Upstream - What Is To Be Done? with Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

What Is To Be Done? This is the question so profoundly posed by the Russian Revolutionary and Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, in his landmark text of the same name. Although it was written well over a century ago, this text, the questions it asked, and the paths forward that it provided, are just as relevant today as they were a hundred years ago. And just as urgent. What roles do spontaneity and disciplined organization have in leftist movements? Can we focus simply on economic reform, or do our actions need a larger political framework to structure, guide, and propel them?  Why does it feel like even though so many of us are motivated to work towards structural change, that things continue to get worse? Why does it seem like potential revolutionary struggles in the West always seem to stall and fail to move from a singular moment to a protracted movement?  These are old and familiar questions — a lot of ink has been spilled and speeches made exploring them — and in this Conversation, we’ve brought on two guests who've not only thought about these questions in depth, but who have some pretty compelling answers that draw from revolutionary theory and practice in both their personal lives and from the deep well of wisdom bequeathed by theorists Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao.  Breht O’Shea is the host of the podcast Revolutionary Left Radio and a co-host of Guerrilla History. He’s been on the show multiple times so you may already be familiar with his voice. Alyson Escalate, who has also been on the show, is the co-host, along with Breht, of Red Menace, a podcast that explains and analyzes revolutionary theory and then applies its lessons to our contemporary conditions.  Further Resources: Red Menace – What Is To Be Done? - V.I. Lenin  Revolutionary Left Radio – Politics in Command: Analyzing the Error of Economism  Red Menace – The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon: On Violence and Spontaneity Red Menace – Understanding Settler Colonialism in Israel and the United States Revolutionary Left Radio on Instagram Upstream – Buddhism and Marxism with Breht O'Shea (In Conversation) Upstream – Trans Liberation and Solidarity with Alyson Escalante (In Conversation) Upstream – Revolutionary Leftism with Breht O'Shea (In Conversation) 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. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

When we're trying to not get tenants evicted, when we're giving mutual aid, when we're feeding, giving school supplies to kids in our community, that's great, but it's literally playing defense. We're trying to, you know, cover up or deal with some of the problems of living in capitalism. We're not taking the fight to anybody at all. If you're on the ground feeding people in your community, salute to you. If you're on the ground fighting for tenants' rights and getting deposits back and taking on slum wards, salute to you. If you're in your local factory helping form a union and leading a union struggle, good for you. You are the sort of seedbed out of which a vanguard party can possibly grow. But we're just saying we're not there yet. And that's the fundamental task because the crises are going to keep coming and they're going to get

bigger and they're going to compound. But if we're not organized, those crises will rack us. They'll scatter us. They'll leave us scrambling to play mere defense and we'll never be able to go on the offensive. And so the task of every communist in the United States right now is to begin working toward a real vanguard party. 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. What is to be done? This is the question profoundly posed by the Russian revolutionary and Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin in his landmark text of the same name.

Although it was written well over a century ago, this text, the questions it asked, and the paths forward that it provided are just as relevant today as they were a hundred years ago. What roles do spontaneity and disciplined organization have in leftist movements? Can we focus simply on economic reform? Or do our actions need a larger political framework to structure, guide, and propel them? Why does it feel like even though so many of us are motivated to work towards structural change, the things seem to continue to get worse?

Why does it seem like potential revolutionary struggles in the West always stall, and that they always seem to fail to move from a singular moment to a protracted movement? These are old and familiar questions. A lot of ink has been spilled and speeches made exploring them. And in this conversation, we've brought on two guests who've not only thought about these questions in depth, but who have some pretty compelling answers that draw from revolutionary theory and practice in both their personal lives, as well as from the deep well of wisdom bequeathed from theorists like Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao. Brett O'Shea is the host of the podcast Revolutionary Left Radio Thank you. show is the co-host along with Brett of Red Menace, a podcast that explains and analyzes revolutionary theory and then applies its lessons to our contemporary conditions.

We're really excited to share this conversation with you. And before we do, we want to say a huge thank you to everyone who's responded to our call for help after we lost our grant funding this year. It really means the world to us to know that you all are out there and that you have our backs. So many folks shared our call for help, reached out to us personally, and became monthly donors. We truly feel the love and are so grateful to you all. Now that this is entirely listener funded, it's not hyperbole to say that we truly could not do this without you. And if you haven't already, and if you can, and if you're in a place where you can afford to do so,

and if it's important for you to help us keep Upstream sustainable, please consider going to upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to make a recurring monthly or one-time donation. Also, if you can, please go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. You can also go to Spotify now and leave us a review there too. This really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget for Upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. Thank you.

And finally, after much thought and discussion, Robert and I have decided in 2024, we're finally going to start a Patreon for Upstream. You've probably noticed that this episode is going to be released on one of our off weeks, and that's because we're getting into the new habit of a bonus episode. In 2024, we'll continue to offer our bi-weekly episodes for free, but we'll also be releasing at least one, if not two, extra episodes every month. Episodes just like this one, but which will be available exclusively for Patreon subscribers. If you're already a recurring donor, we'll make it as easy as possible for you to simply switch over to Patreon. But don't worry about this yet.

You don't have to do anything for now. We'll make another announcement at the end of the year and send out some emails to let you know how you can easily transfer your subscription over to Patreon. Okay, thank you for bearing with us for all of those announcements. And now here's Robert in conversation with Brett O'Shea and Allison Escalante. Brett, Allison, it is such a pleasure to have you both back on the show. I really can't convey just how important Red Menace's work has been to my introduction to and sort of further refining

and understanding of so many of the important leftist and Marxist texts that you guys explore. And so you've both been guests on Upstream separately, but it's really cool to have you both on in this context as Red Menace. And, you know, I'm going to try really hard not to get lost and just sit back and act like I'm listening to an episode of Red Menace as opposed to hosting this interview. But yeah, I'm really excited about it, obviously. And I'm wondering if to start maybe, yeah, if you could just both introduce yourselves for folks who may not have heard any of the past episodes that we've done with you or may not be familiar with your work.

Sure. Yeah, I'll start off. First off saying that I'm sure I speak for Allison as well that, you know, we really appreciate everything that Upstream does, your voice, the podcast itself, but also your voice on social media, the way you stay principled, and your really wonderful way of sort of taking highlights from various shows and getting it out to people in a way that is very focused on political education. It's admirable. And I think both of our shows share a sort of similar spirit in that sense. So hats off to all of you. And I also want to acknowledge that we're recording the day after historic events happening

in Palestine. The Palestinian resistance and its long history have many examples of things that we're going to touch on or talk about today and really helps highlight the importance at the very least of an organized and militant party apparatus connected to the masses. Now the settler colonial situation is unique in that a national liberation struggle which unites colonized people across political differences to fight on behalf of liberation is a sort of prerequisite to having a socialist revolution proper. Although Palestinian history also shows that there isn't merely a rigid, stagist approach to these sorts of things, but there's actually a long history of sort of dialectical unity and tension between different factions of the national liberation struggle,

including explicitly communist revolutionary ones, as well as more Islamic-oriented nationalist ones. But if you want to learn more about that, you can check out some of the episodes I just re-uploaded on RevLeft Radio, as well as Red Menace's three-part episode on Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth. But I just thought that it was such an important historical event, it was worth putting that up front. But as for me, i host um you know rev

left radio as well as red menace with allison and a third podcast called gorilla history with my friends um henry and adnan where just every different show sort of focuses on different things rev left is the big catch-all approach where we try to cover as many topics and have as many voices on as possible to sort of bring people in to these conversations. And then with Red Menace and Guerrilla History, it sort of funnels down into a little bit more advanced, you know, theoretical and historical analysis for those who want to go even deeper. And that's sort of the approach of this entire project and its three arms. I'm also a father of three, lifelong living in the working class. And from the birth of my

political consciousness, even before I had words to articulate in the working class and from the birth of my political consciousness even before I had words to articulate it I was always on the side of working people because they were literally all of my friends and family they were everyone that I knew and so that was the sort of starting position of my politics once my political consciousness sort of dawned in my late teens and so yep that's just that's just, that's basically me. Allison? Yeah, thanks, Brett. A couple things as well up top again. Yeah, thank you, Robbie, for this episode having us on here. I think this is a really cool discussion that we're going to have. So I'm just very glad for the opportunity to get on and discuss this. And I also want to echo what Brett said. I think it would be a mistake not to mention what is happening in Palestine and just

make sure to express our absolute and unwavering solidarity with resistance to Israeli settler colonialism, which is occurring now. A very historic moment that is happening that I hope people are paying attention to. A lot of the theory that we've discussed on Red Menace in the past is playing out in practice right now, and I think there's a lot to be learned from analyzing that, paying attention to it, and I just hope people are watching what is going on and are continuing to stand in solidarity. Broadly on an introduction, I am Allison. I am Brett's co-host on Red Menace, which is one of the many podcasts in the broader RevLeft radio family. Red Menace, kind of the concept starting out was going to be that we were going to take various works of revolutionary theory,

break them down, do some summary work, and then do some Q&A discussion back and forth on them. The shows evolved over time into a couple of different things. We've touched on some decidedly non-revolutionary works by reading some reactionary theory and discussing it from a critical Marxist perspective. And we've also dived into current events discussion in many cases, having previously discussed conflicts happening in Palestine and the struggle for liberation there as well, as well as broad theoretical discussions about anti-colonialism and decolonization. But yeah, I'm super excited to be here. I think there are some really important questions that we're going to dive into here today that tie into the question that is the title of one of the books

that we're discussing, What Is To Be Done?, which is a pressing question right now, right? We are in a strange time globally in terms of politics, there are unprecedented uprisings and wars happening. And domestically in the US, we're seeing a labor wave that is really interesting. And the question of what we as Marxists ought to do about that is super relevant. So I'm very excited to be here. And I think this episode will hopefully have some really good discussion. Yeah, thank you so much, Allison. I'm really looking forward to getting into the conversation as well. And before we do, I also just want to echo what you both said. I completely agree. I think it's so important for us to recognize that, you know, the time that we're speaking, the really, really significant decolonial, anti-colonial uprising happening in Palestine

right now, a militant armed struggle from the Palestinians against the apartheid state of Israel. And yeah, I think we'd definitely be remiss if we did not acknowledge that. Obviously, we're not a current affairs news show or anything like that. So it's a little bit harder for us to always touch on these things. So I think it's really important to acknowledge it and maybe, you know, weave any analysis in and out of our conversation today if it feels relevant. And, you know, maybe we might even do an extra bonus episode if we have the time and we find the right guest to explore this issue soon. If not soon, definitely have plans to do that more explicitly sometime in the future. And I think that before we hit record, Allison was mentioning how

