Episode 388 – From Theory to Praxis: Lenin’s Revolutionary Formula with Breht O’Shea

Steve Grumbine:
00:00:43

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today we’re gonna go down a path that I have struggled with now for probably about six months. And I come to it, and I go back again.

I come to it and I go back again. And I’ve always been used to kind of feeling kind of gross about this one because I didn’t know what to make of it.

It sounded like Lenin was telling us to go vote Democrat, and it sounded like Lenin was telling us to jump in bed with a capitalist party.

And if you listen to DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] folks, that’s exactly what they take from it, which caused me unconscionable amounts of pain and suffering internally as I tried to figure out, where am I going with this? So as we went through, I read the book many times now, Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder by Vladimir Lenin.

And for those of you out there who are not communists, who are not even socialists yet, but maybe you’re socialist-curious.

I hope this helps you out because you will probably encounter this book before you encounter The Communist Manifesto, before you encounter What Is To Be Done? Before you encounter any of the important books of Marx, because DSA uses it as a cudgel to bring folks to vote Democrat. So with that, I brought on my guest. His name is Breht O’Shea. You may know him from Rev Left Radio.

He’s the co-host of the Red Menace podcast and author of the upcoming book Letters to a Young Revolutionary, published by Iskra Books. Breht is also a longtime organizer in Omaha, Nebraska, a union electrician and married father of three. So with that, Breht O’Shea.

Welcome to the show, sir.

Breht  O’Shea:
00:02:37

Well, I’m happy to be here. It’s a pleasure and an honor. And I’m excited to get into this book. And you’re right, there is a lot of contention around it.

It’s misused and abused in a lot of various ways.

And hopefully this will help clarify not only the text, but perhaps a broader Marxist perspective on a lot of core issues that we’re contending with today.

Steve Grumbine:
00:02:54

Absolutely.

And so, as I said, I’ve read this book a number of times, and, you know, I have had the pleasure, if you will, of reading the other books, many of them, anyway. I mean, I’m sure there’s no end to the reading, but I’ve read as much as I possibly can.

I’ve not necessarily processed and analyzed and built into my own revolutionary understanding all of the lessons. I have a feeling that’s a lifetime of work. But I have grown to develop a little bit of an understanding.

But this book is still challenging because it does kind of take focus and target what is typically used as a smear for ultras or ultra-leftists. And, you know, I am very anti-electoralism and I’ve struggled with this, and I wasn’t always in this space.

You know, I kind of learned from the Gilens and Page study in 2014 that we live in a bona fide oligarchy. Not just, you know, hey, a capitalist hellhole, but we live in an oligarchy.

So I was trying to make sense of what in the world would elections do for me at this point, other than get another minister of capital in there. I’m not changing anything. Nothing changes. And so this is tormenting me as people were beating me over the head with, “Steve, you’re an ultra.

You know, you gotta read Lenin, man. You gotta read some theory, bro.” And so I said, “Well, I’ve read this, man, and it doesn’t say to me what it says to you.”

So I’m interested in your take because you guys at Rev Left and the Red Menace covered this extensively and we don’t need to redo that. But I would like to give a good overview and maybe some deeper points at times.

But I also want to roll it into a current event story of, if you will, an evergreen current event story. Because I think what’s happened is people are starting to get very frustrated with the system.

They’re starting to realize that maybe the things they thought they could achieve through the ballot box aren’t really happening and they’re afraid of what that means. They don’t go to the seventh stop on the metro, they stop at the third. So they’re always ending at electoralism or just defeatism, one or the other.

And, you know, even recently, watching folks come to learn of Marxist theory and Leninism and finding them become, what was a word that I had never heard–social chauvinists–in becoming basically, you know, fascists, if you will, or at least looking very much like fascists. So what exactly is this book? Can you tell us what it’s about?

Frame it, put it in its context and sort of give folks an understanding of what Lenin was talking about?

Breht  O’Shea:
00:05:36

Totally.

And first Just for my own bona fides with regards to electoralism, like, you know, you’d be hard pressed to find somebody more critical of the two party system than myself. You know, I think both parties are rotten to the core.

I think Reaganism and neoliberalism was the dismantling of not only the New Deal post World War II consensus, but also the dismantling of democratic whatever was, whatever existed democratically in this society. We could argue about that. Those shreds were systematically dismantled in the project, the bipartisan project of neoliberalism.

And so 40 plus years on from the rise of Reaganism, the dismantling of the New Deal, we have this ongoing corporate assault on whatever democratic mechanisms may have existed to the point that neither party is functional in any way that would be responsive to their constituency. Harvard studies, I believe it was, out of Harvard they did an objective study on do the interests and opinions of average people have any impact on legislative policy?

They found zero correlation there. But the interests of big money donors in both parties were overwhelmingly represented and we see that today.

So, you know, this is by no means a pro-electoral book and we will get into exactly why that is, but to introduce the text a little bit, we’ll start with the title, right? Because it is kind of a smear, you know, Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

And that is how it is weaponized and used as a bludgeon, as you said, is to take that infantile aspect and to label a person that you are being, your politics are exactly what Lenin was criticizing.

But I would like to reframe that a little bit and say that when Lenin is saying this is an infantile disorder, he’s making a structural, not a personal point. He is seeing, you know, he’s sitting after a successful Russian Revolution, this is in 1920 that he’s writing this book.

So the Bolsheviks in 1917 overthrow Czarist Russia, implement the first ever, you know, Marxist inspired proletarian revolutionary workers state, immediately attacked by all, you know, all the imperialist powers, including the US. We don’t need to get into all that history.

But throughout Europe after and in the wake of a successful socialist revolution in Russia, European Socialist, Communists, Marxists, union leaders, et cetera are all, I mean they’re pushing. And this is like a very different situation in the West than it is today, right?

We have all these like beleaguered liberal parties and you know, all these people that are susceptible to right wing, reactionary, faux populism and we don’t see much of a, I mean to say nothing of like a socialist or communist movement. We don’t even see an organized labor movement in the West.

He’s operating in a very different time and he is analyzing how these socialist movements across Europe are manifesting. And he’s basically critiquing two errors. When he says infantile, and you know, so all that is to say that he’s watching socialism develop.

So when I say infantile is a structural critique, he sees that these movements are going through a maturing sort of developmental stage that he is calling infantile, saying that, you know, this is perhaps a necessary stage as the socialist left figures itself out. But he’s making a critique of two deviations. On one, the ultra-left, infantile critique.

He is arguing against people who are hyper purity oriented, right? They say we don’t join the trade unions because they’re reactionary and they’re sold out and they’re class collaborationist.

We don’t ever engage in the electoral system because it’s all bourgeois bullshit anyway. We don’t engage in anything that is not sort of already or seen as a pure vehicle through which our politics can express themselves.

And Lenin sees that what the actual result of this posture is, with regards to the socialist movement is that these parties and these formations are weakened, they’re isolated, they alienate themselves from where the masses are. And while they think that they’re protecting some sort of purity, they’re actually finding themselves less and less effective.

On the other hand, and this is where I think, you know, the DSA using this as a bludgeon gets completely already corrected by Lenin. If ultra-leftism is an infantile left wing deviation, right, you’re too left, you’re too pure.

You won’t engage in anything like that you see as dragging you down or not theoretically pure needs to be, you know, from an a priori position, disdained. On the other side, you have what he calls opportunism. This is right deviationism. This is adaptation to the bourgeois system, to backwardness.

It is, you know, liquidating the socialist movement into liberal bourgeois democratic party politics, right, the Democratic party obviously for the modern instantiation.

But back then, all these other liberal bourgeois forms, these analogs to what could possibly be seen as their versions of the Democratic Party existed.

And so left deviation is this hyper-sectarian purity, spiraling lack of tactical and strategic coherence leading to isolation and a sort of refusal to deal with the messiness of actual regular working people’s politics. And right deviation opportunism is this liquidation of the revolutionary movement into bourgeois liberal politics.

So especially somebody from the right wing of the DSA, they’re trying to use this to slam their left wing counterparts. Lenin is also arguing against their position.

And we’ll get into this later when he talks about engaging in parliamentarianism or electoralism, which he advocates in certain contexts based on certain analysis.

You know, whether or not we can use this as a terrain of struggle, not that we throw our chips in with one of these bourgeois parties or treat the electoral terrain as exclusively or primarily important. So we can get into some of those nuances there, but that’s kind of the overall approach that’s happening.

And I also want to emphasize that Lenin isn’t just sitting in an armchair coming up with these ideas. He just led a revolutionary socialist organization called the Bolsheviks in a successful revolution and then led the defense of it, right?

So this is not somebody sitting in an armchair coming up with abstract ideas.

This is somebody taking practical, real world successes and using that to make sense of and correct what he sees as deviations throughout, in this case, European socialist movements.

Steve Grumbine:
00:12:05

So in the beginning of the book, you know, it comes off, I mean, a lot of this stuff is political jargon, if you will, of the time. A lot of the names, a lot of the things that are going on during this period of time.

I guess for the people at the time reading this, they were well up to date on all these skirmishes. They were involved in them. So they understood what he was saying and he was. These were pamphlets.

These weren’t like, here, let me send this to the editor for publishing a book. I mean, he was intending to try to get this word out to people of like mind.

This was kind of an instruction manual, if you will, or at least telling people what was going on and advising them through theory. Can you help me understand, you know, what the politics of the time were? I mean, like, obviously he had led this revolution.

You’ve got counterrevolutionary forces all around. You’ve got social movements abroad. You’ve got the Second International, I believe it is at the time, going on. I mean, there’s a lot going on.

I mean, you’ve got Germany having its own people, its own thought leaders. And he’s talking to them as well. He’s not just talking to Russians. He’s talking an internationalist perspective, right?

Breht  O’Shea:
00:13:17

Yeah, no, absolutely. So he’s writing this in like, you know, the spring, late spring of 1920.

So this is just before, I believe, the Second Congress of the Communist International.

The Communist International is now this international organization of communists from across Europe who are coming together to kind of push a Marxist, socialist or communist politics.

But in so doing, as you bring more people into not just a national movement, but an international movement, you have all these different opinions, deviations, deficiencies. And in each of their own national contexts, they have their own particularities that they have to wrestle with, right?

And you’re coming out of World War I, so you have mass chaos throughout Europe. Real time of social upheaval. The old order is really falling apart.

You have a successful revolution and the reaction to it across Europe and across, you know, all the way over to the United States. The Russian Revolution, which Lenin led, you know, he just survived a civil war.

