Trillbilly Worker's Party - **UNLOCKED** Nothing is Inevitable (w/ special guest Christina Heatherton)

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

Unlocked from the Patreon vault: Christina Heatherton, professor of American Studies and Human Rights at Trinity College in Connecticut, talks with us about global radicalism in the era of the Mexican Revolution Buy Christina's book here: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520287877/arise

Thank you. Okay, welcome to the show this week, fam. We have joining us today, Dr. Christina Heatherton. Is it appropriate to call you doctor? Is it in fact preferred? Yeah, only call me doctor. If you call me by anything else, I'll sue you. You can call me Christina. It's fine.

If you call me by anything else, I'll sue you. You can call me Christina. It's fine. Christina is a professor of American Studies and Human Rights at Trinity College in Connecticut. She's the co-editor of Policing the Planet, which I have on my bookshelf right now, with Jordan T. Camp, who we've had on the show before. There's a lot of intersecting. There's going to be a lot of intersecting things in this episode i feel like um a lot of your book talks about arigi for example and long-time listeners of this show will know i'm a big arigi head javon yeah uh um but

today we're we are actually meeting to talk about Christina's book, which is a year old. Like today or something. Like today. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, happy birthday. Happy birthday to your book. Also speaks to our unreliability. We got it within the year. There you go. Here, there you go. Christina's book is called Arise Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution. It, yes, is a year old,

which means that it has just been released in paperback, if I understand that correctly. So we're going to be talking a little bit about that book. You know, there's a lot of interesting things about this book that we can like, like tributaries or avenues that we can kind of like go in and any different direction. And we don't have to start here. right before we started recording, actually, I was kind of chasing down one of these rabbit holes in your book, which was about the, I believe they're called the San Patricio Battalion or the St. Patrick's Battalion. They were a group of like 150 or so defectors from the U.S. Army

in the Mexican-American War. I'd never heard of these. I mean, maybe that sounds dumb. I apologize for those of you who expect me to know everything but uh i'd actually never heard of of this group before um they defected from the u.s army in the uh yeah mexican-american war uh they i think they were all executed it was like one of the largest mass executions in the united states history um the leader was a guy named john riley uh who was like an irish um national is that hence the

name hence the name yeah what name saint patrick's uh i don't know what is the san patricio they were they were mostly irish immigrants and some germans yeah right well it actually does kind of provide an interesting entry point because in a way it is a precursor to what you are outlining or illustrating in the book which is this kind of uh sort of nascent internationalism or a growing international consciousness that informs social struggles throughout the end of the 19th century and early 20th century. This was in the Mexican-American War, so it would have taken place in the late 1840s. But, you know, I think the second chapter of your book talks a lot about the late 1840s as this kind of like pivotal moment in, you know, global history, obviously,

but in like capitalist accumulation and in the concept of internationalism. So I guess my first question to you before we start talking about the Mexican Revolution, before we start talking about some of these other things, like what is internationalism? Like how do you, how do you, how are you defining it in this book and what are some of its like precursors that you talk about in the lead up to this first social revolution of the 20th century, the Mexican Revolution. Cool. Well, so let me quote myself. The way I define internationalism in the book is I say internationalism recognizes how people have been unevenly waylaid by the development of capitalism across space, and how they develop forms of revolutionary solidarity in spite of social and spatial divisions, including national borders.

And so I think actually the 1840s is a really good time to start the conversation because a lot of, I think, our commonplace definitions of internationalism start in 1848. start in 1848. You know, it's a huge year of proletarian revolts throughout Western Europe, and maybe kind of most famously, it's the year that the Communist Manifesto is published, right? So I think that there's a pretty traditional way that we can think about an internationalism from that point on. But obviously, if you're thinking about the history of Mexico, 1848 means something a little different, or at least you have to expand the definition of how you're thinking about revolution and internationalism from that moment. So 1848 is the year of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ends the Mexican-American or U.S.-Mexican War. And with that treaty, Mexico loses almost like close to half of its territory. So you're from the Southwest, right, Terrence? I am, New Mexico, yeah. New Mexico, right? Nuevo Mexico.

Thank you, Tom. Wonderful pronunciation. He's our translator, everyone. our translator. So, you know, where you're from, where I grew up in California, you know, like huge parts of the, you know, Western United States, like those are territories that are annexed or, you know, seized at the end of the war. And so, you know, I'm really fascinated by what happens. So, you know, Ulysses S. Grant says of that war, you know, he describes it this wicked war, but he describes how the United States is behaving like the European monarchies are in the sense of like, you know, the United States, still a very young nation is imagining itself in the kind of model of territorial conquest,

imagining itself in the kind of model of territorial conquest, of empire building, right? And so the acquisition of Mexican territories is part of that. But what happens after 1848 is really interesting. The newly acquired territories and some of the bordering lands in Mexico end up being like the site of intense capitalist investment for U.S. capital, intense sites of investment for U.S. capital. And like, I mean, basically, like the U.S. millionaires, you know, are making their fortune in these new sites of investment. And so scholars like Gilbert Gonzales say that you have to understand Mexico as being annexed twice over, like the first time territorially, the second time geopolitically. And so part of what I'm arguing is that there's a shift in the production of capitalist geography that we can kind of like point to at 1848 as a pivot. And so if we think about the way that imperialism is shifting

in this period, you know, like Mexico's role in that, the U.S.'s relationship to Mexico, I think we get this totally different starting point to think about capitalism and also internationalism, you know, that's like it shifts the center of gravity from Western Europe, you know, to the Americas. Europe as this, you know, the springtime of the peoples, this continent-wide revolution that, in fact, you know, Marx looking back on it when he's writing the 18th premier, it's like for him, he had to go back and revise a lot of his assumptions that he'd written in the Communist Manifesto. And what he was wrestling with was like, how are we to account for the fact that the bourgeoisie is so powerful now? And not only that, we'll willingly throw the proletariat under the bus.

And so, you know, I think we traditionally view the era of 1848 to 1914 as this kind of nation-state, this era of, like, nation-state formation. And it's interesting that, like, in North America, the same thing was more or less happening. It's like that quote that you pulled out from Ulysses S. Grant. Like, he's looking at this and he's like, why is America behaving like one of these european uh powers um and then but like as you as you point out it is more complicated in in the united states sense because what comes

to define u.s state formation in the united states after the quote-unquote frontier is closed off is these other mechanisms of power uh you know, like debt regimes and things like that. And I think you pointed out, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think that like the first time the United States entered into a creditor position with another nation state was with Mexico, wasn't it? Yeah, absolutely. The first time the U.S. becomes a creditor nation is in Mexico. So, you know, by the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, which I understand we can still be in the 19th century before we get there. But, you know, by 1910, over a quarter of all U.S. investment is in Mexico. U.S. financers own like 80 percent of all mineral rights in the country. U.S. entities own more of Mexico's surface than Mexico's entities, which is not to say that it was the singular capitalist power. You know, I'm not making that claim.