the next episode of Red Menace might be a current events analysis episode where you discuss this latest armed uprising in Palestine. And so maybe our listeners can check that out if it's available at some point this month. And just to respond also to what Brett was mentioning about Franz Fanon and the episode on Red Menace, where you all spent three episodes exploring the wretched of the earth. Fanon's really important text. Your episode was actually my introduction to that text. And I've since purchased the text and I've started reading it. And so I just want to shout you both out again for introducing me to such an important text as well as, you know, I'm currently reading George Jackson's Blood in My Eye, which is a really, really important text, which I believe Brett on Rev Left Radio,

you explored that as well in two parts. And so listening to that as a compliment while reading the book has been really, really helpful in gaining more perspective and hearing your analysis around a lot of the topics covered in that text, which are not unrelated to Fanon and this idea of colonization and fascism and imperialism. And so I think, you know, lots and lots of connections between different texts and different Red Menace episodes and Red Left episodes. So just really want to appreciate you two for all the really important work that you're doing and helping us all grapple with a lot of these sometimes complex issues and introducing us to these really, really important texts and concepts. So yeah, we're going to be discussing kind of a

wide variety of topics today and drawing from a few different important texts. But like you mentioned, Alison, the most significant text that we'll probably be weaving in throughout the conversation is Lenin's What Is To Be Done? And of course, the excellent Red Menace episode from back in 2019, which explored this text as well. And so before we dive into sort of the context of the text, I was wondering if you could both maybe just give us a brief background on the text, and like the context within which it was written. And you know, maybe if you want to, like sort of how you came across the text and sort of first discovered it. Yeah, so I can go ahead and take a stab at this to

start off. So what is to be done is, in my opinion, one of the more difficult linen texts to read and the context is part of that it's so historically like ingrained in this very specific moment. So hopefully we can provide a little bit of the background where the text comes from. So What Is To Be Done was written by Lenin in 1901, partially in 1902 when it was published. It's a name that refers to a famous revolutionary novel, What Is To Be Done. And broadly, this text is a little bit strange to unpack. I think when most people dive into it, the first thing that they realize is there's a lot of references to a lot of different factions in the socialist movement in Europe and Russia, a lot of references to a lot of different figures, and it can be hard without a broader

historical context to know what to do with it. Broadly, the text is a critique of economism, and it is a critique of a school of thought and kind of a movement within European socialism that was following Bernstein, who was a thinker and political leader within the German Social Democratic Party. And Bernstein, you know, started off fairly orthodox as a Marxist and began to drift from Marxist ideas over time, and broadly comes to be seen as the head of a sort of non-revolutionary trend within the socialist movement, and within the German socialist movement in particular, where the focus was less on organizing towards revolution, or organizing a party to achieve

revolution, and more on focusing on the immediate labor demands that workers had. And built into this kind of trend that Lenin names economism, is the idea that focusing on those immediate demands, really just engaging in the economic struggle and not expanding beyond that, should be the job of Marxists, and in some way can contribute to sort of a broader socialist movement in the long term. And so really what Lenin is railing against here is this Bernsteinist idea that is popular. And Lenin is going to, throughout the text, get into arguments between different newspapers within the socialist movement. He's going to get into discussions of criticism versus non-criticism, how a party ought to be organized.

But broadly, I think it's important to understand that that's the kind of theoretical line that is being struggled against here. And what Lenin wants to do is offer a view of communist organizing and Marxist organizing that is in opposition to Bernstein's view and to that economist view. And all of the theoretical development that happens here isn't just out of nowhere, it's very specifically contrasted with this economist movement, this reformist movement that is occurring, that is moving away from these fundamental ideas of Marxism about revolution and more towards a focus on immediate demands. So that can hopefully provide a little bit of the historical background

here. Again, we'll get into the theoretical depth of that, but that can help set the stage. And it's worth thinking this is a fairly early text for Lenin, right? In 1901, this is prior to the 1905 revolution and to the February and October revolutions, this is a text that did a lot to shape what would become Bolshevik politics within Russia. It really became a defining text for distinguishing the Bolshevik position later on from the Menshevik position and from other socialist positions. So there's a lot of work here that's really kind of historical demarcation of what made the Leninist perspective distinct. Yeah, and the only thing I would add to that, I mean, Allison really covered all the basics of

the general context and background conditions in which this was written. But what we do have sitting as we are in 2023 is the realization that some of these ideas advanced by Lenin in this text, what is to be done, were actually tested in the real world historical arena of revolution a mere 15 to 16 years after he wrote this text and were proven in that hothouse of revolutionary ferment to be the line that won out, to be the historical victor compared to these other forms of socialism, you know, these bourgeois intellectuals and opportunists who were distorting socialism or confusing people about what socialism is, which is something, of course, we still deal with today. But some of these core concepts like economism, like the need for a

vanguard party, these are interesting theoretical abstract conceptions, but we also get the benefit of seeing them put into practice and succeeding. So, you know, you really have to understand that for Marxist-Leninists in particular, and of course, Maoists as well, you know, abstract theory is one thing, but we take very seriously how these ideas are actually tested in real world revolutionary situations. And we have a sort of scientific approach, you know, in the simplest terms of historically what has worked and what hasn't. If you have a theory and you implement that theory, you're running an experiment. Does it turn out that you advance the ball for the working class in a revolutionary direction or do these other strains win out? And I think what we've seen since this text and since the Bolshevik revolution, at least in my perspective, and I,

of course, am coming from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, is that this is a superior mode of organizing and a superior methodology and approach that is more effective than everything else that was on offer at that time and to this day still on offer in a lot of ways. And so that's what makes this text really important for ongoing movements whose ultimate aim is the overthrow of capitalism and imperialism. Yeah, thank you both so much. And so you mentioned economism. Loosely, the idea that our struggles in the economic sphere will spontaneously bring about socialism, that fighting for trade unions or building things like worker co-ops or just reforms of minimum wages, for example, should be where we focus our energy. The

economists argued that this should be the whole scope of the proletarian movement. And so that strategy is juxtaposed with the more Marxist-Leninist approach of understanding that there also needs to be a battle on the political front, not just through the ballot box, but on the streets as well, what Mao, I believe, referred to as politics in command. And I think this perspective stresses the importance of revolutionary theory and class consciousness. And so I'm wondering if you two can unpack these two tendencies. So economism and what we can think of more as like the revolutionary vanguardism, maybe also situating them in the historical context that Lenin wrote about them, and then also illustrating some maybe contemporary examples that might help concretize these different strategies. the table some of the basic definitions and orientation to the concepts and then maybe Allison and I can go back and forth and maybe toss out some examples and maybe some historical context. But the main thing that needs to be said about historical context is this stuff is just as

true in our own time as it was in his. So the things that we're going to talk about, although this book was written in 1901 and it seems like it's so far removed from situations we're dealing with today because the theory is so on point and because the struggles are so similar and because we're still in a global capitalist context, these things really are applicable in the here and now, although the forms in which they manifest might take slightly different expression. Just keep that in mind. But, you know, economism, it really does take many forms. You mentioned some of them. There's, you know, a co-op movement, which says that if we can get enough businesses to turn into democratically run co-ops, there's sort of a quantitative into a qualitative jump that could naturally spontaneously occur if enough of the economy is co-opted and democratically run, that then that can somehow usher us in to socialism so here you don't see any emphasis on the need for a political party a communist party there's social democratic

reformism you know let's let's heighten the minimum wage let's make it a little easier for people to unionize you know maybe we have some welfare policies that help families or working people etc those are all well and good and we'll get into that later on, I think. But here, fundamentally, it's still this emphasis on merely economic reforms and not a challenge to the overall system. And this takes on many more forms, maybe some that we can get into in a little bit. But I found Josh Malfawad-Paul, who I've had on the show, and we actually did an episode called In Politics and Command. He wrote a book on politics on in politics and command in the era of economism.

And he really helps us think through what economism is. And he talks about a subjective and an objective instance of economism. So these are really two major ways in which, at least from his perspective, economism manifests the subjective way he says is that this idea that workers will spontaneously develop revolutionary consciousness through class struggle, a trade union consciousness. You as workers understand there's a contradiction between your desires and the desires of the boss, and you take a more militant confrontation approach to management, to the bosses. You unify with all your other workers, and you sort of squad up and go to class war with them, but fundamentally over increasing your pay, increasing your working conditions, et cetera. And now this idea that if you just keep doing that long enough, that the

workers themselves will all of a sudden develop an anti-capitalist revolutionary politic that says, oh, now because we've been struggling with our bosses, we understand also the need to take on global capitalism and imperialism, right? Fight colonialism and fascism. And those things just don't happen. Trade union consciousness, this step below revolutionary consciousness can be developed organically and spontaneously just through the class struggle that occurs within unions. But that's the limitation of the consciousness. In order to develop a truly revolutionary consciousness, you need something, as Lenin says, from without, outside of the merely economic struggle. And I'll get to that in a second. So that's the subjective idea, right?

That workers will spontaneously develop revolutionary conscious through trade union class struggle. That's not true, Lenin is saying. And then for JMP, he talks about the objective instance of economism. And this is a sort of broader within Marxist tradition idea that is an economistic error, which is what we can call economic determinism or the idea that you sometimes hear amongst orthodox Marxists that merely developing the forces of production to their furthest extent possible will somehow transition you know, transition us into socialism naturally. That all you need to do is to develop to the highest degree possible the forces of production and there's some magic moment in which that threshold is reached and we

shift over into socialism. Kind of like the co-op idea, right? If you build enough co-ops in the economy, maybe they become a majority of the economy. And that in and of itself will produce a sort of socialist revolution and a shift in the mode of production. And we know that these things are not true. And Lenin is really going to point that out and make that incredibly clear throughout this text. Now, you have an entire question later in this outline regarding what the vanguard party is.

So I'm not going to say too much about it right here and now only to say that the revolutionary vanguard party is lenin's answer to the problem of economism if economism overstresses the role of class struggle within capitalism in a merely economic struggle between bosses and workers the revolutionary vanguard party puts politics in command and transcends that error, right? It's not that these struggles within the economic realm and between bosses and workers aren't important. Of course they are. They're essential, but left to themselves, in and of themselves, they're insufficient to get to a real revolutionary confrontation with capitalism. So, you know, the vanguard party again is put up as a corrective, as the answer to the error of economism, which Lenin saw in his day and which we see in

our day. So Lenin argues that understanding politics broadly, especially revolutionary politics, it really requires us to understand all of society, right? As communists today, we understand that we have to wrestle with many different issues and topics, not just workers and their economic struggles with their employers. So Lennon says, quote, class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the

state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes. And that can be kind of a high conceptual quote that you might not immediately understand, but I'll bring it down to our level in the modern day and give you some examples of struggles that communists should take seriously that are not merely the economic struggle between workers and their employers, right? Police brutality, structural racism, ecological collapse, pollution, climate change itself, anti-fascist and anti-bigot, anti-racist struggles, the essential need of internationalism, indigenous struggles, a myriad of other social problems even the homelessness crisis you might immediately think oh that's a that's an

issue about you know workers not having jobs or whatever but also it falls outside the spectrum of traditional trade union struggle right when do you hear union struggles talk about needing to solve the homelessness crisis this is a crisis a social crisis that is a product of capitalism, but occurs outside of the rather narrow trade union struggle. Another obvious example is anti-war efforts, right? To be against war. Now, historically, unions and working class people have had a, in American history, at least a back and forth record on exactly this, right?

