Upstream - Revolutionary Leftism with Breht O'Shea

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

There are many traditions or tendencies among the left. In fact, sometimes just trying to wrap our heads around all of the rich theoretical frameworks and various anti-capitalist thinkers can be dizzying. But it's also exciting — the richness of leftist history and theory is vital to learn and to build our work from. In this episode we’ve brought on someone who knows a thing or two about leftist theory — in fact, he's got multiple podcasts that go into depth on historical figures, theory, and philosophy from a post-capitalist perspective. Breht O’Shea is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, Red Menace, and Guerrilla History. He’s also an activist and organizer based out of Omaha, Nebraska. Although his breadth of knowledge spans an incredibly wide range, we brought Breht on today to focus on the Leninist tradition. We’ll explore the fundamentals of Marxism–Leninism, as well as the related theoretical framework of Maoism. We talk about the importance of theory in informing our organizing, why it's important to learn about both the good and bad parts of historical figures and revolutionary movements – even when it comes to figures as controversial as Mao or Stalin. We also have a conversation about fascism in the United States, where we can go from here, and why it's important to center love and humanity in all we do.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. 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.

Before we get started, please, if you can, go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. You can also leave us a rating on Spotify now. This really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for Upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. Also, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to support us with a reoccurring monthly or one-time donation. This helps keep this podcast free and sustainable, so please, if you can, go there to donate. Thank you. After you've been convinced of the criticism of capitalism, the world historical criticism of capitalism made by

marx with the help of angles and you're won over to the idea of socialism you know you come to the point where i understand what capitalism is i understand why it's bad how it exploits how it brutalizes how it oppresses i know that socialism some form of it is the goal that i want to move toward politically and then you ask yourself, now that you've gotten that, how can you successfully challenge capitalism and imperialism on the global stage? How can we build a revolutionary communist party and lead it to a successful revolution? How should we understand the state and why a social democracy is insufficient? And how do we defend any successful revolution against the inevitable counter-revolution which always occurs?

And it's these precise questions that move me into the direction of thinking the practical thoughts about how this stuff can actually be put into practice. And by doing that, you know, you find yourself very quickly in the Leninist sphere. 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. There are many traditions or tendencies on the left. In fact, sometimes just trying to wrap our heads around the rich theoretical frameworks and various anti-capitalist thinkers can be dizzying. But it's also exciting. The richness of leftist history and theory is vital to learn and to build our work from. In this episode, we've brought on someone who knows a thing or two about leftist theory. In fact, he's got a podcast, well, actually multiple podcasts that go into depth on historical figures, theory, and philosophy from a post-capitalist perspective.

Brett O'Shea is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, Red Menace, and Guerrilla History. He's also an activist and organizer based out of Omaha, Nebraska. Although his breadth of knowledge spans an incredibly wide range, today we've brought Brett on to focus on the Leninist tradition. In this conversation, we'll explore the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, as well as the related theoretical framework of Maoism. We'll talk about the importance of theory in informing our organizing, why it's important to learn about both the good and the bad parts of historical figures and revolutionary movements, even when it comes to controversial figures such as Mao or Stalin.

We'll also have a conversation about fascism in the United States, where we can go from here, and why it's important to center love and humanity in all that we do. Here's Robert in conversation with Brett O'Shea. Brett, it's really, really great to have you on Upstream. I'm wondering if you can just start by introducing yourself for our listeners and talking a little bit about how you came to do the work that you're doing. Sure. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on. It's a real honor and a pleasure to come on Up upstream and chat with you. It's long overdue. But yeah, you know, for those that might not know me, I host, obviously, the flagship is Revolutionary Left Radio. I've been doing that since early, early 2017.

podcasts, Guerrilla History with Henry and Adnan as my co-hosts, where we really focus on history, proletarian history, revolutionary history in particular. And then I have another show called Red Menace, where me and my friend and comrade Allison walk through texts from the Marxist, Leninist, Maoist tradition. And we also now have shifted towards reading some reactionary and fascist thinkers to try to educate ourselves on their political theory. And I think we're moving towards a series on anarchism this autumn where we'll be reading anarchist texts and kind of discussing it and critically engaging with it, et cetera. So that's kind of the work I do overall. And as a little bit more background, you know, the stuff that I do on political education comes out of my local organizing efforts, specifically 2016, 2017, as most of us will remember, was a very uncertain, chaotic time, tumultuous time.

And fascists in particular were very emboldened at that time, especially during the campaign and the first several years of the Trump administration. And like many cities around the country, ours had fascists, self-proclaimed neo-Nazis, white supremacists feeling more comfortable to come out, to try to recruit, to try to organize, to put their face out there. And so a lot of this started with us, a lot of people in my community organizing, coming together to kind of fight back against that new fascist resurgence and to really hand out consequences because we did not want our city or any city to be made to feel like it was a haven or a safe place for these people to just completely organize in the public and be outward facing and not have any consequences for it. So it started with anti-fascist organizing, bled into more broader community organizing and serving the people, mutual aid work, et cetera. And out of

that organizing effort, there was a real need for some political education. And I don't know, I have, I guess, a talent for speaking extemporaneously. And I was like the go-to person in our org for when TV you know, TV crews, media, anybody wanted to interview us or ask us questions at a protest or something is like, yeah, let Brett go and do that. Let Brett go and do that. And so when we were thinking political education, it was kind of like, Brett, you know, could you spearhead this arm of the project of our organizing? And I said, sure. And it was supposed to be, it was intentioned to be a sort of local community thing where we could, among the different organizations popping up

locally, could have some recorded political stuff that they could use to educate their cadre or their new recruits, et cetera. But very quickly, it burst the bounds of locality, became a national, and even now, to some some extent an international program with audiences on every corner of the planet so there was certainly something there that there was a thirst for that even i didn't fully anticipate so it's really humble beginnings and humble intentions and it caught on like wildfire and so i've just been kind of doing the best i can to maintain that and to continue to contribute whatever I possibly can to the emergent left in this society and beyond. And yeah, it's kind of what I'm doing now.

Well, thank you so much for that. And yeah, I mean, so you mentioned sort of getting your start in, you know, navigating the sort of like fascism that was emerging in your community and in the United States more broadly. And yeah, that's a question that I want to get to. And we're going to talk about that in a bit. But yeah, I just want to I mean, we talked a little bit about this before we jumped into the recording here. But just really thank you so much for all of the amazing work that you do. And like Rev Left Radio, I'm a little bit late to it. I just started listening this year, actually, and just went through the like, almost your entire catalog, which is lots and like, you've you've been doing this for years now. So there's tons of episodes.

And I just felt like I learned so much about such a broad range of topics, like starting with theory and different tendencies. And I really appreciate how you don't have any hesitation in talking about, like you said, you know, anarchism and Marxist Leninism. And I know a lot of the times people on the left can get entrenched in their own tendency. But what I really appreciate is just the breadth of tendencies and ideas and thoughts and deep philosophical questions that you explore in the podcast. And just want to really encourage everybody out there to check out Rev Left Radio. It's an invaluable resource. And so speaking of theory, I think one of the first things that I want to dive into with you is Marxist Leninism. So we've done a few sort of peripheral dives into communism

in the show before, but we haven't really spent a whole lot of time just like straight up talking theory. And so, yeah, I think I want to start with Marxist Leninism because you've described yourself as a Marxist Leninist. And I'm wondering what attracts you more towards that tendency as opposed to some other tendencies. And maybe if you could just first set the table for us, like give us an idea of like what Marxist-Leninism is, how it's different from some other Marxist tendencies, and what attracts you most to it. Sure. Yeah, great questions. So let's just, well, first of all, thank you so much for the kind words about the show. It really absolutely means the world to me and everything that I do is like

hoping that by putting it out there, somebody will be inspired or educated or uplifted by it. So to hear that feedback, very grateful for it. Thank you. But yeah, let's go ahead and talk about Marxist Leninism. So what is Marxism Leninismism, first of all? I'm sure your audience has a general idea, but just to kind of make it simpler, I view Marxism-Leninism as Marxism in the era of active proletarian revolution and imperialism. And it really comes out of the direct revolutionary experiences of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia under the leadership of people like, of course, Lenin, which is where you get the name from. So when Marx and Engels were operating, they're operating in the 1800s. There's certainly uprisings of all sorts, the uprisings of 1848 across Europe. There's the Paris Commune attempt that was drowned in blood by the reactionary

forces of aristocratic France. And so there's things happening at the time. And certainly I think the civil war in Paris and France was probably the closest thing to a proletarian revolution that had happened up to that point. And they certainly commented on it. But what happens with Lenin and the Bolsheviks is that using Marxist analysis, using Marxist methodology, and coming out of the Marxist tradition, Lenin and his comrades were able to actually execute the first ever successful proletarian revolution. So with Lenin, you have a figure who is leading and actively participating in a world historical first ever proletarian revolution in a major nation state that topples the czarist regime obviously it's a complicated historical thing and you have to to get the details of it you need to go you know find resources on like everything that happened in between but functionally

it ends up as a successful revolution and so we have marxist theory we have marxist critique of capital we have works by angles and marx like on socialism, utopian and scientific. And these are all things that Lenin uses and learns from to then actually try the thing out in the real world and it's successful. a lot of things. You take the ideas of Marx, you put them into practice, you succeed, and then now we're in brand new territory. So the theory needs to be updated to reflect whatever data has been brought in through the actual practice of revolution and the successful accomplishment of it. So you can think of Leninism as Marxism in the area of both proletarian revolution and modern imperialism. And of course, with Lenin, he writes imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, which shows how modern imperialism is a direct function of capitalism. And in fact, the term capitalism, imperialism, as one phrase comes out of this recognition,

these things are deeply fundamentally rooted together. And imperialism is not a separate phenomena, but one that organically comes out of capitalism at a certain developed stage so that's the basics of it and out of that comes some certain what we would call in the marxist tradition universalizable concepts you know things that were put into practice were tested in real revolutionary conditions succeeded and can be universalized to any proletarian revolution. So there's certainly some things that happen in the Bolshevik revolution or the Chinese revolution that are hyper-specific to those conditions. And you can't take everything out of those revolutions and just apply them willy-nilly any other place. But a couple things

are universalizable. That's the vanguard party. That's the method of democratic centralism within the party. It's the emphasis and the theoretical deepening of the dictatorship of the proletariat through a text in this case like State and Revolution by Lenin. And as I said earlier, it's the understanding of modern imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. And then there's also some other things about decolonization, about national liberation, about self-determination that went on to really undergird fundamentally, theoretically, ideologically, the decolonial and anti-colonial movements throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s. So you also have that connection as well.

