it's kind of tough because I'm married and have been married for a while now. So like I'm not sure exactly what that experience of singleness in the context of the economy and trying to get an apartment is like, I mean, the one thing I would say is that I think your desire to not have to find a partner for financial reasons is very reasonable. I think that makes sense. And yeah, you don't want to have to do it for that reason. The one thing I will say is that I think like, The dream of independence and, like, living alone probably is not achievable in the way the American economy is going right now. And so it sounds like, already, you have roommates and are taking that approach. And I think that's going to become more and more common for adults, honestly. And I think I know people living in that situation who have felt like some kind of shame around that because it kind of doesn't stack up to what we see the trajectory of an individual's life going in in the context of, like, the American dream. but I think, yeah, not, you know, giving into that individualism is meaningful.

Living with other people who aren't your romantic partners is a very valid way of living and is a very, I think actually sometimes very fulfilling way of living. I honestly often really fucking miss having a bunch of roommates. Times when I lived with a lot of other people are some of my favorite memories in my life. And I've had friends who well into adulthood have lived in houses with a bunch of roommates where those houses actually then became like a social space for the broader group around them in a way that I think is really valuable. And, you know, I just think the idea of, like, more communal living, even in the context of, like,

yeah, its roommates has some value, and it shouldn't be seen as a failure to continue to live in that. And I don't think one should rush into a relationship to get out of that. Because it's a perfectly legitimate and valuable way to live. And I actually think, like, globally also, like, living collectively with family for a longer period of time than we see in the U.S. is also very common. And again, as I've gone into tenant organizing, seeing people living in like really creative living situations communally, you start to find more and more. And I think embracing that as just another way of living in a changing and scarier economy is going to be important.

So no, I would say don't rush into feeling pressure to be in a relationship to live in a specific context. Living communally outside of that context is equally legitimate. And I think can also be very meaningful and fulfilling, even if it also often is extremely frustrating. So yeah, those are kind of some initial thoughts. I don't know, Brett, what you think. I agree with all of that. I don't have much to add, except I would just, yeah, I just encourage you, like, let go of that contradiction or that need or that thought.

I mean, easier said than done to let go of it. But just like, you know, you're not alone. This is unfortunately a very common situation for people in the United States. Right now we're living through a horrific economic sort of period of time and epoch within American capitalism. I always often think, like, as much as I struggle financially as we all do, is like thinking back throughout history and all the difficult economic times throughout history. It's like, yeah, I don't get to choose when I'm born.

I don't get to really choose the conditions in which I'm born. It would be nice to, you know, be born in a time where you could easily do that, but that's just not how it is. I just got to, like, face that fact and move forward. But, you know, the roommate thing is totally fine. I would stick to that. Even if you got a partner tomorrow, there's no reason why that person would immediately move in anyway. So there's huge economic pressure on everybody, but that should not be the reason that you, like, force a partnership or force a quick move in with a partner.

As long as you have the housing right now, you have a roommate that is doing their half. Just roll with that and let the other stuff come as it may. But don't stress yourself out about it, I think. So that's, but everything Allison said, I think, is the real answer. Yeah. Okay. All right. I'll take another one skipping ahead a little bit.

Yeah, you can just pick one. Perfect. So this I think is probably something that's come up a little bit, but this is in the context of co-work. So this question is, how do you discuss politics with your more reactionary co-workers? I have co-workers who are extremely liberal. They don't really delve into anything more deeply than what's at face value. More recently, my Vietnamese American coworker was explaining to me how April 30th was the anniversary of the fall of Saigon, aka Reunification Day from the anti-imperialist perspective. It was an annoying day. I know that you mentioned beating. your coworkers where they're at. I'm curious how either of you managed to deal with it when they say something blatantly wrong or reactionary. Is it worth speaking up at all? It feels like an opportunity pushed them a less reactionary direction. So again, I think we've talked about this dynamic, but I am curious, Brett, when someone said something outright reactionary, what's your approach in that moment, maybe? Oh, man, it's so individual. It's like, it's where on this individual and their articulation of their reactionary views can I push. There is no one size, there is no

one size fits all. I'm confronted with all different types of right-wing reactionaryism, Islamophobia, straight up anti-Semitism, hardcore libertarianism, you know, all the different stuff. Trumpism, which, you know, is like, it's one of those things where like, yeah, there are obviously Trump supporters on site, but there's obviously a lot of anti-Trumpers as well. It's so specific. But you do have to speak up, but on another point, like you also don't have to correct. everybody about everything. There are some things you just have to let, you know, drift past you like, you know, there's like I'm not, I just don't have the time or the energy or the capacity to drill down on that specific thing. But every time I'm talking to somebody, I'm one, I'm listening

to them. I really want them to feel like they're being listened to. I'm not morally condemning or judging them because I feel like that shuts down conversations and gets people defensive. I am finding something that they say that I can take and develop in a different direction. for example talking to a Trump guy I like him we laugh about I like him as a person a lot he's a hilarious guy um really one of my better friends on the job site so far he's a Trump guy and like he's still on the Trump train and I'm like you know he knows all my positions he's actually listened to several Rev Left episodes he would seek me out for political conversation um and you know he's not he's not dumb he's like a smart guy like he'll have evidence for his claims and stuff like that

um and uh I like him a lot as a person but we'll be in these conversations conversations and he'll be like you know fucking supporting the war because trump does and he and he thinks trump's playing five deep fucking chess and like this is somehow going to accrue to the benefit of the american people that this actually is america first and all this stuff and in the process of talking he brings up that like you know i get i get down and one thing i'll say is like you know politics grows out of our deeper values so what are your core values like what do you what do you care about most morally and you know the first thing he said is like you know pro life i'm pro life to the core. That's a, that's a, that's a really important thing for me. Okay, I move in the direction of

talking about the Monab School bombing. You know, America, Trump, your administration that you support, just slaughtered 170 children and their teachers in a double tap strike. And then we just shrug and move on. And he starts going, well, you know, technically war is bad. I don't like that. I hate that those, those children were, were killed. But unfortunately, when there's war, that happens and I'm like well there doesn't need to be a war what's the fucking reason for the war you know and then and in any case shouldn't the American government come out and like a face up to that fact instead of just wrinkle over the fact they just slaughtered all these children and are your children up for slaughtered just because there's a war like you know would you just say well collateral damage I guess there's a war of course not for for for for all those parents all those communities those are entire universes and how much do you love your you know I'm getting into this argument right and get deeply pressing on his core value not even talking about this policy or that policy, this politician or that politician. Your core value is this. How do you make it make sense with that? And, you know, he goes back

and forth and whatever. I forget how we end up on that situation. But that's just one example of honing in on one thing and trying to work with that person where they're at. And the next guy I talked to also has reactionary opinions, but in a totally different way, right? And so now I have to, you know, sort of shift my strategy. So again, it's not easy. You have to, you have to, you have on some level be likable or nobody's going to give a fuck anyway. It takes patience. It takes discernment. What is worth attacking? What isn't? I do think that we should push our politics, though. Like, you know, not in an annoying way, not out of nowhere. Don't be the person that brings it up when everybody's talking about something totally different. But be ready for it and then push your

opinion and push your way. And in a way that isn't attacky, that isn't morally finger-waggy. People don't like that. Um, but that, that, that articulates a position and pushes it. And again, I, I, you know, I wish I could record all the conversations I have, um, because I have them every fucking day. Just the other day. So I was telling my opinion on something and, and my co-workers like, oh shit, you're Antifa. You're Antifa. And he was like, he was joking. He was joking around. I was like, yeah. Yeah, I guess I am, you know. Um, and so he's coming from like an Antifa bad perspective. Right. But now the guy he works with and laugh with us all day and hangs out with and likes. is saying that he's against fascism and now explaining what fascism is.

