Upstream - Dialectical Materialism w/ Josh Sykes

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

Contradiction is one of the most important concepts in Marxist philosophy. When we think about Marxism, we typically think about the contributions that Marx, Engels, Lenin (and many others since) have made specifically to the study of political economy—but there are also deep philosophical underpinnings that form the foundation of Marxist political economy, and one of these foundational philosophies is dialectical materialism.  Dialectical materialism brings together two important components of Marxist thought: dialectics and materialism. Broadly speaking, dialectics is grounded in the idea that in order to understand the world, we must look at things in relation to one another and not as isolated and separate phenomena. And we must also understand that those relations include opposing forces that act in contradiction to one another. For example, the two opposing forces at play in capitalism are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—or capitalists and workers.  The other part of dialectical materialism, the materialism part, is grounded in the idea that in order to understand the world, we must start by understanding our material reality, and that material conditions are primary over ideas. It’s not the ideas of great men that drive society forward, but the material conditions that give rise to those ideas in the first place. We’ll walk you through all of this in much more detail throughout this episode. Theory is an essential element of the revolutionary work that we do, and it’s crucial that we familiarize ourselves with Marxist theory to help inform and guide our revolutionary practice. As Lenin said, “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” Understanding the foundational theories and philosophies that underlie the work that we do helps take our work to the next level. Familiarizing ourselves with theory and grounding our practice in it elevates our work and gives us unique tools and specialized knowledge that helps us sharpen the tools in our revolutionary toolbox and understand the world around us with more clarity and focus. This is why we’re going to be sharing a few episodes over the coming months to explore Marxist theory in depth. And in this episode, we’re taking a deep dive into dialectical materialism. And we’ve brought on the perfect guest to help us through this. Josh Sykes is a writer and an activist organizing with Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO). He’s the author of the book The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism published last year by Freedom Road. Josh’s book is an introduction to Marxism-Leninism split up into seven sections, and in this episode, we’ll be taking a deep dive into the second section of the book which explores the philosophy underpinning Marxism-Leninism: dialectical materialism. Further resources: Freedom Road Socialist Organization The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism, by J. Sykes Related episodes: Upstream: Revolutionary Leftism with Breht O'Shea Upstream: What is to be Done? With Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante Upstream: Climate Leninism w/ Jodi Dean and Kai Heron Intermission music by Fugazi.  Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

Ah Some contradictions are a zero sumsum game in some work. So, like the contradiction between the capitalist class and the working class, that's a zero-sum game. Their profit is based upon and built upon our poverty, our exploitation, and to the extent that their profit and power grows, so does our exploitation and misery grow. So everything that's good for them is bad for us and vice versa. So at its core the contradiction between these two classes is antagonistic. There's no way to get around it. There's no reconciliation of our differences possible. The only way to move forward is through a revolutionary

change in which class is in power. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics.

I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Contradiction is one of the most important concepts in Marxist philosophy. When we think of Marxism, we typically think about the contributions that Marx, Ingalls, Lenin, and many other sense have made specifically to the study of political economy. But there are also deep philosophical underpinnings that form the foundation of Marxist political economy, and one of these foundational philosophies is dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism brings together two important

components of Marxist thought, dialectics and materialism. Broadly speaking, dialectics is grounded in the idea that in order to understand the world, we must look at things in relation to one another, and not as isolated and separate. And we must also understand that those relations include opposing forces that act in contradiction to one another. For example, the two opposing forces in understanding capitalism are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, or the capitalists and the workers. The other part of dialectical materialism, the materialism part, is grounded in the idea that in order to understand the world we must start by understanding our material reality and

that material conditions are primary over ideas. It's not the ideas of great men that drive society forward, but the material conditions that give rise to those ideas in the first place. We'll walk you through all of this in much more detail throughout this episode. Theory is an essential element of the revolutionary work we do, and it's crucial we familiarize ourselves with Marxist theory to help us inform and guide our revolutionary practice. As Lenin said, without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. Understanding these foundational theories and

philosophies that underlie the work we do helps us take our work to the next level. Familiarizing ourselves with theory and grounding our practice in it elevates our work and gives us unique tools and specialized knowledge that helps us sharpen the tools in our revolutionary toolbox and understand the world around us with more clarity and focus. This is why we're going to be sharing a few episodes over the coming months to explore Marxist theory in depth. And in this episode, we're taking a deep dive into dialectical materialism, and we've

brought on the perfect guest to help us through this. Josh Sykes is a writer and activist organizing with Freedom Road Socialist Organization, or FRSO. He's the author of the book, The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism, published last year by Freedom Road. Josh's book is an introduction to Marxism-Leninism split up into seven sections, and in this episode we're taking a deep dive into the second section of the book, which explores the philosophy underpinning Marxism-Leninism, dialectical materialism.

And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There's a number of ways that you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes, at least one a month, but usually more, at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. And you can also make a tax deductible recurring or one-time donation on our website at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Through this support, you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping keep this whole project going.

Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now, here's Robert in have you on the show. Thanks. Thanks for inviting me. Great to be here. I'm wondering if we can start with an introduction. Maybe you could introduce yourself for our listeners and talk a little bit about how you came to do the work that you're doing. Sure. I got involved in activism around the beginning of the Iraq War around 2003. I was

a student in college and we formed a student group, sort of anti-war student group called Students for Democracy and Peace at the school that I was at. And from there, we found ourselves, there were these like underlying ideological struggles that were going along with what we were doing amongst ourselves. We had big meetings, we're small, It was a small school, but we had like 80 people coming to these meetings. None of us knew what we were doing. And eventually we came to be interested in Marxism-Leninism through... I was a philosophy student, and so I was just drawn to those kinds of things. I was taking a seminar on Hegel at the time. So it was kind of natural that I would be drawn to Marxist ideas. And about 2005 I joined Freedom

of Socialist Organization. 2006 our student group joins Students for Democratic Society. I was at the founding convention in Chicago in 2006. And now I do a lot of writing for Fightback News, which is Freedom Road Socialist Organization's newspaper, mostly about Marxist theory. Sweet, and yeah, can you tell us a little bit more about FRSO and the work that you do with them and the kind of work that they do?