All these imperialist attacks, which, you know, came as in the form of sort of a imperialist assault that kind of created a civil war in Russia in particular. But revolutionary waves had swept Germany, Hungary.

There’s like, militant socialist, communist trade unions in places like the Netherlands, and in places like Great Britain, there’s elements of the Communist Party. We have this whole episode on the communist revolution in Germany.

It was ultimately crushed by sort of liberal social democrats teaming up with reactionaries to crush the far left. And if you’ve heard of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, [oh, yes] be somewhat familiar with that history.

And that happened in this exact time that happened right before Lenin is writing this material. So the whole continent is in upheaval. But in moments of upheaval, you also have these fascinating opportunities.

We’re kind of seeing that now across the West, and particularly in the US the old order is clearly dying, right? The center of politics that has been the orienting anchor of our entire lives is completely dissolving. There’s a legitimacy crisis.

People no longer believe in their media, no longer believe in their experts. Hypercritical of both parties.

People want to change, but the political system is completely obstinate in the face of that desire for change and completely cut off from the people. So it’s not unlike today, a time of transition, which opens up a lot of opportunities.

And so Lenin in this text is addressing that context politically, socially. Like I said, he’s on the tail end of just doing a successful revolution and defending it through an imperialist assault in a civil war.

In the first few chapters, he is talking exactly about what made the Bolshevik Revolution successful, right? And he’s wondering, you know, this happened in Russia, very specific circumstances.

Russia in 1917 is not the same as Germany 1917, or Great Britain or France 1917.

So he’s wondering aloud in chapter one, you know, what significance, what universalizable aspects of the Russian Revolution are applicable to these other sort of templates, right? These other cultural, historical situations in these different countries.

And he’s coming to the conclusion that, you know, certain features of what the Bolsheviks did, as we’ll talk about perhaps later, you know, the building of a vanguard party, the strategic maneuvering cape that they engaged in the making and then the breaking of alliances, you know, forming the united fronts around certain issues without compromising the independence of the Bolshevik or the revolutionary party. He’s trying to say that these things are still applicable.

So he kind of starts from the extraction of universal lessons from the particular experiences of the Russian Revolution. And then he, in chapter two, he immediately goes into why it was successful. And he’s talking about iron discipline, right?

Combined with like deep rooted authenticity and connections with the masses, with, you know, fighters coming out of World War I completely disillusioned by their government, with workers in a semi-feudal, backward, but slowly industrializing Russia. And then you also have this peasant class which is hard to navigate. And so he is talking about what made the Bolsheviks successful.

What can we learn from it, what is applicable outside of Russia itself. And he gets in kind of a little bit of the history of Bolshevism, but that’s the broad political, social situation that he finds himself in.

He’s writing again in the context of the Communist International, which is this international organizing tool for these movements. And he’s trying to make sense of what to do and what he could offer the rest of the European Socialist and Communist movement.

And he’s doing it in the classic Lenin way, where he’s trying to take these lessons and say, you know, here’s some errors that I see happening. We saw them here and we navigated them, we stopped them. We, you know, we solved these problems.

And now I see that you in this place or that place are facing this or that problem that we also faced. You know, here’s some guidance in that regard. And, you know, people reacted differently to it.

But that’s the context in which he’s writing, and that’s who he’s writing to, right? Other socialist and communist movements across the West.

Steve Grumbine:
00:18:27

You know, when I read What Is To Be Done? one of the things that jumped out at me was his pretty much consistent banging on socialist discipline and the newspaper being disciplined and having good socialist discipline. Discipline, discipline, like the theory, is disciplined. Everything was disciplined.

And when I think about what we see today, most of us have been completely alienated from class struggle. We don’t even know what it means. We may be in it, but we don’t know about it.

We weren’t taught about it in school, we weren’t taught about it anywhere.

And we have to go underground to find podcasts such as your own to read about the stuff in somewhat secretive fashion because you don’t want to be alienated as a commie and all the other tropes that they throw at you. And so there’s a lot of these words that make people say, “What the hell are they even talking about?”

And then they just walk away, you know, entryism, whatever, on and on and on. I don’t know what that means exactly, right?

But I do know this as a guy who came into learning about this stuff through MMT, and believe me, the MMT’ers that I know are not Marxist-Leninists. They are not pushing this theory. I mean, they want to change the world in their own fashion, but it’s not this.

And as I experienced what I would say, the limits of the types of politics that some of them advance, it started causing me to look elsewhere.

And you know, when I think of what Lenin is saying in this book, you know, he’s talking about a lot of different people, maybe they haven’t matured in their understanding of socialism yet. And he’s like, don’t alienate these folks, you know, don’t let them be under the influence of bourgeoisie or petty bourgeois.

And he talks about how, you know, in all capitalist systems there’s even this phenomenon of petty bourgeois revolutionary impulses, but they’re not sustainable, they’re kind of knee-jerk, they’re undisciplined, and then they eventually fade away and capitulate back to normie capitalism, whatever. I think it’s important for me anyway to understand kind of that division point, right?

Like you’re trying desperately to awaken the working class to working class struggle in general.

You recognize the power of the bourgeoisie and the capital order and their ability to influence the lives of people, whether it be through propaganda or whether it be through coercion. At the end of the day, austerity.

These kinds of narratives that came up during that time period around the world as capitalism started redoubling its efforts to maintain control.

How would you talk to people just discovering this kind of information and you know, to make it so that they don’t feel overwhelmed as they’re hearing this, because many of them probably are taste testing this stuff in unsupervised conditions, if you will. I mean, like I said when I read this book, you know, I had a few friends, but many of them were.

Now that I know more, don’t know much, but I know more. Probably wouldn’t listen to them about these kinds of things.

Or I might listen to them, but it wouldn’t be to learn more about the way they’re thinking. It’d be to understand that’s not how I want to be. Can you help me under…

Basically explain how a person just coming into this might read this or hear this information?

Breht  O’Shea:
00:22:00

Totally. And you know, this is.

Sometimes when I get on the mic, I know I’m talking to a certain audience and I might take some things for granted if I use particular jargony words, which I do try to avoid, but they’re sometimes inevitable, you know, then please let me know and I’ll step back and define them. But your overall step back right here I think is crucial. And the way I want to take this is to, one, just say that I live in Nebraska, right?

Born and raised. I’m in the construction trades.

So every single day I am surrounded by like regular, truly working class, to be honest, just because of the demographics of construction, mostly dudes, with a whole wide array of political opinions.

And I, you know, I’m not shoving it down people’s throats, but, you know, when you’re working next to a guy in a trench for eight hours a day, things come up. You talk about politics, you talk about religion, you talk about the state of the world.

And so I am constantly having to navigate people at way different levels of understanding, of analysis, of hostility to my basic vision. And so this is something that I do have a lot of experience, you know, doing, and it’s not always successful. Obviously some people can’t be changed.

But, you know, it is something that I’m, I have experience with.

So having said that, maybe it’s best to just kind of articulate the socialist vision and ultimately the Marxist or communist vision of what the world could be.

I think the fundamental critique of Marxism is capitalism fundamentally organizes society, organizes the economy around the maximization of profit for a few, right, the elite at the top.

The fundamental structure of a capitalist business, of a corporation is to amass profit, to take over the market, to dominate market share, and to advance and grow the business.

On a broader scale, it is dependent on perpetual, genuinely infinite economic growth at all costs, really, to people, particularly in the Global South, but even in the Global North, to the planet, and increasingly at the cost of the habitability of the biosphere. So clearly this is an unsustainable system.

And the moment you realize that the way capitalism operates at its core logic, it’s not a function of greedy people in high places making bad decisions. Structurally, you are incentivized as a capitalist to maximize profit and to grow at all costs.

That is useful as a short term boost coming out of feudalism to, you know, generate the Industrial Revolution and technological growth. There is a way in which capitalism is very dynamic. It does grow the economy, right?

I certainly would rather be living today than I would 300 years ago for just the miracles of modern medicine and technology alone. But fundamentally, it is unsustainable. It’s untenable over the long term.

And the climate crisis, the sixth mass extinction, these are just planetary red alarms that this system, the way that we’re organizing human civilization, is not sustainable long term. And you know, Marx has this great quote is like, you must question a system- I’m paraphrasing- you must question a system that at the

same time that it grows enormous wealth also grows enormous despair, right? It grows. At the same time, we see Elon Musk approaching trillionaire status.

Every major city in the United States, downtown areas have lines and lines and blocks and blocks of homeless people.

At the same time, when you have five men controlling more wealth than the bottom 3.5 billion human beings on Earth, you know, Americans can’t even afford health care.

Trump’s daughter is thinking about buying a Romanian island, you know, so her and her family can live out this fantasy of luxury and opulence, never working a day in their life, never contributing anything of meaning to society, and yet benefiting from the toil and the labor and the production of society made by the working class. So the core idea is this is an unsustainable system. It’s fundamentally unjust, it’s fundamentally unequitable. It literally can’t be reformed.

It can be made to be a little nicer, but the structure of it is such that it can’t be reformed away into something that it’s not.

And we believe, as socialists, that we have to break out of this rotten system, which is a product of slave societies and feudal societies themselves, that we have to organize the global economy around widespread human flourishing. And that ultimately, for our, the communist vision is that our species can, and I’m not saying it will, it certainly is not inevitable.

But I believe that the human species can evolve beyond class society altogether. What do I mean by that? That we can evolve as a species, as a civilization, beyond the stratification of people into rich and poor, worker, boss, landlord, peasant, master, slave, right? That stratification is inherently unjust.

And I think one day posterity will look back and see all of class society from ancient Roman slave societies to medieval feudal societies to modern capitalist societies, all of class society as an adolescent phase of human civilizational development.

And I would place my bets that if we met an alien species that is much more advanced than we are, they would not have an Elon Musk, they would not have bosses and workers, they would not have colonizers in the colonized, that they would have overcome that period in their history insofar as they had it based on their own evolutionary and historical processes and would be a much different species if they were to be able to survive to that length. I mean, Star Trek has that vision, right?

So there’s something deep in the human psyche that realizes that’s a possibility and socialists just say we want to fight for it. I’m not going to settle for Obama’s and Biden’s and Democratic party donor-class consultant class bullshit the rest of my life.

I’m not going to vote for somebody who premises higher wages or health care here in the imperial core on the mountain of corpses of people in the Global South.

I’m fundamentally an egalitarian and I believe that humans can cooperate with each other as equals to create the highest quality of life for as many people as possible and act not as extractors and exploiters of the natural world, but as genuinely intelligent, thoughtful, harmonious stewards of the biosphere.