There was a lot of different forms of foreign capital. But, you know, the way that U.S. hegemony takes shape is quite unique and distinct if you think about it in relationship to Mexico. And I think it's really profound that the first time the U.S. becomes a creditor nation is in Mexico. And a lot of how we chart the kind of rise of U.S. hegemony is, you know, how it's an exporter rather than an importer of capital. And we often think about that as a kind of like, you know, early to mid 20th century phenomenon. But I think if you start thinking about what sort of dynamics are happening in Mexico, you know, I mean, what I argue is that it's in Mexico that the US developed

a kind of new forms of indirect rule, a new modality of imperialism. So it's not just direct territorial seizure, but a kind of indirect rule through finance, a control of banks, of judges, of legislators, all under the kind of threat of military intervention. So you don't have to seize the land, but the threat can always hang there. And so I say in relationship to Mexico, the U.S. developed the capacities with which it would come to superintend the global capitalist economy. Yeah. And as you point out, there's actually a very fascinating, I think it's maybe your fourth chapter, this sort of like transition to the U.S. becoming an exporter of capital necessitates that it then build these containment zones, basically, that become like prisons. And one of which is like Leavenworth Prison in Kansas.

which is like Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. But again, part of your argument, though, that you're making is that in doing so, part of capitalism sort of like countervailing tendencies, it'll bring in its own sort of like negating forces into that. So in Leavenworth, you had basically all these political radicals, one of which was the Flores Magón. I don't know if all the brothers were there, if it was just Ricardo. Two, yeah and enrique yeah okay um but like in leavenworth like they basically

i think the fbi even called leavenworth like a uh a radical university more or less um so why why was that why why did the united states becoming like a major exporter of capital require it to then build a sort of like larger security state? You know, how did the Red Scare and everything fit into that? Why was it necessary for that to happen? Yeah, well, you know, I think that's a really good explanation the way you framed the question that the two things have to be understood in relationship to each other. So I mean, sometimes, when we're talking about carceral systems of the prison industrial complex, they kind of, you know, can almost seem to have their their own sort of intrinsic history and in of themselves. But I think, thinking about it in relationship to the

development of US hegemony, you know, helps us understand that they're serving a specific function. So I mean, you got a lot of people that are questioning the capitalist system in the early 20th century. So I'm really thinking about the period of World War I. And the reason this is significant is it's in World War I that you've got all of these federal laws against political dissent. You got the espionage and you got the Sedition Act, right? And so, you know, a lot of this is because Woodrow Wilson like campaigned on saying he wasn't going to bring the country into war. And then of course he did, right? And so, you know, there was a big crackdown on so-called disloyalty and it became a crime if

you were opposing the draft, if you were, you know, I mean, these two new pieces of federal legislation just kind of like throw a wet blanket over all forms of radicalism that's happening at the time. And so, you know, in Leavenworth in World War I, you see like every kind of radical in the country or who's connected to the country there. So you have, you know, Wobblies, you've got socialists, communists, you have pacifists, you know, and you have members of, you know, Indian Gada rights, people that are organizing against British colonialism in India with key sites in the United States. They're there too. And of course, what brought me there was this is where Ricardo Flores Magón, one of the key, you know, architects, agitators, journalists of the Mexican revolution, he dies in Kansas, you know? I mean, I think

initially I just had to be like, how do we think about the Mexican revolution with this guy dying in Kansas? And I quote some of his letters, you know, like how he's in this cold cell just trying to think about Mexico. What did it mean that he was in Kansas and why was he there? So, you know, part of that chapter is really kind of following on from the Department of Justice surveillance files where there was such a problem with this prison, which is like a military prison. like a military prison, like all of these kind of working class soldiers of empire are getting sent there. And then they keep leaving as organizers. And this is like such a problem that the federal government is calling it a university of radicalism. And so I went to the archives there in Kansas City, Missouri, and found that, well, there actually was a university. And so you put a bunch of radicals together, they're going to do what they do, like in order to try to organize with

each other against the horrible conditions in that prison, they educated each other. And so some of them were formal educators, but some of them would just come and they would talk about the revolutions that they were from, or they would talk about the radical conditions, or they would teach language by explaining, you know, here's the context I'm coming from. They wrote a newspaper, there's a like really, you know, I went to archives in Mexico to see what books they were reading. And so yeah, that chapter, How to Make a University, really tells the story of that prison. But it's kind of a way of, like, how do we think about all the currents of, you know, radicalism and revolution that are, like, in the air at that time, and how do we

think about Leavenworth as this, you know, container, or as I call it, a convergence space that kind of stills it and just lets us see how people were talking to each other and making sense of things. Yeah, and I apologize for basically skipping so far ahead from 1848 to the prison. territorial expansion. And then fast forward into the 1910s, where there is no more quote unquote territorial expansion to be had, at least on the North American continent. So then you've got this sort of, I think you talk a little bit about it, like this idea of like a frontier and like how frontiers of accumulation can be expanded. And in part of that, you've got the expansion of the security state. So I think it's an interesting trajectory to draw. I also think it's just interesting to talk about Ricardo Flores Mago in the sense that what landed him there in the first place was, I think, literally like a pamphlet saying, you know, sort of like encouraging workers of the world to unite.

sort of like encouraging workers of the world to unite. So it's like you've got this cry to internationalism being the thing that lands him in the prison in the first place. So I don't know. I just think that's kind of an interesting story. Well, you know, maybe I can kind of name check your man, Origi. Tom, did you want to give us his first name again? I'm not really good at Italian, just Spanish. Like your pronunciation earlier. So, you know, I mean, part of the kind of setup for the book is I'm trying to make this argument, you know, related to the first question you asked me about, like, you know, how do we even understand this period?

Right. The subtitle of the book is I'm thinking about global radicalism in the era of the Mexican Revolution. And I'm thinking about that kind of expansively. So, you know, I appreciate that you start in 1848, because it's, you know, the book doesn't begin in 1910, with the outbreak of the revolution, it's really kind of slowing things down and asking us to think about the production of capitalist space and the production of an internationalist consciousness. And so, you know, Giovanni Righi, as you know, has, you know, periodizes capital through what he's describing as systemic cycles of accumulation, right? And he's really interested in which powers were hegemonic within those systemic cycles. So, you know, this is like another way of saying that is, you know, the period that we understand as a period of the British Empire. Right. It's like sunsets and wanes in the period that the U.S. starts emerging as a hegemonic power,

right? So, Rui would say that, you know, this kind of late 19th century period when British, you know, British as a hegemonic power is declining, the U.S. is becoming the hegemonic power in a systemic cycle of accumulation. So what I thought was really interesting is, you know, W.E.B. Du Bois is thinking about this same period too, right? And so in this, you know, what we're talking about around 1915, Du Bois writes this article called The African Roots of War. And he describes this period as the era of the new imperialism, right? And he's really thinking about the scramble for Africa, but he's making sense of something that he says is shifting in

both the scale and the operation and the control of capital. And what I think is really interesting about putting him in dialogue with Arrighi is that while Arrighi is talking about hegemony on a kind of like world system scale. Du Bois is asking us to think about it in like a kind of more immediate scale, right? Yeah. So, you know, Riggi's definition in some of his writings, he talks about hegemony as the representation of a specific and small set of interests as the general interest, right? as the general interest, right? And in a lot of Du Bois' writings, he's totally interested in how the working class in the U.S. gets conscripted to believe that its interests are one and the same as those of U.S. capital, right? So it's a question of hegemony for him, but at a smaller scale. And I think that that's a really helpful