Yeah, sure. I'm not like a spokesperson of Freedom Road, so understand that. But the gist of it is that Freedom Road Socialist Organization was founded in 1985 out of the groups that were sort of left from the new communist movement of the 70s, in particular, the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters, which came out of the Revolutionary Union, workers' headquarters, which came out of the Revolutionary Union, the League of Revolutionary Struggle, and a few other big groups that were sort of left over after the New Communist Movement started to collapse. The things that set Freedom

Road apart from other groups are, first, Freedom Road doesn't consider itself to be a party. We have a particular view of what a party is, a Leninist view, that a party is the organized detachment and vanguard of the proletariat and the cadres of that party are the leaders of the proletarian army. And it's our analysis that nobody is this right now. There is no such party in the United States. But we're trying to build one and we'll work with other people and we have to work with other people to try to do that. And we see the formation of such a party, a Marxist-Leninist party that is revolutionary at its core and is capable of leading the working class as essential to having a socialist revolution

here or anywhere else really. The other major thing that sets us apart is our view on the national question in the United States. We have an analysis that sort of like the Russian Empire, the U.S. is a prison house of nations and that there are oppressed nations within the borders of the United States that have developed historically as a result of imperialist national oppression. And those are the African American nation in the Black Belt South, the Chicano nation in the southwest and the Hawaiian nation. The US also has colonies and there are other oppressed nationalities in the U.S. but those are the ones that have a national character and we recognize a right to self-determination for those nations, meaning that they have the right to organize themselves as they see fit and

to even succeed in the course of a socialist revolution. So those are sort of the big things that set us apart. We do, we're very deeply entrenched in mass organizing, and we see that as an essential role that any cadre has to do. You have to organize the Communist Party, or in our case, our organization, isn't strong enough and never will be because of the nature of its high level of unity and discipline to have millions and millions of people in it that are necessary for a revolution to take place. So there has to be a united front that exists with the party at its core. And that united front is built upon a strategic alliance

between the multinational working class and the oppressed nations and nationalities. So part of that united front means organizing with mass organizations, mass organizations being unions, student groups, anti-war groups, groups that are fighting for community control of the police, things like that. And all those groups, of course, don't have as high of a level of unity as a Marxist-Leninist group, and they shouldn't. You know, the idea is that we wanna practice what Mao called the mass line,

which is to respond to the immediate demands of the masses of the people, organize around those in a revolutionary way and like raise people's consciousness and organization through that process and bring the advanced fighters in those organizations to Marxism. And that way we see ourselves as making contributions in a practical way through struggle towards building that party that we need. That's the gist of Freedom Road. We're a national group. We're all over the country. We're in cities near you. If you're interested, you can check out our program on our website, frso.org. And if this talk sounds interesting to you and you want to do that

kind of work, reach out to us. I hadn't heard of Freedom Road until, sometime in the last few months when I actually saw you all out in both, I believe it was San Francisco and San Jose at Palestinian liberation demonstrations. And I spoke to some of the members out there and everybody seemed really nice and welcoming. So, yeah, a lot of respect for what you guys do. And I also really appreciate the not presuming to call yourselves a party

is something that I feel like really struck me when I first found out about that that's one of the the points that you guys try to make clearly. So, yeah, thanks for sharing all that. And we'll throw any links into the show notes so that people can easily find out more about FRSO. And yeah, I mean, God, there's just so many points that you just touched on that I feel like we could do an entire episode on, but I'm going to just sort of move on here despite

how interested I am in pulling on some of those threads, because we're actually going to be talking about the book that you wrote, The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism. And even within that book, we're actually really just going to be focusing on one sort of subsection, focusing mostly on dialectical materialism, because it's such a rich topic, and we haven't talked about it on this show before, and I think our listeners will really get a lot out of it. And so before we take a deep dive into that,

we're going to do a little bit of table setting, getting into some terms and describing Marxism, Leninism more broadly and stuff. But I guess just to begin, I'm curious what inspired you to write the book? Like what was your intention? What were you hoping to achieve with it? to write the book? What was your intention? What were you hoping to achieve with it? After the summer of 2020, particularly in the George Floyd uprisings that swept through all the cities of the country, we saw a lot of growth.

And we were able to play a leading role in a lot of the struggles where we had strong organization on the ground at that time. And as a result of being able to participate in that struggle and help lead it, we had a lot of people who were interested in our group and in organizing and in Marxism. So Mick Kelly asked me to write a series of articles for Fight Back News about Marxism-Leninism to kind of explain it in a concrete sort of down-to-earth way that people could grasp and sort of approach as a kind of practical manual

to Marxism, right? Because our view is that the practical struggle and the day-to-day activities that we do are important, but those struggles have to be guided by revolutionary science. And we wanted to make it possible for activists to answer the questions that were posed to them by the on-the-ground practical struggles that they were involved in. So problems like why do we organize in a certain way? Why do we take up this particular issue and not that particular issue? Why are we oriented towards the working class and oppression nationalities? Things like that to really understand them and to be able to apply that theory on the ground. So the series that we wrote, or that I wrote,

was a hit. It was popular with cadres and members and people around us, and it was decided to publish it as a book. So we sort of just cleaned it up and made it bookie. And Mick wrote an introduction or a forward to it. And there it is. Other than the program, it's the second book that Freedom Road has put out. The other one was Marxist Linus Perspectives on Black Liberation and Socialism by Frank Chapman. And I'd encourage you to read that as well.

It's also a very important text on the sort of connection between Marxism and the Black Liberation Movement. Incredible, yeah. Yeah, I can't recommend the book enough. I've already recommended it to so many people. It's really, really clear, really easily digestible and accessible, but also just really rich, and there's a lot in there. For someone like myself who's touched on a lot of Marxism-Leninism and the concepts within it over the last few years, I got so much out of it. I learned so many new things and also some of the concepts and ideas that I was already familiar with. It really helped cement them and you explain

with so many clear examples to sort of illustrating some of these sometimes a little bit more maybe heady ideas with clear examples in practical applications, which I really appreciate. So can't recommend it enough. Oh, good. Thank you. And thank you for that work. I think people often see Marxist theory as being this like kind of like esoteric thing that's difficult to approach and understand and I get people being intimidated by it and part of the goal of the book was to sort of dispel that illusion. Yeah it's true that there are complicated ideas but if you just you know break them down

piece by piece and show the ways in which they relate to the real world, then it doesn't have to be hard. So let's jump in. So we're going to take a pretty deep dive, I'd say, into the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism for the bulk of this conversation. But just to start, I'm wondering if you can briefly define and unpack Marxism-Leninism more broadly and discuss why we should, you know, not just view it as a philosophical mode of thought, but like you alluded to earlier as a science as well.