So many times I got to explain what socialism even is. And, you know, and that's like that, for sometimes the only gain I can get out of that day is having corrected someone's deeply mistaken vision of what even that word means. And that's a victory on that day, you know? Not easy. It's not easy. Totally. Yeah, no, I think the one thing I'll say is, like, in the example that you gave talking about, like, pro-life and then into war, I mean, like, really what you're doing in the example

that conversation is kind of like the Socratic approach, right? You're not just like factually correcting someone, but you're saying like, okay, I've heard you like express this thing. Now I'm going to ask a question that like stretches your understanding of the value that you've professed, right? And kind of opens that room for a back and forth. That's not just like, no, fuck you, you're wrong. But like, can we talk in a way that like actually maybe stretches your thinking about this thing beyond what you're already at? I find that's generally like the right approach in these situations. I think, you know, it's an ancient approach for a reason it's been around for a while

in the case of Socrates maybe it got him killed but you know I think it can do some good and it tends to be less frustrating for people than just kind of be like no you're wrong yeah that's sort of how I would look at it

and that's where my my sort of interview skills come out and sometimes people will note that they're like oh you like I can tell you interview people for a living because I start asking me I start digging in but you're right

I never thought about it that way but 100% my main approach is Socratic in principle asking people to articulate their views. First of all, people like to be listened to. So if you start asking, instead of you telling them what you think, you ask them what they think about this or that, even something that's uncomfortable for them. Well, what do you think about this? Your president just killed all these kids. How do you think about that? You're not saying, you piece of shit, you support a president that killed all these kids. You're saying, well, here's something that objectively happened. I find it disgusting. What do you think? And then now they have

to articulate and you are listening you're like okay i see what you're saying there i disagree but i understand where you're coming and that makes people feel respected but yeah the so the socratic thing is a is a big is a big part of it for sure all right i'll just go with this next one here mexican stalin long-time supporter um why did the western left adopt self-destructive traits like like being unhygienic unpresentable and neglecting self-care such as exercise or healthy diet was it empathy toward the new problems we face in modern material conditions or was it a rebellion against conservative puritanical ethics? To use myself as an example, I have a bad foot,

and I work full-time at an auto parts store. After I get off work, my foot hurts so badly that I'm basically bedridden. This makes it hard for me to clean, shower, cook, and nearly impossible to exercise. So I can understand why losers like me, you're not a loser, are drawn to dialectical materialism as a way to make sense of our suffering. Or maybe I'm just projecting my own thoughts, and it has more to do with the hippie anti-war movement of the 60s and 70s. Okay, that's an out-of-left-field question, but I don't know, Alison, do you have thoughts on it?

Yeah, I can try to wrestle with it. I mean, so I think one in the example that you gave, I think it's a good example of what we might call self-destructive traits, often being a result of material conditions, right? Like, there are just like realities to your life that limit your ability to engage in certain things. I think like it sounds like you sort of, and I think you're recognizing this and this, are like moralizing those as a failure in some way or some example of being a loser in a way that I would suggest probably isn't helpful just in as much as as like, at the end of the day, I mean, like, there are material constraints that you have. You cannot help the job that you have. You cannot help how long you work, and you cannot help that your foot hurts at the end of the day. Now, there are actions you can take to try to alleviate some of that. So I don't want to say that, like, nihilism or determinism is the solution. But being real about the fact that there are constraints that exist there, should, I hope, help you feel some self-entity towards yourself, is the first thing that I would say.

And then the other thing is, I just don't know that the left has adopted those. traits necessarily. I do think there has been what you sort of call out, it's this rejection of like conservative puritanical ethics on the left. But oftentimes I think like the left is almost too focused on like self-care conceptually to the point where it, uh, uses that to excuse other kind of self-destructive habits. And I also don't know necessarily that I think on the whole the left has embraced like being unhygienic or unrepresentable or unpresentable in some way. I think, sure, there's like counterculture attitudes that often fall into that, but I don't think that's like the left itself necessarily. So I don't know, that's kind of some main thoughts.

But I mean, the main thing I would say is in your case, it is a good example of how we should have empathy to the problems that modern capitalist society is created. It doesn't make you a loser that you're in that situation. I would reject that framing and that wording entirely. And then I think, you know, again, I don't want to overemphasize determinism. I also think of like kind of an existentialist. So no matter what situation we're in, we still have the freedom to try to change things. And we still have the ability to try to make the small changes we can. It's often about finding out what the constraints on that are and recognizing if those

changes might be smaller than we want. We might be constrained in such a way we can't just transform our life tomorrow and cook every meal all the sudden when we couldn't be for or exercise every day when we couldn't be before. But the small changes that add up gradually, I think, are an expression of the freedom that we still have. And so it's a balance between those external conditions that I think you should recognize are often beyond your control and the kind of fundamental human freedom we all have and maybe carving out small changes a little bit at a time. But overall, I would suggest, like, try to be more empathetic towards yourself. I think that will go a long way regardless. Yeah, I agree with that.

And, you know, I'm sure there are definitely subcultures on the broadly conceived left that kind of make it a point to flip. in the face of, you know, certain cultural ethics. You can think of the hippie movement. You can think of like crust punks, you know, anarcho punks in some ways kind of play into this sometimes. But that's just their own personal sort of like reaction to a dominant cultural paradigm. And I don't think it is necessarily indicative of a general aesthetic of the left more broadly. The left comes in every shape and size and presentation imaginable. So I think that is just is a generalization. And I'm sure, you know, on some level you kind of, you understand that. Your question about why people like you are drawn to dialectical materialism to make sense

of their suffering, it's like, yeah, like that's why we, why, I'm drawn to Buddhism for my own existential suffering, mental and emotional suffering. I'm drawn to Marxism because of the suffering of working and poor people in my family, in my community growing up, and then in the rest of the world as I grew up and blossomed into political consciousness. So yes, this is a tool, a way to make sense of our suffering that actually does make sense of it. and you said you have a bad foot. My first impulse is like, well, you should definitely get that checked out, but then we get into the whole question of the medical system.

I don't know what kind of health insurance you have. I don't know if you have the capacity to go into debt, to go get your foot first of all looked at and then probably maybe some surgery. So right there, we're bumping into a class issue. You find it hard to move around after work at all because you have a bad foot. Clearly, you should be able to go and get fucking medical help for that foot and fix that problem so that you don't have to deal with that every fucking day,

but I guarantee you that that is a money issue, as it has been for me my entire life. And I've suffered through fucked up situations, like serious burn marks and, like, fractured fucking ankles without any recourse to the medical system because at that time, I definitely didn't have insurance and I didn't have the money or even a credit card to go put it on to get into debt to get those problems solved.

So I had to go to CVS and buy burn patches for two fucking months and all those things. So immediately we're back into a class issue. Does that make you a fucking loser? absolutely not and that the vast majority of the world are in situations where they find it hard to be able to go to the doctor in many instances. Now, a lot of places have universal health care. We don't. So in the United States, if you're in the toiling class, like what we all are, you know, that is something that you can't take for granted and you might have to deal with

that. And that's fucking bullshit. But don't get that down on yourself. Don't make, don't turn that into an individual failure on your part. It's really not. And insofar, as you have the motivation or the desire to exercise or eat healthy, those are things that you can do. You know, you can eat healthy, although I understand standing up to cook is a problem. There are ways perhaps to exercise where you don't put a lot of pressure on your foot. Something that jumped to mind is like riding a bike. I don't know your exact situation, but insofar as you could get a bike, maybe that won't put as much pressure on your foot and allow you to still get some cardiovascular exercise.