You remember the, what was it called? The hard hat rebellion after the Vietnam war where working class guys and hard hats descended upon anti-war student protesters and like brutally attacked and beat them. So there's an interesting contradiction. The reproductive and domestic labor issues of women in particular, issues of immigration, refugees, et. Right. All of these issues are incredibly important social topics and issues that a communist movement needs to wrestle with and address, ideally through a communist party that fall outside of the merely economistic trends of workers versus their bosses. And so as communists, we need a total vision of the present and future covering the full spectrum of problems and issues and contradictions within our society, many of which again exist outside the merely economic struggle between workers and bosses. outside that realm that necessitate something like a vanguard revolutionary party, which can, along with the struggle between workers and employers, also address in a myriad of ways these other issues that relate to that issue, of course, and relate more broadly to capitalism and

imperialism, but are not merely captured in the trade union struggle. So that would be my opening salvo for that question. Yeah, I'll try to build on that a little bit. So a couple things, I think on the theoretical level, one thing that I think is always important to stress with this text, because I think it's possible to read this text in an ultra left way that could be an error, is that Lenin's not saying the economic struggle doesn't matter, right? So I think it's important to throw that up front. This is like a crucial part of this text that I think like left communist tendencies tend to really misread. Lenin draws on Engels's concept of struggle, specifically as divisible between economic,

political, and theoretical struggle. And each of those sites of struggles is relevant for Lenin, they are each important. So the issue with economism isn't the idea of the economic struggle matters or the idea that Marxists ought to be involved in that struggle, right? I actually really like how you framed it earlier, Robbie, with the kind of framing of like, it's a question of scope. Economism makes this false claim that the full scope of the proletarian movement should be constrained to the economic struggle. And that's kind of where that issue starts to come up. The economic struggle has an important place. Historically, Marxist movements, including the Bolsheviks, have been involved in the economic struggle in incredible ways. One of the reasons that the Bolsheviks were able to respond to the February Revolution so profoundly was because of presence that they already had on factory floors within Petrograd, right? There's no question about

the fact that that struggle still matters. So it's a matter of containing the scope there and then ignoring the way that economic struggle relies on. So it's a matter of containing the scope there and then ignoring the way that economic struggle relies on the political and theoretical struggle. So there's a couple of things that have been brought up here. And again, I don't want to like overlap with later questions too much. But the question of spontaneity, I think is worth touching on just a tiny bit more. It really is a question of can the economic struggle spontaneously turn into something more, right? And what Lenin is pointing out is that no, it can't. This concept of trade union consciousness as the highest level

of consciousness that economic struggle can achieve on its own, I think is something that we really see play out, right? It is super important that labor unions within the United States in our modern context, when pretty big demands and often can pull out some pretty sizable strikes. We are seeing some really interesting stuff happening now with SAG-AFTRA, with the UAW. But one thing that I think we always see again and again is that at the end of the day, the leadership of these labor unions often always does betray the more extreme demands that come up within them and always, you know, tries to take a more moderate position within bourgeois politics on the whole.

And that is indicative, I think, of that maximum level of consciousness that can come from there. And again, it's not to say these unions don't matter and that they're not a place that Marxists should be. But the question is, can these unions themselves turn into something more? And this is where the theoretical and the political comes in. Theoretically, right, Marxism asserts that the consciousness of the workers is something that has to be raised up explicitly. And part of that is organizing. Workers do come to realizations about

their collective power through struggle. But to understand that that power can win more than just immediate demands for their union, and can rather actually transform society, takes something else external, which can be added into it, which is that theoretical and political aspect of the struggle. So again, I think it's a scope question in a lot of ways, and it's not losing sight of the fact that the economic struggle is a part of a broader trio of struggles. I think if we want to talk about contemporary issues with economism today, in the United States at least, we can definitely see economist errors that pop up all over organizing, right? There are many union organizational approaches that while they do correctly identify the rank

and file of the union as a important place for organizing, don't try to move beyond that to connect those rank and files to a revolutionary organization or party in Lenin's formulation that can explicitly build consciousness along Marxist lines. I think a lot of the iterations of the solidarity economy and cooperatives, as we've already discussed, can be a little problematic in this front too. I think a lot about Richard Wolff's articulations about cooperative economies, where Richard Wolff, in a lot of ways, I think exemplifies this idea of the cooperative economy can kind of out-compete the capitalist economy.

And this, I think, is very much like still this economist error. There's no theoretical or political critique of markets broadly that that competition would occur in, right? You lose all this theoretical and political context because of that economist focus. And then in more small scale organizing of the various left groups, I think, you know, and this is self critical in many ways, I've been involved in this type of organizing, this turn towards a type of mutual aid organizing that really is just focused on meeting the immediate needs of people often without actual politicization occurring on top of that can definitely be an instance of economism that we see, you know, organizations

struggle with falling into a lot in our current moment. I think one other thing that I want to add to that Brett got at is, again, the point of the vanguard party for Lenin and the point of avoiding economism is to recognize that the political and the theoretical struggle matter too. And one of the other ways in the US that I think we often fail at this is with recognizing the relationship between struggles for national liberation, which are a political struggle in relation to the economic struggle, right? If we only focus on economism, we ignore national liberation questions that matter here in the

United States and intersect with issues of settler colonialism, issues of the legacy of slavery, and ignoring those things can cause us to actually fall into working class movements that can develop kind of chauvinist ideas about national liberation, about colonialism, and economism can then have these broader theoretical problems that kind of play out from it. So when we're really thinking about what it means to combat economism, it means to put the economic struggle in its place, to contextualize it in relationship to the other two forms of struggle, and we'll get to this in more detail later, to contextualize it in relationship to the other two forms of struggle. And we'll get to this in more detail later, to have an organization, i.e. the vanguard party, which can lead that struggle on all three fronts.

So kind of some additional thoughts there. But I do think it's important to always emphasize we don't want to fall into the left calm error of saying there's no place for economic struggle. There is. It's how that struggle is situated that really matters from Lennon's perspective. Yeah, thank you so much. Really couldn't agree more with both of your responses. And just to touch on a couple things. Yeah, like this idea of mutual aid

without the complimentary like political education is something that I do see a lot. And it's really it's kind of troubling, you know, like if you're simply basing your politics on wage workers passing around little scraps of what they have to each other while billionaires are kind of laughing their way to the bank and you're not infusing that with political education, then it really just stays limited to passing small amounts of money around and letting the state and the capitalist class off the hook for providing a lot of these services in the first place.

And I also really resonated with the comment about Richard Wolff. I mean, he's been on the show several times and we love him and he does such a great job of popularizing Marxism. such a great job of popularizing Marxism. And yes, at the same time, I do think that both Della and I have in like firsthand experience experiencing how the co-op movement cannot simply on its own sort of outcompete and become the dominant model. And we'll get into that in a little bit when I talk a little bit more about our experience going to the Mondragon region and exploring the Mondragon Corporation a little bit. But before that, I've been thinking a lot about how so much of the solidarity economy, which is a space within which Upstream really first grew out from,

like how much of that space exists in this economism mindset, that if we just build enough worker cooperatives, for example, eventually they'll spontaneously replace the capitalist system, that political liberation will come through largely ignoring the state and building our own structures alongside it, or if engaging with the state strictly in sort of an electoral way. But yeah, I mean, it's broadly this idea of building the new in the shell of the old versus the Marxist position that, you know, political liberation can only come after we overthrow and seize the state. the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. But I'm wondering if you could talk about these two different revolutionary strategies. They seem to loosely map onto the vanguardism versus economism tension, maybe not completely. And I'm also curious, like, do they have to be in opposition to one another? Yeah, I can go ahead and take a kind of starting idea at this. It's a little bit tricky. There's

two levels on which I think it's worth thinking about this. So at the risk of overcomplicating this conversation, I think another dynamic that is useful for thinking about the solidarity economy question is also the concept of scientific versus utopian socialism, right? And this is a concept that Ingalls develops very clearly. And for me, when we look at the solidarity economy concept, obviously, I think you're correct, there's these like very strong overlaps with anarchist ideals of organizing and almost prefigurative politics. But I'm also reminded with solidarity economy to a certain degree of some of the utopian socialist movements that Ingalls talks about, right? And specifically, like Fourier's focus on cooperative economic development really does kind of show that even within sort of bourgeois utopian socialism, which is, you know, kind of a complicated concept to unpack, we can get into

that text if we want to. But broadly, you have these thinkers who wanted to kind of construct this socialist society from the ground up, they came up with this utopian ideal, and tried to implement it in a way that looks very similar to the solidarity economy. And I think what we get by thinking through the scientific versus utopian dichotomy within Marxism is another point of critique that can be relevant here, which is that the solidarity economy, to me, I think one of the issues that it kind of misses is that capitalism has already produced certain social forces and dynamics that are actually important and useful for socialism, right? So one of the important things that Ingalls points out is that capitalism has actually done an exceptional job already of socializing labor.