This gorgeous Garden of Eden that we’ve woken up within and that we see ourselves as fundamentally separate from and are destroying, but we can shift that. So that is genuinely the socialist and communist vision.

Maybe you’re more cynical about human nature, maybe you think humans will never be able to break out of class society.

But certainly even if the communist vision is too far fetched for you, the socialist vision that the way that we should approach the economy and organizing economic life should be geared toward the well-being, the widespread flourishing of as many people as possible.

And that if we truly believe in democracy, we should extend democracy into the workplace and extend it into the economy, make it work for regular people. And you will never get that under capitalism. And so I think that’s the socialist vision. I’m willing to go deeper.

I’m willing to talk about the hyper-individualism of Americans, the notion of why discipline and leadership and organization is so important. But perhaps that basic vision, whether you agree with it or not, will at least orient you to our broader project before we get into to more minutiae.

Steve Grumbine:
00:29:27

Yeah, no, I mean I’m there with you. I guess what I’m trying to do is help others that are listening, that maybe, you know, we frequently will have Modern Monetary Theory listeners.

And as we’re approaching a journey, as we go further into socialist theory and quite honestly, you know, into communist theory, we obviously realize that we’re nowhere near that we’re nowhere near the kind of revolutionary awareness awakening of the working class that we would need to get to, to cross that threshold at this point. But we are at a rupture. We are at a point where things are changing.

And basically, how does someone coming into this space fundamentally see themselves both electorally and how do they see themselves organizing within this space so that they’re both true to that vision that Lenin laid out of being disciplined and being true to the socialist ethic and ideal that you just laid out, but at the same time, not forsaking these groups that aren’t there yet so that they can be there to demonstrate the failures of parliament, to demonstrate the failures of bourgeois democracy, to show them and to be there to capture them and catch them as they fall, so to speak. What does that look like in praxis?

Breht  O’Shea:
00:30:55

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think we fundamentally have a responsibility to educate ourselves.

And when you are born and raised in American capitalism, the passive indoctrination and social conditioning that we all face is something that has to be systematically faced, uprooted, and addressed through the engagement with history and with political theory in a way that, you know, to be a liberal or a conservative or a libertarian or a fascist. Yeah, you, you know, you got to learn about the basic premises of your political orientation, but you don’t have to unlearn a bunch of things.

So first thing is first. And, you know, this happened to me, too. This happens to all of us.

We’re born in the US and eventually, for one reason or another, personal experiences or intellectual curiosity, we start bumping up against these ideas that are first, you know, anathema. They’re taboo. Communism, Marxism. This is scary extremist stuff, you know, this is stuff that I don’t… that I’m told is bad.

And everything I’ve learned from movies and books and the guy on the news channel tells me it’s bad. All the politicians tell me it’s bad. But for some of us, that sparks more curiosity is like, “Ooh, if this is taboo, I want to get into it.”

And, you know, that is a process you have to do. And I always say, like, as the center of politics falls out, people look for alternatives.

And the two broad alternatives in capitalist decay is fascism or socialism. And fascists have a much easier job.

Their job is to tap into your basic feelings of frustration, to orient your anger and your hatred towards often powerless, marginalized communities, to pump up your sense of belonging in the “in group”. You know, you’re an Aryan, you’re a white Christian man, you’re an American patriot, whatever it may be.

So you’re playing on these deep human emotions of tribalism and exclusion.

And, you know, for as much as the right wing talks about facts over feelings, very feeling oriented people, this is, you know, the whole Trump’s thing is a vibe based thing and people feel feelings and Trump gives them some sort of outlet for it. Fascism is much easier to spread and we see it spreading in our societies and in fact all over the West.

Marxism, socialism, communism, it requires so much of us. It requires unlearning.

And not only does it require educating yourself, which requires humbling yourself in the first place, admitting there’s a lot that, that you don’t know. There’s a lot I still don’t know. No human being can know even close to everything.

You know, the pile of things you don’t know will always be bigger than the pile of things you do. That’s true for every human being on earth. And that’s okay to set aside your ego and to say, I’m going to be humbled a little bit.

I don’t know these answers. I’m still skeptical. It’s totally fine. I’m going to try to at least learn about this stuff. Maybe I’ll find reasons why I don’t like it.

Maybe I’ll be convinced. That really is kind of the first step. Maybe you stumble across the conversation like this.

Some things strike you in the wrong way, some things kind of intrigue you, and then you just take it upon yourself. Instead of like, I’m just going to like scroll and get my news about the world through the algorithm which we’re all susceptible to.

I’m going to actually carve out some time and start investigating some of this stuff. I’m going to listen to more podcasts like this, or I’m going to read more books like that, etc.

As you develop that consciousness and assuming you’re more or less convinced of our vision of the world and you’re ready to fight for it. Marxism also demands that you have to get involved. And what I mean by getting involved, and these are things that we can all do in the here and now.

We can talk about, you know, Lenin’s big idea of how to organize a national revolution or an international organization like the Comintern [Communist International or Third International]. But where do we start? Well, once you have the theory, you start applying that theory in practice in your community.

There’s many ways that you can start doing that. You can get involved in mutual aid work. You know, look at the Black Panther Party. They did free lunches for kids in their community.

They did police patrols, keeping their community members safe. They delivered groceries to old people. They’re of the community. They’re serving the community.

They earn their respect from the community by doing precisely that. And of course, the FBI and the United States government had to kill them and assassinate Fred Hampton and dismantle that organization. Why?

Because it wasn’t a bunch of people talking in pamphlets or online. It was people going out in the world and trying to change it, organizing and building up dual power.

Dual power means ways of meeting our people’s needs in our community that don’t depend on the government. right? If you’re black in the ’60s, you can’t depend on your government to keep you safe. They’re the ones with guns in your neighborhood killing you.

You can’t depend on the government to, you know, make sure the landlord, the slumlords in your redlined neighborhood are keeping their part of the landlord contract and making sure that you live in safe conditions.

You got to organize and do that yourself.

And so while it might not be as severe for many of us as it was maybe for a poor black person in the 1960s, the same basic premise exists that you have to take this knowledge, you put it into practice. There are many ways to do it. One of the most promising ways of doing it right now is we’re living in a historic housing crisis.

The housing market has never been this inflated, this inaccessible in American history. People feel it every single day.

Whether you have a house already and you’re paying mortgage or increasing property taxes on higher and higher valuations, or you’re locked out completely, as I am, and as many in my generation, in the generation behind me are. This is a clear, material thing that affects regular people’s lives that you can go out and organize with.

Here in Omaha, we have the Omaha Tenants United, and they’ve already formed some of the state’s first ever tenant unions in multiple areas where regular people, they’re not socialist, communist, Marxist.

They’re just regular people who have slumlords who are taking their deposit or not, you know, turning their heat on or not solving things or racking up the rent too high. You go in with a group of people you meet the tenants, you talk to the tenants, you bring them in.

You’re not just going and saving them, you’re working with them to say, what are your issues? How do we solve them? What’s the first step? What’s the strategy?

You’ll have people in the, in the apartment, let’s say you’re trying to organize an apartment complex. You’ll have people that are uninterested. You knock on their door, they say, “Beat it, I don’t care.”

You’ll have people that are hostile to the very idea. You’ll have people more times than not that are just cynical, right?

They’ve been defeated so many times, they’re like, you know, nothing’s going to change. You get that first deposit back, you get that landlord to come and fix the AC for the unit. You know, you start getting these little victories.

People start waking up. And what you’ll find in all, every time you go in organized tenants is some of them really take to it.

They start becoming the organizers, they start setting the meetings and they start setting the agendas. They start knocking on their neighbors doors, they start building community.

And you know, these are the little seed beds out of which higher and higher forms of organization can grow. And what Lenin is critiquing in this text is a refusal to meet people where they are, right?

A refusal to deal with the messiness of people’s politics. Whether you’re in a construction site or a tenants building, people have all these different ideas, conspiracy thinking, reactionary, confused.

And what Lenin was saying is that a certain type of organizer wants to extract themselves from that because it is messy and it feels impure. And these people are, they’re just not up enough, they’re not smart enough, they’re not dedicated, whatever it may be.

And this to Lenin, is a tragedy because now you’ve just abandoned a terrain where people need help. And you don’t convince people by writing pamphlets or even making podcasts necessarily, although you can convince some people.

But how you convince regular people is going to them, working with them side by side and solving their material problems.

And when you do that, the Black Panther Party had huge influxes of often young black people in their communities all across the country, from Oakland to Chicago to New York City. Here in Omaha, we had a Black Panther Party chapter.

A huge influx of people wanting to get involved, not because they sat down and read Marx and Lenin, right? But precisely because they saw what this organization was actually doing in their community and they wanted to be a part of it.

Now the leaders of that Party, right? Huey Newton, Fred Hampton. They read Marx and Lenin.

They understood their ultimate goal, and their ideological coherency is what made their praxis so effective. So if you try to do praxis without theory, it kind of spins its tires in the mud.

Maybe you solve some problems, but the default is back to liberalism, back to voting for certain candidates, you know, back to the default of maintaining the status quo in one way or another. That’s praxis without theory. Theory without praxis is meaningless. It’s a car with no wheels. Yeah, you might feel good about yourself.

You read that big book, you learned some big words, but you’re not putting it into practice.

So, you know, for me, it would be hard to even call myself a Marxist if I wasn’t taking the stuff that I learned and trying to do something with it, whether that’s political education or organization in my community. And actually, the last thing I’ll say on this is, this is empowering, because, yes, it does ask a lot of you.

You know, it asks you to educate yourself, to break out of conditioning and to get out into the world and try to change it. That’s asking a lot. But in the process, it changes you.

And a lot of the meaning that we lack in our modern life, a lot of the drudgery of going to work and paying bills just so I can wake up and go to work and pay bills, and I feel alienated from my work, and I feel alienated from my community. You actually start solving that in real time by taking action in the world. And, yeah, it’s not enough to stop the Trump administration.

It’s not enough to stop the genocide in Palestine, right. But it’s the seedbed out of which the political power and high levels of organization capable of stopping those things must be born.

And so Lenin, in this text, to bring it back to this text, he wants to win. Not only the Russians that did win their revolution, he wants the revolution to spread. He wants these organizations to win.

So he’s not wagging his finger like, you idiots. You don’t understand what I understand. He’s pleading with them, please don’t make these mistakes. These are dead ends.

Here’s how you correct these mistakes. Here’s how you identify them. Here’s how you correct them.