way to think about what struggles over internationalism were in the period, so that we're not just thinking in kind of like big hegemonic cycles, which almost feel like seasons, you know, they're like so big and so inevitable. It's like the movement of the cosmos. But for Du Bois, he's really thinking about political struggles. And so, you know, in that article, and in other writings he's doing in the period, he's really laying out political struggles. And so, you know, in that article and in other writings he's doing in the period, he's really laying out that one of the struggles, you know, to like confronting this system is to get people out of thinking that their interests are the same as the capitalists, right? That that's, you know, the process of hegemony is not foreclosed. It's

not a given. That's something that had to be organized. And I think Du Bois is kind of my key theorist because he's always attentive to the fact that nothing's inevitable. If something's organized, it can be organized against, it can be organized differently. I found it very fascinating. Yes, the African roots of war. He's basically writing this around the time of World War One, and that's the war in question. He's trying to sort of identify just like imperial maneuverings of all the great powers of europe have manifested in this like absolute bloodbath um and he uh but you know as you uh pointed out and i don't want to quote it exactly here because it you know he uses uh words i'm not going to reproduce here but he says the white working man has been asked to share the spoil of exploiting asians and black people um i think that the uh he's he's coming up with a very sophisticated sort of an argument there which is that like for empire to work for this new sort of imperialism to work in this moment like they have to the capitalists of those nations the elite the bourgeoisie they have to sort of like then go to their working masses and say like, OK, we will divide among you all the spoils of empire

and war and everything. It will come at a cost. We're not going to tell you what that is. But basically, the cost is dividing you from your fellow working men and women. And I think that you also pull out another article that I had never seen before, never heard of, which was the John Reed short story called Mac American. And basically what he's doing, I think, did he write that when he was in Mexico after the 10 tragic days? I think that he sort of like maybe wrote it around that same time. maybe wrote it around that same time um but he is kind of providing a sort of illustration of what w.e.b du bois is writing about which is that he's talking to and you know the what's really astonishing about that story is that like anybody who's ever uh spent any time in america would immediately recognize the people in this story i mean these are kind of like brutes but they're

they aren't powerful in any way. They don't have they don't they're not rich. They're not powerful. They're basically the people sent out by the rich and powerful to basically sort of oversee, you know, labor markets that that they oversee the disposition possession of lands that people hold. And he's kind of like really getting into like the psyches of these people um so i don't i don't know i just think it's um there's not any question here i think basically you answered it because i i had on my sheet which was like how are you employing the term color line here like what is uh what is what is what is dubois saying about the imperialism of this time in terms of what he calls the color line which was was not well it's not a term that he came up with

i think frederick douglas may have came up with it right but like the boys is the one who sort of like popularized it like basically he's saying it operates at a global or a macro level yeah well okay so let me try to take that in a few pieces um i apologize for the for the covid brain fog that just makes me asking any of these questions it makes the questions extra brilliant terrence extra brilliant um no i really love how you're putting that all together and so maybe first I'll just back up and say that you know somewhere in the book I say you know internationalism is not as simple as just waiting for the workers of the world to unite right and I think sometimes when we think about fetters to internationalism or fetters to you know international solidarity a lot of time

it's easier to think about repression which is no doubt there right but it's almost to, you know, international solidarity, a lot of time it's easier to think about repression, which is no doubt there, right? But it's almost as if, you know, if it were just, you know, the goodwill of the people, if it were just unleashed, you know, would allow us all to join hands and be together. And it's a little irresponsible. Like we, you know, whether we're talking about history or whether we're thinking about this moment, we really have to grapple with questions of like ideology and hegemony and think about some of these questions that Du Bois put on the table. Like, why is it that some people, you know, don't see other people as their equals or people they can organize with, or, you know, like there's something that impairs their imagination of solidarity. So it's a really kind of generous analysis that he's offering where he's talking about this kind of trick, right?

It's like the, you know, the Carnegie's, the J.P. Morgan's. This is kind of like the Gilded Age. And so many of these capitalists are making their money, you know, not just in Mexico, but in a number of different imperial ventures. you know, not just in Mexico, but in a number of different imperial ventures. You know, Du Bois, he says, you know, that the white working class in the U.S. and around the world are, as you said, being asked to share the spoils and that they can imagine themselves as small shareholders. So, you know, capitalism is, in Du Bois' mind, is kind of like presenting itself as if it's more democratic right so it's no longer just kings and emperors of the ancient regime who get to amass all the

wealth like this is supposed to be a more democratic era because allegedly you know working-class people could ostensibly become millionaires or they can share in the spoils of um empire so du bois is really interested in the way a lot of this uh breaks down around the color line right these ways in which these imperial investments are naturalized and legitimated right uh and the people within them are seen to be you know like um sort of dupes for the taking like uh and so i use uh john reed as a way to illustrate this so john reed some of your listeners might know uh was you know the famously the author of 10 days that shook the world you know like one of the most famous books about the bolshevik revolution also warren beatty made a movie about him i was just gonna say and if they don't know that then they know him as warren beatty i just re-watched reds not too long ago it's such an

interesting film very long too very long i would i would love you with COVID brain to just watch all three hours and then explain on the show what you think it was about. So, you know, before John Reed goes to Moscow, he's in Mexico. And he really wanted to interview Emiliano Zapata, but he got an audience with Pancho Villa. So he's, you know, wrote a bunch of dispatches from the, from the North and, and, and put them all together in a book called Insurgent Mexico. But what I thought was really interesting is he also wrote a bunch of short stories. And so one of the stories, Mac American is about, you know, other men from the U.S. stories, Mac American is about, you know, other men from the U S, uh, I, I, you know, who are in Mexico, their fortune hunters or their, you know, overseers on different haciendas, they're doing

all kinds of nasty stuff. And he's just describing in a kind of fictionalized way, what it means to interact with these men. And Terrence, I think your description of them is like brutes, really easily identifiable brutes is totally right on. So, you know, he describes, it's a kind of like, they're all drinking around the table, and they're all trading stories. And I thought what was really interesting about it was, you know, their stories are all about jobs they've held before. And so there's this kind of like rough camaraderie that comes about because one worked on a Georgia plantation. And so he talked about the kind of fun of hunting, you know, black men, you know, who hunting indigenous people on the plains or in Canada, in Canadian provinces. And so you get this sense that they're coming to Mexico with already an idea of how to identify themselves as white American men. on to Mexico as a territory, Mexican women's bodies, and also, you know, other immigrants that are in Mexico. So, you know, I use this as a way to say, I think that John Reed is doing a really incredible job of helping to illustrate what that subjectivity of the new imperialism

looks like. And like you said, how pathetic it is, you know, these are not impressive men, these are not wealthy men, these are like, you see how fragile the kind of subjectivity of the new imperialism is. So, yeah, I I it's a long answer, but I'll just say very briefly that, you know, there's another story that I tell in that chapter and it's about Langston Hughes, which I think is really important. Yeah, I didn't know about that either. So, you know, I mean, people know Langston Hughes, one of our greatest poets, who, you know, among his famous poems, he's got one, you know, that begins, I've known rivers, but a lot of people don't know. He wrote that poem while he was on a train coming to Mexico to see his father, who was a small land owner in Mexico. And in Hughes's memoir, The Big Sea, he's really trying to work out how frustrated he was with his father. his father went to Mexico to take advantage of liberties there that he didn't have in the Jim Crow United States. He could become a landowner. And not only that, he could also rule over a lot of indigenous people in Mexico, you know, who worked for him. And, and Hughes just talks about