Like labor compared to pre-capital society is highly socialized. Specialization has led to the ability, or the lack of specialization has led to the ability for us to take labor that had to be performed on an artisanal scale, move it to an industrial scale. And one of the utopian, or one of the scientific socialist insights that Ingalls and Marcus put forward is that what we're trying to do isn't build a new society from the ground up. What we're trying to do is find these contradictions within capitalism that are already in favor of socialized labor and socialized production and liberate them from the contradictory elements of private ownership and private property. And so for the Marxist

perspective, that means seizing existing infrastructure to a certain degree. That means seizing existing industrial infrastructure in particular and being able to put it under the control of the masses through a revolutionary movement. And I think, again, in the solidarity economy approach, you have this more kind of ground up, let's build our own competing alternative set of relations, which misses that scientific insight that capitalism has already built that for us. It's a question of vying for and competing for control of it, which is a revolutionary struggle. So I do think that perspective can be useful as well. And then I think, yeah, there is the more anarchist versus Marxist approach that is worth thinking about. I think the solidarity

economy idea is very, very appealing because it does, as you got at, allow us to kind of ignore the question of the state a little bit, right? It lets us get around whether or not we need to directly contest with the state and say, actually, we can kind of do our own thing that will eventually develop into a socialist economy. And you get different articulations of what that will lead to in the long term. I've heard people who support this idea saying that will eventually force a revolutionary clash with the capitalist state, right? Eventually that will happen, or it will out-compete it because it's a better, more rational economic system. But in either of these cases, it's really trying to push the question of confrontation with state power down the line in a way that I think is

problematic. Again, I think it's important to emphasize this doesn't mean that workers' cooperatives don't have a place, right? They can be useful, and actually they can be a place for Marxists to learn about the organization of labor in ways that we might not get to do otherwise, even within union organizing, to learn about the organization of production. That can be super valuable for Marxist movements. But what the Marxist perspective insists is that they in and of themselves are not going to create a revolutionary rupture. That revolutionary rupture has to be pursued through political struggle. Again, this takes the form of the vanguard party. So there's this question of are these ideas inherently in opposition? Well, the practice of them is not strictly speaking in opposition. I don't think

that you need to say Marxists should have no involvement whatsoever in cooperative economic building and cooperative approaches to production. But I do think it is important, again, for Marxists to say that is not the full scope. And also, we are going to insist that we could never just build socialism from the ground up as an alternative to capitalism. Capitalism has created the conditions for its own abolition, and we want to liberate those conditions. That's the scientific thesis at the core of Marxism, and that requires a revolutionary struggle with a revolutionary party leading the way. So kind of some broad thoughts there, but I do think the utopian versus scientific distinction

can also be useful for seeing why Marxists insist that we can't just put off the question of contesting state power and vying for existing infrastructure. Those are actually central to Marxist theory. Yeah, really important stuff. I just have a couple thoughts. Allison mentioned the difference between utopian and scientific or the text, you know, socialism, utopian and scientific by Engels, which we've covered on Red Menace, and some of the contradictions and some of the ways in which capitalism sort of lays the groundwork naturally for the transition out of itself and towards a socialism and eventually communism. And one of those contradictions is, of course,

social production, right? You need an army of workers to produce a product and individual appropriation, whether literally in the form of one CEO or a small board of shareholders or whatever, you have this already existing contradiction within capitalism, which is that people make this stuff, right? In order for Walmart to sell a product or any firm whatsoever to sell any sort of product, good or service, it's going to require a bunch of people, not only in the here and now, not only the people that clock into your firm and go and produce value for your company, but also historically, all the wealth, all the technology, all the advancement we've made has come from countless generations of human beings, most of whom will never know their faces or their names, contributing to create the situation we're at today. Literally all of humanity through all of human history

working to build the modern world and civilization we have today. And then we have a small tiny group of elites at the very top, not unlike feudalism, which, you know, extract and usurp all of that wealth, claim it to be theirs, all that capital, all the productive forces, all the means of production, claim it for themselves, and then sell it back to us as if it's not already ours, as if this is not already the legacy of humanity of which we are equal parts, you know, as just as much human as the CEO. And so it literally individual appropriation of social production. And that is a contradiction that creates an equality that we're seeing today that creates a whole bunch of issues, externalities, because if you are the individual

appropriator, you're out to make a profit and you don't really care about the good of the communities that the working people live in. You don't care about about the good of the communities that the working people live in. You don't care about the broader world and the ecological sustainability. You are there to make profits for yourself or your shareholders, point blank. If you had social control over production, you would immediately and right away involve human beings who have to live in these communities, who have to live in these communities, who have to raise families in this world, on this planet, who have concerns outside of the very narrow realm of how much profit can we make this quarter. And so, you know, that's a contradiction whose fallout we live in the wake of right now and is continuing to create problems for human civilization and will continue to create those

problems until that contradiction is solved. So that's just, that's one thought. The other thought is the importance of the vanguard party. Again, we're going to get more into this as this conversation goes on, but you can kind of think about it as, you know, this overarching structure where every individual struggle can be included, right? You could have a vanguard party and one arm of it is dedicated to and this has happened in the in you know communist history socialist history to going into unions going into flat factory floors making a union more militant fighting for a sort of communist or socialist political education within a union etc you could have another arm that is dedicated to literally street fighting fascists when they go on the march right you could have another arm dedicated to literally street fighting fascists when they go on the march, right? You

could have another arm dedicated to political education, educating workers and people more broadly about revolutionary theory. You, of course, with the Vanguard Party, you're already having a political party competing in the political arena, which a mere trade union can't do. You know, you already have that. So really think of the vanguard party as this broader sort of meta apparatus that can take into account all of these individual struggles and find a place for them under its umbrella, right? As opposed to destroying that umbrella and picking one or two of these things and saying, that's the only thing that we need to pay attention to. And that's going to get us to socialism. It never has. And it never will. The difference between Marx and Bakunin and more

broadly Marxist and anarchist, there are many differences. Of course, anarchists are immediately going to reject the idea of a vanguard party and they're also going to a priori reject the seizure of state power based on their commitments as anarchists. It's literally sort of definitional to be an anarchist is to be against the state a priori and then to want and serfs, or that's modern day capitalism. The state exists in these conditions because it arises from more prerequisite conditions, which is the division of human society into classes. And so we understand that if we want to ultimately transcend capitalism and head towards communism, during that transition, we're still going to be in class society. We're in class society right now. We're not going to wake up tomorrow and two, three, four millennia of class society just evaporates. No, the transition out of

capitalism and towards communism called socialism is still class society. Society is still riven into classes, but the socialist transition takes that into account. And you have a seizure of state power by the revolutionary working class forces that then take over the society, consciously steering it in the direction of communism. And of course, communism is a global state of affairs. Nobody's ever individually achieved communism. The states that we call communist states are communist because they adhere to Marxist theory, but are socialist in material practice, right? because they adhere to Marxist theory, but are socialist and material practice, right? We've not escaped class society and we're not going to likely do it in a matter of a couple of years or one or two revolution spread throughout the globe.

It's going to be a long-term sort of transition out of class society, which has dominated human civilization again for millennia. So understanding where the state comes from and understanding its roots in class society really helps make sense of the Marxist approach to the state and why we do not, like the anarchists do, reject seizing state power as an a priori principle. And then, you know, no hate to our anarchist brothers and sisters. You know, this is just good faith disagreement, but we can look back over the history of revolutionary anti-capitalist struggles and we can ask ourselves, who has taken this fight furthest? Who has challenged

capitalism and imperialism on a global scale? And the anarchists have done some beautiful things. They fought some beautiful battles. They have a beautiful tradition, but they're almost always going to be relocated to a locality or a specific territory and have never been able to display whatsoever that they are able to take on capitalism and imperialism on the global stage. Marxism, for all of its flaws and mistakes andLeninist approach has been thus far historically more successful in an objective way than anarchist attempts to remake society and transcend capitalism. And so if you're choosing between the two tendencies, I think that is at very least a relevant factor to take into account. Yeah, thank you so much. You can't see me, but I'm nodding vigorously along with you. Yeah, thank you so much. You can't see me, but I'm nodding vigorously along with you.

I think that you're doing both a really great job of taking these somewhat heady and sometimes complicated and complex ideas and really explaining them in a way that makes a lot of sense. So I really, really appreciate that. And I know that we promised an episode on Upstream a little while back exploring anarchism more specifically, and we'll still get to that. So any of our anarchist listeners, we haven't forgot about you. We're going to get to that eventually. So I've been listening to Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast, specifically the last season of the podcast, which is no longer a podcast. It ended with this season on the Russian Revolution. And, you know, at times I was hate listening to it. He's, you know, very much kind of a centrist liberal. And sometimes his disdain for Lenin is palpable. And, you know, I bring it up because he did this classic thing early on,

which we have sort of been touching on, where he presented the claim that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were explicitly not interested in improving working conditions in the short term, and that they were simply wedded to this larger, abstract idea of revolution. And I think that's like really paraphrasing what he said. And I don't think it's, you know, it's not just Mike Duncan. This is a narrative. This is a line. Yeah, I mean, I think we can all agree on from just the little that we've discussed it so far that this is absolute bullshit. Not only were the Bolsheviks fighting for an eight hour day, like specifically as a key part of their platform, but they also did a lot of parliamentary work. And actually, like you mentioned, Alison,

they were in the factories. And so I'm going to go ahead and read a quote by parliamentary work. And actually, like you mentioned, Alison, they were in the factories. And so I'm going to go ahead and read a quote by Lenin. It's not too long, but, you know, take me a couple of minutes to get through it. And then I'd love it if we could sort of reflect on it. So the quote is, Reformist tactics are the least likely to secure real reforms. The most effective way to secure real reforms is to pursue the tactics of the revolutionary class struggle. Actually, reforms are won as a result of the revolutionary class

struggle, as a result of its independence, mass force, and steadfastness. Reforms are always false and ambiguous. They are really only in proportion to the intensity of the class struggle. By merging our slogans with those of the reformist bourgeoisie, we weaken the cause of revolution and, consequently, the cause of reform as well, because we thereby diminish the independence, fortitude, and strength of the revolutionary classes. And so I'm wondering if, yeah, if you could both reflect on that quote, and maybe just kind of help set the record straight in terms of Lenin's thoughts on the need for that, for the need for real actual reforms that improve people's lives right now, and the larger revolutionary strategies that the Bolsheviks were advancing. And I think this can also be applied to a lot of current

discourse where, you know, a lot of the times revolutionary communists are thought of as just existing in this theoretical realm and being detached from like the on the ground experience. So yeah. Yeah. I can start this one off now. I think Alison has actually listened to that, that full podcast and I have not, so I can't address that directly. Perhaps Allison can, but I'll definitely address the Lennon quote and how we should think about reformism. Now, Lennon, the quote started off with him saying, reformist tactics are the least likely to secure real reforms. And I think that's so crucial to understand it. I'll give you some examples from, you know, modern American history that will help you understand that. But the most effective

way, he goes on to say, to secure real reforms is to pursue the tactics of the revolutionary class struggle. One reason why this is the case, why merely reformist approaches to capitalism can't secure the very reforms they are advancing while revolutionary struggle can, is that reform within the capitalist system is always subject to dismantling and recall by the dictatorship of capital because when you have capitalism you're still leaving in charge the capitalist ruling class and they're still going to dominate the economic and political and social sphere given their overall power and the mode of production that is currently instantiated. So if you're trying to reform this system, your reforms, let's say your reform of social

security or Medicare, making sure that elderly folks don't live on the streets, for example, is constantly under attack, undermined. Now, those programs happen to have immense support across the political spectrum and Republican voters tend to be older people who really want to hold on to those things. And so, you know, in that one instance, they've had some real difficulty in recalling those programs. And they'll often, in today's world, they'll pretend like that's never been a part of their agenda, but it absolutely has. And even Joe Biden throughout his career, the Democrat, has oftentimes throughout his career advanced this idea of cutting Social Security.