Please don’t fall into them because they lead nowhere and ultimately genuinely read the history. He was right.

So, I think that hopefully answers your basic question of how do people who stumble into these sorts of conversations perhaps begin to move forward and begin to, you know, participate in a meaningful way and not just, you know, listen to a conversation and think it’s interesting and move on with your life.

Steve Grumbine:
00:41:10

You know what? I call this the difference between educating and awakening.

I think awakenings, you know, I’m in recovery, so I think of, you know, the fact that I knew I had a drinking problem, but it didn’t really matter because I was going to keep drinking because I, I could control it this time and that I would end up breaking out in jail cells and handcuffs, you know what I mean? And so it was like something was fundamentally wrong. But I kept doing the same thing over and over again, thinking I could control it.

It was only when I decided, “Hey, dude, you’ve got a track record of this not working out so well. You’ve got to make a change.” And when I made that decision, I had to make a decision to stop drinking.

I had to make a decision to at least try to stop drinking. And I think in this case, you’ve got to make a decision at some level, there’s a point where it goes from, oh, that’s neat.

I just watched an episode of the Flintstones, and now I watched an episode of, you know, some random political thing. And. And okay, that’s.

I’ve done my political part, now I’m going back to sleep and I’m going to go ahead and vote for John Fetterman tomorrow or some shit like that, right? I mean, like, at the end of the day, there is like this, the division between knowing something on the test and doing something in real life.

And I think that’s exactly what you just laid out. I do want to go back to the text real quick, but before I do that, I want to bring up something. When I was doing some more of my reading- and again, this is all me trying to, you know, not be an empty vessel. I want to try and educate myself as much as possible.

And I read Che Guevara’s, you know, book of Guerrilla Warfare, and once you got past the revolutionary, must have a pack of smokes on him and he must have a box of chocolate in his pack, and, you know, he must have a Luger or must, you know, whatever, nine millimeter, blah, blah.

But once you get past some of that stuff, I thought what was really powerful was that the revolutionary, and mind you, Che Guevara was part of a successful Cuban revolution. So, you know, he wasn’t talking, you know, out of some book. He was part of the revolution in Cuba.

And what he talked about was that they needed the people.

The people were like water to the fish, you know, without having the people on their side, there was no place for, you know, the guerrilla revolutionary.

And as I think about maybe not living in the jungles of Cuba or Bolivia or you know, any of these other Global South areas where there is revolutionary pressure going on. You think about in the United States is kind of comes back to this text, I guess a little bit, right?

Trying to get the people on your side, trying to win them over through their material needs, through the actual material conditions they’re facing, empathize with them, see what’s going on and be able to provide what I have been saying and ineloquently and call it organic, intellectual, I don’t know what you want to call it, but bottom line was I’ve been talking about we need to create dual power and we need to have parallel systems because we can’t operate within this space. And it’s just sort of been me. I mean, yes, I’m reading stuff, but it’s me thinking out loud like what would I do in this case? And I’m nobody.

I’m literally nobody. And as I think through this stuff, I’m validated at some level to know that, okay, so the ideas are there. Now it’s time to do.

Now it’s time to do something with them and not just, you know, talk about them. You know, I’ve.

We run a small nonprofit here and we try very, very hard to get a core of people that are onboard doing the thing, understanding the thing, working kind of collaboratively, collectively trying to make a thing happen for all of us, right? And it’s very hard.

You know, people come, they go, some are more enthused than others, some don’t really do the thing at all and others do a lot more of the thing.

And it’s difficult managing personalities when you’re doing these kind of things because you do have that situation where some do almost everything and others do very little. It’s hard to keep that, that- what’s the word I’m looking for- the solidarity in the mix when you don’t have equal share.

And how would you talk to somebody about that?

Because every person that I’ve talked to that organizes or, or is involved in various things, the biggest struggle they have is that it’s so few that actually do and the many that maybe do a little bit, but they’re not fully bought in and it’s draining in the self care and all the other stuff that goes with it.

Breht  O’Shea:
00:45:46

Yeah, no, I mean, it’s a perpetual issue. And really what the issue is, yes, it’s an issue of organizing, right? It’s always going to be that. But it’s also the messiness of community.

When, you know, you know, there’s been like an American hyper-individualist life. There’s been a retreat from community. And on a deep, intuitive level, we yearn for it. You know, we know we need it.

And there’s been studies and studies of, like, you know, when a, when a natural disaster hits, you know, or, or a war breaks out in your country or your

community and you’re directly impacted, people will often say, even though this was horrific and traumatic and terrible, for the first time in my life, I felt community. I felt connection. Me and my neighbors came together and we did something. So there’s this deep…

You know, even in the darkest times, people still find happiness because what they’re experiencing is something deep in our human DNA, that we survived on the savannahs of Africa not because we were the strongest animal or had the sharpest teeth or the biggest claws, but precisely because we are hyper-social creatures that, you know, language itself is a product of our social need to communicate at increasingly sophisticated levels in order to survive. So when we talk about human nature this, human nature that, if human nature is anything, it is hyper-social.

But despite that intuitive, deep need of the human psyche, you know, especially when you can retreat to your own little cocoon of your home and turn on Netflix and not have to worry about anything and kind of escape from it all. Yeah, when you get into the messiness of it, it loses some of its luster. Like, this actually is hard. This guy actually is an asshole.

How do I deal with this problem? Why am I having to do all this shit, right? Like, that is true, and it’s unavoidable, but it’s also the messiness of community.

It’s the cost we pay for trying to be a part of something bigger than ourselves and to enter into community with our neighbors. So, you know, again, there’s, there’s no easy way out here.

But I will say a couple things that when you were talking came to mind, that history doesn’t just unfold. We are not the passive playthings of history, right? And sometimes we can feel that way, that history is happening all around us.

And as you said, and as it’s true for me too, I’m a nobody. I feel completely powerless in the face of it all.

I have all these deep urges to save the planet and stop these genocides and create a better world, but I just feel so inadequate and so impotent in the face of all of it. And it can sometimes feel like we’re just being tossed around in the waves of history.

But, ultimately we’re the vehicles through which history manifests. History doesn’t just happen to us or above us, it happens literally through us.

And so, you know, the way we spend our lives is our contribution, our penny in the well of history. History has manifested through us for that person. It manifested as watching, you know, eight hours of Netflix and scrolling 12 hours a day.

But it doesn’t have to be, even if that is you right now, it doesn’t have to be you tomorrow that you can contribute. And yes, we don’t know the outcome. We don’t know where history ultimately leads.

There will be defeats, there will be difficulties, there will be burnout. You know, there’s some sacrifice that has to happen. But the other question is, how else are you going to spend your life?

Are you, you know, in 21st century America, are you going to spend it just paying bills and being a passive consumer of endless algorithmically constructed slop? Or are you going to try to live for something bigger than yourself?

Try to contribute to that well of history in whatever way you can, and turn your whole life into a vehicle through which history can happen. And ultimately, nobody has to do everything, but everybody can do something, right? Everybody has a role to play.

The musician, the artist, the person with this talent or that, the journalist, the administrator, the organizer, the lady who’s really good with numbers. We all have a set of talents or interests or hobbies that we can subordinate or put in the service of, this bigger movement.

But again, we don’t know where it leads, right? It could lead an abject failure, right?

They could build the surveillance state and they could subordinate and submit our movements, and we could have fascism for 300 years. That’s possible. We could have nuclear war tomorrow, right?

We could hit a tipping point in the climate and live in some sort of eco-dystopia. We don’t know, we can’t control. But what we can control is not what happens, but our response to it. We’re born in this time in history.

We don’t get to choose that, but we do get to choose how we respond. And when you look back through history, every single one of our ancestors, no matter who you are, they lived, they survived enough to reproduce.

They fought their own battles, they had their own difficulties. They faced their own apocalyptic possibilities and horizons. And the human spirit continues forth. And so, you know, I do believe in the human spirit.

I do believe that we can fight.

And I believe it’s actually edifying to the soul, despite its difficulties, to actively take control of your response to this life at this moment in history and contribute what you can. And Che is a perfect example of that. When Che was ultimately executed by the CIA in Bolivia, right, the executioner had Che in a room.

Che’s dead to rights. He’s done. The executioner shaking with anxiety. He knows he has Che in his gun sights. And his job right now is to take Che’s life, right?

And the guy ultimately did. What did Che do? He stood firmly, he looked the guy in the eyes, and his exact words were, “Shoot, coward. You’re only going to kill a man.”

And what does that actually mean?

That means that Che had so deeply and profoundly dedicated his life to creating a better world that he was willing, in the ultimate instance, to sacrifice it with courage and knowing he did everything he can in his life to push forward human flourishing and human well being and liberation and self determination and all the things we care about. That’s a life well lived.

At the end of your life, do you just want to say, “I spent 17 years of my life scrolling on the corporation’s algorithms and you know, I binge watched Netflix for 12 years.” No, you know, or “I just went to work and I came home and I just try to keep to myself.”

You know, maybe that’s suitable for some people, but I genuinely think that life becomes more meaningful when you live for something bigger than yourself.

And if there’s anything bigger than yourself worth living for, it is doing everything you possibly can to try to advance the conditions of our species and push us toward a better world of more justice, more equality.

And in the meantime, building relationships with people you would have never met otherwise, solving problems that would have never been solved if you didn’t put your, your whole heart and soul into it, and navigating the difficulties that come with that. But still, that’s a life worth living, in my understanding.

And it’s much, much more worth living than chasing fame and money and the grind set and hustle culture and, you know, trying to become famous or chase status or build enormous wealth just to prove that you can. And that’s kind of what society tells us is a meaningful life. But I reject that. And I think there’s,

there’s something meaningful in trying to change the world for the better, whatever the results may be.

Intermission:
00:52:46

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website, realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

Steve Grumbine:
00:53:09

I gotta tell you, if you could see my face, I mean, this is an audio podcast, but if you could see my face, it’s grinning ear to ear, mouth kind of open and awe inspired. This was wonderful. That was great. And, you know, and what I want to take us to next, it’s tough because that’s like, how do you finish off of that?

But I think this is really, really important stuff. You know, we talked to Luna Oi [Nguyen] about Ho Chi Minh and the fact that Marxist Leninism to him looked different

and would be different wherever you have it.

And that was one of the things that came out and reading this was, “Hey, when revolution breaks out in Europe, Russia’s not going to be the model anymore. We’re going to be the backwoods again. You guys are going to be the new way, the truth, so to speak.”