I say that because mentally, just simply, you know, going on a walk or exerting yourself a little bit, boost your mood dramatically. There's been so many times, for instance, where I'm having a bad day, I'm in a shit fucking mood, I'm pissed off, I'm annoyed or whatever, and then I go to my volleyball league and just hopping around for an hour playing volleyball, I come out, all of a sudden my mood is lifted, I'm feeling better. So it's not so much about like get in an exercise and get jacked and get ripped. It's about like mental and emotional well-being is deeply tied to physical activity, and we should try to do that. But in your case, again, the foot is a serious issue. but yeah my love and my heart goes out to you and please let me know if there's anything that we can do to help you on that front

if it is a money issue perhaps we can come together as a community and help you out so you can go get that foot looked at and I mean that so respond if you can all right um let me ask this next question um and just bounce it off you I'm asking you this because I feel like this is more relevant particularly in Jewish communities because I'm, you know, I don't have Jewish family members that support Israel. So the question is, how do you manage relationships

with friends and family members who somehow still support Israel? I never want to cut someone off, but I'm having a harder and harder time interacting with people who are essentially on the same level as Nazi sympathizers in my book. Yeah, this is a good question.

Oh, God, I wish I had a good answer. So in terms of like friends, honestly, I don't think I have a lot of friends left that are still supportive of Israel. The interesting thing is that over the last few years, I think that's had less to do with me cutting them off and more them cutting me off. I have found that people who are like ideologically Zionist to that degree really have not been willing to even hear anti-Zionist voices whatsoever, and that the moralization of anti-Zionism is somehow anti-Semitic has given them like the excuse they needed interpersonally

in order to cut people off. So in terms of friends, I don't think that that has been an issue so much. I will say I do draw some lines around this, right? Like, I'm Jewish. I participate in Jewish religious life. And I don't go to a synagogue where there are Zionists. I'm a part of an explicitly anti-Zionist religious community. When I celebrate the holidays with my Jewish friends,

it is explicitly anti-Zionist Jewish friends that I am celebrating with. Part of it is that I think because there's so few of us, there is a desire to like find those spaces together and that's a line that I consider to be like pretty important on that side of things. Then in terms of family members who still support Israel, I mean, so my family is they're all Christians and so they fall in the Christian Zionist side of things. And it's tough. I'm not super close on like a very deep level with the Zionist members of my family for reasons that go beyond that, honestly. I think I've had family members like my mom who has really begun to like question Zionism and have really begun to push back against it

and become more sympathetic to anti-Zionist perspectives. So my focus has been really on like cultivating that and trying to provide support there and trying to provide educational resources. But I do think like it's a good thing to draw a line on. One of my really big frustrations with like Jewish anti-Zionist spaces, which again, I participated in Jewish anti-Zionist spaces. But one of my big frustrations is that people often don't want to draw that line. And I do kind of think it's important to draw. I think, you know, saying that this is equivalent to Nazi sympathy is not unreasonable. I don't disagree with that perspective. And I do think like increasingly we are at the point where like drawing the line in the sand is really the option that is available. So I don't have Knights feel good

advice there. It fucking sucks. And again, I think a lot of the Zionists have started to draw the line themselves and that's kind of changed things. But that's sort of how that all looks like on my end. I don't know, Brett, if you have thoughts are experienced there. Just in Nebraska, there's not a large Jewish population. I mean, there are, I actually do have Jewish friends, but of course, given the milieu I operate in, they're all anti-Zionists to the core. Right. I've had Passover dinner with a Jewish friend who invited me into his home to have it. I loved that.

I thought it was so cool, so interesting. A religious community and tradition that I had never engaged with directly and being invited into that. But, you know, he's one of the leaders of the Jewish Voice for Peace in Nebraska. He's like, obviously a longtime organizer. as a Jewish anti-Zionist. So that's mostly what I come across. The only time I've come across, Zionist sympathies is, again,

in these fever dream conversations at work I find myself in. And I go hard in that case. Even with people that I like and we get along very well, I could tell, like, my unrepentant, like we got in the conversations like five guys standing around me and me, and we're going in this political conversation. Everybody has some disagreement with me. And then we start talking about Palestine.

And I'm like taking these incoming, incoming fire from all these directions about, you know, all this war on terror, propaganda, Muslims. They've been fighting for thousands of years in the region. And I'm just like dealing, dealing, dealing with it. And then this evangelical Christian started pushing the Israel stuff. And I was like bringing up the genocide. And he said, what genocide?

I said, what genocide? Over the last two years, Israel has slaughtered over 100,000 innocent men, women, and children. and he's like, I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true, man. That's not. And I realize it's like, holy shit. Like, he wasn't being, he wasn't lying.

His algorithm only gives him a certain thing. And he's, you know, I would presume this is not somebody that's going home and reading books or anything. This is somebody that opens up his phone and scrolls and gets his news. Largely, he didn't even know the genocide. And he's defending Israel. And in those cases, I'd just go fucking hard as shit. I talk that, I say Iran has every right to defend itself. I say, you know, Palestine, I want a free Palestine, Israel is a settler colony,

and I go hard, and it frazzles some people, it throws some people off. For a lot of people, it's the first time they've ever heard that shit. And I'll even, like, I have a Palestine flag thing that I wear in my backpack, and I had a big sticker on my lunchbox that was on some free Palestine shit. And younger people ask me about it, and I get to educate them on it. But older people that are committed, it's just like one of those areas where I'm just, I'm not being mean, I'm not attacking you as a person, but I am not filtering my position at all,

and I'm making you deal with that. So that's my personal experience with that. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. You can pick the next question. All right, let me pull up another one. That cat, Ladue one looks good. Sorry, I couldn't hear what did you say? Oh, I said the one from Cat Ladue looks interesting

if you're searching around for one. Yeah, let me find that. I think I had scared. Ah, here we go. Oh, yeah, this is a really really, good question. All right. Where's the line between making a valid critique of liberal elitism and just being a class reductionist? When does the critique of liberalism just become a way to avoid addressing things that only affect women and black and brown folks, LGBT issues, imperialism, microaggressions, cultural issues, language? I'm thinking of the growing popularity of the

big cheever, who I don't hate and Dino Gostela, who I pretty much always disagree with. So I'm I'm kind of familiar with Vivek's work. I see him and Jack have been a lot, not super well-versed on his overall politics, and I just genuinely don't know who Dino is. Again, we're just taking these as they come. I haven't had a chance to look up the background of some of these questions.

But my whole thing with liberals is the liberal politic that we're going to be against is not identity issues as such. It's identity reductionism, where the liberal elites, over the past 10, 15 years have used liberal identity reductionism

as a weapon against class politics and anti-imperialist politics. It goes back to the Hillary turning Bernie and even Obama, you know, Bernie bros and Obama boys into this patriarch versus feminism thing where it's, where when they were running

and Obama's a fucking betrayer of course, but when Obama ran the first time, he was talking about class politics ending all the wars, right? So you could reasonably be somebody that was that anti-imperialist politics and working class politics and see Obama, especially after the Bush years, as real hope. He was campaigning on that stuff. Of course, he didn't do any of it. But at the time, Hillary would weaponize not only his mailness, but she would, she actually played into the racial shit too. If we go back and remember that first

one, that's neither here nor there, but worth considering. But the Bernie stuff is much more straightforward where Bernie is being lambasted. Now, Bernie is just a so fucking social Democrat. reasons we can critique Bernie, but he was running on a class-based agenda. And what were the main attacks against him? He's a sexist. They even try to do that he's an anti-Semite thing to Bernie fucking Sanders. They were using identity to fight against a class and an anti-imperialist politic in any way, shape, or form. And that, I think, has been the real innovation of liberalism over the past 10 to 15 years. And it's an inversion of the reactionary trick to use racial divisions, which they still do all the fucking time, to distract away from class issues.