So even the party that is ostensibly, and we all know this is not true, but which likes to present itself as more a working class party than the Republicans are still a function of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and are still interested in ultimately first and foremost emphasizing the interests of the ruling class, which they are often a part in which their donor classes are made up of. So this idea that these reforms are always subject to dismantling, we can look at our own history. Now look at what happened in the Gilded Era, the Gilded Age of these robber barons, late 1800s, massive inequality, massive poverty, the shift to the progressive era, ultimately culminating in the Great Depression, World War II, and out of that came the New Deal, right? Now, we've talked about this on Rev Left Radio. There's lots to say about the New Deal, lots of errors and mistakes, but it was, and it gave rise to, for at least white middle-class Americans,

the highest quality of life that the average working class, white middle-class Americans, the highest quality of life that the average working class, white middle-class American at least has got to experience. And of course had broader impacts throughout society. Now that gave rise to the very period of American history where reactionaries today will often point to when they say things like make America great again, or America used to be great. What happened to it? They'll point to something like the fifties, right? They'll point to the early sixties. And that is precisely the time when the new deal was at its strongest. There was a complete bipartisan consensus more or less around it. And of course the new deal reforms came about through bottom-up struggles, through explicitly communist and socialist movements, through trade union struggles, and importantly, by external pressure from the Soviet Union, which had risen.

And then you had the Cuban and the Chinese revolutions as well through the 50s and 60s that put external pressure on Western capitalist governments to reform their systems to help working class people lest they have a Bolshevik style revolution on their hands. So it's a little bit ironic that the people who are the most dedicated to anti-communism in American history today point back to this time largely created by these bottom-up internal and external socialist communist trade union movements creating the economic possibility for this period, this golden age that white reactionaries will look back on today and point to as what they want to recreate. But of course, they don't want to do it through the economic policies of the New Deal, right? They want to do it through the reviving of cultural norms of the 50s.

If we can revive the cultural norms, not the economic ones, but the cultural norms of the 50s, maybe we can get back to prosperity. It's laughable. But that's a slight digression. The main point here is that even the new deal was clawed back. What is neoliberalism? What is the Reagan and Thatcher quote unquote counter-revolution? If not the bosses dismantling as much as they fucking could the new deal order and its premises and its manifestations, right? What is Reagan? If not the giver of an ideological narrative to this attack on the new deal to this counter revolution from the ruling class, right? What Reagan did was give it ideological coherence.

He formed a narrative out of it that really helped push it further. And then what did Clinton do? He made it a bipartisan consensus. So we see this long process of the New Deal going into effect, really helping American workers, the golden age of unionization, where a guy could go down to the local factory and make enough money to afford a home, a car, support his family, his wife could stay at home, his kids could go to a school, right? Like that whole era of American life has been clawed back and we're living in the wake of 40 years of the neoliberal counter-assault on precisely that. So again, a perfect example of really well-meaning and good reforms that were always subject to being dismantled and were systematically

dismantled by this new era that we call neoliberalism. You can look at the NHS in the UK, constantly under attack by the forces of the Tory political movement, by the right-wing political party in the UK, constantly trying to defund it so it works shittier, so they can point at it and say, look, it sucks. Let's just dismantle it and privatize it. Roe v. Wade. This is not an economic struggle, but a human rights struggle, bodily autonomy for women that was common sense law for half a century and has already been stripped back even against the will of huge majorities of American people.

This fundamental human right that we took for granted has been stripped away by the forces of reaction. And so if you want to and these are just a couple examples, we can go on forever talking about this stuff. But the basic idea here is, you know, if you want to secure these reforms, they have to come with a revolutionary militant struggle that is willing to defend them in perpetuity. And of course, in the in the imposition of socialism, these would be just completely embedded in the system. Once you have a socialist party in power, you have the power finally to prevent the ruling class bourgeoisie from clawing back those reforms because you have political power which stands above and can subordinate their economic power. And without that political power, without the state apparatus to discipline and subordinate those factions of the American population or the economy, you will have their dictatorship of capital claw back any and all reforms,

especially when you have a crisis of profit, which we saw in the 1970s, right? A falling rate of profit and this realization that if we were going to explode our profit margins again, we have to dismantle these welfare programs. We have to dismantle these unions, right? Unions are what give working class people under capitalism a seat at the table of power. And that was unacceptable to the ruling class. And so they really did a number on us. And we're just getting back to our feet after 40 years of being absolutely pummeled by this counter-revolution. So I think that's a great way to highlight at least one aspect of what Lenin is saying here. And so the last thing I'll say before I hand it over to Allison is that, again, this

does not mean that we should not participate in these reform movements. In fact, we can and often have, you know, these radical elements of society been the leaders that got these reforms to happen in the first place. You know, whether you look at the New Deal, you look at the NHS, you look at social democracies in Northern Europe, which a lot of social Democrats point to and say, that's what we want. All of those things were undergirded by socialist, anarchist, communist, radical worker movements forcing the hand of the ruling class. And so, you know, far from saying we shouldn't do these reforms or that we don't care about

working people's conditions right now. We just want revolution. No, we lead these reforms. We articulate the necessity of them. We make them common sense amongst the people, but we never tire of pointing out the fact that these reforms, if we really want to secure them in perpetuity for our kids and our kids' kids, we have to continue the confrontation with the dictatorship of capital and we have to center the revolutionary struggle. It's not over until it's over. And so, you know,

lead the reforms, support the reforms, articulate the need for the reforms, make the people understand and embrace these reforms, and then remind them that these are always subject to recall unless we take this thing further and continue to fight the counter revolution and the bourgeois elites. So, yeah. elites. So yeah. Just going to pop in real quick before you respond, Alison. I mentioned I'm reading Blood in My Eye by George Jackson, and I just pulled up a really relevant quote, I think, that I'd like to just share real quick. Also, because, you know, Brett, you mentioned very explicitly that these advances during the New Deal era were really only limited to quite a small slice of the population, mostly white, quote, middle class men, right. And so there is a big question as to, you know, the breadth of these sort of reforms and how broad they are distributed in the first place. And I think George Jackson does a really great job of questioning the welfare state, as we know it, whether it really was a welfare state in many ways. And so

this quote goes, even the old left promotes the lie that valid concessions have been made by the ruling class as if deceptively better working conditions and illusory wage increases were Marxism. A true Marxist revolution abolishes the wage system the true welfare state could be the final and highest stage of social development where the world and the state are one where the material and psychological needs of the masses have been met and political regimes have ceased to exist the new deal and the resulting military industrial complex as welfare statism i swear i'll strangle the next idiot who repeats that line classic jackson yeah he's so i i love reading the book he's so inflammatory and you almost feel like you're committing a crime by reading yeah absolutely uh yeah definitely

um but i just wanted to share that because i i thought it was on my mind and um you mentioned the new deal reforms but yeah please allison i'd love it if you could respond and share your thoughts as well. The important thing is that the New Deal, even as a bourgeois reform, was forced, right? And I think, you know, Brett got at this. There were these grassroots movements. And I think let's go beyond that. There was a communist party in the United States that was large, right? That was sizable. That was organizing. That was building the beginnings of power.

That was organizing in industrial context, was organizing in cultural output, was organizing in agricultural context as well. And we can see that that movement, that that communism in the United States was large enough to force government action in multiple ways, right? To a certain extent, the New Deal is inseparable from the Red Scares, which also occurred, right? Both of these are bourgeois responses to that development. And even if the New Deal is limited, I think the point is that it gets at this idea that Lenin is saying, which is not just about securing long term reforms, but also if you're going to get any reforms in the first place, you're going to get them by forcing

their fucking hand, right? And that's precisely what we see here. Yeah, so I think the important thing to really emphasize on this front is that, you know, from the Leninist perspective, reforms are won through forcing the hand. And one other thing that I think is really important here that Brett was starting to get at, and that I think you got as well, Robert, is that reforms need to be won through political independence as well. This is in that Lenin quote that was part of the original question, right, where Lenin is saying that while we can fight for reforms, we shouldn't join our slogans together with the bourgeois slogans

and the bourgeois reformists. And I think this is really important. The risk of reformism, if we are not careful, is that we can actually end up strengthening the bourgeois elements that are trying to repair capitalism, trying to prove that there is a more kind of like just or humane capitalism in some way. And the antidote to that risk is political independence. When socialists talk about reforms, we always do it not by backing up the bourgeois parties that call for more limited reforms, but by criticizing them, criticizing the limitations of their reforms and creating these external forms of struggle that force those reforms in the first place.

So I do think the question of political independence is very important to emphasize here. And this is obviously very important in the question of the United States, right? One of the larger self-described socialist organizations in the US, the DSA, has like this core question that they have of how do they relate to the Democratic Party, right? This is a question that is like of central importance. And I think Lenin emphasizes here, independence from bourgeois political organizations is a crucial part of why the revolutionary struggle can succeed. Cool. Yeah, thank you so much, Allison. So I'm wondering if

you can talk about spontaneous versus conscious action, and maybe especially drawing on any recent movements, like I'm thinking about Occupy specifically or the George Floyd uprisings of 2020 to help illustrate the difference of like spontaneity and conscious action. This, I believe, unconsciously held assumption among many that spontaneous protests will lead to transformation. And I think this was also clear with, you know, the protests against the overturning of Roe, where we saw that nothing really material ended up coming out of those. And so I can definitely relate to this. And I'm sure many listening can, that like, you go to these protests, and you get really invigorated, and you get really inspired. And then you leave the protest, everyone goes home and nothing changes.

And you're left thinking, you know, well, now what, right? Like what next? And so I think that's one of the errors of the spontaneous approach that we've been sort of alluding to throughout this conversation. So I'm wondering if maybe, yeah, if either of you want to sort of reflect on that and, you know, give us your thoughts on that. Yeah, I'll discuss this. I think I am exactly the right age to be one of those people in the socialist movement for whom the Occupy movement was kind of a wake up moment, right? A lot of my politicization, my starting to look at the world through a socialist lens, I think came from what was happening with Occupy when it happened. I was

very interested in it, very focused on it. And so that is a movement that I think like a lot of us, I've spent a lot of time critically reflecting on. And I think the spontaneity is like a really good example of that. One of the really interesting things about Occupy in retrospect is that it kind of had this aversion to politics in a way that is super strange for what was a political movement, ostensibly. And I think we could see that in a couple ways. One of like the big things about Occupy was that it tried to articulate itself in kind of the most broadest amorphous populist terms, right? So the 99% versus the 1% framing, which can have some value, there are real tensions and political differences that exist there. But one of the things that I think even at the time people hammered Occupy for super correctly, and that in retrospect we can see is a big issue, is this like reluctance to make clear demands,

right? To actually articulate a political position. If you went to the Occupy parks where they were happening, you would have these open mic discussions of what people want, but there was never any attempt to clarify them into a coherent political line or theoretical line. And this really does get back to this idea of spontaneity, right? That if we got the 99% together, we talked it out, we discussed it, we built consensus, somehow that in and of itself would be enough. And it obviously wasn't the Occupy movement. You know, we often talk about it fizzling out. I don't think that's like quite a correct description. In many ways, it was crushed, right? It was at the Los Angeles Park the night LAPD shut it down, and it was absolutely crushed by the state. And part of