So that's what Marxism-Leninism is. And then you asked, how is it different from other Marxist tendencies? Well, it's different from democratic socialism or social democracy in its insistence on anti-revisionism, which is an insistence that Marxism is a revolutionary political program. It is not a electoral political program. It is not something that you vote and get in by using the mechanisms of bourgeois democracy or as we would call it, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, but is actually a fundamentally revolutionary tradition. And so – and then the emphasis on imperialism as well, which even to this day, democratic socialists and advocates of social democracy really under-theorize and it leads to a bunch of errors. So that's how it would

be different from other explicitly Marxist tendencies. But of course, for numerous reasons, it's different from something like anarchism, from the very concept of the vanguard party, the very concept of democratic centralism, the very concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat are antithetical to anarchism. So, you know, of course it differs there. So that is what Marxism is in a nutshell, how it's different from some other major Marxist tendencies. And then so the last question is what attracted me to it? Now, I started Rev Left calling myself, I think at the time, like a libertarian Marxist. I think we all go through, especially as you develop a political consciousness, you're

coming out of liberalism, right? For me, at least, democratic socialism was a first stop after coming out of liberalism, right? For me at least, democratic socialism was a first stop after coming out of liberalism. And then because of its lack of revolutionary militancy, I shifted towards anarchism. And then actually as I start to show, I start calling myself a Marxist and I'm comfortable doing that but still emphasizing the libertarian aspect, right? I clearly had some things to unlearn. to unlearn. And then, you know, through the process of interviewing, just people across the board, people, you know, historians, philosophers, activists, organizers, I had on people to talk about Marxism-Leninism specifically as somebody like at the time, I did not call myself that. So I was like, well, let's hear them out. Let's see what they say.

And I can raise some objections and some common criticisms and just hear what their replies are. And after that interview, it really started shifting my perception of Marxism-Leninism in a much more positive direction. And then I think the big thing that moved me to claim the title of being comfortable calling myself a Marxist-Leninist is after you've been convinced of the criticism of capitalism, the world historical criticism of capitalism made by Marx with the help of Engels, and you're won over to the idea of socialism, you know, you come to the point where I understand what capitalism is. I understand why it's bad, how it exploits, how it brutalizes, how it oppresses. I know that socialism, some form of it is the goal that I want to move toward politically. And then you ask yourself, okay, now that you've gotten that, how can you successfully challenge capitalism and imperialism on the global stage? How can we build a revolutionary communist party and lead it to a

successful revolution? How should we understand the state and why a social democracy is insufficient? And how do we defend any successful revolution against the inevitable counter revolution which always occurs and it's these precise questions that move me into the direction of thinking the practical thoughts about how this stuff can actually be put into practice and by doing that you know you find yourself very quickly in the leninist sphere and so those questions of okay now that i'm convinced that this is capitalism is bad, the Marxist critique is on point, socialism is the answer, you can go a bunch of different directions from there. You can go social democracy, you can go anarchism, you can go some non-Leninist form of Marxism, left communism, if you will. But for me,

the efficacy, the pure and raw efficacy, the ability to challenge capitalism and imperialism on the global stage in multiple iterations was so convincing compared to all other left-wing sects that I felt very comfortable after that point deepening my understanding of what Leninism is and defending that political tradition. So I guess that would be my answer to that. And it was really the utter efficacy as well as how so much of the anti-colonial movements were directly inspired by and directly read Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc. And they were able to successfully kick out, you know, colonialist, neocolonialist, imperialist oppressors, time after time after time. So yeah, just the raw efficacy and the historical data in favor of this tendency is actually being the most efficacious, you know, warts and all imperfections and all, it really pushed me in

that direction. Yeah, just I know that you and your guests on the show have talked about this idea of like Leninism being almost like a science of revolution or like empirically the most successful like global revolutionary force. So I really appreciate you bringing that up again here. And yeah, it's interesting too. I'm thinking about my trajectory as well and like starting off as a liberal and then sort of like calling myself an anti-capitalist or like, you know, Marxist at one point or socialist. And now I'm kind of just like, I'm going with communist, which is, I think, a pretty broad one too. And yeah, so you highlighted how like, you get to this idea of like, sort of, I guess, broadly anti-capitalism, and then the sort of means to getting to this

end that, again, something you've also mentioned on the show, I don't remember exactly in which episode, but I do remember someone talking about how like, in a way, anarchists are all communists, like we all sort of share this aim of classless, moneyless, stateless society as an end, aim of a classless, moneyless, stateless society as an end. But then like the means towards where we get to that end is quite different. And I'm no expert, but it seems to me like, you know, for example, with anarchism, and to just to circle back, I'm really excited to hear that you all are going to be doing a deep dive into anarchism on Red Menace. But like anarchism seems, well, it doesn't seem like it is very much against this idea of dictatorship of the proletariat and vanguardism and utilizing the state as it is,

the state is an organ of the capitalist class, right? And this idea in Marxist Leninism, or Marxism Leninism is that you would then take the state and use the state to create a dictatorship that is for the proletariat. Like it's a state that is working for the working class, for working people, as opposed to for capitalists. And then this idea that the state will sort of organically wither away after a while and will no longer be necessary. But anarchists, they hate that idea, right? Like they want to build the alternative before that. And so just a huge difference between the means to getting to what I would argue is a pretty similar end, I'd say. Yeah, yeah. And just to touch on that very briefly, I've also had on Rev left a series called In Dialogue with Anarchists

a few years back, where I think there's three episodes very closely packed together chronologically where I just had on different anarchists to just not have a debate. I'm not one of these sectarian dogmatic psychos. I just, you know, I enjoy talking with other people on the left, people that are good faith that just come to different conclusions. And so, you know, I try to do that in dialogue with anarchism as, you know, like an olive branch. Like there's no antagonistic contradiction between Marxist and anarchist right now. We can certainly work around the 97% of things in capitalist America right now that we agree on. And at a certain point in a certain

revolutionary process, those differences could become super meaningful. Right now they're not. And to over-exaggerate the importance of these divisions such that you divide and break up the tiny, barely getting to its feet revolutionary left that's in existence in North America, I think is disastrous, whether it comes from sectarianism on the Marxist side or sectarianism on the anarchist side. But yeah, I mean, we see the state as a historically produced entity that, you know, nationalism in the nation state as we know it today arose historically with the rise of capitalism and the transition away from feudalism. And we understand that the state as it exists under

capitalism is and only can ever be a mechanism of one class domination over the other. Capitalism is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to get to a point that we all share with anarchism of communism. We need to take that state and use it to suppress our enemies and transform it in the process. Importantly, right? Marx said famously, I think it was Marx, you know, you can't just lay your hands on the ready-made machinery of the state, but it needs to be transformed in the process of being taken over by the proletariat. But it's a world historical weapon in a brutal fight between capitalism, imperialism, and any liberation movement. And to take the biggest weapon on the field of battle and toss it aside preemptively a priori I think is a huge mistake.

And it goes some degree to explaining why for all of its beautiful traditions and victories, anarchism has never been able to challenge capitalism, imperialism at the global scale. It's been able to recoil into autonomous territories. It's been able to work around the fringes. It's certainly been able to confront the state in various ways and fascists in various ways. And I tip my hat to anarchists for all of that. But historically, it's never been able to get much further than that. And there's important reasons that that's the case. And one of those reasons is, I believe, an idealist conception of the state and where it comes from and this a priori swearing off of the state as if

it is this thing that exists in a vacuum and not a historical process that needs to be wrestled with. So, but again, no, no hate to the anarchist. And I also wanted to touch on the label very quickly. You know, you can say I'm a Marxist Leninist. I'm kind of early days of Rev left was certainly into these tendencies and parsing them out very closely and clearly. But, you know, I call myself just a communist, just a Marxist. And as a communist, as a Marxist, of course, I take Lenin seriously. Of course, I take Mao seriously. If you call me a Marxist Leninist, I won't bat an eye. You call me a Maoist, I won't bat an eye. But I'm also not as concerned or certainly not obsessed with these differences and these distinctions to the point where they become larger than they need to be conceptually in the minds of

a lot of people and can create a lot of problems if you take them too seriously if you make them too much a part of yourself or if you fetishize the minute distinctions too much so i would just warn against overdoing it in that direction as well and i'm yeah I really couldn't agree more with this idea that we all share, like you said, 97% of like overlap there. And so, yeah, I think we could all, those on the Marxist-Leninist side don't need to call anarchists liberals and anarchists don't need to call Marxist-Leninist tankies. We can sort of focus on the common ground. But speaking of, you mentioned Mao and as a Maoist that you wouldn't blink an eye. And so one of the things that, I mean, definitely from listening to Rev Left Radio, completely transformed or even not even transformed, completely transformed or even not even transformed because I get I wouldn't even say that I had a much foundation at all on what Maoism is or even who Mao was. And so on our social media every now and then I'll post something like either something serious or like a joke about Mao and landlords, you know, and we get just tons and tons of pushback whenever I do