The right wing will tell you, you know, you are losing your country, right? There's either a Jewish conspiracy theory to destroy your country or the immigrants being let in are destroying the whiteness and the Christian nature of our society. They're using this all the time. But the way that liberals have inverted that have taken identity politics, taken progressive identity politics, and then turned fashioned that into a weapon against class politics is the problem now from the class side i don't have a problem with with um identity politics and sometimes you'll hear class reductionists say none of that shit matters the only thing that matters is class my retort to them would be if you're interested in genuine class solidarity the motherfucking working class is every gender every sexual orientation every

religion, every race. So if you want to build solidarity, the first step in doing that is to take those issues very fucking seriously. A woman has a different experience in this world than a man. A black person has a different experience in this country than a white person. A trans person has a different experience than a cis person. And the basis of solidarity is understanding, loving, and respecting those experiences, struggling with them to overcome them, while at the same time using our shared class interests as the bridge that can unite us despite those lived and identitarian differences. So for me, it's not an excluding one or the other. It is real solidarity requires you take these issues seriously, but not reduce everything to them. Because then we're

just a bunch of individuals with micro identities fragmented against each other, having no way to come together at all. And we've seen that flourish on the liberal side of things in the Democratic Party for many, many years, where basically the whole thing is, I'm a this, this, and this. You would never understand me. We have nothing to talk about. You're so far away from my lived experiences that your minds will be a fucking alien and that we don't have any shared interest. That's a lie. But again, class solidarity is rooted not in dismissing that, right? Imagine these vulgar class reductionists just telling, you know, an immigrant person or a black person, or a trans person's like,

shut the fuck up about all that. It's about class. Was that person going to want to have solidarity with that person? No, they're going to be like, okay, this guy's an asshole. He doesn't even care to meet me as a human being. He's trying to take me and reduce me down to something that fits his paradigm and his project. That's not the basis for solidarity. So I think we can both combat class reductionism and liberal identity reductionism

dialectically and bring them together in a way that actually provides a way forward instead of just another tool to bash each other over the head with. Right. Yeah, I think that's a good answer. I think, you know, one of the things that I'll say, I really hate the term class reductionism, actually, because I don't think it accurately gets at what the problem is, which is usually like chauvinism in some form or another.

Because I think logically, from a philosophical perspective, I think Marxism is class reductionist, point blank, i.e. materialism, historical materialism, holds that all social phenomena can be explained through materialist, orientation, which is usually going to boil down to class and property relations, right? And so that's why I don't like the term class reductionism. But alongside that, Marxism has an incredible history of being able to wrestle with other social phenomena, which are then produced on top of class, right? Go listen to our episode on Engel's work on the family, right? Like, this is looking at how a development of changes in class relationships as society shifts from a primitive communism to another social form. then creates the family, creates the basis of patriarchy, go look at the work of honorata Gandhi, who I think does a great job of showing how women's oppression emerges from specific changes in property relations. All of those things, I think, are our class reductionist in as much as

they start with class as the method of analysis and then look at how the social formation develops on top of that. And so I do think if we want to think about gender, race, sexuality, nation, and all of these things. We actually do have to start with class in order to get to them if we want to be materialist. But that doesn't mean they don't exist. It doesn't mean their secondary concerns. And it doesn't mean that they are, you know, just free-floating identity markers. They have to be grounded in a materialist perspective. And when I look at the work of, I mean, Cheever, I can't comment on that much, but Costella, I have actually seen about his work. And I do see him being, I think, quite chauvinistic around these issues. And I think that that is

more driven, again, by not a focus on class, but by actually. a lack of taking class seriously. A lack of taking seriously that from a Marxist perspective, the primacy of class does not mean that other social phenomena don't exist. And it's an intellectual laziness and an unwilling to do the hard historical and anthropological work to show how changes in the material base of society produced gendered divisions, produced racial supremacy, produced colonialism. It's intellectual laziness, it's chauvinism, and it's crude populism. And that's my main problem with it. I think it is just not actually Marxist or materialism. or a class standpoint at all because of that laziness.

And then, yeah, I do think we need to reject a sort of liberal, I like the use of identity reductionism that treats race as just an identity, that treats sexuality or gender as just an identity. That does the same thing where it cuts them off from the material historical changes that have produced the inequalities and oppression and exploitation around those categories. And again, I think actually the way we figure out how to address them is tying it back into the broader struggle against capitalism. That's kind of how I look at it.

Yeah, I don't know. Hopefully that's helpful. I just think, like, Marxism is class first, but that doesn't mean the other stuff doesn't exist. Well, that's the thing is like I kind of understand the use of the term class reductionism because it's class first, but dialectics is anti-reductionist to its core. Sure. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I know this is a minor semantic point, but I actually do think there is a phenomena of class reductionism and it is chauvinism. As you said very clearly, they basically amount to the same thing.

And we see formations on the ostensible radical left to this very day that can be called reductionist in the class sense and that they're willing to just throw away all these other things and actually even actively denigrate people for their identities in a way that is not helpful at all and is reductionist in a certain way. So I don't know. I think there probably is a place for that language, although the way that it's used often obscures its meaning and it can be wielded in very different ways. and it can be lobbed at people who are not being reductionist at all. But the core thing I think is really important is that dialectics prevents vulgar materialism and prevents reductionism if you take it seriously. So that actually is the cure ultimately.

And I think what Allison and I are articulating is a dialectical response to these questions. A dialectical materialist response because in the final instance, it does come back to class struggle. It has to. And that's just a function of living in class society. And there's no way around that, you know. Okay. Whose turn is it? I think it's yours.

Okay, okay. All right, this is a good one. I have to leave reasonable, like in a little bit, but I think we have time for a couple of questions. Yeah, whatever. Okay, so this is from Matt. Hey, Allison and Brett. First off, love and solidarity, the both of you are indispensable for deepening political education for so many. Thank you.

I have been wanting to get involved in a local org for a while now. The one concern that sticks out to me is dealing with surveillance. I've heard from another podcast that it would be best if you're not openly a communist or a lefty. It's best to keep it that way. Or if you're already not openly communist, it's best to keep it that way and do organizing in a much smaller, essentially underground fashion with a cell of a handful of people that you would trust with your life that you've literally known for years. I'm wondering what your recommendation would be in these times, given flock cameras, social media surveillance, the MPSM7 directive by the current administration. obviously the left has been plagued with state counterinsurgency, red scare, surveillance, and infiltration for decades.

It's a very real problem that persists and has evolved with the tech today. I agree. Wondering if you all have any thoughts or recommendations on joining an above-ground org versus the small cell formation in these times. Yeah, that's an interesting question. As someone who's been like very openly and publicly a communist for a long time, I've often wondered like if that weren't the case, how would I approach these things? So I relate to this.

So, okay. again, here's where I'm going to maybe get like what feels pedantic, but I think matters. There are different kinds of organizations, and some organizations, by necessity, have to be above ground. For example, trade unions, labor unions, tenant unions, mutual aid groups, all of those things are necessarily above ground organizations. And those are the places where I believe that communists can go and interact with the masses and inject communist politics and political struggle.