And it was kind of like everywhere you go, it’s going to look different based on the material conditions of that day in that community, et cetera. Can you talk a little bit about how a Marxist-Leninist perspective might morph based upon the conditions of the country in which it’s in?

Breht  O’Shea:
00:54:15

Absolutely. I think it’s a core strategic aspect of Marxism Leninism that it understands that there are certain universalizable principles.

There are things that work in every context. But there are many situations that are very different, right? Vietnam is different than 1917. Russia is different than 1959 Cuba.

And we can go on down the list. Certainly all of those are very different than 21st century United States.

And one place that socialism has not succeeded yet are in the most–in contra to one of Marx’s predictions, unfortunately–where he thought that socialism would naturally develop in the most advanced capitalist parts of the world. What Lenin did is come along and say, “Well, actually it happened in the most backward country in Europe, here in Russia.”

Then it happened after the century of humiliation. This is after Lenin died, of course. But it happened in, you know, in China after their century of, of

humiliation and the Opium wars and colonization, and then in Vietnam, in Cuba. Wow! Why are they all happening outside of the exact place where Marx predicted they would happen?

And Lenin talked about imperialism, and that’s a whole other book he wrote, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in which he argues that monopoly capitalism, as capitalism grows and develops, even within Europe or within a nation state on the global level, when you take a global system, make it capitalist and view it from the global level you get imperialism. And we have episodes on that.

That text is very short and people can read it and understand that basic argument. But that helped clarify a lot and it helped explain why Marx was wrong that it would happen in the most advanced capitalist countries.

Because imperialism becomes, as we say in Marx’s jargon, the primary contradiction globally that actually the average American worker in the 1990s, let’s just say, is pretty goddamn comfortable, you know, pretty middle class person, pretty happy with how things are going more or less than somebody, you know, under the boot of a colonizer in Algeria or, you know, under occupation and apartheid and genocide in Palestine or wherever.

So the imperial system, which is the imperial core, you know, North America, Europe, the West, that started, you know, 500 years of European colonialism that morphed into imperialism on the global stage as capitalism developed. And so you actually see that where these revolutions tend to happen is where people are the most desperate.

And so you see that in Vietnam and you see that in the Global South. You see that all throughout Africa. And you know, we have as many episodic historical anecdotes as we can on these socialist experiments.

But you know, ultimately there is a sense in the imperial core that things are getting worse. And it’s like kind of a weird realization to have.

But, that the average American, it’s not that we want them to get more uncomfortable, it’s that capitalism is already making them more uncomfortable. They’re losing that quality of life generation over generation. Their quality of life is declining.

A Gen Z person will not have on average a good as a life as their parents had. And that is starting perhaps to change the calculus. And so we know what does it mean to make socialist revolution in the belly of the beast?

You talked about Che earlier. He said, he said, “I’m jealous of you North Americans because you live in the belly of the beast.

You know, you have the most important job of all, which is overthrowing this empire, this behemoth that stomps on the throats of people throughout the Global South and is the epicenter of global capitalism to this very day. But it’s also the hardest place to make socialist revolution.”

And then you add a hundred years or whatever of Cold War propaganda of demonizing the left, of dismantling any democratic mechanisms. If you noticed in the 20th century, what did they start dismantling first? They first they had to deradicalize the labor unions.

So in the 1910s and the 1920s, you had your first red scare where they systematically went after militant unions like the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World], which were the first unions that weren’t trade specific. They were for workers of all industries that allowed in women and black people for the first time. Okay, this is too radical.

They were actually the organized labor socialist movement that helped give rise to the progressive era and was the backbone of the concessions that are ultimately known as the New Deal. So they had to dismantle the militancy of the unions and then with the rise of Reagan, they just de-unionized the working class at all.

And why did they do that? It’s sort of like an inverted Marxism because they realize that organized workers are actually the backbone of a real threat to capitalism.

Because capitalism only speaks in two languages, violence and money.

And if you’re not able to contend with it on the level of violence, which we certainly are not, this is the, you know, the US military and the state apparatus is the most well funded, biggest, strongest, most technologically advanced repressive mechanism on planet earth and in human history. Then you have to speak to them in money. You have to stop their money.

And the only thing that could fuck up their money is organized workers at choke points in the economy, shutting things down.

If the American dock workers tomorrow suddenly got huge infusion of class consciousness and wanted to bring the system down right, they could. Truckers could stop getting in their trucks, consumers could stop buying shit in a few parts of the economy strategically. Teachers stop going to work, dock workers stop loading ships. You could bring this entire system to a halt in a week. They’ll try to kill all of us.

They’ll try to drown us in blood. But if we can hold out for a week, the economy would collapse and we could have the possibility of building something new in its place.

And they can’t have that. So there has to be an ideological assault.

There has to be the dismantling of working class power in the forms of unions, and then ultimately the dismantling of the working class itself to where the middle class needs to be taken down and workers need to be put in such a state of constant precarity and uncertainty and debt, right? Students coming in, just bright-eyed students, including myself. I have tens of thousands of dollars in student debt.

Bright-eyed students entering the world trying to create a life for themselves. Okay, if you want to create a life for yourself, you have to go to college. And if you want to go to college, sign right here for this loan.

You know, I’m 17, 18 years old, I don’t know what the fuck I’m signing, but I know that this is the barrier to entry, to try to create a better life for myself. Oh, isn’t it interesting that every new person that tries to do that is now saddled with tens of thousands of debt for the rest of your life.

Does that make you want to get uppity? Does that… it might make you want to, but really you have to pay off that debt. You have this albatross around your neck now.

So this constant precarity and this dismantling of unions, all this stuff is an assault by capital on the rest of us. And those are the conditions that we’re operating here in the United states. So you’re 100% right. There are universalizable aspects.

One of them that comes out in this text is the idea of a vanguard party, which is just a highly disciplined high level of organization on a national level that is theoretically informed, that has organic leaders from the communities that they represent that can advance the socialist cause. That is a universalizable aspect.

You need that level of discipline, which is just to say you need that level of organization. If you’re going to take on any government in the world, how is the

first move you say is like “We don’t like leaders and we don’t like organization and we’re just going to wait for the masses to spontaneously erupt and do

revolution” right? Oh, the rulers love that. The rulers love that. So you know, Lenin and Marxism and a lot of people don’t like to hear it because it is uncomfortable.

And sometimes, you know, leaders do betray and sometimes organizations do get shitty in various ways.

But if you’re going to take on a highly advanced, highly organized, highly funded, highly competent enemy, in this case the United States ruling class, you have to have requisite levels of high levels of organization and leadership and discipline in order to do that. And in every place there’s been a socialist revolution, they’ve had exactly that.

So they’ve proven historically that at least this one aspect of Marxism, Leninism, that you need this high level form of the vanguard party and that’s going to look different depending on where you are and all of that. But that is absolutely a prerequisite to being able to not only win a revolution, but to be able to defend it in the aftermath.

Because winning a revolution is just the starting gun to the counter-revolutionary assault. We’ve seen that from the French Revolution onward.

Steve Grumbine:
01:02:37

You know what, thank you so much. I’ve got so much to say this. You hit on so many really important points.

I just, I want to go all the way back momentarily to Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. That was one of the first books I read. And when I read through it, I was on with Esha [Krishnaswamy] from Historic.ly, and she had me read chapter nine.

And when I was reading it, it was like I had never read this before. So I was like, what? Wait a minute. It was so. It felt like a current event. It did not feel like a book written a hundred years ago.

It felt like every word was dripping with relevance to this moment, to this day.

And as you think about the IMF and the structural adjustments and the way they indebt the Global South and they have to take on more debt to be able to pay off the old debt and how it just keeps feeding on itself. He was spot on. It was like, exact. I just.

I mean, one of the most revolution, revelation, revelatory, whatever it is, whatever that word I’m looking for is. You get the idea that I had an awakening as a result of reading that text.

Breht  O’Shea:
01:03:43

Yes.

Steve Grumbine:
01:03:44

But then the other thing that I think is really important is that when you were talking about having, you know, a revolutionary party with discipline and stuff like that, I mean, this is really important. I think this is what made this text so challenging for me.

Because even though I know what he is saying, at least there was a part of me that intuitively knew exactly what he was saying. But there was a part of me that intuitively didn’t know. Because all these DSA types try to “this is why we got to vote with the Shitlibs.

This is why we gotta be, you know, buddying up with AOC, man. Don’t you know, AOC? She’s the business.”

And so as I listen to that and my skin crawls and I develop hives thinking about it, and I think to myself, this is like the largest “socialist organization” out there. But in reality, they were perfectly content with Genocide Joe. They were perfectly content with, you know, AOCIA.

They were totally okay with things that just aren’t okay. And I think to myself, I mean, I was. You know, my first taste test of socialism years back was to join DSA. And I really valued Jacobin at the time.

I mean, you gotta realize I came from a Reagan household. I once was a Ron Paul supporter. If you can put all this into pra… You know what I mean?

The transition from being part of the Rush Limbaugh, ditto head right wing, kind of, you know, “I can beat a liberal with one half of my brain tied behind my back.” All that stuff, you know, all that stuff pouring into constant cultural hegemony.

These messages pouring in through the radio, through the TV, through the school, the history, every single thing you hear is pointing you to hate socialism, to be scared of…

And all you think of socialism as, you know, “the only problem with socialism is eventually you run out of everybody else’s money” or something like that, right? And see, this is where my MMT background destroys that.

So I was able to destroy the anti-socialist stuff early on, even before I became a socialist, you know, and I think understanding that helped facilitate like so for me, my pathway to this came through… Obviously I became part of the Bernie Sanders thing. That was my first real honest to God, pseudo-left wing awakening.

I mean, I become a Democrat for whatever that’s worth. I still had never voted for a Democrat, you know, up until. No, I don’t think I’ve ever voted for a Democrat for president in my life still.

But the point was, is that during this transitionary period, it has been a huge transition. And you were talking about student debt.

I have $125,000 worth of student debt for a Master of Business Administration and a Master of Science and Technology Management. 125 grand. That’s a noose around my neck. And I’m 57. This isn’t going away in my lifetime. You know what I mean? It’s just not going away in my lifetime.

And so everything that you said are the things that went into radicalizing me. Losing my job during the great financial crisis was a big one.

I had a 17 year career as a senior sales engineer at Verizon and I was a Cisco engineer. I was all these things. And lo and behold, I lost my job, I lost my family, I lost everything. And it’s amazing how different the world looks.

And I used to have this saying that “it’s better to have never had than to have had and lost.” Because the idea of not knowing what you’re missing at some level has got to be freeing at so many levels.