anything like that. Not from everybody, but there are a lot of folks who just hear about Mao and they're like, you know, that genocidal psychopath, like, why are you even like, you know, bringing up Maoism at all or Mao at all? And so, yeah, I just, I want to ask you if you could introduce us to who Mao Zedong was, what Maoism is, because, you know, it's not exactly the same thing. Maoism is a tendency on the left that arose much after the death of Mao's, you know, from what I learned from your podcast. And yeah, why Maoism is important, why it's a helpful theoretical framework. And yeah, I mean, how you would respond to somebody who just has this immediate allergy to anything having to do with Mao. Sure. Well, the first thing to say about Maoism in the modern world is that, and certainly Maoists

believe this, it's contentious amongst Marxist-Leninists, but that Maoism or that form of communism is now the leading edge of the international communist movement. Now, MLs will say, no, China is, right? Maoists will say, well, after Mao died and Deng brought in the reforms, it's basically been on the capitalist road. It is now a capitalist state and meshed in the global capitalist economy, et cetera. So those differences certainly exist and are probably the main contentious fight between MLs and MLMs. But so it's kind of important just to kind of keep that as some background. But I'm trying to figure out which way to attack this rather large question. I guess who is Mao? Well, you know, Mao was born

a peasant in China. He became a national liberation fighter against the Japanese imperialists and then against the Chinese nationalists, right? At the time, Japan was invading the mainland China. So the right and the left of the Chinese political spectrum called it functionally a truce to be able to fight and repel the Japanese. And after that was successfully done, the communists and the nationalists basically had their civil civil war and the communist came out on top so that he was a chinese communist revolutionary he was a chairman of the the chinese communist party and crucially he was a marxist political theorist so just like lenin took marx updated him put him into practice in the russian situation and generated universalizable elements through that actual real world world historical struggle-historical struggle. Maoists believe that Mao and the Chinese communists did a similar thing. They took Marxism-Leninism, applied it to Chinese conditions through that successful revolution and the attempt to construct socialism, also generated universalizable elements of scientific socialism or the Marxist tradition

that builds on Leninism, but fundamentally ruptures or updates or evolves Marxism-Leninism for a new era and for new conditions. So that's kind of important to keep in mind. I'll go into the lies about Mao here in a second, but just to kind of touch on Maoism really quickly. So Maoism as a tendency is formalized, is synthesized in the 80s and the 90s. So Maoism actually wasn't a thing when Mao was alive. I think Marxist-Leninists who became sympathetic to the Chinese communists would at first call themselves anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninists, and then some people would call themselves Marxist-Leninist Mao Zedong thought and then with the formalization of Maoism came Marxism, Leninism, Maoism and just like Leninists see Lenin's and the Bolsheviks experiment in socialism generate things like the vanguard

party imperialism as the highest age of capitalism democratic democratic centralism, et cetera. Maoists see that through the Maoist struggle in China, universalizable aspects were generated like the mass line, which is an organizational principle, the cultural revolution, right? A revolution in the superstructure as well as the base. Protracted people's war, which is this idea of working from the countryside in towards the city and surrounding the city. And this is specifically, I think, for peasant countries. But a lot of Maoists will argue that you could apply it into industrialized, post-industrial countries as well. And then did a lot of work on contradiction, on antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions, on dialectics more broadly. And then today you look around the world in places like India, places like the Philippines, and you see that Maoists tend to be the ones on the cutting edge

of communism, waging armed struggle in people's war against, in both of those cases, you know, under Modi and Duterte, although that's now changed, but still reactionary institutions, administrations, often aligned with US and the broader imperialist powers, etc. So that's Maoism, that's Mao. And then the question is, is Mao this terrible monster, right? And one thing you have to keep in mind whenever you're hearing, especially when you're passively absorbing through a life lived in the United States or a hyper-capitalist country, passively absorbing certain information about certain communist figures in particular, you should really, especially if you just want to be intellectually honest or if you want to be ideologically coherent, step away from that propaganda, investigate yourself. You will never ever get handed the reality about any communist

movement or any communist figure from the world historical enemy of communism right the united states of america and the imperial bloc that it leads so just you should at the very least be skeptical and a lot of people who just you know will jump out of the woodwork to call mao a psychopath or a genocider not only are they passively absorbing propaganda that they're then regurgitating as if it's the conclusions they came to but i also think there's plenty of orientalism here there's a certain orientalist conception of of mass movements of asian people of asian leaders in particular that americans and westerners are very eager to believe all sorts of wild shit. And you can see this most clearly today with like the DPRK and just random stories that are just completely made up will have

so much traction in the Western press and will be brought on board and believed so easily by the Western populations that you really cannot exclude Orientalism from all of this and its conception and the worst thing that i've seen is like placing mao above hitler as a worse dictator killed more people than hitler that's just straight up fascist bullshit that is a fascist lie it completely eradicates actual intentions and it attempts to equalize the developing industrialization and the brutal process that is in China and the deaths that are generated by that attempt with this systematic, conscious, industrialized mass slaughter of minority groups, right? Jews, Roma, homosexuals, disabled people.

There's just no comparison whatsoever. So then let's get down to the actual stuff that people will point to and say, this is why Mao bad. Well, there's the great leap forward in the cultural revolution. Those come up a lot as his greatest crimes. Now the great leap forward was a bungled, but earnest attempt at mobilizing the masses to industrialize and develop the Chinese economy and country after a century of humiliation as a neo-colonial, you know, sort of neo-feudal victim of global circumstances, China's getting to its feet. It needs to catch up with the West. It needs to industrialize. The Soviet Union had to industrialize as well. Now, industrialization is always brutal. And no matter where it happens,

industrialization is a brutal process and no country that has industrialized has done it with rainbows and lollipops. When we think of the Western industrialization phase, we think of basically a century or two of like child labor and, you know, smoke clogged city streets and workers routinely getting sucked into machines. And then the union struggle and the suffragette struggle and the women's struggle, all these struggles come out of trying to, you know, address the brutalities of this industrialization process. And that's all just accepted as history. Yeah, of course, Britain and America and Europe industrialized. And of course it was a rough

process, right? But nobody ever says everybody that died in industrialization under capitalism is a victim of capitalism or a victim of a specific capitalist leader. So intentions really do matter. With the Great Leap Forward, it is not Mao going out and stabbing Chinese people in the neck. These are his people. This is his country. These are his countrymen. His entire life is dedicated to ending the century of humiliation, to uplifting the Chinese people. And by doing that, you have to industrialize your economy. Now, were some of the schemes errors?

Yes. Were there mistakes made? Absolutely. Did things go terribly wrong? Absolutely. Am I trying to downplay the death of millions of Chinese people and peasants? Absolutely not. But I am not going to jump on board and say that all of those deaths due to famine, due to industrialization can be laid at the foot of one person, much less that his intention was to slaughter that many people.

So, you know, all the tours and tragedies of the Great Leap Forward, it was an experimental, mass-mobilized attempt to industrialize the Chinese society. And that was a brutal process. Many innocent people died. It was a tragedy, but by no means are these victims of Mao. And then the cultural revolution is another instance in which chaos certainly ensued, but intentions again matter. The cultural revolution was an attempt in part, and this is a complicated topic, but in part by Mao and his comrades to look at the Soviet Union, how it ossified, how it became bureaucratic, how it detached from the people and how that ultimately led to the revisionism of post-Stalin leaders in the Soviet Union and eventually the entire dissolution of the Soviet Union. So, you know, Mao and the communists in China are watching that. They're learning from those mistakes. And the cultural revolution was an attempt, another one, at the mass mobilization of the people against not only

this superstructure ideology of, you know, centuries of traditional Chinese culture beforehand that they needed to break with, but a mass mobilization where Mao specifically would say, like, unleash the masses on the party itself. You know, under Stalin, for example, Mao watches how the Soviet Union, you know, becomes bureaucratic, how Stalin believes that, you know, after a successful revolution, class struggle no longer happens, especially not in the party. And Mao is seeing all these things as errors. And he's seeing if you want to prevent the ossification and bureaucratization of the socialist project, and then the inevitable road towards revision and capitalism, you need to put the power in the people. So if Stalin was too top down, and even

that is relative to the Western societies in a lot of ways, especially the early Soviet Union was much more democratic and in some ways stayed more democratic. But, you know, we have to, it was too top down. Too many errors were generated from that mistake. We can't make that mistake. We have to put the hands of the revolution in the hands of the people. And that was the cultural revolution and certainly got out of hand. Tragedies happened. People were brutalized. But in a lot of ways, Chinese society and the different factions within it turned on it on themselves, started fighting each other. It was like a low-level civil war in a lot of areas, specific areas. And Mao eventually had to come out, calm things down, and pull back on the Cultural Revolution. Now, you can say this

experimental approach is not good and that you shouldn't be able to roll the dice like that and who knows what's going to happen and so to some extent it's the fault of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party for even doing these things but again what were his intentions to mobilize the masses to put power in the hands of the people so that it doesn't become too bureaucratic and rigid and ossified, to put the revolutionary power in the hands of regular Chinese people, because that's the safest place for a socialist movement to be put, in the hands of the people. Look at Cuba, the Bay of Pigs, right? Under attack from the greatest military and economic power in the world, it's regular Cuban people that rose up

and fought back and defeated the Bay of Pigs. So socialism absolutely centers on and needs and requires the mass support and mass mobilization of the people. Mao and the communists openly experimented with that, sometimes to great tragedy and error and sometimes to impressive success. But to compare that in any way to the genuinely genocidal and genuinely psychopathic Nazi regime, I think is at this point pure fascist propaganda and an uncritical passive acceptance of propaganda that you've been fed and you've never really looked into it or challenged it in any real way. But you've convinced yourself that it's not just me being fed propaganda my entire life, but these are actually conclusions that my independent critical mind came to. And that is, that's when you're sort of fully, fully lost. So I'm not going to say that everything under Mao or under the Chinese communist was perfect. I'm not going to create apologia or I'm not going to dismiss the lives lost in that process. But I