Yeah, Marxism-Leninism is basically, you might say, the sort of theoretical summation of the practical experience of the revolutionary socialist movement since the late 1800s. And it starts with Marx and Engels and their experience organizing as part of the International Workman's Association, the Communist League, their activities in the revolutions of 1848, their summation of the events around the Paris Commune or the US Civil War, all that stuff. And in addition to that, there's the sort of analysis of capitalism that Marx in particular puts forward in capital especially.

And out of that, you have the development of two things that sort of work together, dialectical and historical materialism. Dialectical materialism on the one hand being sort of the philosophy that grounds Marxism and historical materialism being that philosophy applied to history and to historical processes to understand it in a scientific way. I'll talk more about the science aspect, but Marxism-Leninism, as you would guess from the hyphen and the second part, also goes through Lenin and the experience of revolution and socialist construction in the Soviet

Union and the analysis that Lenin created or developed out of the study of imperialism and how it develops and the particular ideas that Lenin developed for how to organize a communist party and how to develop revolutionary strategy as well as ideas about national self-determination and the left sort of thing and analysis of the state. That's all part of Marxism-Leninism. It's continued after Lenin's death in the Soviet Union, and the main theorist at that point is Stalin, who develops it until his death.

Particularly, he's able to analyze the national question in the Soviet Union and does the most work in that regard, and the work on socialist construction in the Soviet Union and the defeat of work in that regard, and the work on socialist construction in the Soviet Union and the defeat of fascism in World War II. But we also, in addition to Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin recognized Mao Tse-Tung as a principal theorist of Marxism-Leninism, who made important contributions in the course of the Chinese Revolution in summing up those lessons. And he made important contributions regarding the united front, the mass line, and his essays on practice and on contradiction, which are going to be more pertinent to what we're talking about today.

So dialectical materialism as a philosophy, first of all, it's materialist. So it is grounded in an understanding that the starting point is our material everyday reality, in particular the way that we organize production, the production of humanity's material needs, like food and shelter and clothing and things like that. And it's dialectical because it sees things not just as isolated and fixed and rigid, but as all these different aspects of how society advances, moves forward, is based on the contradictions that exist between things and the interconnections exist between things. Mechanical materialists would have said that materialism sort of proceeds

in this like very neat and orderly sort of clockwork fashion. And dialectical materialists say that in fact it's pretty messy and that it's driven not by like smooth mechanical progress but by conflict and strife and struggle. In particular, class struggle. The struggle between the class that owns the means of production and the class that works in that situation. In an Irish society, it's the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the capitalist class and the working class. I can say more about particular aspects of that if you want, but that's the sort of the broad overview. Yeah, I know that's great. That's what I was looking for, a broad overview. And we will get into some of the nuances, I think, more as we go through with the discussion. But yeah, I mean, you talked about materialism in dialectical materialism.

And I'm wondering maybe if we could spend a little bit of time talking about materialism in sort of its opposition with the idea of idealism, the concept of idealism. Like, yeah, maybe you can just flesh out the difference between idealism and materialism, and if there are any sort of examples or illustrations that you might be able to draw on in order to help us sort of pick apart idealism and materialism. Yeah, sure.

The basic idea with idealism is not the sort of common sense everyday way that we use the word idealism, which is that like like someone cares about things beyond just like material gratification and enrichment, but that they care about ideas. And that's not really philosophically what idealism means. And when we're talking about dialectical materialism, that's not what materialism means. It doesn't mean that you're interested in material gain first and foremost. It's like a common way people use the term and that's not how we're using it. Idealism means really that it's ideas and thought that determines things as they develop. So for example, a lot of people think that it's like the ideas of great leaders that push society forward and that if we

could just come up with a better way to run society, we could just do that. Whereas materialism sees our material reality as primary, that it's the main thing that drives things forward, that human progress is based upon our ability to satisfy our material needs, and that in order to do that we have to organize society around mainly the development of tools and the way labor relates to ownership. So we see that in the sort of history of socialism, when Marx first starts writing, idealism is still dominant. And you have utopian socialism, which is the sort of main thread in the international

socialist movement. The main forces in the first international, like people like Robert Owen and Saint-Simon and Fourier, are utopians who are just like, we just have to come up with a better way to organize society and we can just do it. What Marx and Engels did in particular was say, well, we need to have a scientific analysis that looks at the way production develops, and we can see how we can move forward step by step. We can't just like do whatever we want. We're limited in many ways by the sort of material conditions that we find ourselves in. This is why Marxism disagrees with like anarchism, right? Because there's a view that

we need a stage of society where the state continues to exist but is organized and controlled by working people and that the purpose of this and Marx goes into this in Critique of the Gotha program in particular he talks about this that we have to break down the sort of residual elements of capitalism that will continue to exist for some time and that we need a state to do that in order to break that down. The other sort of aspect of this is that materialism sees our ideas as arising from material reality. So there's an idea of there's ideology and material reality sort of puts the limits on what we can think at a given time. So liberalism comes to exist as the ideology of the bourgeoisie

as a result of its needs to be able to think through the problems of early mercantile capitalism and then the Industrial Revolution. And the proletariat too, out of the course of the class struggle, develops its own ideology that solves its problems, which is Marxism or scientific socialism, if you want. And these ideas don't just exist in a vacuum, they come about as the result of the class struggle and particular class positions within that class struggle. Right. So to sort of summarize that last part, the ideology of liberalism wasn't thought up by some like thought leaders, which then influenced, say, politicians or others in society to construct a society based on those specific ideals. That

would be the idealist view, but rather shifting material conditions during the emergence of capitalism gave rise to the ideology of liberalism. And the transformation to capitalism happened because of certain material needs and like shifts in the forces of production. And this was a material process that took place. And the rise in liberal ideology was a response to that process. And just to clarify, we're talking about liberalism in the broader philosophical sense, not the US sense of political liberalism, like liberals in the sense of the Democratic Party, but liberalism as the philosophy based on like individual rights and private property, basically the ideology of capitalism. I think another way of thinking about materialism and idealism is is that the material conditions and the ideas in society of course