But the need to hold on to shit that doesn’t really matter, you know, kind of the trap that capitalism does to us, that kind of indebts us and keeps us defending whatever gains we had. So we betray our fellow workers because we’re hyper-individualistic now. We’ve got to defend our families, not defend the working class and so forth.

So I think that these challenges for me personally in this journey, I think they’ve helped make me have a hunger, a thirst to learn, to grow and develop, to find something that works. Because I’ve tried the Bernie Sanders approach. I tried all those things and each time there was complete capitulation.

There was no real, meaningful, you know, revolution, political revolution, any of that shit. And really, I guess at the end of the day, it’s kind of like, how do you as an individual cope with capitalism not delivering the promises they sell you in school, not delivering the promises they sell you in all the advertisements

and all the happy blonde hair, blue-eyed families with, you know, khakis and they’re smiling for their family pictures at the beach. And, you know, and it just, all the imagery doesn’t measure up, doesn’t match up to reality.

And I think for me, you know, I have an evangelical kind of mindset. I have a desire to talk to people, to socialize these kinds of concepts. And it’s a burden.

Not in the way a sense like, oh my God, you know, but it’s more of something I feel led to do. I feel like I need to do it like a baby that discovers something. “Oh my God. You got to look at this. This is super cool.

You got to, you got to read this, you got to learn this. You got to understand this.”

And I’m wondering, given how much effort and money has been spent to demonize socialists and to kill them, and the efforts that have gone through, like Huey Newton and all the rest of the revolutionaries in this country that have tried and have done and have been killed for those beliefs. How do you frame them in terms of what advancements came as a result of them? Where is the turn? Is it, is it in the, the writings? Is it in just the history so that we know it can be done?

Or, you know, is it, “Hey, they tried and they succeeded and maybe we can try and succeed again.” What is it that we get from understanding and reviewing books like this and other historical figures within the movement?

Breht  O’Shea:
01:10:05

Yeah, so much that you said there that is worth wrestling with. And perhaps I could address the electoral argument here in a second. But to your point, you know, I see everything.

And this is actually not to get again, too jargony with the Marxist stuff, but you know, there’s this idea of dialectics, but it’s basically in its simplest form, it’s…

It’s seeing everything, including political reality and history and even your own self in so many ways, as not a fixed static thing, but as a perpetually evolving and unfolding process.

Once you view everything processually, that everything is in a constant state of overturn and shifting and changing, driven forward by contradictions between and within things, right, you start to see the real impact of these figures. You look at a figure like Malcolm X, right? You say, you know, he did these things.

He stuck his head out. He was incredibly radical. And what did he get for it? He died.

And more evidence is coming out that the FBI was involved in that particular murder, although it was the Nation of Islam, ostensibly in an internecine argument.

But you know, Fred Hampton killed by the Chicago Police Department after having been drugged by an FBI informant earlier in the night. Laying drugged out because somebody slipped something in his drink earlier, passed out next to his pregnant wife.

Chicago police kicked in his door, murder him. This is a, you know, coordination between the local Chicago Police Department and the FBI to kill somebody

that was actually organizing and inspiring people in a very serious way. Fred Hampton was 21 years old. You know, go back and listen to his speeches. 21. For me out… You know, you’re 57, I’m 37. That is a kid. That is a kid.

When you’re 21, you think you’re an adult. When you’re older, you look back and you’re like 21 year-olds. Those are babies, man.

And you know, and he was already so advanced, such a threat to the system that he had to be killed. You say, “Well, you know, what impact did did they have?” Their impact lives on. We’re still talking about them.

We just mentioned Che Guevara earlier, right?

Everywhere around the world where people are rising up against their oppressors in one form or another, you see somebody with a Che Guevara sign, right? Malcolm X’s legacy lives on in black militancy. Literally, the Black Panther Party as a formation came after Malcolm X.

Try to imagine an American history where there was no Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party arose.

No, that was a militant, even down to like, you know, the aesthetics are sort of influenced by Malcolm X. I have this argument that I’ve laid out in the past that hip hop itself is actually an interesting cultural expression and fallout of Malcolm X’s impact on the black community. This self love, this, this. I’m not going to think that I’m lesser than or I’m inferior to the white man.

I’m standing up and I’m saying what I believe loud and proud. And I’m being belligerently me and you have to fucking deal with it. You know, these figures, they live on in history. They continue to inspire.

Do we know the person that shot Malcolm X? Do we know the name of the Chicago police officer that put the final bullet in Fred Hampton’s chest? Do we know even the guy who executed Che Guevara?

No, These people are lost to history. Their contribution was meaningless.

And the people that died, that made the ultimate sacrifice, they were doing it for others, fundamentally, all these figures. And we can talk about so many more, right?

Rosa Luxemburg, you know, we could talk about a million people, many of them that did pay the ultimate price.

You know, a lot of the indigenous fighters like Crazy Horse and stuff, fighting American and European colonialism in North America, we can go down the list.

They died fighting for something bigger than themselves and more than that, fighting for other people, fighting so that their people could have a better future. And ultimately then the Marxist expression that all people will have a better future.

The people that died in the Palestinian resistance, people that died in the Hezbollah resistance in Lebanon, these are people that are living for something bigger than themselves and ultimately sacrifice their life for the advancement of their people, for freedom, for democracy, for self determination. You know, that is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

I’m not saying by no means that any of us have to sacrifice our life for that, you know, but we can sacrifice our time, we can sacrifice our energy, we can certainly contribute to them, but their legacy lives on, and these evolutionary processes continue to mount. You mentioned Bernie Sanders 2016. Think about what happened before that. I was, I’m old enough to have participated in Occupy [Wall Street].

You have Occupy, you have the Bernie Sanders movement, you have all these other iterations like Ferguson and Standing Rock. You have the 2020 George Floyd protests.

You have now the reaction to Palestine and the genocide in Palestine, and all these young people coming into political consciousness, particularly on college campuses, learning about the history of colonialism, imperialism, through their moral outrage at the genocide in Palestine. And all of these things build on each other. Look where the left was in 1999, the WTO protest that, and eventually in 2010 or so, the Occupy protest.

That was a very individualist, anarchist, inflected American left, which is not a diss on them. I’m just saying that was kind of the state of the development of the left at that time.

And through these struggles, through the deterioration of the quality of life, through the educational processes that are these individual instances that seem to blow over, right? Who remembers Standing Rock anymore? You know, who remembers the Bernie 2016?

We might remember it as a vague memory, but we sometimes think, oh, that’s in the past. No, those were steps on the path to an increasingly more informed, more mature American left.

As we go through our own evolutionary process to shake off the Cold War propaganda, to shake off the, you know, the, the impact and the damage that was done to the Left after the ’60s and ’70s, right? The American government- you had the counterculture in the ’60s and then you had these real anti-imperialist, real socialist movements.

Perhaps the Black Panther Party is the most well known. They had to do something. They infiltrated, they c- opted, they killed and murdered and assassinated.

They did everything they could to stop that because it was a real threat.

And then you live through the ’80s and the Reagan era and you have this period of sort of counter-revolution and cultural reactionaryism and all of this stuff. And the left had to kind of find itself again, had to get up out of the dirt and dust itself off in the United States.

And we’re living to and genuinely contributing to that evolutionary unfolding process. And the left has gotten more mature, more young people are coming into the left.

These discussions on the levels of organization and not just “voting blue, no matter who” are actually a symptom of the growing consciousness on the left.

And these contradictions among the left that need to be now worked out that 20 years ago, you know, you and I would just be seen as like, you know, fringe weirdos talking like this. We would be irrelevant, you know, not that we’re at the center of American political life, but, you know, we’re making waves. We’re making waves.

So yeah, I see these things as evolutionary and unfolding and we actively are contributing to that really in the sense of the American left, this maturing process that we’re going through.

Steve Grumbine:
01:17:02

I think that’s well said. And I do want to laugh for a second, but I want to go back to something very serious though.

You said, you know, the tip of the iceberg is the revolution. That’s not the full underneath. I mean, it’s just the starting point.

And I think one of the tropes, and I’m sure that at some level this text that we’ve been talking about loosely back and forth is kind of addressing this in its own way.

But the counter-revolution that always comes after, the counter-revolutionary forces people are always focused on, “Hey, if socialism’s so great, how come so many people get murdered? How many, how many? So many people die, blah, blah, blah.”

And I, you know, I go back and I’m glad you brought up the French Revolution, because that was my first real deep dive in understanding revolutions. And I mean, I spent a lot of time understanding what occurred during that period. And for me just realizing that, right, I mean just as soon as Robespierre crapped

the bed, even before that there was a monarchist movement coming ready to, ready to sweep it all away. And then you have bonapartism I mean, at the end of the day, you’ve got. There’s always a counter-revolution.

I mean, you look what happened with Toussaint Louverture in Haiti and you know, he was kind of like the Barack Obama of revolutionaries. And you’ve got Jean-Jacques Dessalines who comes through there right on the heels of that. But then what happened?

Haiti has been dealing in counter-revolutionary hell now for an awful long time.

You know, I mean, like, so, like people, I don’t think they realize, I mean, Honduras, you look at Nicaragua, you look at Bolivia, I mean, all these, I mean, my goodness, look at Thomas Sankara. I mean, Africa has been living this in perpetuity. Can you talk a little bit about counter-revolutionary forces? And so people understand what…

You know, I’m not a Trot [Trotskyite].

So, you know, this idea of permanent revolution doesn’t really sound awful to me though, because there’s a part of me that kind of understands what that is. But at the same time, you’re in a constant battle. There is a battle, there’s a… There is the other side coming back.

It’s not like it just goes away and everybody assimilates. Can you explain that a little bit?

Breht  O’Shea:
01:19:19

Absolutely. So, so much interesting, fascinating history here.

And you know, one of the core aspects of Lenin’s text, and you know, perhaps the universalizable aspects of Marxism, Leninism, is this need for internationalism that actually it’s not just a socialism that can just happen and be protected in one country. And Trotsky was onto something here when he thought permanent revolution is actually a way to secure the revolution.

Because if we’re just isolated in this one country, we can more easily be isolated from the global economy. We can be actually militarily invaded in various ways. If the revolution spreads, we’ll have allies. So it made sense.

But you have to understand the Russian conditions. They just went through World War I and a Civil war and a revolution. The Russians were not like, now let’s take this to the rest of Europe.

They’re like, can we consolidate these victories and these gains and slow down a little bit and kind of solve some other problems in this project?