the issue is that I think that the Occupy movement, with its spontaneity, didn't even think about what are we going to do if the state decides to come for us, right? There was this avoidance of the question. I think with the George Floyd uprisings, we saw this similar thing where the George Floyd uprisings are really unlike anything in my lifetime that I've ever seen. The scope of them, how large they were across the United States, the intensity, the burning down of a police precinct, Trump having to go into a bunker, right? Like the intensity of those uprisings was insane. And it's easy to look at that, to look at that rage, that organic anger that is moving people into the streets and think

that that is enough. And clearly it wasn't, right? At the end of those uprisings, some modest reforms in some cities were won around police. But even then, many of those have been undone. And so to me, there's this very obvious reality that if you are a socialist who's been involved in politics over the last decade or so, you've seen time and time again, the failures of spontaneity and organicism and how they do not lead to something more. I think really importantly, too, we need to emphasize the fact that the bourgeoisie knows this. I think the bourgeois parties are distinctly aware of the fact that protests, while they can present these short-term challenges that they'll feel the need

to crush, in and of themselves lack inherent theoretical and political content in many cases. And that means that they can be usurped and taken control of very easily. We saw how quickly Democrats responded to the George Floyd politics by insisting on a bourgeois political line in response to it, by insisting that police abolition become actually police reform or community policing these changes, because there is this political gap that exists in protests on their own that needs to be filled. And unfortunately, because the political elements in the United States that are organized to fill that are the bourgeois elements, we see co-option and counterinsurgency be able to respond to these things extremely effectively. And I think that points at what Lenin is getting at here, which is that when these protests

happen, ideally we need a fucking party to be able to interject that political content, that theoretical content, and to take these uprisings and connect them to a broader struggle. It's important to be able to show that the uprisings against police brutality are part of broader political struggles that only can be united through a vanguard party. They're inseparable from national liberation struggles in the United States, a history of slavery, policing, and economic conditions that shaped American capitalist foundations within this country. But absent a party to actually secure that, to show that, and to build some sort of long-term movement out of it, the bourgeois political parties will always insert their

own political content, unfortunately. So it's not just a question of whether or not spontaneity and organic change can occur out of these things. Clearly they can't. And by abandoning, you know, explicit politicization, we allow our enemies to be the ones to provide that political context. And I think that is what is so dangerous. One of the responses that I heard to a lot of Marxists during the George Floyd uprisings was to be like, now is not the time to interject Marxist theory into these questions. And it's no, now is precisely the time, right? Because if we don't do it, it's going to be bourgeois politics that are inserted into it. This too is a site of ideological struggle, and we have to engage in that, and it is our responsibility to do that. People often see this as kind of a paternalism from Marxism, but the claim that Lenin's really making in the

Vanguard Party is, we have the correct fucking theory, guys. And we have a responsibility to insist on that and to push that theory as a means of unifying these different struggles into a revolutionary movement. Yeah, absolutely. Just a real quick comment before you respond, Brett, one of the ways that these movements are co-opted by bourgeois politics, like specifically in the George Floyd uprising, policymakers like, you know, Stacey Abrams, for example, were constantly talking about how we need to move this movement off the streets and into the electoral realm, right? And so that's just one example. But yeah, Brett, go ahead. Yeah, no, absolutely. And that's what happens with spontaneity. You get opportunism, you get co-option, right? You geticism you get tailism i mean i remember being an occupy

i'm almost 35 years old so occupy was also very crucial for me i'm only here in omaha so we didn't have a huge occupy movement but we certainly had a big one i mean especially relative for omaha i remember you know like looking back at a long marching line and not being able to see the end of it walking around downtown omaha at this time But I also remember standing right next to a Ron Paul libertarian, right? And that's a sort of political contradiction from the jump that you just have this spontaneous uprising and then people can fill in whatever their political vision is, can make it make sense for them and their vision of what they want. So the person I was walking, they're an occupier. They're right next to me, marching, shouting, holding up signs. They wanted economic libertarianism. You know, they wanted the Ron Paul revolution, not to say anything about the democratic sort of liberals

and just the hodgepodge of heterodox, weird ideas you have when you put a thousand or 10,000 Americans together, like you're just going to be crazy ideas. And just, you know, there's no way to find any traction or any unity. You can let everybody speak. It doesn't solve any problems, you know? And so we can clearly see the limitations of that in the Occupy movement. And what also happens with spontaneity is because there's no organization, there's no spear point that can set out a list of demands that can escalate in a strategic way that can call on other arms of its organization to do something right like let's say imagine there was a vanguard national party black panther party a communist party of some sort during the black lives matter

movements that could articulate a given set of demands, that perhaps had pulled with some major unions in the United States who could go on some sort of strategic strike in order to escalate, in order to get those demands met, right? You can begin to see how having a national vanguard party would be able to take the very real anger and frustration of the people that lead to these spontaneous revolts and then give it a direction. Give it a sharp point that can actually lead somewhere. But in lieu of that, we see exactly what happens. As I said, opportunism.

So all of a sudden these people start rising that come out of fucking nowhere, that have no connection with any community or organization start claiming that they're the leader of black lives matter and no you know what i've actually started an llc called black lives matter incorporated and you can you can give your money to us and all of a sudden they're living in million dollar houses right why black people are still being brutalized by police are still subject to the carceral state you know black and brown and poor white people are still being pushed into the homelessness crisis. Nothing was solved. There was real revolutionary energy there.

And, you know, I'm sure people listening and both of you participated in it to various extents. I participated in it. Incredibly militant. The clashes in the street with the SWAT team here in Omaha. It was very intense. And so there was this amazing revolutionary energy that was just sort of dissipated because it couldn't do anything else. That's as far as it could get. And of course,

you go in and you start asking people their political opinions. They're going to have a whole, just like an Occupy, a whole slate of random opinions coming from a whole slate of different political backgrounds that can absolutely not cohere with one another to form anything like a meaningful organizational movement that can carry this revolutionary energy into real material gains for black people in particular, but for the working class and oppressed people more generally. So what happens is you have these spontaneous uprisings and then these left-wing organizations say, let's just join them. Let's basically get liquidated and absorbed by them. Our job as revolutionaries is to just go and support these protests. And that also leads nowhere. You're tailing spontaneity, right? You're going to share the same fate as spontaneity.

And so, you know, again, this is not an either or thing. Just like with trade unions, it's important. These spontaneous uprisings are amazing. They show without a shadow of a doubt, real discontent amongst oppressed and working people. with no strategic organization, still taking to the street, still chasing cops out of, out of departments, you know, still burning police departments to the goddamn ground. But here's another thing that happens with spontaneity because there's no coherency, because there's no demands, because there's no way to discipline anybody within the movement. It also then attracts vagrants and opportunists and just people who want to fuck shit up for the sake of fucking shit up. And what does that lead to?

It leads to, you know, people doing things that have nothing to do with the struggle for black equality. And then you have right wing and corporate centrist media pointing to those people and saying, this is anarchy. This is chaos. What we need right now is law and order. And while they may have had a good point in the beginning, now it's going too far. Now they're just fucking shit up. They're destroying things for no reason. Here's a video of some guy getting knocked out in the middle of the street. These are

animals. Let's do law and order. And what we saw after Black Lives Matter is both the Democrats and the Republicans take different rhetorical strategies, but in practice, they were both ahead of bipartisan consensus that we need to reintroduce law and order. And this is precisely another consequence of mere spontaneity with no ties to a disciplined, centralized, and importantly, national organization. Because every little city, every little county can have their own little left-wing sect, right?

Engaging in mutual aid and doing protests, but there's nothing to link them together. And I think inherent in the idea of a vanguard party is a national party, a party that represents the movement across the entire country, which is also the prerequisite for internationalism, right? If you want to have an organization that is connected to other communist parties and organizations around the world. Having a national party that speaks for the communist movement here in the United States is incredibly helpful as opposed to having 37 tiny microsex, right? That all claim to speak for the American Marxist socialist movement or for the working class or whatever. And that's just incoherence.

There's nothing to work with there. There's really no foundations for any sustainable internationalism as well. So, you know, these are some of the thoughts that I have when talking about these questions. And these are some examples that we've all, everybody listening to this has lived through and seen for themselves. Just look at it. This is objective reality. We can analyze it and learn its lessons. And that's precisely what Lenin was doing back then. And that's precisely what we're trying to do right now. Yeah. One more point. Oh yeah. Go ahead. Is just to say this as well with the spontaneity. I think Alison touched on this strong capitalist states can absolutely weather spontaneous uprisings. Look at France every goddamn other week, they are burning shit, throwing trash cans, huge amounts of people into the street. And some of those aren't even merely spontaneous. Some of those tend to sometimes have some leadership, right? Maybe it's just the unions or a conglomeration of various organizations, et cetera. But is the French state ever really challenged in a way that like they could lose control and that working class people could take

over the state apparatus? It doesn't even come close. And sometimes those protests will explode for months on end and the french police state they can go in there they can make sure they don't get too out of control they can corral them they can they can sort of keep them boxed in let them run out all their energy and then it's back to business as usual and france is much more militant just as a baseline cultural value than the united states i think it goes back to the nature of our founding revolutions. But even in the French situation, there is no real attempt on the state. And there's really no fear amongst the French ruling class that anything like the Yellow Vests or any of these other movements are going to come anywhere near challenging their hold

on state power. And I think we have an obligation to learn from that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Brett. And I'm actually going to read a quote of yours, just to tie up this sort of conversation around spontaneity, and then move us into more explicitly talking about the vanguard party, which we've talked about quite a bit, but there, there's some gaps that either of you may want to fill. But this quote comes from the Red Menace episode. want to fill. But this quote comes from the Red Menace episode. And it, for me, just felt like really, really spot on. So you say, tendencies obsessed with horizontalism and spontaneity. Lenin argues that, quote, this is a quote within a quote, this is Lenin, great revolutionaries are degraded to the level of an amateur among amateurs, end quote. And then

you go on to say, which is why in Occupy, for example, one could walk into a meeting and a freshman at the local college, who's never organized a day in his life, would have just as much say in how the movement should progress as a 40-year-old veteran organizer with decades of experience. This is not a strength, it's a weakness. And in opposition to this, Lenin argues that our focus should be to exalt the amateur to the level of revolutionary, to train, educate, and give experience to people, to raise them up. And for that sort of systemic cultivation of training of revolutionary leaders, one needs a party. And so, yeah, I'd love to move into sort of more explicitly this

concept of the vanguard party. It's, you know, one of the key points that Lenin underscores is that there must be an organization already in place when revolutionary rupture occurs. And so it's been argued, and I would say very much correctly, that the reason that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was successful in going as far as it did was because the Bolsheviks had already spent decades building a party, both in more legal parliamentary ways, but significantly in what was illegal under the Tsarist regime and organizing in the streets among workers. And so a couple of quotes here, and then I'm going to ask you to sort of unpack this idea of the vanguard party a little bit more explicitly. So a quote from Marx, to conquer political power has therefore become the duty of the working classes. And Lenin also wrote, without an organization, the working class is nothing. So I'd love it if you could both reflect on that and maybe just give us a 101 and anything that we've missed so far because we have discussed it a little bit on the Vanguard Party. And yeah, just for folks who may not be super familiar. Now, you mentioned the idea that the Bolsheviks had spent decades building a party, and that's really crucial because you can't build a party in the middle of a crisis, right?