I think if you call yourself a communist, you should be involved in those organizations, which requires being involved in an above-ground organization. Now, those are not explicitly communist organizations, right? Although I would suggest you would be engaging with them in a communist way. But I do think mass organizations are necessary, and I think that we should be involved in them. And that's going to require some level of publicness. I also think one of the key goals of state surveillance and kind of like counterinsurgency, organizing is to convince people to back off of public politics, to try to turn radical politics into a weird subcultural thing rather than a potential mass movement, and not ceding ground to that,

I think is really, really necessary. So that would be my other take away. Now that said, surveillance is happening. It is much more technologically advanced than it's ever been. And I also think oftentimes people don't take security very seriously in ways that I think are regrettable and unfortunate. And I also think that, think people don't read the detailed, like, court news of cases of repression that occur in the United States to learn some of the details of how state repression happens. And I think those are all mistakes and that we need to be serious about these things. We need to be up to date on the legal side of things, et cetera. So all of that said, though, I do not think you can back off. Now then

in terms of if you're trying to have, like, a communist cadre group, I'd say I would lean more towards more secure than less secure on that. But if you just have your, these are my five friends. who I really trust and we're doing our thing underground and we publish some stuff and that's it, you're not doing anything, right? You also have to be interacting in mass organizations, in actual organizing, making contact with people. So there's a balancing act and it's going to depend on what kind of organization we're talking about. Organizations have different levels of political unity. They have different goals and the level of openness or secretness that they have will probably vary based upon those things. Ideally, we want a open above ground party,

some day in this country, right? So I do think that's pretty important for us to keep in mind and to not abandon that as a goal. But yeah, those are some broad thoughts without being too detailed because it's kind of a sensitive question. Yeah, I mean, my thoughts are just like on one hand, like I understand it. On the other hand, you can't be too paranoid that the more of us that are out there, the more of us that are talking, the more of us that are saying, yeah, I'm a socialist. I'm a communist. Because I believe in this vision for humanity. I'm compelled by my moral values to speak out. Yes, there's not zero risk with that. But if you're not breaking laws,

if you're not doing anything clandestine or fucking crazy, I would encourage people to be publicly a socialist at least, right? I am like a communist, I'm a Marxist, whatever you want to put it. I know some words are scarier than others, depending on who you're talking to. But if we are cowtowed into like hiding and being super secretive, we disconnect ourselves from the masses, we allow our enemies to tell the people who we are,

as opposed to us, and we overall weaken our movement. Like, you know, I'm proud to be this. I can argue for this. I'm not committing crimes. I am fucking speaking freely from my moral values and my political conviction, and I think we should be public with that. We should join organizations, you know, not be scared of that. On the other hand, certain protocols are obviously sensible.

When you're on the internet, I don't use my fucking real name. On the internet, because it just takes one fucking freak online who fixates on you for some reason to at least annoy you if not like fucking cause real fucking stress in your life. And another thing is that the algorithms that we're in, I feel myself being pulled to say crazy shit. Like I get fucking pissed and I see something

and I want to like type of comment that might get my ass in trouble. And there's been so many times I've commented something and then erased it and said it's not worth it and just close the app. Don't get baited by the algorithm them into saying stupid, reckless shit on the internet. Every single thing you say on the internet, just assume the worst person in the world is reading it, even if that's not true.

And that kind of pushes you back a little bit because the real problem that you'll get into is obviously doing crimes or anything. You'll be attacked. But if you're saying crazy shit on the internet, that will get you a visit. That will get you put on some sort of monitoring list. That can make things more difficult for you. And even if it's not the state, again, some. weird old you never know who the fuck is reading this so i don't i don't use my real name and i tell my

whole family there's no reason to put your real name out on the fucking internet you don't need to do that private your account if you're not a public facing account um you know there's no reason why you need to be public private it you don't need to say every thought that comes into your head online um that's just not really uh productive at all and the only thing that can come out of that is not that you radically change people's mind but it's that that you draw heat on yourself um right I learned early on with podcasting. I was engaged in anti-fascist organizing. I would call out fascists by name on the podcast. And that is what got me this incredible blowback where now I'm being called out by name on these hardcore neo-Nazi forums, my vehicles, my address, my parents'

address being put like, I've touched that stove and I encourage you not to touch it yourself. And since then, I've depersonalized my public shit. I don't need to attack that or that person. I'm talking my vision, my politics, putting it out there in the world. I don't need to invite that sort of blowback. So be smart, but don't be scared. Don't hide yourself. Join an organization. And again, an above ground organization means that you're not doing anything illegal.

There's no reason to be doing illegal shit right now for 99% of us at this time. We need to build power in our communities through organizing tenants and organizing workers and helping meet people's needs and building dual. power. That can be done in a responsible way. But even if you do everything right, there's no guarantee that you won't have some consequences. That's what it's always meant to be on the left historically. And we shouldn't be scared of, you know, my whole thing is I'm, I know that I'm doing everything right. I know that I'm not committing any crime. I'm going to work. I'm paying my taxes. I'm raising my kids and I'm being honest about my opinions publicly. And I'm trying to inspire people and win them over to my ideas.

I am controlling what I can. If somehow, some way, that is still enough for the state to somehow some way persecute me or track me or make my life shitty, I can't control that. And I'm not going to live in fear of that. I can control what I can control. And then I allow things to play out as they play out. You know, Patreon tomorrow could take me off our shit. You know, the podcasting apps tomorrow could say this is radical. We're taking it all.

I can't control that. I'll roll with it if it happens. I'll deal with it if it happens. It's not going to stop me from being who I am, but I'm also not going out looking to be reckless, especially on the internet. So again, as Allison said, there's a balance to strike.

But intuitively, I'm against the idea. You don't need to go around, you know, rubbing in in everybody's face that you're a communist if you feel like that's not productive. But say your shit, you know, stand on your ground. Like, we are this. The more of us that are out there, the more musicians making music about it.

it, the more authors writing books about it, the more pundits doing shows about it, the more of us there are, the harder it is to crack down on anyone. If we're all secret about it, then it's a whack-a-mole. Somebody pops their head up, they get whacked. Somebody else, you know, that creates the context in which crackdowns are actually more effective. So I recoil from the idea that we should be secretive. It cuts us off from the masses. It weakens what we're able to do in the world. And at the end of the day, we believe we're on the right side of history. We believe we have the right values. We have the real solutions to the problems facing our species in the 21st century, we should be loud about that. Yeah.

All right. Got time for another one, Brett? Yeah, yeah, I do. All right. I'm going to go back to the Buddhism topic because there's another one right here that I think is very practical. So I'm interested in learning more about practicing Buddhism as a way to better ground myself in a world that feels sick and like it's constantly spinning out of control.

Do you have any book recommendations for someone totally new to understanding Buddhism? Book recommendations, that's one thing. there are some a path with heart by jack cornfield is a really down to earth super accessible way into the practices that really can cultivate love and compassion in a way that's really important and for me and my Buddhist orientation it is through the figure of the bodhisattva it is through the heart it is through the expansion of love and compassion first and foremost and that grounds my entire practice and a path with a heart by cornfield is a great way into that pema shodron P-E-M-A-C-H-O-D-R-O-N is a really good, really accessible, emotionally intelligent Buddhist teacher.

I think out of the Thick-N-H-H-H-H-H-N-Tradition or the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, I can't remember, but she has a lot of books talking about this, about feeling sick, about feeling despair, about feeling like life is out of control, those hard, difficult emotions in life. She's really good and has a lot of really accessible books on that front. But, yeah, at the end of the day, it's about the practice itself. have to learn some stuff in order to do the practice effectively and all of that. But the practice itself grounds you in reality. It grounds you in the here and now. It allows you to let go of what you don't have control over and be okay with that and to be able to face whatever comes up with

increasing amounts of courage, patience, and equanimity, which can only be to your advantage. So Buddhism is not something we use to retreat from the world. It's something we use to become more grounded and thus more useful and effective out in the world. And a lot of that, you know, what does the ego want? The ego wants the control. The ego wants the certainty. The ego is driven by fear. And anything that is driven by fear is always going to be fragile and weak in some way and under pressure will crack.

operating from increasingly a place of love and compassion gives you a certain amount of courage and Buddhist practice allows you to detach from that fear-based ego and to operate from a deeper part of your being that is much healthier and allows you to face reality as it really is without needing to retreat or needing to be driven around by fear. You know, we're human beings.