Impact each other they're not isolated and right and this is where dialectics comes in They're in relationship with each other and they influence each other. Yeah, the material conditions are primary They're the ones that the ideas arise out of, right? Which would be the base. Yeah, so if you think about any particular society or social formation has a mode of production, right? The way that that society organizes production and distribution of goods. So there's, you know, there was like a feudal mode of production in medieval Europe. There's the capitalist mode of production.

And this means that there are certain, each of these modes of production has corresponding to it forces of production and relations of production. And these forces of production are the sort of factories, tools, techniques of production that exist and arise to serve the class in power. And the relations of production are the sort of relations of ownership and power that come along with it. And out of this mode of production arises a superstructure, which is ideology, culture, political formations, like bourgeois democracy, for example, and all these things exist to maintain and reinforce the superstructure,

these sort of like dominant aspects of the superstructure. That's not to say that there aren't like a secondary aspect of that superstructure that is proletarian in its character, proletarian science and ideology and things like that. But the primary aspect is the part that is the part that is in service of that mode of production and created by that mode of production for its reproduction. Let's talk about dialectics. Yeah, I'm wondering if you can explain, and I know we've briefly touched on it already,

but maybe just in some more depth, if you could explain dialectics to somebody who may never have heard of it. And also I think importantly, distinguishing it from metaphysics or like metaphysical thought, because that's actually something that I really took from the book

that I hadn't really known about before, that actually the mode of thought of dialectical thinking is, as someone who grew up in Western society, that's not something, it's not a way of thinking. And I even studied philosophy in college, and it was all metaphysics. And so I'm wondering if you can sort of describe what dialectical thinking, dialectical mode of thought is,

and also what metaphysics is and how it's sort of in opposition to that dialectical way of thinking. Yeah, so metaphysics just kind of looks at ideas as sort of isolated and operating in and of themselves. You don't have to like interact with ideas that are around them and they don't they sort of pocket themselves away and just kind of do what they're doing on their own. And for example, someone who is interested in metaphysical thinking might say a particular idea just sort of spontaneously exists. We can just look at it isolated, pick it apart, flip it around and think about it without contextualizing it or thinking of where it came from, what it developed from, where it's going, and the other things around

it that it's interacting with. The sort of metaphysical thought comes out of, you know, both metaphysics and dialectics have roots that go way back into like ancient philosophy. But metaphysics, like if you look at like Aristotle, for example, you know, there was this idea that you could just like take apart the world and thought and sort of compartmentalize everything and analyze it like that. And then dialectical thought in ancient philosophy, you think of particular like Socrates and Plato come to mind who were thinking about the idea that we can come closer to the truth

by having like a dialogue and having sort of like someone presents a position and someone else picks it apart and then they improve that position from there. And it's always like step by step getting a little better by dealing with the contradictions that are inherent in it. And then in the 1800s, Hegel becomes the sort of major figure in German

philosophy and European philosophy. And Hegel has this idea of dialectical idealism, which is that it's still ideas that are moving history forward. And in particular, it's like spirit actualizing itself through like a process of historical development. And Hegel's like a religious thinker and a reactionary, but Marx and Engels noticed that within this thinking there's like a correct idea, which is that it's true that it's contradiction that drives things forward, but the idea is to break it away from this idealist framework and take this dialectical methodology and use it to analyze material processes without thinking about things like spirit and things like that that

Just aren't relevant to a like a scientific approach So the essence of dialectics is contradiction You have some different things at work here, like transformation of quantity into quality. But the essence of it is that you have contradictory forces at work in a process, and it's the conflict of these contradictory forces that lead things to higher stages of development. That's sort of dialectics

in a nutshell. And those contradictory forces that build and and then negate one another and we'll get into that a little bit more in a sec but this would be the the thesis, the thesis, the antithesis or antithesis, and then the synthesis. And I'm wondering if maybe you can illustrate dialectics and contradiction in that sense of the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis, and then maybe talk about how Marx sort of flipped Hegel's dialectical understanding as like an idealist form of dialectics and how he sort of flipped it on its head to quote Marx himself he flipped Hegel on on his head or whatever he said and began to analyze dialectics as a material process

yeah so this thesis and to this is synthesis thing is it's at work in Hegel, but he doesn't really use those specific terms. He does that, like you'll see that he has these dialectical triads that work out in this way of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and so it's like convenient to discuss it in that way. So the basics of it are that for Hegel, you would start with some affirmation, such and such is true, and that there would then be like a negation of that, that says, well, that's not quite right. It's actually this, right. Well, that's not quite right. It's actually this, right? And then there has to be a third step, which is the negation of the negation or the synthesis,

which carries forward parts of the original affirmation into a newer and higher form. And this accounts for like a spiral development of things going. Instead of just a circle where, you know, affirmation negation, affirmation negation, going back to its starting point. Instead, you come back around to a higher point and then you proceed again and to a higher point.

And one way to look at this, it's like, it's hard to talk about it in like an idealist way and for it to like make sense and be helpful. So let's just talk about what Marx does with it because he says that contradiction, that there's like this rational kernel of the Hegelian mystic shell, the mystic shell being this whole like system of spirit moving towards the Absolute. And the rational kernel then is contradiction driving things forward. And to some extent we still see this idea that there is an affirmation and then a negation and then a second negation that brings forward a synthesis. But I think that that's an overly linear way to look at dialectics.