So Trotsky could kind of be seen in that instance perhaps as, as ultra left in the infantile sense that Lenin is saying, not because permanent revolution is wrong in all circumstances, but because conditionally, given the specific situation that Russia was in at that time, it was unwise, it was not what the masses wanted. And they kind of rejected that line. Although, again, I’m sympathetic with why Trotsky would argue for it, right? So that’s just an interesting thing.

And the internationalism is like, everybody’s connected. Like, you know, it really is like, look at Cuba, just quick and dirty history.

This is like one of the most clear cut cases of the Cuban revolutionaries being the good guys. If you understand this history. Before Castro, before Che, Cuba is this plantation puppet dictatorship economy that the US ruling class owns.

It’s the brothel and the casino that the American ruling class would come down and vacation in and go back to the US and they had this brutal dictator, Batista, and they had this horrific economy where, you know, literal slaves and plantation owners and all of this. The Cuban people, led by Fidel and Che and Raul and all the others, they wanted to take Cuba back for the people.

It was a national revolution to get this invader, this puppet dictator from the US imperial core that is exploiting and dominating and impoverishing and immiserating their people and killing them and imprisoning any political dissidents, et cetera. We are going to rise up and we’re kicking this motherfucker out of here and we’re replacing it. Totally good. Go back and listen to that stuff.

Fidel, Che, Raul, the revolutionaries of the Cuban revolution, they are the good guys. There’s no way around it. And they have not forgiven them since. To this day, Cuba is under a brutal decades long blockade and embargo.

And think about, you know, not only the fact that any country in the world needs to trade with the rest of the world, but an island nation, you definitely need to trade with the rest of the world just to survive. You’re isolated by water from the rest of the global economy. You need trade.

America says not only can you not trade with us, but anybody in the world that wants to trade with Cuba, you can’t trade with us and in fact, we’ll punish you. And now with the Trump administration, they’re tightening the hatches, they’re shutting down any import of energy whatsoever.

And part of overthrowing Maduro was so that because Venezuela was this huge energy assistant to Cuba, right? It was able to, because they’re an oil producing nation, Venezuela was able to at least give Cuba energy in the form of oil.

Well, now that Maduro’s out, that oil that went to Cuba has been redirected by the US Empire to various other places, including Israel and the Middle East, disgustingly. So obviously this horrific thing and they’ve never been forgiven and that is counter-revolution. You overthrew our puppet dictator. We are going to crush you. In fact, we’re not just going to crush you, Fidel and the Cuban government, we’re going to make sure your children can’t get medicine, we’re going to make sure that your people can’t get food. This is the logic behind, as Kissinger said in 1973 with Chile, make the economy scream.

Which is basically the slogan for the sanctions regimes and embargoes the US has been engaged in ever since.

From Iran to Palestine to Cuba to Venezuela to anybody, anywhere that stands up in any way, shape or form against American imperialism or the penetration of their country, but by Western multinational corporations to extract their resources and funnel them north. Anybody that stands up to that is demonized, is attacked, is sanctioned, is impoverished. And then in the case of Cuba, what do the ruling class do?

They point to it, this little island nation that they have brutalized for decades and they say, “See, socialism doesn’t work.” And Americans eat that up. “Well, yeah, it must be socialism. That must be why those people are suffering over there.”

They have cars from the 1950s because that’s when the embargo started. They couldn’t get new parts in. So the mechanics in Cuba have had to make cars last decades past their expiration date.

I mean, really, once you look at it, you have this amazing admiration for the Cuban people, this amazing admiration for the Palestinian people. These people are under the worst circumstances, impossible.

And yet they still love, they still resist, they still stand up, they refuse to be coward, they refuse to give in. And that’s what we know. So you talk about counter revolution, it happens everywhere.

And then they’ll point to it and say, “See, that whole system doesn’t work. In fact, socialism is actually against human nature. Real human nature is letting five guys own everything. That’s actually our human nature.”

And people fall for it. It’s crazy.

But my last point here, speaking of counter-revolution and actually connecting it with your electoral point, if we elect these Social Democrats, if Bernie 2016 got elected, which I actually supported in a Leninist sense, because he was actually talking about class, he was talking about solidarity, he was talking about political revolution.

For all of his limitations and his cowardice after getting destroyed by the Democrats and still lying prostate in front of them and backing Biden and all of this disgusting stuff that he did, Bernie could have set out a different trajectory, could have done a third party move, anything, but he just accepted his own domination by the Democratic Party, blah, blah, blah, if he would have won, right? And let’s say the Social Democrats are right, just got to vote for Democrats vote for social, vote AOC, vote Bernie. They get into power and then what?

Let’s just take away SCOTUS and let’s take away Congress and the Senate and let’s just say they’re able to advance their Social Democratic goals. Goals that you and I, reforms that you and I would largely agree with, right?

Higher taxes on the rich, universal health care, higher minimum wage, more unions for working people. These are all necessary reforms that any communist, any Marxist, would absolutely support and actually be participating in and contributing to.

But what would happen?

The Social Democrats think that if they play the game by the right rules, if they win fair and square, if they just win elections and play the democratic game well enough and win, that the ruling class will say, “All right, you win. Here’s all of our stuff. Here’s universal health care, you know, here’s a bunch of our money for taxes. Spend it on whatever.”

No!  You run into the same problem that revolutionaries run into. Counter-revolution. The democratic facade would drop away instantly. Capital would go on strike.

You’d have the international Western ruling class coming to the aid of the beleaguered capitalist class in the United States. They would shut down the economy, they would fire people anybody tried to unionize, all this stuff.

Fascism itself is actually an immune response of capitalism under threat.

Whenever capitalism is in a state of decay, and is particularly not only in a state of decay, but is under threat by organized left wing movements rooted in the masses, rooted in the working class, fascism is the way that capitalism reasserts itself. And what does that consist of? Largely, the dropping of the democratic facade.

This is all a game to them, you know, as long as they’re winning, yeah, they’ll do the masquerade, they’ll run the candidates, they’ll pretend there’s checks and balances, the moment in any way, shape or form, right, wrong, illegal, illegal, whatever. You start encroaching on their actual material interests, they will drop the facade and attack you mercilessly.

And they do it to people around the planet. And if we ever had a successful movement here in the United States, they would do it here.

FDR was almost fascist ???couped, the business plot, right? When FDR was just trying to. He’s actually saying, “I’m saving capitalism, my reforms, the New Deal is my way of preventing the collapse of capitalism.”

And still that was too far left. And he almost suffered a fascist-backed military coup because he had so much mass support that was ultimately prevented.

And all these other contingent variables happened. And you know, the Great Depression, World War II and then the post-war boom came.

And so, you know, they were able to give a bigger slice of the pie to the working class in the US and allowed the New Deal to take place simply because after World War II, the US was the global hegemon, right? They rebuilt Europe, they had all the leverage, they had more money than ever, biggest time of economic growth.

And the boomers really got the benefit of being born at that particular time in American history where they were willing to make that compromise in part to prevent more militant stuff. They had the Soviet Union over in the east as a threat, right? The Soviet Union over there saying, “Hey, this could happen there too.”

And you had FDR trying to save capitalism, trying to prevent a Marxist Leninist Bolshevik style revolution in the United States. And he did so successfully.

Once that project played itself out, once capital was sick of sharing their piece of the pie, once profit rates started to fall in the ’70s and ultimately once the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the ’80s, right, then it was, that’s no mistake that neoliberalism became a bipartisan consensus in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. There’s no more threat. The working class has been de-unionized and de-militarized, de-socialized.

And the big Soviet threat, that was an option for all working people over the world, that you could do this too in your country that had completely collapsed and in that particular era is when we get this full bipartisan onslaught that we now call neoliberalism and that we’re living in the wake of. So counter revolution that’s 100% part of the process. And if that’s not baked into your politics, is anybody to the left of center?

If that’s not baked into your politics and you don’t have some way to anticipate it, to prevent it and to defend yourself against it, you’re cooked.

Steve Grumbine:
01:29:26

Yeah, I mean that’s the Bubba Clinton third way bullshit. The triangulation that they mastered to basically bring us further to the right than Reagan ever could. I mean, it’s just kind of shocking.

I do want to do something that I, I’m doing because it’s a good thing, but it’s also because I think people that know I’ve become Marxist Leninist would probably flip out.

And that is, I want to hat tip to Trotsky for one book in particular, and that is the pamphlet he put out called Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It. And even though you have to weed through, I mean if you got rid of all the anti-Stalin stuff, it would be a, like a two pager.

But it really is instructive, though.

It was the first time I ever thought of fascism not as a permanent state, but as a tactic, as a reaction to labor unions and the left in itself organizing, rising up. And this is capital’s way of beating it back down. And I give him all the credit in the world for that.

I’m sure he’s done a lot of other great things, but I’ve struggled with reading one thing and not, you know, it’s hard to read his stuff because literally everything he writes, three quarters of it literally is “Fucking Stalin.” I mean, literally everything he writes is that. And it’s like, okay, I got it, man, I got it. You can’t stand Stalin.

You don’t like bureaucracy, whatever, I got it, I got it, I got it. But this book though, once, if you can get past all that, really, I think is really good at explaining it.

Breht  O’Shea:
01:31:00

Couldn’t agree more, couldn’t agree more. And I’m not, I’m not so sectarian that I say, don’t read anything like, I read everything.

Listen to everybody, engage critically, build up your political knowledge so that you can engage with stuff without being totally swayed by it.

But yeah, Trotsky had many contributions and ultimately before the split and before his own deviations and his own weirdness, he contributed to the Bolshevik revolution in big, serious ways. He was a, you know, high ranking commander in general in the Red Army.

And so he did make his genuine contributions to the revolution and its defense against counter-revolution. So, yeah, the whole split, that’s a whole, you know, rabbit hole we go down.

But I also think it is interesting that a lot of those, in the U.S. especially, a lot of people that were like Trotskyists in the ’60s and ’70s, they became some of the leading figures of the neoconservative movement in the United States in the ’80s and ’90s.

You could have some sort of analysis of Trotskyist, you know, permanent revolution idea and the way he turned against Stalin in a way that turned against the socialist project in a lot of ways. He didn’t articulate it that way, but you could still, you could see how hostile he was to that.

And Trotskyists today are very hostile to many of the revolutions that you and I have just commended and applauded here.

They would call it state capitalism or blah, blah, blah, but I think it’s a very interesting development evolutionarily that a lot of those young Trotskyists in the US became the leading intellectual figures of the neoconservative movement in the ’80s and ’90s, which we’re still living.