how kind of disgusted he is and how he starts to understand something different about the structural racism that his mother, who's a working class woman in Chicago, faced by watching the kind of glee that his father feels being this big man there. And I make, you know, the point in relationship to Du Bois to be able to say, like, I think my point with the color line isn't to reinforce this idea that only like so-called white people or people who believe themselves to be white are the only ones who, you know, like are entranced by the color line or this kind of racism or this kind of subjectivity of the new imperialism. I mean, like we know this in the United States right now, especially with like, you know, what's the support for the right? It's growing among like communities of color. There's nothing intrinsic between like your identity and your politics. And so I think it's really important to understand the subjectivity of the new imperialism

in the United States is, you know, I'm not just talking about like white people did this and they're racist and they believe X, Y, Z. It's a political project and it held a lot of people in its way totally you know i think that that might be a good way to so i guess there's there's several different sort of like paths we could take here one of which is that we haven't even talked about the mexican revolution itself which was that like i plan to start out talking about it. But sometimes these things take on a life of their own. But I think that maybe one of the best theorists of what you're talking about is the individual, I think you talk about him in maybe the third chapter, M.N. Roy. about him in maybe the third chapter in in Roy and like he kind of came to this awareness or this sort of conceptualization of sort of like revolution I guess through the idea of colonialism and like he received a lot

of pushback I think even from you know from john reed actually it sounds like i i couldn't i couldn't tell how how linen necessarily felt about it uh it seems like you you get with linen it's kind of difficult because you get what he says on one hand but then you got to also keep in mind that he was like leading one of the only you know revolutionary states in the world at the time so like he was gonna do things differently than what he said uh so it's hard to kind of like tell where he landed on it but i think what linen told people was um the proletariat of various colonialized nations needed to form a kind of alliance with the bourgeoisie of their nations in order to sort of foment like social rebellion and i think this was probably all predicated on the marxist idea ironically that a lot of uh soviet um revolutionaries also thought

up until i think trotsky's uneven development thesis which was that like for a marxist revolution to occur you have to then pass through the sort of like capitalist uh phase of development and then pass on to the socialist one um roy thought that like this was probably not going to work um for the for the one of the reasons of the color line basically what you're just saying here that like the bourgeoisie of various colonized nations could then be conscripted into the exploitation of its working masses. And that like the workers among those nations

already had a pretty good idea of how that oppression and exploitation worked out. So you didn't need to go then tell them, you know, collaborate with your bourgeoisie, with your masters, like that'll help everything. I think that this actually, as I was reading it, I think it provides a pretty good sort of, I don't want to say roadmap,

but it does provide a pretty good lesson in what you would, what is kind of, like, vulgarized now as, like, class reductionism. You know what I'm saying? Like, it gets vulgarized now as, like, either race reductionism like class reductionism you know what i'm saying like gets vulgarized now it's like either race essential race reductionism or class reductionism or like one of the two i think that like your chapter on roy kind of like talks about how um you you have to kind of treat the same uh treat the two as one in the same as like a sort of like process like a motion that of that's always sort of occurring um maybe that's a kind of very long-winded way of asking like who was m inroy like how did he

how was his specific experience in mexico how did it inform how he saw the world and how how he then went out and sort of theorized it and theorized how to change change it you read the shit out of this book didn't you terrence i tried i'm telling you i was sick but i tried to read man you're doing so good for for post-covid thanks guys yeah encouragement i mean by any standard but particularly because i don't feel like i'm like i am but well let me let me take the first part of your point and then we can talk a little bit about mn roy because i you know i you know part of part of what i wanted to do with this book was kind of hit some i think unhelpful ideas on their head right right? I mean, I think there's some, you know, unfortunate configurations, you know, where people imagine, okay, well, Marxism doesn't account for colonialism,

right? If you're talking about the class struggle, you're not talking about racism, you know, or that feminist struggles have to be completely theorized anew at this moment. And so part of recovering a lot of the struggles and this like sort of alternative history of internationalism, I'm trying to say, well, no, I mean, people have done a lot of this work. And if we even just go back 100 years and try to trace some of these debates, I think we have a much richer understanding that we can draw from now. So one of those characters is M.N. Roy, Manavendra Nath Roy, which is not his real name, but it's the name he used. And he's got this really interesting trajectory. He was, you know,

he's from India. He was part of movements that fought British colonialism. He was a militant who was kind of charged to go and amass weapons and money and international support for that struggle against British colonialism. And he has this really kind of fascinating transformation when he comes to the United States and then to Mexico. So he's in the U.S. meeting with people, you know, like, as I know, reading Marx in the New York Public Library. But in 1917, when the U.S. enters World War I, you know, he's got to flee because all of a sudden he's organizing against one of the U.S.'s allies, right? So he goes to Mexico. And in his memoir, he describes Mexico as the land of his rebirth because it's in Mexico that he says he goes from being a diehard nationalist to an internationalist. And part of how he narrates that process is he's, you know, he's looking for work.

And some of the kind of socialist comrades there are like, well, okay, why don't you write some articles and just explain to a Mexican audience what the struggle, what the Indian struggle against British colonialism is, right? And so he sits down to start writing. And he says, suddenly, he realized that explaining the situation as if it was totally distinct, explaining the situation of what Indian people were fighting under British colonial rule to Mexican people was like, quote, carrying coal to Newcastle, right? He's like, I don't think I'm introducing a new dynamic here. You know, by 1917, the revolution had been going on for seven years. There's like a long history of struggle against colonialism against imperialism and so roy describes this like this jump in his

understanding and you know roy this man who was born in india ends up becoming one of the founders of the mexican communist party and he's sent to the Comintern as the representative for Mexico, you know, to talk about the situation there. And so for, you know, for people who know his name, as you mentioned, it's mostly in relationship to this debate with Lenin over the national colonial question. And, you know, so I mean, I don't have to rehearse what you just said, but Lenin's idea was that the working class had to be empowered in industrial countries, but in the colonies, colonial workers were not yet of kind of sufficient maturity. They hadn't, as you said, passed through capitalist development in the same way.