You can't build a party in the middle of the Black Lives Matter uprising. It has to already be there in order to take advantage of that revolutionary uprising and its energy and to give it structure and focus and direction. and focus and direction. So, you know, of course, the task of communists in the United States today is precisely to build this national party so that we have it ready for the crises that are absolutely already on the way, some of which are already here, some of which we've already weathered without a communist party, and we see exactly where that leads. So that's just one thought. The other thing is what is a vanguard party? Well, in the simplest terms, it's a centralized, disciplined, organized, even hierarchical national party. And it's centralized because it's, you have leadership, you have roles. And now these leaders, and this is where a lot of confusion comes in. And this idea that, you know, our critics will say, oh, you're not even of the working class.

You want to subordinate the working class to a small elite. You're just replacing one terrible elite with another elite that doesn't care about working people or just wants to be authoritarian and dictate to working people what they can and can't do. But the truth is, in every communist party that's existed, the leadership arises not as something imposed on the working class from without, but often involved in those struggles, whether the individual is from the proletarian proper or the petty bourgeoisie or whatever. careerist finagling and scheming and plotting to subordinate everybody else for their own ambitious, you know, control of power. But people rise in good communist parties based on the mutual respect that they earn from their comrades in the party, the experience that they have, the work that they've put in. And, you know, I always look at a figure like Fred Hampton, you know, Fred Hampton rose through the ranks of the Black Panther Party, not as some alien from outside the black community, right? Coming in saying, I have a bunch of ideas.

You should listen to me. Not by plotting and scheming and destroying his enemies so that he could get to the top. He rose to prominence precisely because of his credibility, because of his work, because the people, the masses in his community genuinely loved and uplifted him. You know, and that I think in a healthy communist political party, that is how leaders arise. Now there's another element to this. And we talked about this in the red menace episode. Okay.

You want working people to be a part of this party, but a lot of working people and all the duties that come with being a communist partisan within a communist party, a lot of these working people have to work all day. What are you going to do about working class people who have to go work eight, 10, 12 hour shifts every single day and don't have time for all this organizing? Well, that's precisely where the Vanguard party has another advantage because the Vanguard party is able to collect funds and basically take money from the entire organization in order to pay full-time what Lennon calls professional revolutionaries. So the party apparatus is able to fund a cadre of really advanced organizers, train them on how to be even better organizers,

give them full-throated political education, and then allow them not to have to go squander their waking lives in a factory, but can actually put all of their time and energy into building the party, into organizing, into education. So this is a critical advantage that the Vanguard party has over lots of other, you know, anti-capitalist and socialist forms of organization. And it's proven itself to work many, many times. So the disciplined aspect is also incredibly crucial. The line struggles that happen within an organization, right? Democratic centralism. We all have our different ideas. What democratic centralism allows for is robust, vigorous debate between party members, right? Democratic centralism. We all have our different ideas. What democratic centralism allows for is robust, vigorous debate between party members, right? We have a time where we democratically debate our different lines and our different ideas. Then the party as a whole votes

or however decides what the correct line is. And then you subordinate your personal preferences to the greater good. So maybe you disagree with the party on this or that thing, but it's not about what you personally believe. It's not about advancing your ideas at the expense of other people's ideas. You have vigorous debate and then a line wins out. And then if you are a disciplined comrade in a party, you accept that line. Now, of course there are limits, right? I mean, like you could have a party that is deforming and degenerating, and then that necessitates certain splits or purges or whatever, but in a healthy, robust party, a feature or phenomenon like democratic socialism can actually operate. Now, what happens when you just have spontaneity? Well, let's go back to occupy.

You have a bunch of people snapping their fingers, every person raised their hands, and then they get to talk for 15 minutes on their ideas. And then somebody else snaps their fingers and they get to talk for nothing ever happens, right? Nothing ever actually gets done. No decisions are made. It's people venting and that might be therapeutic, but it's not how you challenge capitalism. And it's certainly not going to lead to a revolution. So there's lots of other things to say about this. One book that jumps to mind is aubious Battle. I don't know if anybody's ever heard of it, but it's a really interesting novel approach, literally in novel form of the early communist party and how they would do precisely this, how they would fund

professional revolutionaries to travel the country and go into places where workers were discontent or trying to strike or trying to fight back, help supply them with any funds that they might need, with backup that they might need, help educate some of the less advanced workers about what needs to be done, help formulate a strategy, and then carry out that strategy alongside them, right? You don't just leave and then let them go to war and hope it works out. You know, you are in these processes, you are in these struggles. And that is also how you build up mass support because the party is not some alien thing outside the working class imposing itself on it. It is a part of the masses.

It's a part of the working class. It fights alongside working class people for better working class lives and ultimately for revolution. That's how you build up camaraderie. That's how you build up solidarity. You know that people have your back. And if you're going to do crazy political actions like go on strike or confront the police in the street or engage in illegal anti-fascist action, it's also really nice to have an entire party having your back. Oh, you need a lawyer? We got you. Oh, you need bailed out of jail? We have funds for that. This is really taking the fight to a higher level, a more organized level, a national level, and being able to solve precisely the problems that we see destroy spontaneous movement after spontaneous movement after spontaneous movement. This is the solution. Now, does it have its own set of problems? Absolutely. Does it have its own contradictions that are generated within a party? Absolutely. Can parties fuck up and completely take completely wrong lines? Can they alienate themselves from the masses? Absolutely. But to get to that point, I'd rather have to deal with those higher level issues and navigate them than never even get to the point

where we have the chance to navigate such issues. And I think that's what's really important. But yeah, Allison? Yeah, there's a lot there that I think is really exceptional. I don't have too much to add, but I think I will touch on one theoretical component from what is to be done that I think is really important for wrestling with. And I think addresses some of the criticism of the vanguard party that we get from non-Marxist perspectives. I think when we do

like Marxism 101, one of the things that often it's easy to fall into is just pretend like there's just a black white, there's the proletariat, and there's the bourgeoisie. And that's it, there's no other classes, there's no distinctions within those classes, etc. And one of the things that Lenin really addresses in this text is that's not true, right? There are different classes beyond that. There's a lumpenproletariat, but also within the bourgeoisie, there's a small and a large bourgeoisie, or the petty bourgeoisie versus the large bourgeoisie. And in different contexts, these different classes will play different roles. And I think one of the things that's really fascinating in this text is that Lenin insists that the vanguard party is the party through which all progressive classes

can be united under the proletarian class, right? And so what is interesting is we have this open question all the time in politics, what do we do with the intellectuals? What do we do with petty bourgeois figures? What do we do with, you know, the big talking point in the United States is the professional managerial class, right, has gotten a lot of attention as a term. And one of the things that Lennon tells us is the party is the point where when these classes have progressive interests, those can be unified and subordinated to proletarian interests and proletarian struggles. So the party's crucial for being able to pull progressive forces beyond just the proletariat

immediately into a political struggle. And this isn't cross-class collaboration, right, which is what it sounds like it's risking, because other classes by coming into the party are subordinated to proletarian interests, ideally, and I think this is really important. So one of the criticisms that you hear of the vanguard party, and that you hear of this text in particular, right, this is kind of one of the anarchist criticisms of what is to be done, is that Lenin is saying, oh, the working class is helpless on its own, and it needs to be rescued by the intellectual class, right? That is this kind of cynical way of reading this text. And I think one of the things that's important about the vanguard party is that the vanguard party isn't subordinating the working class to the intellectual

class. It is actually bridging a gap between them, right? The intellectuals within society often are completely devoid from the mass politics of the proletariat. And likewise, if we keep that devoid, the proletariat gets caught in what Lenin calls trade union consciousness. But the party becomes a point through which workers can be raised to the levels of intellectuals through the process of becoming a professional revolutionary, as you got to, Brett. And intellectuals can become subordinated to the movement of the pro professional revolutionary, as you got to, Brett, and intellectuals can become subordinated to the movement of the proletariat, right?

And I think this is really crucial. The intellectual class exists. You're not just going to get rid of it. I would argue they tried to do that in Cambodia, and it did not go very well. But it has to be dealt with in some way, and the party is how you can do that. And the party is how intellectuals can set aside the individualism that often marks their petty bourgeois class position and choose to stand in solidarity with this broader movement. And precisely in Our Heroes, we see that, right?

What was Marx? What was Engels? What was Lenin? They were intellectuals. They were of this class background who subordinated themselves to the broader revolutionary movement. And the party is the way that that can happen. So it's not that the party is how the intellectuals put the pearls down and keep them under control, right? This is kind of the 1984 George Orwell cynical view of how a party structure functions,

but rather, it's a way that the intellectuals can be held accountable to the proletariat, and that the proletariat can gain intellectual theoretical training to become revolutionaries in the Marxist sense, which means to have that correct theoretical line. And so I think it's very important to note that the party is a process of subordination to bourgeois class power that pulls in other class elements as well. And that is a really crucial part of why it's able to unite multiple struggles all under the banner of proletarian struggle and revolution. Yeah, thank you so much. And I think just to sort of wrap up our conversation on the solidarity economy and move on before we wrap up our conversation today, I just wanted to say, you know, the point isn't that the solidarity economy organizations aren't necessary and

important. They absolutely are. I think the practice of exercising our atrophied muscles of collectivism and prefiguring the world that we want to see are essential components of transformation. And to your point too, Brett, I think a lot of the time these spaces can provide a very important therapeutic component. But my critique is that these initiatives will not be enough to transform our world on their own, and that they need to be coupled with a revolutionary political movement that can contend with the capitalist state in a way that pure economism alone, as we have hammered home, I think, throughout this entire conversation, does and cannot. And I'd

go even further to suggest that solidarity economy models alone aren't inherently revolutionary, and they don't necessarily organically or spontaneously engender a revolutionary class consciousness. And the ones that do, that influence is always brought in explicitly from a parallel revolutionary framework. brought in explicitly from a parallel revolutionary framework. And I discovered this myself most potently when I traveled to Mondragon, Spain, along with Della, you know, home of the Mondragon Corporation, which is the largest network of worker co-ops in the world. And we actually spoke with a lot of co-op members who told us that they didn't see what they were doing as being part of anything political, that it was just a job. And that's