It's not that it's not, you know, it's descriptive of what's happening, but if you get too focused on it, I think you end up with too linear of a view of what's going on. And Mao makes a point in an essay in his works called Talks on Questions of Philosophy that at every stage of the process, affirmation and negation are happening. There's not like a particular part that's like, this is the affirmation part, this is the thesis, right? And there are no antitheses or negations going on in that part. That part is teeming with contradictions itself. And that the whole process, every step of the way, there are contradictions everywhere. And it's not just a linear process of this versus that leads

to this new thing, but there are all sorts of contradictory forces at work, not just a couple. So, for example, in capitalist society, it's worthwhile to say that Mao gives us a new conceptual framework with which to understand dialogical materialism that you don't find systematized in Engels or Lenin, really. But if you read Capital, you'll see that it's operating there. It's just not spelled out. And Mao breaks it down in a way that is really helpful and important.

And what he stresses is that there's like a complex matrix of contradictions at work. And that these contradictory forces, the contradictions themselves and the forces within them are developing unevenly. So you have some contradictions that are secondary and then you have contradictions that are primary. And what that means is that some contradictions are there and they're influencing things but they're not the contradiction that's like really driving the process forward. So if you look at

capitalism, the contradiction that's driving things driving the process forward. So if you look at capitalism, the contradiction that's driving things forward is the class struggle. The struggle between the owning class and ruling class of capitalists and the working class of proletariat, right? And that's not to say that there aren't other contradictions at work. There are contradictions between imperialism and the oppressed nationalities. There are contradictions between like, say, the way capitalism organizes production and the need for like women or LGBTQ liberation. These things are contradictions that exist and are influential and important and have to be addressed, but the contradiction that's

driving things forward is this contradiction that's centered around class. So if you want to use like the sort of thesis synthesis thing, the like obvious example is if you look at socialism, the way that plays out, the thesis is capitalism. The antithesis of capitalism is socialism, which is the proletarian state which negates the affirmation of capitalism. And then because there are still elements of capitalism left over that have to themselves be negated that are present in socialism, there's a second negation, right, which is communism. And the things that communism is bringing forward are the advancement of the productive forces, the

elimination of scarcity, things like that. But what's being negated is the relations of production, the relations of ownership and power that have restricted and prevented the further development of those productive forces and prevent us from being able to organize society in a way that meets the needs of the people instead of just fattening the pockets of a few billionaires. But I think that to look at it that way, you lose a lot because the sort of framework of

primary and secondary contradictions gives us a lot more to work with in a practical way and a lot more of a way to like understand the complexity of real struggles that are happening in the world. Because easily people are going to say, well, you're being like a class reductionist or something like that if you say that this thing is primary and these other things are like, don't exist, right? Obviously these other struggles exist that are important and sometimes are extremely important. And secondary contradictions can change places and become primary at times, right? I'll leave it there.

You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Josh Sykes. We'll be right back. I'm gonna go ahead and start the song. I am a patient boy, I wait, I wait, I wait, I wait My time, the water's gotta drain Everybody move it, everybody move it, everybody move it, move it, move it, move it Please don't leave me to remain Move away from all the noise I can't live this way All of the noise I can't live this way

See that side of town Everybody's always down Too high Because they can't get up Come on and get up Come on and get up But I don't sell it by I'm playing a big surprise I'm gonna fight for what I wanna pay And I won't make the same mistake, feeling no much time that way Function is the key

I'm through the way, no more on the nerve I can't be free, I wanna play It's in that side of town, everybody's always down So I don't we go take a dip? Yeah, I'm gonna kill My mother when it wrong That I'm not a fan of the way I roll, because they can't get up That was Waiting Room by Fugazi. Now back to our conversation with Josh Sykes.

So one thing that I think might sort of be helpful again is to try to keep bringing this down to eye level through illustrations and examples. So you write in the book, quote, currently we live in the era of imperialism. Imperialism led by the United States strives to dominate the world politically, militarily and economically. And the principle contradiction on a global scale is the contradiction between imperialism and the oppressed nations. To say that other contradictions are secondary isn't to diminish their importance,

but rather to say that these contradictions are influenced and determined by the principal contradiction. We can't deal with principal or secondary contradictions if we don't know which is which. For this reason, Mao stresses that, quote, once the principal contradiction is grasped, all problems can be readily solved, end quote. One example that I think might be helpful to kind of talk about this through is how primary and secondary contradictions are playing themselves out in terms of settler colonialism and imperialism, say, in Palestine. Yeah.

So we owe to Lenin the sort of analysis that we have of imperialism and how it functions on a global scale. And at its core, imperialism is monopoly capitalism. And it's about the export of capital, the control of resources, and the division of the world amongst these financial capitalist groups and imperialist powers. And part of the importance of understanding that is in understanding what's happening in the Middle East, in Palestine, we see that the thing that's sort of driving things forward is this desire for imperialist hegemony in the

region. So US imperialism can't just fight everywhere all the time. It has to like find allies and it has to find in the case of Israel a like proxy that can do its work for it. So the US funds Israel billions and billions of dollars a year to give it one of the largest military forces in the world. And if it weren't for the backing of US imperialism, Israel would cease to exist. And the purpose of that to give the US a foothold in the region from which it can threaten military attacks and military might against other forces. So some countries in the Middle East align themselves with Israel, some against based on this. And the sharpest point of this struggle presently is in the struggle of the Palestinian resistance against Israeli first, you know, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid, and now since October 7th genocide against the Palestinian people. So you see there, there's an oppressed nation of people, the Palestinian people in their historic homeland,

who since the Nakba in 1948 have been further and further shoving Palestinian people into these like sort of two enclaves in Gaza and the West Bank. And it's a system that has every parallel to apartheid South Africa, right? Even to the extent that they're saying, oh, we're giving them control of their own territory in these little like Bantustan enclaves in Gaza. But in reality, it's like an open air prison. Gaza is a concentration camp, or was. Now it's just, now it's a death camp. And the response to this shouldn't surprise anyone, given no other option. Like Oslo was a failure. Every attempt to develop any sort of peaceful solution to this has been a failure. And it's a failure that has been orchestrated by the US. The US doesn't want a free Palestine, so every

chance they get they sabotage any sort of peace process. And the call of the Palestinian people is this from the river to the sea thing, right? Palestine will be free. And the call of the Palestinian people is this from the river to the sea thing, right? Palestine will be free. And the idea behind that, which like say the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine puts forward, is that the way to have peace and security for Arabs and Jews in Palestine is to have one single democratic secular state that doesn't privilege one people or one religion over another, that doesn't curtail the rights of one people in favor of another.