And so the alliance had to be built with the petty bourgeoisie there. And Roy is like, well, hold on. Like, why do conditions have to be different? And like, this is a big mistake. This is like you're setting people up for a counterrevolutionary revolt if you do this. And one of the interesting things is in reading some of the writings and speeches that he made in Mexico, he's actually like working a lot of that out as he's trying to talk about a comparison between the Indian and the Mexican situation. So, you know, this ultimately gets published as a supplementary thesis to Lenin's, you know, notes on the national and

colonial question. But as you said, I think that its significance is really kind of like reframing what some of these debates were 100 years ago. I think they point us in a different direction. I think they take us out of some really kind of unhelpful thinking around class reductionism. So yeah, I mean, that's part of the reason I lay it out there. Yeah, I think that this actually is the perfect place for me to ask the question I was actually going to ask at the very beginning. What is it about the Mexican Revolution that figures like Roy found so inspiring? And not you know not just roy there's a lot of other characters in your book that gravitate towards the mexican revolution um i guess you

know to add context to the reader mexican revolution happened in 1910 this is seven years before the bolshevik revolution of 1917 the first social revolution of the 20th century, as we say. We don't have to get into the specifics of the Mexican Revolution. It's a very complicated, in my opinion, it's not so straightforward. It's not as straightforward as the Bolshevik Revolution. There's a lot of twists and turns, and people who were friends, this is a parallel with the Bolshevik, people who were friends one day will be enemies the next. And I think that's just how revolutions work. But it is a complicated it is a complicated thing.

them, like figures like Roy. Why Mexico? Why the Mexican Revolution? Like, what was it about this world event that they found so both inspiring, but also informative from a sort of like theoretical view and from a sort of perspective of praxis and, you know, going forth and trying to change the world? Well, maybe I'll tell you how I came to this and then I'll try to answer the full question. So my, some of my family is Okinawan on my mom's mom's side. And, you know, on her dad's side, they're, they're Japanese. And so my family was interned during World War II in the Japanese American internment. And so I was talking to a lot of my relatives about what that was like and just what happened. And one of my uncles told me this really crazy story where he said he was like, OK, Christina, well, you know, we're Okinawan. And his father, my great uncle, Masao Yamashiro, was Okinawan. And he was a farm worker. He was an organizer in the Central Valley right near the U.S.-Mexico border. And he could speak Japanese, there were FBI roundups of like a lot of key figures in the community.

And like kind of most wartime roundups, they, you know, descended on organizers they were already surveilling. So my uncle tells me this story about how these federal agents come to his door. He has no idea why. And nobody knows what's happening or what's going to happen. But my uncle says that he said, well, you know, his dad had been down in Mexico fighting with Pancho Villa in them. So he knew how to take care of business. And if he was going down, he was going to take those mofos down with him. Right. And I was like, down with him right um and i was like what what he what he what uh he you know and uh so you know i so this was kind of like yeah a big question um and uh yeah that i mean i had to figure out i was like i are you telling the truth are you drunk drunk? Like, where is this coming from?

And, you know, it turned out a lot of my family, like a lot of Okinawans at the time, came illegally from Okinawa into the United States through Mexico. And, you know, I mean, some of them had very violent encounters with the state and with Mexican revolutionaries. But there's some evidence that some of them discovered a kind of international consciousness while they were there. So I think it's in chapter two, I tell the story of Paul Kochi, who I, you know, I, my great uncle didn't write a book, but another Okinawan immigrant who knew my family, who, you know, lived alongside my family in different places. His name was Shinsei Paul Kochi, and he did. And he wrote a book called Iman no Awa, or it's a short memoir, where he talks about how he came through Mexico and discovered internationalism. And it's a really beautiful story where,

you know, he's thinking first about struggles against Japanese colonialism. And then, you know, he takes this long path to the United States that goes through Hawaii, that goes through California, that goes through Mexico. And on every step along the way, he's kind of doing something similar to what Roy did. He's like, going, okay, wait, I understand what this struggle is about. I understand why, you know, indigenous Kanaka Maui workers in Hawaii are getting totally disrespected. I recognize that, you know, I recognize the class divisions on this ship and who they're, you know, trying to humiliate, you know. But he reserves this special attention for Mexico. And he describes throughout his travels there that he's just encountering so many of the, you know, similar kinds of struggles, struggles that also

similar to Roy kind of expand the way that he's understanding even his own condition. And, you know, for like somebody who's, you know, writing like a memoir, his critique of global capitalism is surprisingly strident, right? I mean, it's, he's not saying this is just the kind of same old, you know, haves and have nots. He's like, the particular development of global capital, you know, in the early 20th century produced the conditions where so many people were forced to migrate, or, you know, are dying of all these kind of unnecessary conditions. And so there's like a kind of common cause that people can find in being able to recognize that. So, you know, so that, I guess, maybe I'll just stop talking in a

second. But like, that was how I came to the question, you know, where I was just like, I think there's maybe something more there than meets the eye. And then once I started scratching the surface, I was like, okay, well, there were other people who had similar experiences in Mexico. And then thinking about places outside of Mexico, like Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, I was like, okay, there's actually this really interesting way where the history and the lessons and like you said, the praxis of the revolution is manifesting itself in all these other struggles that just kind of change the way we think about internationalism, labor history, militancy in this country. And so that was the question that I tried to pursue. Yeah. And this is a slight tangent in the book.

So I don't know anything about Okinawa, but in the book I wrote in the margin, as you were explaining Okinawa, I was like, it kind of sounds like the Appalachia of Japan. It's sort of like. I've always kind of gotten that vibe about it. Like, is there like sort of like an Okinawan sort of independence thing where it's like they're kind of see themselves as like different from but mainland you know i guess the rest of japan or whatever yeah absolutely absolutely yeah not only do i mean it's kind of uh it's a very crude way to ask that question no no no no no i'm so glad you asked it just the way you did um i would just say that like you know the thing that paul kochi's writing about and a lot of okinawan radicals in the period were writing about was, you know, being depicted as savages and barbarians in relationship to mainland Japan.

I mean, it's understood as a colonial relationship. So they were absolutely trying to, you know, assert that they had an identity that wasn't just as barbarians and savages. You know, I mean, like the Okinawans ate pork. They were like, you know, supposedly did all these things that were not. Let me put it to you this way. When I was very young, my and I'll get in trouble maybe for some Okinawan scholars, but my uncle took my sister and I to like an Okinawan cultural night. It was it was a Japanese cultural night.

So there was a lot of, you know, very like elegant and graceful dancing and singing. And then the Okinawans came on. They had a snakeskin fiddle. They kicked their sandals off. They did the most boisterous dancing. I grew up mostly with like a very big Okinawan and super mixed family in Los Angeles. And I was like, oh, I get it now. Okay, I get it now. So I don't think that's an incorrect comparison. And, you know, I mean, like, we talked just a little bit before we got on, you know, like, I mean, I went to Appalachia for the first time a few months ago, and definitely felt like a lot of resonance between kind of common communal practices and traditions that

people talked about how you take care of each other not to romanticize the area or anything like that but i was like oh i grew up in something like this this feels very familiar i think also to like you just think about like sort of the the towering not really towering i shouldn't say that but the more uh household name people of Mexican Revolution and Pancho Villa Miliano Zapata it's like my uncle Randy who uh you know grew up fighting chickens like he's watching this thing on T on some sort of TV channel about the Mexican Revolution and I went stopped by to visit him not too long ago and he just told me how that uh poncho v and emeliano zapata were some bad hombres i think that there's like sort of a um you know they were campesinos right from

from morelos and i think there's a little well poncho v was from uh durango yeah in the north yeah in the north but i think it's an interesting difference because the mexican revolution it a lot of the large questions it was trying to answer it you know and again i'm not a student of the mexican revolution in the way that like i could talk more freely about like the bolshevik revolution but um in in russia obviously there was this huge question of the peasantry. The vast majority of the population was still peasants, more or less. You had a very small proletariat. It seems like that is also true in Mexico at the time.