explicitly a conscious part of the Mondragon model. Like they stay out of politics, you know, with both a capital and lowercase p. And, you know, we've watched as Mondragon has lost its way in many ways. You know, they brought on an exploited labor force in the third world that aren't part of the cooperative, for example. And the pay ratio between the lower and higher end worker salaries continues to increase. And, you know, essentially, they've just fallen prey to a certain kind of compromise with the capitalist system, you know, certain kind of opportunism, maybe. And Della and I did a whole two part documentary series on this on worker cooperatives specifically. And in the second part, we really,

without knowing that we were getting into this terrain, because we were quite early on in our journey of, you know, understanding Marxism and all of the kind of stuff we've been talking about today. But we did sort of organically on our own come to this realization that like, okay, without explicit politics, Mondragon is kind of doomed, you know, in many ways. And so, yeah, I mean, if anybody wants to sort of dive deeper into that conversation, specifically about our experience with Mondragon, check out our worker co-op episode. But you know, I also get this feeling, it's not just Mondragon, like a lot of the times when I hear about solidarity economy spaces, and many instances, you know, there are incredible benefits, but also very real and sometimes debilitating limitations and challenges that these initiatives face when they bump up against the very tight guardrails

put up by the capitalist state. So yeah, I just wanted to share that anecdote and that observation before we moved on. And I want to sort of wrap up by really zooming out and coming back to this question of the vanguard party and this question of rupture. You know, I think despite conditions being as catastrophic as they are right now, insurrectionary rupture hardly seems like it's really in the realm of possibilities anytime in the near future in the United States. Despite the significant and increasingly radical labor actions we're seeing this summer, it almost feels like the revolutionary rupture is going to come from some external force like climate collapse or, you know, nuclear war or something like that. And I'm wondering what

you think, like, if you see any examples of revolutionary parties in the United States that might be able to guide us through something like that. I'm wondering if you have anything to say about any potential vanguard parties or, you know, current or historical or, yeah, any contemporary examples internationally, just to give us a little bit of an idea of what's out there right now and what has worked historically, if we can like tie that to the present. Yeah. So a couple of thoughts on this. I think one of the difficult things is that often in the context of the United States, it does feel like we have very little to start from, right? I think like you said, like the idea of the rupture feels so far off and often we fall back on this idea of maybe some external thing is going to force it for us, right? So like you mentioned climate change, war, something like that. And I think the fact that we have to fall back on

those kind of like, very depressingly fatalistic thoughts like that really tells you how far behind we are in some way. And I think one thing to say upfront is that those external forces will not provide us with a rupture, right? Because the unfortunate reality is that capitalism is very good at adapting to these things. You know, Brett and I got into this a little bit with Climate Leviathan, one of the texts we worked with, but there are many horrific ways that capitalism can survive climate change, even if it creates some forms of rupture, right? And so there is not an organic rupture that I think can clearly exist and happen there. And as Brett got at earlier, right, one of the realities that I think we need to face is that if you're trying to build the party in the time of crisis, you're already too

late, right? That has to be a foundation which is laid ahead of time. So I think this question of does that exist in the United States today is a good question and is one that is going to be super controversial. My position is no, I don't think that there is a vanguard party in the United States. I think there are people trying to build it in various different contexts. I think there are a number of organizations that want to be that. But I also think most of those organizations are honest enough to not pretend they are a vanguard party, right? To not make that claim. I don't think anyone has risen to that level within contemporary US socialist politics. And even within, you know, the last several decades, it's been tricky. I think the Black Panthers that you point to are an important group historically for the struggle

in the United States for national liberation. But even the Black Panthers, as important as they were, kind of had a level of political eclecticism that is still kind of at odds with the way that the Vanguard Party is theorized by Lenin here. So it's not clear to me that there is anything quite like a Vanguard Party in the United States, which means that the task becomes like very, very clear in my mind from the perspective that Lenin puts here, which is that the construction of such a party becomes the necessary thing that we need to do. The answer of what is to be done for us was the same answer as what is to be done in the time that Lenin wrote it. A party is necessary. It has to be built. And since we're, you know, coming up on the end of this episode, I'm not going to get too much into the

many countless debates about how we build that, right? But that is the task. It's something that hopefully all Marxists can agree on. I would really hope that's a foundational premise we can come together on. So internationally, I think there are organizations that I take inspiration from, obviously, from the perspective that I come from the Communist Party of the Philippines, Communist Party of India Maoist, these various ongoing movements that are fighting revolutionary warfare right now and are putting themselves internationally in solidarity with other movements for revolution who are speaking out in solidarity of Palestinian revolutionary struggle right now. These are the groups that I look to as hopeful sites of struggle that we can see that have integrated a real connection to the masses in terms of their theory of what the party

is. But for us here in the United States, I think we're at a very foundational step. And I think that one of, again, really the core things that we need to agree on is that we don't have a party and that getting one is a prerequisite for Marxist politics to really mean something in the context of the United States. It's kind of just a brief opening there, but those are broadly my thoughts on the question. Yeah, thank you. And Brett? Yeah, definitely. I was going to, you know, earlier we were talking about mutual aid and some of these sort of things that organizations do that aren't really ideal, but they're like the bottom of the barrel things that maybe we can only do.

And a lot of that happens because it's the product of being small and local. When you are just a small little organization within one community, within one city, there's only so much you can possibly do. I've organized in many different organizations here in Omaha. None of them have reached anything like a big enough apparatus to do, you know, really go on the offense. Maybe that's the way to put it, to go on the offensive instead of constantly playing defense. When we're trying to not get tenants evicted, when we're giving mutual aid, when we're feeding, giving school supplies to kids in our community, that's great, but it's literally playing defense.

We're trying to, you you know cover up or deal with some of the problems of living in capitalism we're not taking the fight to anybody at all and capitalism can sit around all day long and let us do our little food drives and get deposits back for tenants and those things are beautiful things i've literally seen you know families have their school year changed poor families immigrant families here in omaha have their school year changed. Poor families, immigrant families here in Omaha have their acute immediate lives sort of made better by these programs, but it's a product of being small and local. And so for me, I totally agree with everything Allison said. And, you know, sometimes people will get a little pissy with us when we say there's no Vanguard party at the moment. There just isn't. I'm sorry. And I think we should all be humble and face that reality. Maybe you think

your organization could be that, but for me, there's like a there is a basic standard you have to meet. And that is, is it a national scaled party? And some maybe some parties can approach or even meet that standard. And the other one is, does it have genuine mass support? And almost no political parties in the United States amongst the communists have real mass support in the way that, you know, Chinese communists, Cuban communists, you know, Bolshevik communists were able to get and were actually the prerequisite to making them successful, right? gone very different, but it was precisely regular Cubans who were fully on board with the revolution standing up and beating that back. You know, what would have happened to the Chinese communist fighting the Chinese nationalists after they defeated Japanese imperialism if there wasn't millions of Chinese people who had the back of the communist party and same with the Bolsheviks and Russia and all the socialist parties that were a part of the USSR. So is your party national in

scale and does it genuinely have mass support? Those are two standards that once you hit both of those, then we can begin talking about the possibility of whether or not you are a vanguard party. But at the moment, no organization in the United States quite meets that standard. But of course, you know, to build a big party like that, there's these kernels and these seeds that have to exist before that. And of course, before a big national party with mass support, you're going to have a bunch of little parties that are trying to do organization, trying to link up. And you have some organizations that have multiple chapters. You know, you have the PSL, you have the DSA, regardless of what you think of the lines of those organizations,

they'll have chapters in different cities, much like the Black Panther Party did, right? Did it ever quite rise to a national party like the Bolsheviks or like the Chinese communists? It just quite hasn't risen there. Maybe the Communist Party USA in its absolute peak and heyday basically met that or was very close to meeting that standard. I think you can make a good argument that they did meet that standard, at least for a time, but that eventually, you know, fell to various forms of revisionism. And we see what we have today. And again, this is no shade to anybody.

We're not shitting on anybody. We're in the same boat as you were your comrades too. We want a Vanguard party. You know, we, we applaud and tip our hats. Anybody doing any organizational work. If you're on the ground, feeding people in your community, salute to you. If you're on the ground fighting for tenants' rights and getting deposits back and taking on slum wards, salute to you. If you're in your local factory helping form a union and leading a union struggle, good for you. You are the sort of seedbed out of which a vanguard party can possibly grow. So we're not shitting on anybody, but we're just saying we're not there yet. And that's the fundamental task because the crises are going to keep coming, and they're going to get bigger and they're going to compound. But if we're not

organized, those crises will rack us, they'll scatter us, they'll leave us scrambling to play mere defense, and we'll never be able to go on the offensive. And so the task of every communist in the United States right now is to begin working toward a real vanguard party. Easier said than done. It comes with a whole slate of issues that we have to solve. And I'm not pretending this is an easy thing or we can just snap our fingers and make it happen, but it has to happen. And one of the things that has to happen is that communists in the United States in particular overcome their hyper-individualism. And we see this hyper-individualism manifest in treating, as Mao would say, non-antagonistic contradictions as antagonistic. Oh, you're a Marxist-Leninist and that person's a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist?

You guys are going to war on Twitter. We don't even have a party. We have no mass support whatsoever, but you think you need to carry out these line struggles on Twitter.com. And that's somehow going to facilitate the rise of a mass movement or a vanguard party or that you're holding it down for any sort of official communist party line. And that's just not the case. And a lot of people get in organizations and they want to be the smartest person in the room. They want to be correct more than they want to be effective. And that can literally just one person in an organization who is like that, or a small group of people who are like that in an organization can ruin that

organization. And so that's, I think, again, where this idea of the vanguard parties, a notion of discipline comes in of subordinating your individual career goals, your individual aspirations and ambitions, the idea that you have all the correct ideas in your head and everybody else is a dirty revisionist who just doesn't understand Marxism. These are sort of narcissistic traits that will eat an organization from the inside out. And I think it behooves us to begin to develop the sort of discipline that's a prerequisite to building a vanguard party along with all the other prerequisites we have to meet in order to build that. So that's just the situation we're in.

That's the objective reality. And again, it's our duty to build this party. And of course, I hope in some tiny, humble way that our projects of political education are at least pushing things in this general direction. Organizing is even better, but sometimes organizations prerequisite is political education. And one of the things that's made me most happy about me and Allison's work is hearing organizations come to us and say that we've used your stuff in our political education processes within our organization.

We're using your stuff to help build up revolutionary theory within our organization. We're using your stuff to help build up revolutionary theory within our organization. And, you know, for me, that's one of the highest praises that we can get, that we're actually providing something useful, not merely for individuals who consider themselves Marxist, but for organizations which will go on to create the bedrock for a possible vanguard party. Vanguard Party. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Brett O'Shea and Alison Escalante, co-hosts of the podcast Red Menace. Brett is also the host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of Guerrilla History. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert.

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. are tax exempt. For more from us, please visit upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter and Instagram for updates and post-capitalist memes at Upstream Podcast. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And if you like what you hear, please give us a five-star rating and review. It really helps get Upstream in front of more eyes and into more ears.

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