And that single secular democratic state is the way forward for Palestinian liberation. You know, part of national oppression is just that these oppressed nations don't have the opportunity to develop because of imperialist oppression in the same way. Underdevelopment is the way that it's talked about, but the only way to like uproot that is to have liberation for those people. And in Palestine, there's a united front that exists between the resistance forces. Those resistant forces have different class interests. They have different programs and different ideas for how to move forward. But they see that they have a common enemy in the Israeli occupation and genocide that's being carried out against them and against US imperialism,

which funds and backs the Zionists who are on the ground against the Palestinian people. The other aspect of that is that for us in the US, anyone who wants to like support socialism in this country or liberation struggle in that country, you have to support the resistance struggle. Because the Zionists are sort of tools of US imperialism, we have to understand that their defeat in Palestine is a defeat, a blow struck against US imperialism. It's a blow struck against the monopoly capitalist class that are our enemies here in the United States. So every struggle that fights them and weakens them and pushes towards their inevitable demise is good for us. We want it. We want the Palestinian resistance to win, right? And it's good for us as the US working class and then for us to fight and to have demonstrations to support the Palestinian struggle, to fight for ceasefire

and end to USA, to Israel. That's how, you know, we can work together. It's another strategic alliance between the working class in the US and an oppressed nation Even if we may not agree with the entire Hamas platform Right. I think one illustration of the idea of primary and secondary contradictions as they manifest with imperialism and settler colonialism particularly in Palestine, is when we think about certain socialists, for example, who say they support the Palestinian cause, but that they don't necessarily support Hamas,

because Hamas may not have a platform that they can fully get behind it as communists. And it's like the error in that view is based on the fact that the primary contradiction in Palestine is the national question, not necessarily class contradiction. And so when we're thinking of who's on the vanguard of the Palestinian liberation movement in Palestine, we can't focus on things like whether Hamas has ties to certain bourgeois elements and in the constellation of the Palestinian resistance or like whether they have the right class analysis or whatever the primary Contradiction there is the settler colony backed by the imperial hegemonic United States and Hamas is leading that struggle Yeah, yeah And the the the way we have to come about that is to have a concrete analysis of what's

happening in a particular place and situation and moment in time. When we talk about everything, the time, place and conditions are the main thing. That's the thing that we have to analyze and figure out what's going on. And in Palestine, it should be abundantly clear that it's the contradiction between imperialism on the one hand and oppressed nations on the other that is like really pushing and driving the situation forward. But like even beyond this idea of what's the primary contradiction in Palestine, that being imperialism versus the national liberation struggle. Right?

We can look at, you know, even here in the US, in an imperialist country, where we would say the primary contradiction is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. We still have to organize a united front with other forces that we may not agree with in order to carry out the sort of revolutionary change that we have to enact. So that's part of it. The other part of it is it's just chauvinism for leftists or communists or socialists or whoever in the U.S. to try to dictate the terms of the

Palestinian liberation struggle. Like it's up to the Palestinian people what their program is, right? And we can take cues from revolutionaries there. Like we look to the popular front for liberation of Palestine as the sort of advanced Marxist-Leninist line within Palestine. But what are they doing, right? They're uniting with Fatah and Hamas and the other groups, Islamic Jihad, that are active in the struggle because they can see from their point of view that the enemy is the Zionist state backed by the US. And whatever contradictions exist among the resistance, and there are plenty, can be handled internally amongst themselves and can be, you know, worked out when this particular problem isn't as threatening and menacing as it presently is. Like it'd be silly to think that the main battle right now

would be amongst the resistance fighters. That's exactly what the US and Israel would love, right? Is for them to just fight each other and argue and not be able to unite. But none of them are big enough or strong enough to not need to unite together in like a broad, united front. Yeah. I really appreciate how you brought up the

importance of like the time and the place, the evolving material conditions, like in, in forming how we decide to unify or, or not, you know, or, or in what direction and, and what contradictions we see as primary or secondary at any given time. And I'm really thinking of, I was reading a really interesting history of the Palestine Communist Party or the PCP from like 1919 to 1948. And the party broke apart and split up into different factions after 1948, but during that period of 1919

to 1948, the Communist Party in Palestine was working closely with the Communist International in the USSR, the Comintern, to sort of like formulate its political lines and its strategies. And there was this really fascinating back and forth throughout the decades on what the primary and secondary contradictions were in Palestine, depending on specific material conditions and balances of power between the British mandatory government, Zionism,

and even the role of Arab nationalist leaders. They constantly sort of went back and forth. Was the primary contradiction with imperialist Britain? Was it Zionism? Did the Palestinian proletariat just need to unify with the Jewish proletariat against both the British and Palestinian ruling classes? And a lot of the time, Moscow and the Palestinian communists actually disagreed on who to ally with

and what direction to go in. They were debating, do we join forces with the bourgeois Arab nationalists, who were in many ways a semi-feudal leadership class? Do we join forces with them to fight the British, despite the fact that they don't share our class interests? Or do we focus our efforts on, say, like the working class coalition with the Yishuv, or the Jewish working

class, against Zionism? And, you know, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, about how shifting material conditions and time and all of those different factors will make it so that, you know, certain contradictions come forward and become primary and other contradictions recede and become secondary. And also like how that determines the strategies in terms of like unifying or building alliances with other elements.