But the I don't know, it's like I think there is a big difference in the sense that like in Russia, pre-revolutionary Russia, a lot of those peasants still owned the land in some form or fashion. There was communal ownership over the land in Mexico. A lot of that land had basically during the porfiriato had basically been sort of sold off to various U.S. interests. and so yeah it's amazing how many people i've met in the last two or three years who i just like just through talking to them like find out that they're like sort of mexican like sort of bourgeois royalty including some friends of ours really yeah yeah well i think that that probably accounts for like why you have such a huge peasant uh sort of upright i i guess you could call it that like emiliana zapato and like morelos and everything like it was a million is a potto and like morelos and everything like that was in a in a very literal sense a more peasant led rebellion

than you would consider like a proletarian even though like there's those were the sugar plantations right like these people worked uh you know incredibly long hours and on land that wasn't theirs that had been taken from them um so i i don't know but i guess what i'm saying is that like for that reason uh you because it's not like strictly an industrial worker-led revolt because it's like spread out larger across a larger social base and there was more like middle class uh revolt in this as well a lot of different like questions get kind of like sucked into it that weren't necessarily brought up in the bolshevik revolution well yeah i mean maybe it would just be helpful for like let me just give some contours of the mexican revolution

and and let me just start by giving a story that tom can give to his uncle Randy. So I was thinking about you, Tom, because there's a river in Durango called the Sextin River. And there you go. So for a while, I think this is like 1904, Pancho Villa ran with a gang of bandits who camped around that river. And so this is in his 20s before he's like a military leader or before he's like a folk legend. So this gang was run by a man

named Jose Beltran, who was nicknamed El Chado, the cowboy, because allegedly he wore silver cowboy outfits. So El Chado, the cowboy, he had once done legitimate business with the owners of like one of these haciendas, what we might describe as plantations, you know, very rich landowner. But this guy did what a lot of rich people did in the period. He didn't pay the cowboy. He didn't pay El Chado. Instead, he did what rich men were able to do in this period. He turned him into the law. He denounced him in court. He got him sent to prison. And from there, he got him drafted into the law he denounced him in court he got him sent to prison and from there he got him drafted into the military right but el chato waited the cowboy

waited to get his revenge and so according to paco ignacio taibo the second um you know via was with him when he tried to exact his revenge. And so like, you know, instead of just thinking about what Villa did during the revolution, I think it's kind of disarming to think about him as a young man, somebody who, you know, was, as you said, Tom, a poor campesino, like the child of an itinerant sharecropper

who worked on a lot of haciendas, who's like in his own kind of lore he uh becomes a bandit because uh one of the hacendados or the sons of the hacendados allegedly like either raped or tried to rape his sister and he shot him shot at him and then had to go on the run and so you know the the the reason that these kind of stories turned into legends and resonated so much was not just that there was this vast injustice, you know, among the like the very few who were very rich and, you know, the Campesinos who had nothing but were forced to endure this. But also that that whole relation was structured and protected by the law and the state. So just a kind of few kind of nuts and bolts. The Mexican Revolution, as Terrence said, you know, breaks out in 1910.

And it's most often understood as a revolt against the president, Porfirio Diazz who rules for over three decades so he's you know there's this real contradiction in this period from the late 1870s until 1910 because on one hand like by the time 1910 happens this like national railroad like uh you know diaz had modernized the country uh you know installing things like rail railroads and new roads and connecting like rural territories to cities and ports. But a lot of times this was to take things, like you said, Terrence, you know, sugar and morelos, where's the patas from oil in a Tampico, you know, like crops from different parts or cotton from Monterey and putting it on those trains to those ports and sending it out. And you have a massive incursion of foreign investment in new industries. But this

all required the mass dispossession of the peasantry who constituted like almost three quarters of the country. So you got a lot of pissed off people who would have, you know, absolutely been on board with Pancho Villa and hearing that he shot at a Hassan Dado. You have a middle class who's really frustrated because for like over three decades, you got the same guy in power and he's increasingly, you know, his regime's becoming increasingly dictatorial. There are fractions growing among the elites. There are foreign investors who are just like wary of the turmoil. And increasingly, the government's just trying to crack down with an iron fist. They have a federal police called the Rurales who's, you know, always chasing Villa. So, you know, you got a lot of legitimacy,

you got shrinking popular support, you got fractions developing domestically and internationally. So these are some of the conditions that explode in 1910 as revolution. And the kind of only postscript to that, I would add, is that even though they were not unique to Mexico, right? I mean, you have Mexico as well as a lot of other countries experiencing modernization in a similar way or getting pulled into, as Friedrich Katz says, the frenzy of global capital in the same period. So these dynamics are not new. These just like incredible tensions from dispossession and political disenfranchisement but they uniquely explode in to revolution in this period and i think because of that there's uh you know as i say a lot of other radicals from around the world and particularly in the us who are being forced to think about revolution anew

in relationship to it yeah pre pre-bolshevik you know uh Russia, you've got the Vita system. You've got this long process of development and integration with the world market. But a major difference is that Russia at that time is a colonizing... in the world system i guess you could say it's definitely peripheral or semi-peripheral but it is at the end of the day a sort of like empire it's a colonizing uh force whereas like mexico at this time is i would i guess you could say it would be peripheral right like it is um colonized in many ways like it's resources anyways like they're not owned by the people there um so i don't know that's just me the people there. So I don't know. That's just me shooting from the hip, though. I don't know if that's. Yeah, no, that's that's really helpful.

And I think like I mean, part of the reason this is an interesting trajectory to trace is that, you know, Mike Davis in a lot of different works, including in his, you know, I mean, in Planet of Slums. But also he revisits this in his last book, Old God's New Enigmas. He's like, okay, you know, the turn of the century, like the 20th century didn't unfold in the way that revolutionaries imagined that it would, you know, that it was going to be led and dominated by industrial workers at the point of production in Western countries, right? But, you know, Davis is always like, it was this epic of peasant wars and anti-colonial struggles and rebellions against dispossession. And so there's something about the shape of capital that I think we're still sort of struggling to contend with, to understand all of these things as not just kind of peripheral, you know, peasant struggles. But actually, like, if you're thinking about the

capitalist world system, and you're thinking about how it's developing at these times, then you have to take each of these struggles a lot more seriously, as not just kind of like, immature forms of anti-capitalist revolt, they have to be included in the way we understand anti-capitalist resistance and then and then i feel like the way that we think about struggle and internationalism shifts accordingly totally um tom did you were you gonna say something did you have something that you wanted to yeah no i i was it it came and went i was going to say something about pamphlets It came and went. I was going to say something about pamphlets.

You don't see pamphlets so much anymore, yet they punched above their weight back in the day. Absolutely. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think about that question a lot. Like just I mean, one weird thing about doing this project and I guess, you know, other kinds of research I've done is going into archives and being like, wow, you know, people read so much more, first of all. But also there just was like, you know, such a greater proliferation of ideas and really kind of like more complicated ideas. You know, the Internet supposedly was supposed to replace that. We were all supposed to be reading all the time. But it's humbling. It's humbling to go into archives of movements in the 70s. It's really humbling to go into archives of movements

of the 30s and the teens and be like, I feel like I can barely get through a medium post. Yeah, it's kind of weird and probably no accident that you could spread pamphlets around here in the early 20th century, late 19th century and and get more bang for your buck. Whereas now, you know, we can't organize a late night round of Taco Bell with just getting all the information out there like that. It's just interesting to think about. Just interesting to think about. Wait, you know, one thing that is so when you look at the prisoners in Leavenworth or people who were just caught up in some of these new espionage and sedition laws, like the stories are actually really disarming. You know, I mean, there was such a profound jingoistic crackdown in that period that like sometimes disloyalty was like, you know, a man could be arrested because he had

an American lapel pin, but it was upside down. But it was just because the guy was, you know, walking around New York City and bumped into people on the subway or whatever. But a lot of time it was about the inflammatory material they had on their person at any point when they were stopped. And so like, it's my favorite part of just understanding like, what got pulled out of people's bags or pockets, right? And you just kind of get this sense that, you know, there were any number of like street corners, you didn't have to go into a place to seek out politics, there were a number of people who are trying to shout it from soapboxes or give you a flyer or give you a pamphlet. And so there were a lot of people who were swept up. And I believe that they were totally innocent.