will point out that this is nothing like fascist brutality and genocide, nothing psychopathic about Mao. And Mao himself did not go out and slaughter people just like Fidel and Che did not go out and randomly slaughter people. That is complete nonsense. And so I just would urge a more critical, more even balanced approach to these things. And if you're genuinely interested in Chinese history, investigate it. But don't just regurgitate slogans and buzzwords and demonize a figure that, of course, is going to be demonized in a society that stands against everything that he stood against. Liberation, collectivization equality you know human freedom in its fullest sense and so be very very suspicious of anybody

demonizing these people and at the very least look into it yourself yeah thank you so much for for getting into such interesting and important depth on that and like contextualizing everything and i think that one of the things i really love about the show that you do is that contextualization. And, and I think we'd also be remiss not to just briefly mention, like you, you'd mentioned successes, like there are huge successes in post-revolutionary China, literacy doubled, life expectancy doubled. So those are really important things to take into account as well. And for anybody who wants to really dive deeper into the Chinese Revolution and Maoism, or any of the topics really that we're talking about today, there's probably at least one if not a dozen excellent episodes on Rev Left Radio going

into all sorts of this stuff, like if you want to learn more about the mass line, or we mentioned earlier without really defining like vanguardism and Leninism, and even just you mentioned the DPRK, you have an episode about the DPRK busting some myths around that. So yeah, just want to again, throw that resource out there folks who want to get deeper into any of this stuff, because we are just providing a lot of bird's eye views. So yeah, you want to bring it down to eye level, Rev Left Radio, amazing resource. And you also mentioned Stalin, and another highly controversial figure on the left. And so yeah, let's let's talk Stalin. I know you've had folks on your show before who've given a really great overview of Stalin and both as a theorist and in practice, and I'm wondering what your thoughts are on Stalin,

Stalinism, and just generally what you think his contributions have been to the communist left and like what we can learn. Because again, that's another thing I love about the podcast is you really frame this stuff and like, okay, what can we sort of discard? And what can we learn from all of these highly complicated times in history and these highly complicated figures? So what can we learn from Stalinism? What can we learn about what happened in the Soviet Union during his time? Sure. Yeah. Well, just like Mao, Stalin is not a one-dimensional figure. He's not a cartoon that he's made out to be. And both in Stalin and in Mao's case, contrary to popular belief or popular propaganda, they are not total fucking monarchs and emperors that just hand down dictates to everybody in the party that control everything. No, they are both in context of being within communist parties, which is vociferous debate, criticism, different elements vying for different interests or putting the right

opposition and the left opposition. And then none of these figures are at all possible without mass mobilization and mass support. So to understand Stalin or Mao or to even begin talking about them, the first thing you have to do is knock down this idea that they're one-dimensional cartoon villains and knock down the idea that they are just completely unaccountable you know dictators from on high handing out death sentences and policy you know programs it's just not the case it's much more complicated and if you're genuinely interested in that stuff there

are infinite resources to learn about both the chinese and the russian revolution and complicate your conception of these figures so that's the first thing to say. The other thing to say is, you know, let's start with some of the good stuff. Stalin is a crucial figure from early on in the Bolshevik party. People know him in his early pictures where he was like robbing banks to get funds for the Bolshevik party. He was there the entire time and he really was a major figure within the party and dedicated his life to the revolution and the overturning of the czarist regime. He oversaw the, just like Mao, the industrialization of his country in both cases in record time. So if you look at the capitalist West and its industrialization process, very long,

very brutal. And in both the Chinese and the Soviet context, and the industrialization process equally as brutal, but done in record time. So socialist communist parties in both Russia and in China were able to turn backward peasant countries into superpowers challenging the number one economic and military hegemon in human history in a world historical amount of time that quickly, you know, from from czarist backward peasant serfdom Russia to racing the United States to the stars in a few

decades. So absolutely amazing, regardless of what your politics are. And like Mao lifting millions of people out of poverty, industrializing the society, ending serfdom, etc. And of course was the number one contributor to the defeat of the Nazis. So people say Stalin's industrialization policies were too brutal, too fast. Other people will point out, yes, but if they did not do it that quickly and to that degree, they would not have had the industrial might to fight back and defeat the Nazi machine. And it was the Soviets who gave by far the most casualties, the most human bodies, the most lives in the fight to end the scourge of Nazism across Europe and across the world. And so, you know, if you can, you know, say what you will about Stalin, he was great at killing

Nazis. So you got to tip your hat to him for that. And then will about Stalin, he was great at killing Nazis. So you got to tip your hat to him for that. And then of course he also – in the foundations of Marxism-Leninism, he helps kind of formalize and synthesize after Lenin's death I believe Marxism-Leninism as a new thing, right? Lenin of course sees results of the attempt and the experiment of socialism, do these universalizable concepts get generated such that Marxism-Leninism could be its own thing. And so you need somebody else to formalize it. Just like Mao didn't formalize Maoism, Lenin didn't formalize Marxism-Leninism. It was thinkers after him, in this case, Stalin. And now we did an episode on the foundations of Leninism on Red Menace. You're more than welcome to go check that out if you want to dive into that text. But the text itself is

very short, very accessible, very readable. And so reading a text by Stalin, it's short, it's accessible. I highly recommend it at the very least to see that this is not just a murderous brute, but somebody with real thoughts, with the real intellect and with real conviction about what he was doing. And that's true. He's not a cynical actor that's just out for his own power and prestige, right? But was thoroughly committed to Marxism-Leninism come what may. And, you know, Mao was asked, for example, after Stalin passed and then after Khrushchev releases his, you know, secret speech about Stalin, Mao is asked, what's your take on Stalin more or less?

And this famous equation comes out, right? Mao says 70-30. Stalin was 70% good, 30% bad. And I've touched on some of the stuff that Mao would go on to realize were deficiencies in the Soviet Union and attempt to break through those deficiencies with his experiment in China. But that 70-30 is an interesting split. I had a Maoist friend of mine who is a fan of Stalin say, actually, I think it's more like 60-40, but not for the reasons that a lot of people

would think, right? So, okay, that's in the Marxist-Leninist and in the Maoist tradition, Stalin is seen as an imperfect figure, but as an important one in the history of socialism and that's what this is about I think this tradition is about accepting what our tradition is right we are Marxist we're communists we're socialists we have a history and a tradition going back a couple hundred years at this point and you know there's successes there's failures there's mistakes there's errors there's nice personalities and less nice personalities, but it's all our tradition. And so to be intellectually honest about that means not apologia, but also not turning away from the imperfections of these experiments and casting them with the fascist and the capitalist as wholly unworthy and completely irredeemable formations and movements, but actually wrestling with the tradition and engaging with it and accepting that it's ours.

That can go a long way. And I think buying into a lot of the bullshit about him. But now what's some bad stuff? Well, certainly I'm against the purges and the show trials. And I think they went way too fucking far. Murdering comrades that fought and spilled blood for the Bolshevik revolution, dedicated their lives to the revolution. That is not how you fucking handle contradictions amongst comrades. That is not how you deal with your friends and comrades, even ones you disagree with. And a lot of that shit was bullshit and was not legitimate. Even on that episode with the Marxist-Leninist friends of

mine where we talked about Stalin, they were much more in favor of saying, actually, these were not show trials. There were real concerns here. I don't go as far as them in accepting that. But also it's worth noting that Stalin at some point realized that these purges went too far and spoke out against them. And again, this is not Stalin sitting in a robe handing down death sentences. This is an entire movement, an entire party, many figures, right? And many people in the population were 100% on Stalin's side. And still to this day, there's a lot of nostalgia for Stalin, mostly for the Great Patriotic War, as it's known in Russia, but for many other things, right?

Just the dignity that it brought the world, raising their society to world power status, right? That's a part of their tradition as well. And there's a lot of pride there. So, you know, the purges, so trials, not good. His dialectics, I would argue, were too mechanical and dialectical and historical materialism. He lays out what I believe to be an accessible, but rather rigid and mechanical understanding of dialectics which was addressed by Mao philosophically like with on contradiction and other works on dialectics but also in practice in this understanding that for example class struggle continues after a successful revolution and actually intensifies within the party right this dialectical relationship between top down and bottom up pure bottom up is something

like anarchism pure top down is like bureaucratic stalinism mao try to find the dialectical unity of these two things and i think mao deepened and extended dialectics in a much less mechanical and much more actually dialectical way and you could say well that's just philosophy but there's an argument to be made and i have a close maist, very educated friend who said that his mechanical dialectics and his philosophy actually manifested in his policy and how he dealtics that revisionism is able to get a foothold, sprout, and pop up, eventually take over the party and lead it to its ruin. So you can agree or not agree, but that is what it is. So there's a rigidness, there's a top-down, there's a bureaucratic ossification to it. There's a means justify the ends that comes out of a certain overdeterminism. Like, if you really believe in the stagist conception of Marxism, that the proletariat is inevitably

going to displace the bourgeoisie and it's just a matter of getting there and it is inevitable and humanity will be better off for it, you could justify almost anything in the meantime. And to some extent that that was done so you know there is a again and i'm sure i've missed many goods and many bads and people that share my tendency would argue and push back on a claim here or have a different take over there but um you know that's that's kind of my breakdown an imperfect figure perhaps needed for the time certainly helped make advancements, was crucial in the defeat of the Nazis, but also at other times, too cold-hearted, too rigid, too deterministic,

and too brutal, I would say, to comrades within the party and that helped get the revolution to that point. So those are some of the main things that I would say. But his book, Foundations of Marxist-Leninism, is really good. If you want to get a taste of Stalin's intellect and how he synthesized Marxism-Leninism, I would recommend you check that out. But then after Rev Left did our big episode on Stalin, we had comrades from Swampside Chats respond. So they were kind of rough with my guests. They were trying to be nice to me me but they had a full-throated response from i would say more of a left communist perspective and then cosmonaut the magazine recently and podcast recently released an episode on stalin it's about three hours itself and takes a more nuanced take on stalin as people who consider

themselves leninists and supporters of the Bolshevik revolution, they laid out a bunch of criticisms of Stalin. So if you want to hear the full-throated defense of Stalin, you can check out our old Rev Left app. If you want to hear a more nuanced take on Stalin, you can check out the Cosmonaut podcast. And if you want to hear a direct response to our episode on Stalin, you can check out Swampside Chats. And between those three shows, I think you'll get a pretty damn nuanced communist take from three distinct different perspectives on Stalin and what our relationship to him should be. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Brett O'Shea of Revolutionary Left Radio. We'll be right back. She likes to come into the catacomb