Steve Grumbine:
01:32:30

Indeed. I appreciate that. Absolutely. I mean, for me, you know, we had.

You know, I got to talk to Jeremy from Proles Pod, who I know you guys did a lot of great work. He talked about you behind the scenes as well as on the show.

And it was just really, he really helped me understand, you know, kind of the split and really the power of democratic centralism and why Trotsky fucked up. I mean, really.

I mean, when you’re sitting there saying you support Lenin and democratic centralism, but yet you don’t shut up and fall in line once the decisions have been made, you know, really, I mean, you’re part of the problem at that point, right?

Breht  O’Shea:
01:33:09

Totally.

And, you know, that could be applied to this text, the ultra-leftism, this sectarianism, this insistence on purity and the ego personality that gets involved that says I’m right and everybody else is wrong, or I refuse to submit to democratic centralism, even though I agreed to it. What is democratic centralism for those

that are wondering? It’s just the idea that within an organized political party like this, you know, when you’re coming to a decision, let’s say you have to make a decision A or B. Within the party you have vociferous democratic debate. People have different lines, they argue different things.

Everybody gets their turn to say something once there’s a vote. And that organization says, okay, we’re going with B.

Everybody, even those that supported A are expected for the greater good of the organization and the acceptance of democratic input, are accepted to fall in line and support that choice as a choice that the organization has made as a whole and to continue to insist on A, even though you were outvoted, you pleaded your case, the organization has chose B, and you’re still insisting on A.

That becomes sectarianism, that creates splits, that wrecks organizations. That’s egoic. That is putting yourself and your own opinions above the good of the organization.

Sometimes being a part of something bigger than yourself means accepting that you don’t fucking control it. And Trotsky can never do that. And that’s why he fucked up.

Steve Grumbine:
01:34:24

That’s why Mexico happened. So, all right, so let’s go ahead and take this out.

You know, we’ve been on here for a while, and I appreciate this immensely, and there’s so much more I want to talk to you about, and I hope I get many more times in the future to talk to you, because I don’t think I’ve enjoyed too many other conversations I’ve had with people more than this, really have appreciated this.

But what would you say is the key takeaways as we’re walking away from this in the current event? What would you want people to take away from the book, from our conversation and words of wisdom to go forward?

Breht  O’Shea:
01:35:01

Sure.

I would say, first of all, if you’re interested in this, you know, Lenin wrote in pamphlets, so most of his books are actually very short and fairly accessible.

There’s some historical and cultural minutiae that doesn’t translate to those of us living today, some name dropping and responses to things happening at that time.

But if you’re disinclined to go out and read the books, almost every Lenin text has an accompanying Red Menace episode where Alyson [Escalante] my co-host, and I walk you through the entire text, including this one. We go chapter by chapter, talk about all the arguments, then we reflect on it and apply those lessons for today.

So if you’re at all interested in diving deeper, we have almost any communist you can think of that wrote a book.

We have a Red Menace episode out there that you can listen to that can actually be a great assistant to the book or even a standalone episode to understand the main arguments. I would say with this text, Lenin is really pointing out the errors of opportunism.

You know, this right deviation, tailing the masses, which is, you know, falling behind the masses or taking the confused masses line instead of leading them, or being a part of the advanced vanguard party and is arguing against ultra-leftism.

This what how it manifests today is hyper-onlineism, sectarianism, purity spirals, this refusal to engage in impure tactics and just to kind of put the bow on the top of this electoral discussion. Lenin’s basic argument is not shut up and do electoralism.

Lenin’s argument is that the electoral terrain is a genuine terrain, just as the union, the trade unions are a general terrain of struggle, just as ideology itself is a terrain of struggle, hence political education.

I argue religion is a terrain of struggle, that we should actually take back the traditions within Christianity and Islam and Judaism and Buddhism that are very much in line with our core values as socialists and communists and not just say religion bad and let the right wingers take it and speak for it. So he just basically saying, be strategic. Where are the masses actually at? And go there and compete on that terrain.

In the United States, for better or worse, vast majorities of Americans engage with national politics through electoralism, through the elections. That does not mean you just mindlessly vote for blue, no matter who. It does not mean that you support any Democrat.

I didn’t vote for a Democrat in the last election. Hell no.

I’m not going to support anybody that murders and kills people or supports and facilitates the murdering and slaughtering of my brothers and sisters in the Global South. That’s my red line.

But he’s saying communists should operate on that terrain of struggle without liquidating themselves into it, meaning without dissolving their independence into it.

So a communist faction in the United States would, let’s say in Bernie 2016 for a clean example, yes, you would support the Bernie struggle because he’s focusing on class, right? He’s talking about solidarity.

He’s talking about a political revolution, the need for mass movements to come together to make his political project possible at all, which would force people who cared to get involved, organizing and mass mobilizations, et cetera. And this is not the end all be all of our politics. But you can see a venue there that would be worth us struggling on.

And even though it’s impure, even though we don’t believe that electoralism is the end all be all, we still see it as a terrain of struggle.

And so anybody that says, well, you should read Lenin’s left wing Communism and vote for AOC and just support the Democrats, they’ve completely missed the point. And Lenin explicitly criticizes them in this text as well. So it’s really thinking about terrains of struggle.

And I think what Lenin’s genius is, is that he knows how to keep principles firm. I have these core principles, right? Internationalism, proletarian, communist independence, right?

We don’t just dissolve ourselves into somebody else’s movement. The necessity of class struggle, the persistent critique of capitalism as a system. We’re not trying to reform it or make it nicer.

We are ultimately trying to over these, all these principles. And then he mixes that with the ability to be flexible with tactics.

You know, how do we in this moment, given these conditions, engage with the electoral system? And that for me during the last presidential run meant completely criticizing both parties, completely.

That my red line is like, I will never vote for a candidate who is okay with or facilitates in any way the robbery and murder of people around the world. If you are okay with funding Israel during a literal genocide, I don’t care, Blue or Red, Democrat or Republican, you’re not getting my vote.

If you’re somebody that comes tomorrow, runs as a Democrat or whatever, fuck run as a Republican and say, my number one goal here is to stop the imperialist wars abroad, to stop hurting, killing, embargoing, sanctioning people around the World for the interest of multinational corporations like you would get my vote. Because the electoral terrain is a terrain of struggle.

It’s not a priori abstract position that you take going in blue no matter who, or, you know, red no matter who. That’s silly. And as Lenin would say, infantile. As is the stance that we should not engage at all.

That we should just sit back and only talk to people who are already pure, that already understand form our tiny little microsec non-party that we call a party and completely alienate ourselves from any normal person and say that at least we have our purity. Lenin’s critiquing that as well. So I think those are some of the main lessons from this text in general.

And then just kind of as a closing statement, I would just say that we live in the 21st century at a crossroads in the evolution of our species and our civilization. That the choices that we make and the actions that we take in this century that are unique because of their global implications, their implications on the biosphere.

The ability to destroy life on Earth through the development of nuclear weapons and dystopic AI scenarios and a bunch of other things make the 21st century in particular a unique century. In the past, people could fuck themselves up, People could go to war. People could destroy their little areas, their little local ecosystems.

Very, very rarely in human history, before the development of nuclear weapons in particular, could one person or one group of people eradicate life on Earth. And now that is a viable tactic here.

Precisely at the same time, historically, that capitalism is proving itself to be untenable and unsustainable long term, that we’re now looking down the barrel of an AI technological revolution that in and of itself is just another technological development, a neutral tool. But under capitalist class, society will be used to immiserate the working class and to create the world’s first trillionaire.

We could live in a scenario in which we both have 40% unemployment and the world’s first trillionaire. And that is completely in line with capitalist structural logic. And that to me just seems absolutely unacceptable.

And that we have to do everything we can to educate ourselves, educate our neighbors, and then get out in the world and do everything we can to organize and work toward the ability for us to take political power. That’s messy. Nobody likes it.

But the ultimate goal of all of our politics, we want political power so we can wield it for the benefit of human beings, so that we can stop slaughtering people in the Global South.

We can stop embargoing and strangling other people’s economies that we can take the wealth and resources that the workers of the world produce and distribute it to the workers of the world and to all human beings who need. The core slogan of Marxism and communism, “From each according to their ability, whatever you can contribute, please do. To each according to their need. Whatever you need, we got you.”

That is a beautiful one sentence summation of our politics.

And I think at this critical time in history, although it’s scary, although it’s dizzying and disorienting, we are actually given a wonderful, fascinating, gorgeous opportunity to contribute whatever we can to the maturation of our species and ultimately the liberation of our species from the rusted, stupid, brutal cage

of class society and of imperialism and colonialism and domination and oppression. And we might not live to see the end of that.

We might not live to see a fully matured human civilization, but we can certainly play our role and we can certainly leave our mark, and we can certainly contribute what we can and then hand the baton to the generations coming up behind us to take it further.

Steve Grumbine:
01:43:29

This was absolutely amazing, Breht, thank you so much for joining me tonight.

And just so you know, every Tuesday night we have something called Macro N Chill, and we put these podcasts into a video form where we have myself and whoever the guest is in boxes and then we have the words running in the side and we break it up in 15 minute increments and we talk about the subject together and we allow people to ask questions and we discuss it and we think about it and so forth. When this comes out, we would love to have you.

If you can’t come, we understand, but if you would like to, we’ll let you know behind the scenes because we’re taping this well in advance when this will actually be released. But It’s Tuesday nights, 8pm Eastern Time, 5pm Pacific. It’s a lot of fun and it would be an honor to have you. If you can, you can.

If you can’t, we understand.

Breht  O’Shea:
01:44:21

Please let me know and I would love to attend. That’d be awesome.

Steve Grumbine:
01:44:24

Absolutely. All right, so I’m going to take us out. Folks, my guest, Breht O’Shea, is amazing.

He’s with Rev Left Radio and again, his podcast, the Red Menace is out there. You can find it very easily. It’s amazing work. Please support them. As far as myself, my name’s Steve Grumbine.

I’m the host of this podcast, Macro N Cheese. As you know, most of the work we do is between MMT and class struggle and the intersection between so we appreciate all your support.

If you want to become a donor, which we desperately need, you can go to realprogressives.org you can go to the donation page there. You can go to patreon.com/realprogressives and become a monthly donor. And you can also go to our Substack and become a monthly donor.

And with that, on behalf of my guest Breht O’Shea, myself, Steve Grumbine, and the podcast Macro N Cheese, we are out of here.

End Credits:
01:45:26

Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by our volunteer team at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To become a donor please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com, or realprogressives.org.