They were just like, I don't know, it seemed interesting. I don't know, someone just gave it to me, right? Where they had no record. And you know, like a lot of hay was made by some of the defense campaigns to be like, do you see how absurd these laws are? And so you really get this sense that there just was, there were much richer conversations going on. And yeah, I mean, it's,

it's a little depressing what we late night run to Taco Bell. That's exactly right. Well, I was like, I was me and a friend of mine were looking through the archives. Where was that at? Maybe when we were down in Atlanta doing that show, Terrence,

but of the great Speckled Bird, which was kind of like a radical paper out of Atlanta, or maybe Birmingham, but somewhere in the South. It kind of had a little bit of the countercultural aesthetic, but the politics were way different.

I don't know. We just don't feel like we need to bring a little bit of that back there's plenty of that going on i'm sure i blame the long history of trotskyism in the u.s it's there's no you see the swp literature and you're just like i just i just love how all malice groups have the most insane names like Shining Path or I don't know I think that Shining Path is actually like Marxist Leninist but there's like uh Freedom Road and stuff like that but like all the trots trot groups are like Socialist Workers Party International Socialist Trend

Trend or whatever you know what I mean it's like it's just it's just dry stuff okay well here's creativity here's a here's a trailbillies exclusive so um so i i think my father married a flight attendant when i was in high school so there was this very precious short period where i was the daughter of a flight attendant and i don't know if you know but you get to fly for free like i think up until you're 23 so there was a lot of different kind of, you know, activism I was involved with, but it would always change things, right? Like, so I was working with housing organizers in the Bay Area, you know, some women who were living in their cars, and they were trying to stay change some like police parking statutes. And

they were like, you know, there's actually some really cool stuff happening in Kentucky, in Washington State in England. And they were like, so you can just go, can't you? So I would like, you know, as long as I had a place to stay, I would go to a lot of places. I was working as like a journalist then, like a young community journalist, but I was able to go. And one of those trips took me to England. I fell in love with someone in england and lived there for a while um and got very caught up in the kind of orbit of maybe one of the best publications magazines zines which was called class war so for like a very short period i

worked as the publicist for ian bone who was one of the founders of class war and i bring it up because he's got a great memoir that I was helping him publicize. And he talks about what it meant to support a lot of the mining strikes in the 80s, especially in an environment where people are like a little hostile to taking newspapers or broadsheets that, like you said, the font is small,

the names are really strident. And they were called Class War. They're all punks. And so he describes in dramatic detail, like the first time they had published this thing, and they go to the site of one of these great strikes and um uh you know he describes everybody kind of shaking it's early in the morning all these punks had to wake up really early to distribute it but their cover was um it was one of the workers punching one of the scabs right and they use that as the cover image so first everybody's kind of walking by until someone goes hey you know like that's ge. So they become celebrities. Everybody's like, there is this guy signing all the copies of it. And it, and it just

like, and it becomes like a hit overnight. And so, you know, and that became their aesthetic all the time. Like, how do you think about things that people can relate to that are funny that are really transgressive and you know ian bone's got a great uh book about this and about the publication so yeah it's it's it's like kind of a lost art yeah it's like kind of like a uh it's definitely not something that we put as much effort and creativity into as we should i think um but it's interesting like talking about all the things we've just been talking about it's crazy how many like sort of parallels there are to the current moment obviously that's just kind of how history works um but like talking about like flores magone getting arrested for his his pamphlet, right, like about anarchism. And I was reading that and thinking of the protesters, the cop city protesters who got or getting hit with these charges for like mutual aid and all this stuff.

It's like, you know, and I know that there's there's some differences there because in flores mcgoan's case it was the sedition act that was a law in this case we're talking about like rico yeah rico prosecutors like sort of like using this uh however they see fit but um but it is also interesting to think about the role that mexico plays in current u.s politics how you are now hearing more and more it is just a sort of mainstream middle american talking point now that we just need to invade mexico again um absolutely inside i mean yeah it's it's uh it it is i don't know i'm not sure what the point there is but i do think that like you've got several sort of trends there that kind of like rhyme with these like past uh events yeah totally um also another interesting thing and this is again this is kind of like shooting from the hip

but in some ways there are parallels in the current american political situation to the lead up to the mexican revolution in the sense that you've got a decades-long paradigm of accumulation that is all held in mexico's case it was just one man porfirio diaz the porfirio gato but in our case it's like kind of the same thing when you look at mitch mcconnell and trump and biden like they're all old men and it's just like you know this was the kind of thing heading into 1910 it's like porfirio diaz is like 80 years old like how much longer is he gonna live but like the fact that nothing could get done it was all held at the top of like this sort of regime where they were not going to cede any power to any of the younger um

you know people i don't know i don't know I'm not saying that like there's the political economic differences are vast, but the political differences are kind of there are some similarities there that I think are totally well. First, I just want to underscore the first thing that you said, which is that, you know, I mean, it should have alarmed everybody that at the Republican presidential debates like there, you know, I mean, the candidates were competing with what kind of gruesome things they could say about Mexican people and Mexico. I mean, it was like such a dorky thing. It's not a dorky thing. It was just he's a dork. Ron DeSantis is a dork. But the, you know, way that he tried to present this real kind of masculine bravado by saying on his first day in office, he was going to do some kind of extrajudicial violence to Mexican people on the board. You know, I mean, I think it's,

it's really fascinating that that didn't cause a big flurry, because we're so accustomed to people defining, you know, like, American, so called American strength, you know, like masculine strength. You know, I mean mean it's trump coming down the escalators talking about they're not sending their best the bad hombres right like um i mean this is just i the criminalization the like the um talking about mexican people as if they are barbarians and savages that need to be controlled is like that's colonial iconography that's persisted as long as there's been U.S. investment in Mexican land, labor, and resources. So, you know, I just spoke to an audience in Mexico and everybody who was from the United States there said it's like

it's all of our jobs to just like nip that in the bud because those kind of representations, as I talk about in the book, have material repercussions, you know, not just like upon like violence on Mexico and like U.S. policies, but on Mexican people and people that are perceived broadly, you know, to be Mexican in this country. I think this is just like violence for, you know, people throughout Latin America. violence for you know people throughout latin america um so yeah i mean like look the thing about a rigi now is really um it's poignant because a rigi is talking about the like in thinking about these systemic cycles of accumulation he's thinking about the sunrise and the sun setting of them and i think your description is totally right like you know it's i don't think i'm unique unique in talking about like a lot of