Yeah, I mean, you can see that at work in the history of the Chinese Revolution too, for example, like the united front with the Kuomintang and the resistance to Japan, that there was a need to unite with the nationalists and the national bourgeoisie to stop an imperialist power that was on their soil, right? And then when the Japanese imperialists were defeated, the united front between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang transformed into a civil war. And that's just part of that process. One thing about the Marxist-Leninist analysis of the way imperialism

and national liberation shake out is that no longer is the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class on the stage of history anywhere, right? Because imperialism has divided and redivides the whole globe amongst itself. The only way to rupture that system is socialism and that if the national bourgeoisie is allowed to like lead these struggles, they're gonna end up being bought off and you're gonna end up with some kind of like neo-colonial situation in those countries. And we see that just over and over and over again in the sort of liberation struggles of the 20th century. And it's the countries that turned to socialism and had the leadership of a communist

party and the revolution that were able to break with imperialism. So if like in China, the Kuomintang had had leadership of the revolution and the Chinese Communist Party had entirely subordinated itself to them, their leadership, things would have gone obviously very differently. So just to say that just because you're working with these groups, other groups that you don't necessarily agree with or have the same program or have different class interests, independent organization built around our class and our program is still essential. Maybe still essential is like understating it, it's like more essential than ever in those situations. In chapter 10 you talk about quantity and quality and I'm wondering if you can talk

about how change occurs according to dialectical laws and sort of what this tells us about liberal reformism and revolution in practical terms. Yeah, the sort of quantity quality thing is one of the like sort of aspects of dialectical contradiction that you have. You still have two sides that are in conflict with each other. And there's a buildup of force between one or the other as you have more and more quantitative change. You know, you have more members of this organization. You have, you're able to work in more cities or you can drill it down to something

like even just like a small mass campaign where you're saying, well we have to go out and leaflet and bring about a good chunk of people to like put pressure on whatever some politician or something, right? These are quantitative changes that are taking place. The real fundamental nature of the situation doesn't change as these are happening, right? The overall balance of forces doesn't change. There's still one group that is weak and another group that's strong. And it's only by building up enough quantity

that a sort of qualitative leap becomes possible. And when this qualitative leap happens, this revolutionary leap, what you have is then the primary and secondary aspects of the contradiction, the two parts that were in conflict with each other, exchange places. So now, just to keep it simple, the working class and the ruling class, if the working class is in the US, the working class and the ruling class. If the working class is in the US, the working class and the ruling class, the capitalists make up two aspects of this contradiction

at the heart of class struggle, right? And the primary aspect of the contradiction is the capitalist class. They control the state, the military, the police, the media, they have all the power. And we have a lot of people, but we're disorganized. We have a low level of class consciousness. We've got a long way to go.

So if we build up quantitatively, which means not only building basic numbers, like we think of quantitative, we think of numbers, right? That doesn't just mean that, it means building up force, building up organization. Our organization, we have to build a party, we have to build mass organizations. They have to get bigger, stronger, better organized, better coordinated. And we have to build revolutionary consciousness. We have to get our class to stop seeing themselves as just individual workers, but as a class that's able

to act together in its own class interests. And then we have to, you know, bring Marxism to the class, you know, fuse Marxism, Leninism with the working class movement in a way that our class is able to look at capitalism scientifically. And all these are quantitative changes. As we do this, you know, we get more organized, we get more conscious, but we are still, the capitalists are still in control, and we're not. But once we reach a certain point, this balance of forces can change. And the primary aspect of the contradiction will become the secondary aspect of the contradiction and vice versa.

And this is the sort of revolutionary leap, the qualitative leap that takes place. And it's the sort of social democrats would have you believe that we can do it just by organizing voting drives and getting the right people into office. But that misunderstands this idea that there's a revolutionary leap that takes place, that it's just this steady progression of quantitative change. That eventually, quantity just advances and advances and advances and then we're just like, it's just socialism now, right? And that's not the case because it ignores the fact that there are two aspects of this contradiction and conflict, right? And that for one to ascend, the other has to be brought down.

And the capitalist class isn't just going to step down and get out of the way, right? We know historically that's never happened and it's not likely to ever happen. So an accumulation of organization and consciousness and force ultimately is what will allow that dialectical leap to take place. And yeah, so just to summarize all of that from a quote from the book about a paragraph, you write quote, liberal reformists believe that we can create a just society through a series of incremental changes, and that revolution isn't actually necessary. Social democrats commit a similar error.

They misunderstand the transformation of quantity into quality because they don't understand that it's a function of dialectical contradiction. They believe that if enough social democratic reforms are accumulated, then the capitalist state can be transformed into a socialist state without a proletarian revolution to overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie. These reformists misunderstand not only the place of antagonism in the struggle,

which I actually don't think we've actually touched on antagonistic contradictions, but these reformists misunderstand not only the place of antagonism in the class struggle, but also the way that principle and secondary aspects of contradiction exchange places. It isn't a question of incremental accumulation of reforms, but of the accumulation of force, like you said, of power that determines which aspect of a contradiction is dominant. So before we get into the negation of the negation, I actually think maybe just to go back a second, because we didn't talk about antagonism and antagonistic and non

antagonistic contradictions. Do you want to plug that into and sort of talk about how that's related to this? Basically, the idea is that to put it really simply some contradictions are a zero-sum game in some arc, right? So like the contradiction between the the capitalist class and the working class that's a zero-sum game. Their profit is based upon and built upon our poverty, our exploitation, and to the extent that their profit and power grows, so does our like exploitation and misery grow. So everything that's good for them is bad for us and vice versa. So at its core the contradiction between these two classes is antagonistic. There's no way to get around it. There's no reconciliation of our differences possible. The only way to move

forward is through a revolutionary change in which classes empower. Mao wrote an article called The Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People. And this is where this like idea of antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions get sort of fleshed out the most in Mao's work. And, you know, he's talking about the idea that there are contradictions between us and the enemy that are antagonistic and contradictions among the people that are non-antagonistic.