To see what she might find There might be something she left behind Finds a picture in a quiet place A dream as clear as the night Picture of parent please From some time ago I can hear the angels sing When you smile He wears a white carnation

But the suit don't seem to fit Now the people standing on the stairs Seem to smile through the teeth? Could be twenty-four years later She's so tired from the game Could she imagine they're just the same? Take all away Losing self and life Why don't we go to the coming time Catch a little boat

Gets too hot to subside It's a long, easy suffering fight It's a long, easy suffering fight Why don't you come in time? Catch a fever, oh, it gets too hot to subside That was Ease Yourself and Glide by Parsley Sound. Now back to our conversation with Brett O'Shea of Revolutionary Left Radio. Okay, so before the break, we were talking about Stalin. And I just want to, again, underline this idea of like, contextualizing these figures and how important it is on the left for us

to just even if we're going to be flat out critical and if it's like 100 zero for some of us like 100 bad just understanding the context of what all of this um how everything played out like for example just from the soviet union and and how a lot of the decisions that were made a lot of the things that were happening at that time are taken out of context when they're just shit upon by a lot of people who will just throw these figures out outright, or just, you know, even going further and just saying that communism itself is just a murderous totalitarian system. Like, those are quite different people that would probably say those, like the person that would throw out communism versus the person that would throw out communism versus the person that would throw out Stalinism are coming from very different places. But oftentimes,

they do come from the same not understanding full context. So really, really important to do that. And I'm glad that you you mentioned, well, all the resources that you you provided sound really great. I did listen to the Stalin episode on RevLeft and I did follow along with the Foundations of Leninism that Stalin wrote and that you covered on Red Menace. And I just remember being like, oh, all right, they got an episode on Stalin. I'll check that out.

Kind of like, okay, I wonder what this is going to be about. And then by the end of it, I was like, okay, damn. Like, all right, I learned a lot. And it was actually really interesting and learned a lot about Leninism and angles of it that I hadn't thought about before. So, again, like a lot to learn. And I know, again, we're throwing out a bunch of terms here. So, you know, I don't want to assume that all of our listeners are pretty well versed in Marxism, even in the basic 101s. So like stuff like historical materialism and dialectics and like the idea of the tendency called left communism, which you mentioned.

These are all things that if you are interested in and you want to learn more, there are multiple episodes, excellent episodes on Rev Left Radio that dive deep into each one of these things. And there is so much that I'm not – there's so much that in stuff like this I just can't possibly get to. So I do like this opportunity to say if you're interested in this stuff, if you disagree or agree with me, there's more resources you can go out and investigate. But that's the important thing, investigating the actual issue, not just taking up some ideas that you've been given over your life and then being very arrogant about them and one thing i always do when anybody comes up and because you'll hear it all the time if you say you're a socialist or a communist what about castro what about ma what about stalin and then you know when they have

a strong opinion on any of those figures just ask them hey can you just let me know just one book you've read on that figure yeah just one book or one document, anything. Can you tell me the resources that you've read, that you've engaged with, that brought you to this conclusion that this person is a genocidal monster of historic proportions? And they just won't have a single resource. And at that point, it's like, okay, either you want to listen to me and we can have a good faith dialogue or I can just walk away from this conversation because this is not actually a good faith inquiry that you have. But this is something that you're not even willing to spend any time investigating on your own, but you want to be arrogant and come to other people and launch accusation after accusation and make them try to have to deal with it. As Marxist, I always say like to be an anti-communist in an American

society, for example, there's no standard. You can just make shit up. You can just say anything and you'll get a round of applause. To be a Marxist in America, you have to know philosophy. You have to know economics. You have to know history. You have to know every single detail of Stalin's personal life and the Maoist movement in China. You have to know everything. And if there's one thing you don't know, that will be pointed out as like, see, this person has no clue what they're talking about. And so there's one thing you don't know that will be pointed out as like see this person has no clue what they're talking about and so there's this insane asymmetry already and it's just it can get very frustrating so curiosity open-mindedness and personal investigation is always the way to go and a great example of that is when zizek debated

jordan peterson right on marxism and it just turned out that this guy who's like entire thing was about shitting on communism didn't know a fucking thing about what Marxism was. Hilarious. Yeah, I guess the final sort of thing in terms of theory that I want to get into. Can you talk a little bit about why you think it's important for us on the left to be well versed in theory more generally? Like, what can theory provide in terms of like, say, our current organizing? And what would you say to someone who might argue that like, theory is not that important, we need to just, you know, completely focus on getting stuff done on

the ground, like organizing and mutual aid work and all that kind of stuff? Like, what do you think it's important to infuse our organizing with theory and really have a deep grounding of theory as leftists? Sure. Well, the first thing to quickly say is there's a dialectical relationship between theory and practice. So if you just are all theory and no practice, you're useless. You're just interpreting the world. You're not changing. And as Marx would say, if you're all practice without any theory, there's no, it's just free flowing. It's eclectic. It's just based on personal preferences or personalities or spontaneity. There's no leading guidance there. There's nothing to move the thing in a direction that can actually learn from the past and build on those things. And so what happens is a lot of

these people who, for various reasons, you know, don't even want to think about reading Marx or Lenin or let alone Stalin or Mao, is that they lose out on so much stuff that people have actually gone through, right? In the case of Lenin and Stalin and Mao, regardless of what you think about them, they all participated at high levels in successful socialist revolutions. So to say, hey, I'm a socialist. I want to overthrow capitalism. It's been done a few times in the past, but I'm not even going to read or think about them

because whatever, I have ideas about how bad or evil they are or I'm from a totally different tendency that rejects them. You are going to, at the very least, have to wrestle with and get caught up in reinventing the wheel, as it were, again and again. And it just is common sense that traditions have key figures that have advanced the field that you're interested in.

And it's common sense to study them. So like if I went into the hard sciences, right, I want to make a career out of being a scientist. But I say straight up, I don't need to know anything about what Newton and Darwin and Einstein thought. They're all dead old white guys. They have nothing to teach us in 2022. Unthinkable.

All of your colleagues in the scientific field that you're going to be like, what? You should at least be passively understanding where they came from and what they did and how they revolutionized this field that you're trying to get into and dedicate your life to. And so in the same sense, regardless of where you come down on the questions of anarchism or Marxism or authoritarianism or whatever, you should understand the past history and the successes and failures of the very tradition that you're claiming to operate in. So on that level, it is really just common sense. But I think in America,

in hyper-capitalist societies more broadly, there's a lot of hyper-individualism, which quickly becomes arrogance and narcissism. And there's a deeply narcissistic and profoundly arrogant element to thinking that you don't need to learn from the past, that you can sort of exist as a free-floating brain that generates its own theory in a vacuum or that the present is so detached from the past that there's nothing that we can learn from it. You know, all those things are huge mistakes. And no, no socialist organization has ever successfully taken power by explicitly rejecting the theorists who built revolutions before them. It's just never, ever happened. And so in a lot

of ways to turn away from theory is to condemn yourself to failure, but it's also out of an arrogance and a sort of laziness. I mean, this shit is hard reading Lenin and Stalin and Mao, especially reading Marx and Engels. It's not easy. And people don't want to think of themselves on the left as, as being lazy, or they don't want to come out and say, I don't want to think of themselves on the left as being lazy, or they don't want to come out and say, I don't want to read theory because I really just, I'm just not interested in it, or I can't get the motivation to do it, right? They have to present it as like a principled thing. Like, no, we don't need it for this or that reason. A lot of cases, it is just laziness. It is just egoism. It's narcissism and it's arrogance. And theory is not something that

you internalize as dogma, right? It's not you just pick up like a like a square peg and put it into the round hole of present conditions it is about engaging with learning from testing out and experimenting with the ideas that have come from your comrades before you people before you who believed in a just world in a world of, in a world of equality, in a world of fraternity and solidarity and internationalism, they actually tried to do the damn thing. And for, you know, especially like some college kid in the US to just be so dismissive of that and say that they have nothing to learn from that, I think is anathema to the fucking pursuit for, for equality and real human freedom and flourishing. So I think it's actually incredibly dogmatic, incredibly sloppy, incredibly narcissistic

and arrogant to think that you have the answers and there's nothing that anybody in the past can possibly teach you that'd be relevant for today. It's just never true in any field. And it's certainly not true in the, uh, in the field of revolutionary politics. Yeah. And, and I can definitely attest to how, I mean, getting into theory is fairly new for me, but it's completely transformed the way that I view the world, the way that I view our struggles and just really infused it with so much context, so much nuance. And like, I'm just thinking about like, I don't know, that's probably not the best example. But like, for some reason, all I'm getting in like all my social feeds right now, I had to mute him as Andrew Yang and his fucking forward party. And all I can keep thinking is like, this is what happens when a motherfucker does not read theory.