We live in this world. We have no fucking control. All of our ancestors, lived through almost to a person, worse, harder, less stable, less certain lives than we live, right? The fucking infant mortality rate was like 50% until 100 years ago. Like our ancestors dealt with horrific shit and that sometimes grounds me. It's like, I'm just living through history. I'm a human being living a human form.

I will pass away one day and be reabsorbed into the cosmos, into the fabric of nature itself. And I can engage with the work. world in a way that actually let's go of fear and is driven by curiosity and love and acceptance that all of this ends in me in the ground anyway. And there's a radical, there's fear that can come with that, but there's a radical freedom that can come with that as too, that they can come with that too, that I'm going to radically live my life according to my deepest values. I'm going to pursue a life of meaning and reward and community. I'm going to be guided by love and compassion. I'm going to try to deepen my wisdom. And I will control.

what I can and accept what I can't. So, so, you know, that's crucial. And if you're really interested in anything, everybody asks for book recommendations, totally logical question. If you're really interested in something, you'll find a way. You know, when I got interested in Buddhism,

it was like fucking 20 years ago in Omaha, Nebraska. Not a single person in my life could even define what Buddhism is. The internet wasn't even really developed to the point where I could go on and find those things. I found a way. And I taught myself and I learned myself. So if you're genuinely compelled, and you're deeply interested, you two will find a way, but a path of heart or Pima Shodran,

those are great doorways. And Alan Watts, if you're more philosophically minded, those are some really accessible ways in, and then you can find your way from there. Yeah, I think those recommendations are really good. The only two that I'll add is I found Tickna-Hans, the heart of the Buddhist teaching to be a really helpful book. It's very overview-y, so if that's kind of what you're interested in, just like a broad perspective on Buddhism, that's useful. And then a very not-overview book that I found really impactful was Joan Halifax's being with dying, which has a lot of like the Buddhist stuff about death in there, her own experience as a Buddhist hospice caregiver.

And that book for me really was, I think, huge for understanding Buddhism as a compassionate way of relating to other people, which I imagine would be appealing to people with our politics interest in Buddhism. The last thing I'll add is also like books are like part of it, but also like practice is probably the much more important part. And if you're looking for a starting point on that, there are like a lot of apps out there that are kind of helpful. And a course that I would recommend is I think it's on the Insight Timer app. Jack Cornfield and Tara Brecht have an intro to mindfulness course that I think is really digestible and straightforward. And I would highly recommend that if you're looking for something practical to you. Yeah, I have, um, the last book I

read on on buddhist concepts is awakening from the daydream i'm trying to click on this for the full title one second here um i can't find the full title but it's it's it's awakening oh yeah here it is awakening from the daydream reimagining the buddha's wheel of life by david nick turned if anybody can see that maybe maybe maybe that's it's on audible as well um that's a really cool book it's it's accessible and it takes core buddhist concepts and kind of psychologizes them in a very helpful way, so maybe that will be useful as well. All right, I have another question. Okay.

Keep going. Anton Panicoic asks a great long-time supporter. Critical supporter, too. Often and sometimes disagree with me, and I love that. But their question is, the imperialist war against Iran has now gone on for three months. The Strait of Hormuz has been shut down for the same time. But still, we haven't seen the price shock on oil markets that was expected and predicted. How exactly are Western nation states and their financial systems manipulating the oil prices?

And how long can they keep this up before the price boomerang hits? Yeah. Man, isn't this the fucking question that I keep asking myself every day? So one, how are they manipulating it? Well, one, the U.S. has loosened oil trading rules, as has Europe, to allow oil to move across markets that it previously had it because of sanctions. So that's the most obvious manipulation that I think that we've seen. We've also seen oil reserves getting tapped into as a part of this as well, so I think that is a big part of it. Draining of oil reserves will probably be when the boomerang occurs, I would have to guess.

But yeah, it's kind of like hard to say. Again, Russian oil has actually been allowed to move more than it normally would be, which I think is the capitalist market compensating for this and trying to, you know, create that manipulation. But reserves are not forever. and I do think this disruption is going to continue. I don't know how to give you like a win-will-will-the-boomerang hit, but it's coming still, I think, if the straight remains closed, if that disruption still occurs. And I would, yeah, think that it's as reserves start to get lower,

that panic starts to set in on the market, and I would imagine that that panic is going to cause price fluctuations before actually running out of reserves does. But I will say, so much of the last half a decade of my life has made me think that capitalism is so much more fucking resilient to these kind of crises than we often think and that it is very good at adapting. So I'm not surprised that we're three months in and the like price shock still isn't here. But I also don't think like it can go on indefinitely. Some broad thoughts on that question.

Yeah. I mean, I agree with that. The reserves play a big role. Some countries are feeling it much more than others. The U.S. is a huge oil producer. It's been able to kind of tap some of those reserves and even still the prices are going up and there's a lag in the system so even if it stops tomorrow even if the strait of Hormuz is opened freely tomorrow we're plagued with six to 12 months of inflation from the lagging effect of this so i think there's still going to be bite there's now talk today um of of getting very close to a deal which has neocons on online flipping out that the Trump administration and Iran are coming to a deal that very much includes the opening of the Strait of Hormuz soon. Now, we've heard this before. You know, there's lots of reasons to be

skeptical about that. There's lots of internal pressure in the White House and from the Zionist and neo-conservative factions inside and outside of America to keep this thing going. Certainly, Trump will not have accomplished any of the goals. I mean, if the goal is to open up the Strait of Hormuz, that was already open before your fucking war. You know, if there's the thing is a nuclear preventing them from having nuclear, I don't see how reaching any deal is going to even be better than the JPCOA that the Obama administration was able to strike with Iran that Israel and the neo-conservatives fucking hated and used Trump to dismantle that agreement precisely so they could pave the way for war and leave open the nuclear excuse

for the war. So again, there's reason to be skeptical about that. The longer this goes, on the worst it's going to be. And yeah, the boomerang will eventually hit. It's surprising how much market manipulation and working on the fringes to start exporting oil from the U.S. to different allies and stuff have been able to kind of keep the lid on it, but there is immense pressure from U.S. allies that are not Israel all around the world to stop this. Because if this continues to go on, there is like a global Great Depression. fucking famines that are on the menu. And I don't know if Trump realizes that.

Who fucking knows what kind of information Trump is getting, let alone metabolizing and internalizing with his fucking demented brain. So it's really hard to predict what the Trump administration is going to do here. But yeah, I just think they've been able to manipulate markets. They've been able to compensate in various ways so far. But that's an ephemeral strategy. And so I think the bite is coming, even if. even if an agreement is reached today,

Israel will be working behind the scenes in the wake of an agreement to dismantle it as they have continuously throughout the years. And so there's so much left on the table as far as what's going to happen. But yeah, it's kind of impressive how they're still able to keep the stock market all-time highs and keep the shit going, even as all of the core indicators of the economy become increasingly divorced from the live experience of people in the world. the actual economy. But yeah, that's a deep contradiction in the system overall.