And we can go back to look at the Palestinian resistance discussion that we had before, right? So within the united front, there are obviously contradictions. There are contradictions between nationalists and socialists. There are contradictions around questions of how we relate to religion, how we relate to important questions, very important questions. It's not to like downplay them, but these are not, it's not a zero-sum game. Like we can convince the other people in the United Front with us that we're right, or we can come to like some common agreement, right? It's not like what they want is antithetical to what we want, and one of us must win and the other has to lose, right? It's not like what they want is antithetical to what we want

and one of us must win and the other has to lose, right? We can come to like a kind of unity based on dialogue and debate and work it out in practice through the process of revolutionary struggle. And eventually we want to overcome reactionary ideas amongst other forces in the united front and get rid of them. But you know, it's not the case that that has to be dealt with antagonistically. Pretty much all you really need to say about that sort of thing. Yeah, thank you. That's helpful. So, and you've touched on this quite a bit, but I'm just going to ask you to sort of respond to this sort of just as one piece here as we slowly begin to close out this discussion on dialectical materialism. Can you explain Mao's contribution to dialectical materialism in his essay on

contradiction, this idea of the negation of the negation and what this means for qualitative change and also importantly for socialist revolution. If you read up until the sort of like 30s when Mao started writing, if you read Marxist writings on dialectics, it was always described in these terms that we get from Ingalls, so there being like these three laws, three dialectical laws. One is the transformation of quantity into quality. One is the unity and struggle or unity and inner penetration of opposites. And the other is this negation of negation. And if you read Mao, and you read on contradiction,

that this thing about the negation of negation isn't in there, right? He doesn't talk about it. And it's like a controversial point amongst Marxist-Leninists. So I don't want to pretend like it's like universally agreed upon that we understand dialectics in this particular way. But my view tends to be that the negation of negation is like a way of describing dialectical contradiction, but that it's insufficient because it's too linear and static in sort of a way it deals with what's actually much more complex. And what Mao writes in his talk on questions of philosophy is that both the negation and negation and the transformation of quantity and equality

are just aspects of contradiction. And the contradiction is the thing that we should talk about and understand those things through the lens of looking at contradiction. Contradiction is just the unity and struggle of opposites, right? And so for Engels this idea of negation and negation and

qualitative transformation were separated in the way he discussed dialectics, right? He made them separate dialectical laws and separate, again, from the unity and struggle of opposites. Mao was trying to do, what he's trying to do is try to say, well, dialectics is more of this unified system, and if we separate those things off from each other, we end up looking at them

metaphysically because that's what metaphysics is. It's when we compartmentalize things and don't look at their inner connections. So if we overemphasize these things in their separateness, we risk looking at them in a metaphysical way. And so for Mao, the main thing is contradiction itself and the way that we have change and development is better understood by looking at the transformation of quantity and quality and looking the way force, the accumulation of force, creates a dialectical leap and the principal and secondary aspect of contradictions exchange places. And this is a sort of better model

for understanding dialectics than understanding it in this term of affirmation, negation, and negation of negation, or thesis, antithesis, synthesis, if you want. I talked about in the book that this idea of synthesis also tends to sort of overemphasize unity instead of struggle within dialectics. It's not to say that synthesis doesn't take place, but to just talk about it in those terms can

be confusing and can lead to us thinking about it a little metaphysically when we should look at it as much more complex and interconnected than it is. One quote from the book on this that I think really might help drive it home. You're right. Qualitative change doesn't result from a drive towards synthesis, but from the transformation of the principal and secondary aspects of a contradiction into their opposites. It isn't by uniting two contradictory things that we make historical progress, but by dividing them. We don't make socialist revolution by uniting with the bourgeoisie.

It is true that socialism carries forward elements of capitalist relations, production, in the transition to communism. But the main thing isn't to preserve those elements, but to destroy and uproot them piece by piece. Qualitative change results from the quantitative accumulation of force, which changes the balance of power." And yeah, we've talked about that quite a bit. But I think that quote was really helpful for me,

at least, in sort of picturing how transformation occurs. Yeah, I think it's really, if you're interested in Marxism and Leninism in a practical sense, and actually putting it to work towards understanding the way that the laws that govern society work and operate, we have to do everything we can to sort of like avoid the possibility of metaphysical errors. And I think the framework that Mao develops in On Contradiction is among the sort of core of Marxist-Leninist theory. It's about the most useful description of dialectical materialism that we have. And like people should read my book and what I talk about about it, but they should read that essay. It's it's importance can't be overstated.

So there is so much in the book that we we couldn't get to in this conversation, which like I said at the top really just focused on one section out of several in the book. And there's so much more to Marxism, Leninism, and maybe we can have you back at some point to continue the conversation and explore historical materialism and political economy. There are a lot of different components to Marxism and Marxism, Leninism that we could get into. So yeah, I would love to invite you back at some point. I think our listeners would really enjoy that.

That sounds great. I think that'd be a blast. This has been a lot of fun and it's been really good talking to you about all these things and sort of digging into these ideas in a piece by piece way. Absolutely. Yeah. I guess just to close out, you know, if you had any final thoughts or if you want to maybe talk a little bit about why you feel it's, it's really crucial for us as socialists, communists, Marxists, to understand theory, but not just to understand it, but sort of thinking about the practical

applications of theory in our revolutionary work. Yeah, I mean, the reason that we care about dialectics as far as Marxism goes, look, if you're not interested in practical revolutionary struggle, Marxism doesn't have anything to say to you. Like, it's worthless if you're not going to, like, try to do something with it to change the world. What we can do with this analysis is we can understand the underlying laws that govern material development, that govern change, and we can understand the forces at work,

and we can understand which ones are the ones that are sort of moving things forward, and we can apply pressure in a way to like, work with the laws that govern society to create change instead of just spinning our wheels and doing things any old way, right? This allows us to be more effective. It's like a force multiplier that allows us to like,

you know, apply leverage to situations. And it allows us to be able to have a unified strategy and plan and purpose for how to move forward. Lenin said that like practice without theory is blind and basically vice versa. Neither of these things are sufficient on their own. They have to be applied together. We have to like practice in mass revolutionary struggles. We have to struggle for reforms and build day-to-day organization among masses of people. And we have to sum that up in a way that allows us to see what's working and what isn't and apply Marxism to that process, to like be able to figure out what to do next. Otherwise, we're just going willy-nilly

and we're not gonna be effective. There's a reason that all the successful socialist revolutions have been led by Marxism-Leninism and the groups and organizations that don't use Marxism-Leninism haven't met with success. Right? If you don't use the sort of scientific theory that we need, we can't accomplish anything. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Josh Sykes, a writer and activist organizing with Freedom Road

Socialist Organization, or FRSO. He's the author of the book, The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism, published last year by Freedom Road. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Fugazi for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. Upstream is almost entirely listener funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support.

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Thank you. You