You know? Yeah. I don't want to get into the details. If you don't know about Andrew Yang's forward party, you're lucky. Don't worry about it. You don't need to worry about it. Let me just say one thing really quick. When you're looking to build a third party in the US, there's certain circumstances where I would support it. If we had a working class anti-imperialist party fighting on the electoral realm, I would a hundred percent support that, um, and actively join that party. Um, but there's this elite thing that, that bourgeois elites in our society do where they,

they want a third party, but they want it right in between the Republican and Democratic party. It's like, you are so detached from everyday people. If you truly think what the American people are pining for is an even more centrist party and even more capitalist captured oligarch ran elite fucking party in the middle of already two completely failed political parties so yeah the yang thing is a extra funny to me yes no absolutely i agree with all that and okay so let's just talk a little bit briefly about this sort of idea that and this is again, again, something I just came across for the first time from listening to Rev Left Radio is this idea as Marxism as a science. And it's been really interesting for me

because I actually, I guess, came from a place on the left where this idea of economics as a science in general was like, really attacked. And like this idea, we've had folks like Kate Raworth, known from donut economics, her donut economics framework, or more recently, Jonathan Aldred. And they argue that economics is not a science. And of course, in this context, they're referring to neoclassical economics. So folks that are familiar with those two figures and our interviews with them will have some basic idea of, you know, what those arguments are as economics not being a science, it should be viewed as a philosophy and at most a social science. But I was really intrigued by this whole thread, this idea that you've advocated for on the show in a few different contexts about Marxist economics being a science.

And yeah, I'm just curious what your thoughts are on sort of the tension that I just mentioned earlier with, you know, this idea that science and economics are incompatible in many ways, or that they're different. You can't see economics as a science. And specifically in terms of Marxism as well, I'm wondering like what your thoughts are on Marxism specifically as a science. Sure. Well, yeah, this is a huge question. So I'm going to defer to some other stuff where I can go more in depth here in a second, but just a few things on this front. This is an entire conversation in and of itself and a very complicated one. I think this is one of the harder things to really wrestle with in the Marxist tradition. And you're never going to be

able to do it justice in just one question. But a few things I wanted to point out there is that I actually agree completely, especially in the neoclassical sense, that economics is not a science, that it is sort of like how priests in the past would try to naturalize feudalism by saying, this is the divine order, the divine rights of kings. This is how God wants it. And in our scientific age, economics and the economic departments of major universities play a similar role in naturalizing the exploitation of capitalism under the banner of this is actually scientific. No, we're not doing capitalist apologia. We are just using science to analyze things. And it just turns out that all the premises of capitalism are stuff that

we share in the field. And so I completely understand and agree with the fact that economics in our modern world is not a science, although it often masquerades as one. But when Marxists say that, you know, we're scientific socialists, we're not necessarily saying that Marxist economics in and of itself is a science. Certainly there's a scientific aspect to Marx's critique of capitalism in Capital. It is a deep, objective, third-person investigation of where capitalism came from historically and how it operates. And so that is a criticism and a critique and an exploration of what capitalism actually is. And in a lot of ways, that endeavor is scientific on some level. But when Marxists say that we're scientific socialists, we're pointing

beyond simply economics. There is, and again, these are big terms and I hate throwing these out knowing I won't be able to fully go into them. But in Marxism, and this is simplified, but it will help you orient yourself to what we mean by this. We view historical materialism as the scientific aspect of Marxism, and we view dialectical materialism as the philosophical framework through which we interpret and understand and navigate historical materialism. So in very simplified terms, historical materialism is the scientific aspect, if you will, of Marxism. And dialectical materialism is the philosophical framework or structure of ways that revolutions are the experimental laboratories and you test certain ideas out in the hothouse of revolution and that generalizes certain universalizable concepts that can be used in all future socialist struggles.

And so you have Marxism turning into Marxism-Leninism turning into Marxism-Leninism, turning into Marxism-Leninism-Maoism because of this idea that with every attempt to build revolution and build socialism, new data is generated. And we take that data in consideration. We look at what did and did not work. More revolutions means a broader data set. And we operate scientifically in the sense of testing hypotheses, seeing if these things are universalizable, seeing what things are specific to certain conditions, and emphasizing that experimental,

open-ended aspect of Marxism. Lenin and Mao do not have the final word on Marxism and how to go about doing it. But every time there is a successful revolution and it's building on the failures and successes of previous ones, it generates new data that we can operate from and use and utilize and narrow down for the next attempt while also being able to compensate for the wild differences in circumstances. Launching a socialist revolution in the United States in 2025 is going to be fundamentally different in a lot of ways from the Bolshevik revolution in the early 1900s. But what will remain the same is that you need high levels of organization,

like the vanguard party. You need organizational elements to figure out how you come to consensus within a party without destroying and splitting, which is democratic centralism, right? And understanding of imperialism as a manifestation of capitalism. These things are awesome. And then the next attempt at revolution will use those universalizable concepts as best as they can and hopefully take them further. And so, you know, Mao and the Chinese communists were explicitly and consciously thinking about this. This is an open-ended scientific exploration and experiment. We've had one before, the Russian Revolution. Let's look very deeply at that. What were its failures? Okay, well, it got bureaucratic.

It was too top-down. It led to revisionism and capitalist road. Okay, then how do we navigate those things? Well, we need to be more in line with the masses. So, you know, our organizational principle is the mass line. There needs to be a superstructural revolution because we saw that without that, the ideology of capitalism can creep even into a socialist and communist party and destroy it from the inside. So there needs to be a robust confrontation with the ideological superstructure of capitalist society and on down the line. And so in this sense, you can see that there is a more or less scientific approach to revolution that is interested in experimenting, in using data, in testing results. So if this thing worked in the Russian revolution and it worked in the Chinese revolution,

you know, the next world historical revolution, if we get the chance before the world's fucking destroyed, we should take that idea seriously and see how far we can take it in these different conditions. Now, maybe we'll find out in the laboratory of revolution that what we took to be an earlier thing as a universalizable concept actually isn't. We tried it out. It failed. We had to do something else. But that's how science works.

Science never, in hard sciences, for example, never come to hard, forever, static conclusions, but is an open-ended experimental thing where you're basically ruling out things that don't work forever. There is no time when science stops and says, we got it all figured out. And in a very similar way, that won't happen in the Marxist tradition. Now, that is a hot and fast breakdown of a very complicated topic. And there are plenty of questions that any reasonable person right now would be asking. And I would be asking if I had

heard just that. So what I'm going to do, and I don't want to continually point to other shows, it can get annoying. It's like, well, I'm trying to listen to you right now. So I deeply apologize, but just allow me this one last, this one last recommendation recommendation because on Rev Left, we did an episode called This Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists, Marxism as Science, where we had on the philosopher Joshua Malfawad Paul and me and Allison discussed with him. I don't know if it's just me or me and Allison, but we discussed this entire idea, broke it down, went through every objection to it and talked about, you know, Popper and falsifiability and all these ideas that you might be having right now. So if you want to go get a deep dive

on Marxism as a science and why we stand by that, you can go check out this ruthless criticism of all that exists on RevLeft. And then we had a debate with some libertarian socialists, me and Allison from Red Menace, debated the seriously wrong guys on scientific socialism. They are social ecologists, libertarian communists, libertarian socialists, whatever, anarchists adjacent, definitely not Leninists or Maoists of any sort. And so we had a two-hour friendly but deeply engaging debate on this very topic. And they're coming from a left-wing position that is very skeptical and outright rejects the idea that Marxism has any scientific aspects to it. And me and Allison

are vociferously defending that line. So you can get the breakdown and the debate and really flesh this question out because this is a complicated, deep concept and it would take many hours to give a full fleshing out here and now. So I point you to those other resources. Okay. So one of the things that I wanted to get into a little bit with you is this idea is something that's weighing heavily on a lot of people's minds right now, this sort of steady decay into fascism that we're seeing. And I don't want to suggest that fascism has like never existed in the United States and in various forms or anything like that, like it definitely has.

But there does seem like there's this sort of new emergence of it. And, you know, some people would argue that fascism isn't the right term. And I don't want to sort of split hairs on that. I think there are pretty good arguments both for and against using the specific framing of fascism. But regardless, I think we all sort of know what we mean when we talk about fascism. So I guess I would love to just sort of get your take on this, this sort of decay that we seem to be seeing in the United States right now goes without saying things like the recent Supreme Court decision on Roe and all of the anti-trans legislation that's been proposed and passed throughout the country and just like straight up displays of people who identify as Nazis

in the streets, like in our streets, like you talked about at the start of the show. And so, yeah, I guess I'm just wondering, like, what do you think of all of this? Sure. Yeah. a very fascinating conversation. And, you know, questions like this are really important to be in an organization or to just have some good comrades around you because the Marxist understanding of how we build knowledge is not individuals going out on their own and reading books and coming up with knowledge. But, like, interrogating and going back and forth and putting ideas into practice and like multiple brains working on the same problem, right? So that's just a general, you know, pointing out that that's how we should go about wrestling with these problems in our communities is organizationally and communally. But, you know, the general Marxist position on what fascism is, you know, there's a famous Lenin quote, fascism is capitalism in decay. I often say fascism is capitalism with its fangs out.

Fascism arose under modernity, under capitalist so-called bourgeois democratic societies, and is a new phenomenon that came onto the scene with capitalism. So it's like imperialism, modern imperialism, inextricable from capitalism. So that's important to remember. So throughout capitalist history when capitalism goes into crisis either because of its own machinations and the crisis prone nature of the capitalist economic model or because there's a socialist communist anarchist anti-fascist or imperialist anti-imperialist movement in your society challenging the wealthy and the powerful

fascism is sort of like an immune response that is generated within capitalism to prevent it from being overthrown in moments of crisis and so that's kind of helpful to think about but we also know that capitalism almost always in crisis and certainly if you're my age, I was born in the very late 80s. All I've known of capitalism is crisis. And so it is no mistake that as American capitalism in particular, as an example, enters a period of protracted multiple crises, the crises of institutional legitimacy, the crisis of inequality, the crisis of climate change, all the crises, the 2008 recession, you know, the Trump years. When it's going in that form of crisis, it's trying to bear the winds of the crisis that

it itself generates. Fascism comes to the fore. When capitalism is humming along quite nicely, when there's not a lot of opposition internally or, you know, externally, but specifically internally, capitalism kind of puts away. Fascism hides underneath the subsurface, if you will. It's always there, but it is not always acutely in your face. But whenever capitalism enters crisis, that does rise up.