And who knows how that's going to play itself out. Yeah. All right. Let me take another one for us. So have you read into quantum mechanics slash entanglement? I find it extremely difficult as everyone does, but I find the implications interesting. Though it's a completely different field that sometimes comes into contradiction with materialism, I can't help but draw the parallels to the dialectical worldview and even to some

degree to the concepts you discuss more in your spiritual episode. In any case, would you ever consider a guest from that field might prove to be an interesting dialogue. I would love to have a guest from that field. There's been episodes where I've talked about, you know, cosmology and theoretical physics as an amateur, as a layman who's always been interested in that stuff. Einstein called, you know, quantum entanglement, spooky action at a distance. But, you know, even though there's so many question marks around the quantum world and there's so many issues in physics of uniting the macro with the micro at the constant. scale, understanding the role that gravity plays on the quantum level or how gravity could emerge out of quantum dynamics is an interesting aspect of this. The entanglement in a distance,

it does seem to indicate, and again, this is so speculative and tentative and science is open-ended and always being revised and paradigms are always being overthrown by the very nature of what science is, but certainly it gestures towards a profound interconnection in the cosmos of some sort of sort of fabric in the cosmos that is connected across space and time because the crazy thing about entanglement is that, well, it's one of the only things within space and time that can occur faster than the speed of light, right? The speed of light is the speed limit on anything with mass in the cosmos. And even photons themselves travel at, of course, the speed of light. And the closer that if you could theoretically accelerate yourself to or even close to,

Or let's say you could accelerate a human body, which you can't because anything with mass can't go that fast. But you could accelerate a human body in a magical spaceship to the speed of light, time would stop. So literally you wouldn't be thinking thoughts anymore. Your eyes would stop blinking. You would be frozen as no time would pass for you to be able to do anything. So like the fascinating relationship between space and time and that the faster you move through space, the slower, time itself. It is, it blows the mind to try to think about these things. But I think the core thing, and I think what you're getting at with dialectics and with perhaps Buddhism or spirituality or

dependent origination, is this profound interconnectivity at the very core of the cosmos itself. And if we take the Big Bang seriously, then everything that we see, the infinite universe was once condensed into, you know, an unbelievably small amount of space that makes us profoundly. interconnected. We all come from that Big Bang. We all come from that space. You know, our whole being is forged through these cosmic processes. The iron in our blood is forged through stars literally dying and exploding and spreading their guts in the cosmos to allow complex multicellular your life to be possible in the first place. So more than anything, given the scientific question marks and the basic agnosticism with the core questions of the

mystery of existence is that the deeper we dive into understanding reality, the more we are confronted with our profound interconnectedness. And that is Spinozist, that is Buddhist, that is dialectical in a deep and profound sense. And it's one of the most beautiful things about the universe, in my opinion. Yeah. No, I think it's an interesting question. I would love to talk to someone from that field, honestly, because I think I always get nervous with quantum mechanics generally because I think a lot of philosophers like bastardize it

a little bit and can fuck it up in ways that are kind of frustrating. And that's where actually talking to someone from the field would be really interesting. And there are a few cases where I've listened to conversations between philosophers and physicists get into this. And it is always interesting to watch those two approaches kind of develop. So I do think it's an interesting question. And I do think, wow, it raises some big questions. And the more you start to get into like weirder parts of philosophy, like consciousness,

the more of this can start to feel relevant weirdly in ways that I think we have to deal with. I just feel so ill-equipped because I don't have a very good understanding of even basic conventional physics, nonetheless of the quantum mechanics side of things. So that is always the difficulty there. But I think it's important to engage with, even if I think philosophers can be kind of sloppy with it. I think the impulse to engage with it is correct. And I would hope to see more dialogue between philosophy and between like actual physicists in the field trying to figure out how to do that productively. I think like convincing a scholar that doesn't know anything about Rev. Left or Red Menace to come on a explicitly Marxist political podcast is kind of already a barrier to entry. You might just think like, I don't know what to expect here. This seems weird. I don't know if they do that. But I'm sure we have listeners, and I know we have listeners who might be in grad school for some of this stuff and could come on. I have done episodes where I opine on it as a solo person. And then I had a guest a few years back who was, I think, in grad school for something like theoretical physics who,

We kind of had an interesting back and forth with that stuff. I'm deeply interested in it. It's one of those things where once you're a thinking person, you think about the utter mystery of our existence, the mystery of the cosmos, like this crazy thing that we wake up one day and find ourselves within, this profound mystery. I think there's something naturally curious and fascinating about that.

And I'm kind of perplexed by the amount of people you come across who don't have any curiosity about the fact that they exist at all. It's like, holy shit. Right. But yeah, I would love to. I have so many questions I would love to ask a theoretical physicist or a cosmologist for sure. Here's another question from Dylan. We're going over three hours.

We said we're going long today. For both Allison and Brett, how do you manage your socialist organizing efforts with your partner or spouse? My partner is basically a center-left liberal that likes CNN and gets annoyed if I talk politics. I normally hold my tongue to spare us both the frustration, but I'm finding it very difficult to bring them over to socialism and have us both, or at least one of us, start organizing. That's an interesting dynamic, Allison. Yeah. It's hard because from personal experience, I don't know that I have a lot to offer.

My wife is also a communist. We organize together. So that kind of makes it tricky. The extent to which, like, there has ever been tension when we started dating was that I think she considered me a Stalinist in a prerogative sense. And he was sins worked past that. So, yeah, I don't know. that I have like any director concrete advice honestly because I'm married to someone who really

shares my politics. I would imagine this is a quite difficult situation to be in. But just to be honest, I don't know that I have a practical piece of advice. I don't know about you, Brett. That's that's difficult. Obviously, yeah, my wife was sort of like, I would say that and I think she would admit this too, that she was not political at all when we met. We met in our early 20s. and so but she had these intuitions obviously left left wing intuitions she's a second generation sort of like immigrant and uh you know already has like these sort of progressive values already kind of had like a basically feminist outlook and as born and raised in the working class an immigrant working class no less so when i started being me around her i think what that did

for her was just kind of fill out the picture that she already wanted to have filled out you know, like my analysis of the world, which is a Marxist analysis, made sense. And so, like, her intuitions were then clarified. And so we never had a political disagreement or, you know, a political disagreement in that, in that big sense from the jump. And so we've, we've kind of grown and evolved together in that way. So she's definitely on our shit. So it would be difficult. I don't know. Like, I sometimes think what it would be like to be in a relationship that intimate of a relationship with somebody who didn't share those core values, I don't want to say that that's impossible or even that that's a reason why you shouldn't be with somebody. Like,

there's lots of people in my family, for instance, who I'm not a partner with, but it's still huge parts of my life who we don't have to agree at all. It doesn't bother me that they don't agree with me politically whatsoever. And I always think like family bonds are more important than political disagreements ultimately, although those political disagreements can be fun. And of course, there are lines. I'm not talking about like, you know, crazy, Nazi types or anything like that. I don't know how long you've been together. I don't know, like, as you live through historical situations and try to make sense of it together,

how that might, you know, radicalize somebody. This is a period of time in which liberals are being radicalized leftward. That is happening. And so, again, like, what are the class positions here? What are the background education situation that the person is coming from? what do they do for a living? How precarious is your economic situation? How closely do they follow events?

What is their explanation of why we are, where we are? And then maybe once that person gives you and articulates, this is my theory of how we ended up here, you could give your theory and kind of deepen each other. I don't think it has to be inherently hostile. It doesn't have to be a thing where you should be quiet and not bring it up. I mean, if that's happening, then perhaps the way you're going about bringing it up is the problem more than bringing it up, right? It doesn't have to be a debate. It doesn't have to be a fight. It can be just open communication, you know.

And you can just have like a sit-down conversation where you're like, okay, all the problems in the world and perhaps all the things that make a relationship difficult, this is not do or die. But, you know, my politics are ultimately rooted in my core values. and it does bother me a little bit that we aren't on this together. I don't want to have a debate. I'm not trying to force my opinions on you. I just want to communicate with you honestly as partners about this thing that I'm dealing with and get your opinion on this thing that we're dealing. Keep it at the level of like, you know, here's an issue in our relationship that I just want to bring up

and communicate openly about not. Here's my political position. Here's yours. Here's why you're wrong. You don't have to go in there. But I think the first step in this situation, would be open and honest communication about your feelings as such. And an expression of the importance to your core values as a human being that your politics are.