current struggles being thrown up because there's a crisis of U.S. hegemony, you know, like it very much feels like things are sunsetting. And yeah, having Mitch McConnell freezing up and Joe Biden having like a lot of old people, you know, it feels like this kind of profound metaphor for the just like what's decrepit about US power. But I do want to say that I think the question of hegemony becomes really important here too, because I think sometimes we miss, you know, if hegemony is the representation of like small specific interests as the general interest, I think sometimes we miss how that's happening in U.S. politics right now. So, you know, we have a very peculiar fraction of capital, right? they the you know the elon musk the jeff bezos the like people who imagine that they're this insurgent fraction that are like you know uh meeting the obstacles of uh like traditional fractions of capital kind of merging with somebody like trump who i would say sort of skirts both

like an old new divide you know i mean I mean, like Trump's people are like, you know, Manafort, who has a lot of interest in like construction companies, or Michael Cohen, whose money came from like ownership of, you know, taxicab medallion companies. Like they're not the same kind of like leading novel new sectors of the economy. They represent a kind of distinct fraction of capital, but

they're merging. And for them, they see that their interests are being rebuffed by the state, by state regulations, by, you know, like longstanding partnerships. This is all just a long way of saying they feel like they're being excluded, right? But when Trump puts it in the way where he's like, they think they're better than us. They are, you know, like those elites are excluding us. He's both talking about a specific fraction of capital that's trying to become insurgent, but the way that that gets picked up as a populist appeal is if he's talking to everybody who's looking down their nose because of education or culture or whatever. And so like, I think having an analysis of hegemony now helps us like,

to like, not just think, like I said before, about like hegemony in the kind of world systems general way, but in terms of like what the dynamics of the political struggle are before us, because this is not inevitable. We don't have to get our butts kicked so badly we don't have to lose but i think we have to understand what why that that those hegemonic calls are so powerful at this moment yeah yeah i i i think that's a really good way of putting it um and i think that like your book shows that uh as you put it at the very top of this episode um a very useful uh person to study is wb devoid because like as you pointed out like there's some a theme that he always comes back to is that yes these things are not inevitable there is no inevitability to any of this.

And so I think that I don't know. I think that that is a probably a good place to end on, because if you didn't go and read Christina's book, basically what you're trying to show is that if you if you look around at the way that capital transforms the political economic geography around you, you will find obviously lots of things to be depressed about, lots of things to want to hang your head. However, it also produces what you call in your book, these convergence spaces, these spaces that can produce capitalism's own negation. And again, this is obviously one of Marx's central insights, that the mode of production of capitalism

will inevitably produce within it its own countervailing tendencies. And I think that books like yours show not only how, they show not only where to look, but how to look for them because they are there. They're crucial. They're crucial to if we are serious about social revolution, if we are serious about taking, you know, creating a new world, we have to know how to look for those things. And so earlier you said, it sounds like you read the book. That's why I read the book. Well, thanks for reading the book. And I'd like just to kind of amplify that last point. You know, every chapter in this book is called how to make, right? So it's, you know, how to make a university,

how to make love, how to make a living, how to make history. And I, you know, I appreciate your rendition of the book as a kind of like invitation, because that's the spirit that I wanted to present it in, that, you know, in Du Bois' formulation, if a thing can be made, it can be unmade. And I think sometimes we just kind of need to know how. So, you know, I mean, the book is like, it's called Arise. That's because that's the first word of the international. And I think there's a lot of really interesting books that have taken different lyrics from that song, but all to think about what the struggle for internationalism means at different moments, you know, most famously, Frantz Fanon takes the second lyric, you know, Arise, you wretched of the earth, to, you know, title his

book about anti-colonial struggles in Algeria and beyond. And, you know, so like, it's an invitation in that way, because we have to be able to theorize the forces that are arrayed against us and develop a kind of power to confront it. Because if we't not looking so good so you know i mean i'm i'm really appreciative to to talk with the two of you about this and um yeah i mean i i don't think we have to accept what we've got i agree um i i also agree that you don't have to accept an empty bookshelf. And so you should go fill that with Christina's book. I think you could probably find it pretty much anywhere. It's obviously Amazon, if that's your thing.

But I think University of California Press is who published it, correct? Probably get it from their website. Yeah. And there's a few. Look me up on social media. I've got promo codes, places. The book's about to come out in paperback. And then in a few months, the Spanish translation will come out in Mexico by La Cigarra Press.

So it'll also be out in Spanish. By me, of course. I'm sorry, by Tom. Tom will translate. Tom, let's translate. Christina also has a podcast called Conjuncture, which is not only a podcast. You're doing something that Tom and I should have done a long time ago, which is getting into video. With these mugs?

I don't know. Hey, or these cats. Do you have a cat running around behind you, Tom? Yeah, she kept being crazy the whole time. I apologize. No, no, no. I didn't see any craziness. I just saw her slinking around. Kind of posted up here, just mugging.

Right there. Damn. Yeah, I think, Christina, you host that with Jordan Camp. Yes. Who we've had on the show. We had on to talk about development arrested mississippi's finest yeah honestly that was one of the sort of synchronicities i was gonna bring up because a large part of that book is about international harvester

you mentioned that the very well like the second page of your book uh which you know is a big uh i think at that time you know they played their workers played a role in the hay market riot and everything but also like you your book opens with the image of a rope and so uh you know you sort of like trace all the various ways in which labor regimes and debt and everything in the color line are woven into these different kinds of ropes. It's interesting for me because

I don't know anything about ropes anyway, so I learned a lot just about that. We're the Boy Scout, eh? Yeah, I was never a voice camera yeah uh but so anyways go check out christina's podcast go buy the book um anything else christina anything else you want to plug before we let you go last thing i'd plug is that um there's uh one So when I went to Eastern Kentucky, I drove on the Hal Rogers. Parkway.

Parkway. Okay, so this fool has a big old road. I don't know why he needs a prison too, but there's a great and very important fight that everybody should be a part of to stop the building of this federal prison in Letcher County. Organizers in Eastern Kentucky and Appalachia have stopped it once.

They got to stop it again. So all hands on deck. Check out the campaign. I don't I don't have the, you know, the the all the social media deets, but go look for, you know, stop Letcher County prison and join that fight. go look for um you know stop let your county prison and join that fight yes i am a part of that as is tom uh the you know mentioned the hal rogers parkway used to be called the daniel boone parkway uh which pretty bad pretty not not a great guy but just imagine the hubris you have to have to like sort of supplant a guy, you know, that's a household name like that. Name it after yourself. He seems like a peach. Well, also another extraordinarily old member who is like a kind of like remnant of this like dying regime dying regime that can't put a foot forward, really. It does have insurgents within it, the Thills and the Elon Musks and everybody.

But at the same time, it also can't fully figure out what comes next, just like the rest of us. I mean, none of us really know but i don't know anyways a symbol of a dying regime mount rogers um let's hope that uh let's hope that because he is who he is he will fail to build this new prison um but he won't do it without uh any sort of pushback and so yeah i'll try to find some links and everything we can put in the show notes for that um thank you for mentioning that christina

yeah well thanks for finding a fight well uh so i think that's probably a good place to end it i guess until next time and until you next write your next book or before that when you come visit you can come on the show in person. Sounds good. All right. Well, thank you again, Christina. Thank you.