So of course, we should expect that in this time of deep crisis, we would see it. And it's precisely what we see, not just in North America, across the world. There is a move towards right-wing authoritarianism, whether that's Duterte or Modi or Bolsonaro or, you know, Orban or Trump himself or whatever. There is a very reactionary mood in the world right now. And it has very fascist connotations because global capitalism is in many crises right now. So that's just helpful. Another thing that's very helpful, and this is a dialectical point, we talk about dialectical materialism or thinking dialectically, understand that fascism is a process. Because under dialectics, everything is a process. Nothing is a

static state of affairs. Nothing is a metaphysical category that doesn't change for all time. Fascism is not something that you turn the light switch on or off on, right? Either fascism is here or it's gone. No, fascism is always present with us. It is a process. At certain times it comes to the fore, at other times it falls into the background, but fascism is fundamentally a process, not a static state of affairs. So in some sense, it can be said that wherever there's capitalism, there is always a fascist undercurrent. Fascist politicians, fascist ideologies are always present to one degree or another. They could be hyper-marginalized or they could come and be the

dominant form of an entire political party, for example. And so we're somewhere in between that. We have real fascists in theocratic fascism right that's gaining momentum through the courts where you know these people are raised from you know early law school to be these psychotic reactionary judges specifically in place to destroy things like uh roe v wade which they've they've successfully done but then there's a sort of fascism from the center if you will there's a far right obvious fascism like literally dudes with skinheads and neo There's a far right, obvious fascism, like literally dudes with skinheads and neo-Nazi flags, right? You can think of like the Proud Boys and all of these formations that have come up in the last several years are explicitly fascist organizations. Throughout history, right? You have like in both Italy and in Nazi Germany, you start off these

fascist movements with like street fighters who fight union guys and who fight communists and anarchists in the streets something like the proud boys certainly displays that element of fascism but then the question is if fascism is to come to america let's just assume that it's not acute that we don't live right now in a fascist dictatorship which i'm willing to grant to some extent although certain minorities in amer America have always lived under a fascist dictatorship for sure. But then the question is, where will the fascism come from? Will it be these cartoonishly evil motherfuckers on the far, far right taking over the government and instituting something that looks just like Nazi Germany? I don't think so. I think if there is a robust move towards fascism, it will actually come from

the center of American politics, not the far right. Because most people are aware of the aesthetics of the far right. They have no real support. Very few people want a Nazi fucking government. You know, like the idea that they're going to take over the government and not immediately descend into civil war, the vast majority of Americans fighting back, this is never going to happen. But something like a more robust move to fascism could certainly come out of the center. In a moment of piling up crises, for example, this is just one hypothetical. In the U.S., let's say you have multiple climate change disasters plus an economic collapse, right? You could easily see a situation where America starts coming apart at the seams. And then the response is not, let's put in this fascist dictatorship

from the far right. Nobody wants that. Not even most elements of the bourgeoisie, but a fascism could descend from the center of American politics in the form, I think, likely of maybe a military takeover. Again, this is all speculation, but the military is one American institution out of very few left that has not been completely delegitimized. I think it should be. On the left, it certainly is. But amongst the average American population, there's still a lot of trust in the military. And so in a moment of acute crisis, you could see the military stepping up, pausing elections and basically taking over using its whatever legitimacy it might have at that time to say, hey, we're just here to facilitate the transition to elections. that in a moment of crisis with a strongman at its lead consolidates the capitalist class behind it, the petty bourgeoisie behind it, and tries to clamp down through police violence on protests

throughout the country, etc. But I was actually recently talking to Vijay Prashad recently about this exact question, and his take was kind of interesting. He said, in America, a fascist dictatorship isn't even needed, right? There is no mechanisms of popular power that could challenge the ruling class in any meaningful way. And so to move into a full-on fascist dictatorship would be superfluous. There is no need for it. They have functionally pushed out every average regular working people from having a seat at the table. They've done that through many mechanisms, not the least of which is the de-unionization efforts that have happened all through American history, right? In the 19-teens and 20s and 30s, there was the de-radicalization of unions. And then with the Reagan era, there was a de-unionization of the economy. And so that is a mainstay of workers fighting back specifically against fascist encroachments. That's been eliminated, so we don't have that. The political apparatus,

as it stands, is not movable by the will of the people. We know that. We know on every major issue that Americans want health care. They don't want war. They want a more egalitarian economic system. And those policies are never going to be trumpeted by one of the major parties, much less carried through on. So is there any reason to install a fascist dictatorship? Vijay says no. And then to complicate the situation even more, and I'll end it after this, is reading a book like Blood in My Eye by George Jackson, who makes this claim very convincingly, and

it's very much in line with my idea of fascism as a process not a static state of affairs that fashion has always been present and specifically for the you know the formerly enslaved and then the deeply oppressed black community and the society all the way up until today with the carceral state and you know no accountability to police that murder black people in the streets that they've always been living under a stage of fascist siege. And I completely agree with that. Indigenous people are another community that have, you can honestly say, have always lived under fascism in the United States. And so when we talk about it or middle-class white people talk about it, or even working class white people talk about it we have to account for those differences and actually lived experience between different identity groups and how what we think of fascism

what we would take to be fascism is a state of affairs that oppressed people specifically indigenous and black people in this country have always had to deal with and so i think keeping that at the forefront of our mind when we talk about fascism is also really important. And Blood in My Eye by George Jackson is not only deeply insightful, but deeply inspirational as well. And I highly recommend it. Okay. So I'm going to ask you a sort of a follow-up to that, I think, which is a lot of people reach out to us and they're like, okay, so I know everything is fucked. The system is fucked up. I listened to your podcast. I've listened to other podcasts, but sort of what now?

Like, what should I do? And I'm wondering if you get that question often and sort of like what your response is or what it would be. Sure. Yeah. I mean, of course we get that question. I asked myself that question. Lennon wrote a book called What Is To Be Done that I think is a good place to start in finding himself in a similar situation, him and his comrades in a similar situation. You know, the system is fucked. It's losing legitimacy. I

understand why it's bad. What do we do now? You know, that's his answer at that time. My answer at this time broadly is that if you are going to take on a force that is highly disciplined, is that if you are going to take on a force that is highly disciplined, highly organized, highly funded, like the United States fucking government, the military, any state apparatus, you are going to have to at least try to match their levels of organization and discipline and militancy. And so anybody that says that you don't need to organize or downplays organization of any sort is really leading us astray. We need organization at every level. A communist party would be wonderful, but fuck, I will take one radical union, you know, to be organized. So the fundamental thing that all of us can do in this period of crisis, knowing where these things are not going in pretty directions

over the next several years, is to try to get as absolutely organized as you possibly can, whatever that means for your community or anything. The left in this country, in the U.S. in particular, which is where I'm from, so that's what I emphasize and I know it best, the left in this country has been systematically destroyed. The unions, the mechanism by which regular working people used to have a seat at the table and could actually funnel it into political power was consciously gutted under Reaganism such that we have, we've been completely knocked down. Our organizations that used to be the mechanisms through which we pursued revolution have been utterly dismantled. And after 40 years of neoliberal Reaganism in both political parties, the American left

is just getting to its feet. So imagine being knocked out, you know, going to sleep for a few decades, more or less, and then slowly coming to your own. Your ears are ringing. You're seeing double. You start pushing yourself up off the ground. You realize you're full of blood, but you're getting yourself off the ground. That's the state that the left is in right now in the United States.

And so organization is going to be the central, most important thing, whether that is organizing labors or just organizing labor in the form of unions or joining the labor movement, whether that is tenant organizing, that is a great front to organize specifically in a time when housing and rent costs are through the fucking roof. People are being displaced. People that live in a single tenant building are kind of like, you know, workers in the past who would come to a single factory to work every day, thus making organizing them easier than it is, let's say, in the gig economy where American will have two or three jobs, none of which, you know, are in a single place. You're doing Uber, you're doing Uber Eats, you're doing Uber Eats,

you're doing that or this. It gets a little more difficult. But tenant organizing is often a situation in which many working class people will be in a single building with a single interest of reducing rent to making living affordable. That could be a great point of organizing. Serving the people in any capacity is absolutely essential. And going out into your community, serving the people such that you then begin to create new organizers from the masses. A tenant organization here in Omaha was pursuing this exact strategy and it was very successful. They would go, they would fight for people who didn't even know what socialism was, but they saw that these people who call themselves socialist and communist show up every damn day.