And really listen to what they have to say. What about your approach politically with them is off-putting? What makes you have to hold your tongue in the first place, right? I think that less than the politics themselves, this is speculation because I don't know your details, but I would argue that it's something about the approach that is off. And then having that conversation and getting all that stuff out on the table can be very helpful and create an opening for the path forward. So yeah, my recommendation to you would be bring this up in a non-debaty, non-confrontational

way. You know, don't make them feel like they're on the back foot or that the relationship depends on them coming over to your side or that this is some serious thing, but just openly, vulnerably and honestly express your feelings on the situation and then truly and genuinely listen to their thoughts on it and move forward from there. And maybe you'll find that you don't have to necessarily agree on politics, but it's the underlying feelings that are the problem and those can be dealt with in a constructive way. So again, don't know enough details to have anything more than that, but that would be, if I was in your situation knowing what I know,

that would be my approach because I truly believe the cornerstone of any healthy relationship is open, honest, vulnerable communication, even and especially when it's uncomfortable to do so. That is the glue that holds a relationship, any relationship ultimately together, and I think that would be my first step. All right, I'll take another one. This one says especially for Allison, but I think we are both capable of answering this. I'll ask you, Brett. As a tenant organizer, I'm curious if you all are familiar with the Tenant Union Federation,

They've had a string of big wins recently, mostly in red states, but they don't seem to be getting much attention on the left. They have a training called Union School, which is absolutely transformative in my experience. And then two, if every socialist only did tenant organizing, we would be screwed. But I know you've both spoken about how critical it is in our given material conditions, the state of the labor movement, state capture of unions, deindustrialization. What can we do to push more socialists from activism, mobilizing, and electoralism into concrete, highly accessible forms of organizing, like tenant organizing, especially in organizations like the DSA. Yeah, I mean, you're really involved in a big tenant union in L.A. So I would defer to you on some of those core questions there.

Certainly, I'm adjacent to my comrades in OTAU, Omaha Tenants Union, and they do amazing work, and I keep up with their work and I help in ways that I can. It is a core area of organizing, and it's organizing around people's most material needs. similar to labor and work organizing. It is organizing around housing. In the middle of a housing crisis, people are radicalized by their housing situation. People are terrified of being evicted and not being able to find a new place or having just 50% of their paycheck eaten up just to keep a roof over their head for one month.

So it's a particularly potent area of organizing that brings people together around a shared class and material interest. And I think it is one of the higher forms of organizing that. we see on the American left right now. And I think that insofar as you're looking, anybody's looking for something to get involved with, this is an immediate, material, class-based, organizing structure that you can either create or plug into

that does meaningful work in people's material lives and that is a really radicalizing experience for people when it's, again, the communists coming to them, organizing their tenants. You turn people who are at first victims of landlords and slumlords, into politically educated comrades through this process. I've seen it happen through O2 you time and time again. And I'm sure you know you've talked movingly, Allison,

about seeing that happen in your own world. So this is a crucial site of organizing and everybody looking for something to do can absolutely plug into that immediately. The housing crisis is not going anywhere. And even if the housing crisis culminates in a crash, that doesn't mean that the problem solved. That means that there's going to be more evictions,

that more people are going to be made homeless, you know, that the barrier to entry even in some ways gets bigger and that it has reverberating impacts throughout the economy that makes everybody poorer. So tenant organizing, I think, is a crucial side of struggle, especially in lieu of us being able to organize effectively around labor in this country, which is obviously the big step that we need to take as a movement. Tenant organizing is the working class because if you're a tenant, you know, you're not a homeowner, you are a renter and you're almost certainly in the working class and that's class-based organizing.

Allison. Yeah. So on the tenant union federation thing, yeah, I appreciate you mentioning this. Tough has had some really big wins and is really large. Like some of their tenant unions like Kansas City are huge and I agree that they have not gotten very much attention, which I kind of think is interesting. I know out here we've discussed them and sort of what's working for them. So in the tenant organizing space more broadly they're known about.

but yeah, maybe not beyond that. I will say that union school that you mentioned in your question, I have a comrade who went through that and also reported it as like a very transformative experience in terms of being equipped as an organizer. So I've only heard like really solid things about them having like a very concrete organizing methodology that they know how to teach and go and use. Which I think is like a level of professionalism towards organizing. That's pretty awesome.

And I hope we can see more of going into the future. And I also think that's related to like your second question about, what can we do to push more socialists from activism into organizing? And I think we kind of need some like training capacity for that, honestly. I think like formalizing our methodologies, knowing what they are, documenting them, and then knowing how to teach them to people is pretty important. Like, in tenant organizing, kind of asking for a big pitch, go into your neighborhood, meet some people you don't know, and organize them. What the fuck does that mean? What are the details? What does the concrete and practicality of that look like? And that's where like actual organizational training

and beginning to formalize methodology would be important. Because I think a lot of people are energized. They want to do stuff. And they look at something like that. And organizing is almost a mystifying term that covers up a set of concrete practices that they don't know what they are. And trying to make that documented available and trainable, I think is probably a pretty big step towards getting more people to plug into that kind of work.

So yeah, some thoughts there. Absolutely. And also, I think it's a testament to the need for a party. like a vanguard party where that literally does turn activist into organizers it's it's a central hub through which a million spokes are connected that you can get into various forms of organizing through the party apparatus itself but of course we're not we're not there we're not quite there yet there are not to say there's not parties but there's not a vanguard party um in any case joining a party is good and and and worth doing to develop it in whatever capacity you possibly can um but yeah

A true Leninist vanguard party really is the solution, but that takes organizing to even build. And so, you know, we're not quite there yet. And that probably is, in my estimation, the number one goal for the American left would be to work in the direction of a fighting, militant, socialist party with roots in the masses. That level of organization is absolutely required for any of our actually big goals of confronting power in any meaningful sense. Or just as I said in a recent episode, my number one. My number one goal as a Marxist in America is around the primary global contradiction of imperialism. It is to get the boot of my government off the neck of my brothers and sisters in the global south. And that any domestic gains for me and the working class in America truly is, I believe,

this secondary to the moral human need to stop the mass murder and economic strangulation of countries throughout the global south. But in order to rip that boot off the neck, that takes real political motherfucking power. And that requires the type of high-level national and international disciplined organization that Lenin is talking about and what is to be done. There's really no way around that.

And every other, you know, attempt to build power that doesn't do that fails over and over and over again. It's like history is begging us to do this. And, you know, I feel sometimes a shame that we, that we have failed in that regard because it's so dire. Literally people's lives depend on it. And we're sitting in the belly of the imperial beast, watching our government stomp on people's faces all throughout the global south and do whatever the fuck they want and bomb apartment buildings and bomb little girl schools. And we are fucking impotent to do anything about it. And that should really compel us to dedicate our fucking lives.

to trying to do something about it, and that requires high levels of organization. So great question, though, absolutely. Yeah. All right. Well, I think we're at three hours and 20 minutes. A little rough start, but we did it. This was actually intended to be a Patreon exclusive

just to give something back to the people that support us. It's now a public episode, but thank you so much to the people who do support us. It means the world to us, and not just support us financially, but that spread the word, that support us on social media, that share our episodes with family and friends,

that bring our episodes into organizing efforts as political education, which is a lot of what Red Menace is meant to do, is like provide ready-made, accessible political education to people and ultimately to organizations. And I've heard countless times that our shows have been used for exactly that. And it means the world to me. So, yeah, Alison, any closing thoughts? Go ahead and give your final thoughts and take us out.

Yeah. No, I mean, this has been enjoyable. Thank you all for sticking with us for three hours of live stream. appreciate it. The shot's been lively and it's been good to go back and forth. So yeah, I appreciate all the questions. I hope any of this is useful. And yeah, I think like Brett said, we appreciate the support people spreading the show. I think anytime I hear that anything we produced has helped people in like concrete work at all, it's like the whole reason that this is worth continuing to do. So it's always very appreciated and I'm very thankful for all of you.

Absolutely. All right. Talk to you all later.