They fight for my deposit back. They fight for the landlord to come in and fix my sink or whatever it may be. And these people are writing for me. I'm going to write for them. And they've actually been able to, and this is not just them. It's many good organizations the world over, turn people who you're initially helping, who you're initially serving into active participants in the organization themselves. That process is absolutely essential. And the mass line,

this idea of going to the people, asking what they need, coming back to your cadre, figuring out how you can actually meet that need, trying it, going back to the people and saying, did we succeed? Are there any problems? They tell you, actually, this was a going back to the people and saying, did we succeed? Are there any problems? They tell you, actually, this was a pretty good project, but I noticed, you know, this one thing happened that I don't like, and here's an error that I wish we didn't make. And you know, now I'm in a bad situation on this end. Okay. Then you take that information, you go back, you figure out a program to address those needs. You try it out. You go back to the people, right? to address those needs. You try it out. You go back to the people, right? That is a tried and true organizing method that doesn't make you a person coming into the community from the outside,

telling them what they need or giving them what you think they need, but actually inculcates you with the community such that they see you not as an outsider coming in to maybe give them some help or some charity, but as a neighbor, as a comrade, as a community member. And that I think is much more efficacious in the long run. And in fact, the Black Panther Party did exactly this. They were concerned with the black community issues in the black community, and they came out of that community such that they were not seen as an outside force. The police were seen as the outside force and the Black Panther Party were seen as the highest levels of organization from within that community. And that's how you build

legitimacy. That's how you build mass movements. So those things are absolutely essential. Political education is also essential. You know, we have to break down the anti-communist propaganda that we've been force fed our entire lives for generations. We have to educate people on what capitalism actually is, what socialism actually is, what the stakes actually are. And that's always going to be important. But political education completely separate from any organization, any accountability, any group of people that you're actually fighting for or working with or answerable to can quickly just become careerism. And so we should always guard against that. This is not about lifting me up to a position where I can make a career out of this. This is fundamentally first and foremost, always about trying to get information out to

people to raise their political and social consciousness such that we can form the foundation to more robust levels of organization going forward. And then the last thing I would say, or two last things, something to be skeptical of is academia, the Democratic Party, and the social media as being worthy of your time. You know, there are some great thinkers that come out of academia and that do important work. Academia in and of itself tends against revolutionary politics. You tend to get more comfortable. You tend to move up the class ladder if you're successful in academia. And the urgency that you might otherwise have to change your rotten conditions gets less urgent. And so while we should make use of academia and

academics, we can't make that the center point of our organizing or the focus of our work. It really has to be rooted in the working class. The Democratic Party is not a mechanism by which we can pursue our goals. It is terrible. The brand it has with regular working people is dog shit. To tie your revolutionary political project to the Democratic Party is like tying your neck to an anchor and jumping off a boat. We need to confront the Democratic Party and offer a real alternative to it, not try to work within it. And then lastly, social media. I mean, we all go out there, we make connections. That's good, but it has deep limitations. And you're always, every time you log into a social media account, you're at the dictates of an algorithm constructed by corporations to sell your data for profit.

And so the very field you're playing on is one that is skewed in every way against your actual political goals. So make use of it, but keep it in its proper place. If you're spending seven, eight, nine, 10 hours a day on Twitter or on Facebook or on Instagram talking politics, you know, there could be some benefits from that, but that is really a waste of your time. Going out and shoveling your neighbor's, your elderly lady neighbor's driveway is more important than 10 hours of posting online about communist politics. So, you know, keep that in mind. And then the very last thing I would say is we all, no matter where we are, no matter what we do, we have the possibility to impact

the people in our lives. But to do that in the direction of our values and our goals politically, you have to kind of be a good, normal fucking person. And I see a lot of people who get their brains broken on the internet or broken on dogmatism become so insular, so self-referential in their ideas, so cloistered away from regular people that they functionally become unable to communicate and relate with regular people. And so you want to be a normal person in the sense that you can interact with conservatives and liberals and centrists who are all around you. And you want to be a good person that shows that my politics are actually coming

out of the best parts of my character. And the way I carry myself as a communist is one of dignity, of integrity, of compassion, of responsibility. And I think that goes a long way to breaking a lot of taboos. So if you're going to say I'm a communist and I'm talking to all my friends and family about how I'm a communist and why they should be open-minded to socialist politics, but I'm an egomaniac and I fuck over the people who trust me and I'm unreliable, you're not a good marketer for socialism or communism. So holding yourself to high levels and high standards of ethical behavior, I think is really, it can't be just dismissed as individualism. This is an element in the struggle. And for you to be taken seriously as a human being and as a thinker with an alternative

to the way things are, you have to be a person that can relate to others and a person that other people look to and say, I might not agree with him, but goddamn, he's a good person. And if I need help, I know he'll be the first one to show up. That goes a long, long way to dismantling, especially the most rabid forms of anti-communism that a lot of regular people are inculcated with. Yeah. Thanks so much for that, Brett. And I just want to uplift something.

Like I'm not trying to call out the ironic or I hate this term, but like the dirt bag left or whatever. But I think there is a tendency on the left to just sort of shroud yourself in this disassociative irony and i mean i get it because the world is overwhelming and sometimes it's just easier to retreat behind this all pervading sort of sarcastic detachment and irony but one thing that i i really love about your shows and and sort of the approach that you take is like the sincerity and the passion and you don't shy away from like emotional vulnerability. There's like that Che quote that you bring up a lot, the one about love. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, a revolutionary

is someone guided by a great sense of love or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I just definitely feel that permeates through all of your work. And I just, yeah, I just really appreciate that. And I think it's really important to carry that as leftists. Thank you. And I also want to underline what you were sort of talking about this individualism. And of course, that's inculcated in one way or another in all of us under capitalism. And it also has a tendency to permeate a lot of leftist institutions and organizing as well. So a few years back, we did a two-part audio documentary, part of our quarterly documentary series. We did one on worker co-ops. And we spent the first half just sort of exploring worker co-ops and talking to

people like Richard Wolff about economic democracy and stuff like that. But in the second half, we got in touch with Sam Gendon, who co-authored the book, The Making of Global Capitalism. And like, we ended up spending the entire second half of the documentary exploring this idea that like, and this isn't just about worker co-ops, it can be true of unions, it can be true of a lot of work that we do, that if you're organizing isn't steeped in movement building and like building class consciousness, then you're really missing a super important part of the whole thing, like with the tenants organization you were talking about in Omaha. And we have a number of great ones here in the Bay Area,

the Tenant and Neighborhood Councils or TANK, which grew out of the East Bay DSA. They situate all their work within like an explicit political framework. And I think that's just so, so key, like framing your organizing as a class struggle. It's a historical class struggle that what we're doing right now is part of a long legacy of revolution and anti-capitalist struggle and not like in a heavy-handed way but just you know to orient people as like hey you're part of a movement and here are some other people who are facing the same struggles and it's not just you it's the system. Let's build collective power and yeah so just like to go back to the worker cooperative audio documentary that I mentioned, that was one of the biggest challenges we uncovered in the worker co-op space is like

many of them are just these disparate islands within a sea of capitalism. And that unless all of these individual islands join together as part of a broader movement, they're like not going to make it. And yeah, so I'm, I'm really glad that you underlined that and just the importance of organizing and building community and getting ideas out there while also helping others and like, you know, touching grass as, as they say. Yep. Absolutely. Really quickly. I just wanted to say thank you very much for those, those kind words. And there's that Malcolm Yep. Absolutely. rest assured that I was wrong with utter sincerity. And I've always loved that quote. I believe in that. And I absolutely love that. And with the Che quote about love, love is the foundation of my politics, of my spirituality, of my relationship to the world. And I am motivated genuinely at the

end of the day, if I had to boil it all down to one thing, it would be a sincere and desperate love for my fellow human beings and the sincere, desperate wish that every single human being can live a life of dignity and integrity and freedom in this world. And I believe that as long as there are human beings on this planet, the fight for justice, for truth, for equality, for basic human dignity will continue. And that gives me great hope. So love is absolutely at the center of this. Yes, I think that's such a strong and beautiful place to end Brett. What an inspiring conversation. And I guess I just want to end by asking you, for anyone out there who's ready to just sort of take a leap into some theory or important texts more deeply, what are some

resources out there and some of the first places that you'd maybe direct them to? Absolutely. And just really quickly, we made Red Menace for that person. So for the person who really wants to learn about these primary texts, but it's hard, especially with little information to dive into a primary text, especially when it's translated, especially when it's a century or more older. It can be intimidating and it can be hard to follow. And I completely understand and appreciate that. And myself have struggled with that. So on Red Menace, the entire goal was to take these texts one by one, discuss them. So we go through the text, then we reflect on it, discuss it, bring out its implications and what it can teach us so from works by Marx by Engels by Lenin by Mao by feminists by you know anti-colonial theorists

like Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire we cover their texts in depth and really we did that to make it easier for people to engage with the text so if you want to read something like socialism scientific and utopian which I highly recommend highly accessible very short written by angles that's a great place to start but it could also be very helpful to listen whether before during or after you read that text to our red menace episode on it where we just talk about it flesh it out bring it to the current era and talk about what we can actually apply and what is relevant to today from that text. And it also is very helpful with the whole scientific socialism thing.

So socialism, scientific, and utopian, I would recommend that. State and Revolution by Lenin, I would recommend that. Both of those texts are small and fairly accessible. There's some historical jargon and some terms that might be difficult, but the part of being an intellectual or developing your intellectual capacities is wrestling with texts. There's been many books I've read that I did not understand the first time. The second time, you know, maybe I'd have to go out and look at some secondary literature and then come back and revisit it. That's all part of the program. Nothing to be ashamed about. Take advantage of all of that. But yeah, Socialism, Scientific Utopian by Engels angles state and revolution by lenin and then

wretched of the earth by france fanon to deepen the understanding of colonialism and its connections with capitalism with imperialism and with fascism so he's coming from the perspective of a colonized individual thinking about how we can take something like marxism and apply it to the anti-colonial struggles and to great effect, right? So those three texts are introductory, but they really cover some important, crucial elements of Marxist theory. And then Red Menace is there to hold your hand and walk you through all of them. Yeah. Thank you so much. And yeah, just want to reiterate too, Red Menace is a great, I mean, that's where I got into all of this stuff

that you just mentioned. I first listened to it on Red Menace and followed along and it was like just a really, really helpful way to digest and then have a broader conversation around a lot of these texts. So yeah, I really appreciate that and the work that you do. And yeah, I guess thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you so much for having me. I deeply, deeply appreciate it. It's been a great honor. You've been listening to an Upstream conversation with Brett O'Shea of Revolutionary Left Radio. Thanks to Parsley Sound for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. And just a quick note,

this conversation is part of an ongoing theme of taking deep dives into theory. So far, we've done episodes on capitalism, fully automated luxury communism, and we plan to continue in the weeks and months ahead exploring the theories of eco-socialism, anarchism, and more. So stay tuned. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of you, our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. And because we're fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit Independent Arts and Media, any donations you make from the U.S. are tax exempt. Upstream is also made possible with support from the incredible folks

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