Air Date: 5–27-2026

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we examine what separates successful revolutions from failed ones, ask why so many revolutions of the 2010s fell short, understand how revolutionary energy gets neutralized, and explore the strategic case for nonviolent resistance.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include

The Inquiry

The Politics Show

Leeja Miller

Dan Harumi

and Degenerate Art

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 4 sections;

Section A, ANATOMY OF FAILURE

Section B, REVISITING THE RECORD

Section C, THE CURRENT MOMENT

And Section D, STRATEGY AND PRACTICE

And now, on to the show.

Milošević took control of Serbia's security services and state media and started brutal wars with its neighbors. Srdja's brother fled the country to avoid the military draft, and his parents, once prominent journalists, now made a living by selling smuggled petrol.

Within this environment, we had only two choices.

We could either fight or flee.

And Srdja chose to fight, but not through violent street protests. He and his student friends had tried that in the '90s. They still had the scars. The new plan was more civilized: to bring down Milošević at the next election. They created a movement called Otpor or Resistance.

Their aim: to get the whole country behind them.

Not only political players but people across urban rural lines, people across the educational lines, and bring all of these grievances to the mass of people that participated in the elections in 2000.

They spread through the country, and soon tens of thousands of people had joined the movement.

The training was intense. They learned how to hide from the police and survive violent interrogations without fighting back. When Milošević called elections in 2000- They knew this was their big moment. All they had to do now was decide which opposition candidate to back. There were quite a few.

We did polling, around the opposition leaders, and it appeared to be that the most visible opposition leaders has the same number of negative votes as Milosevic.

So aside of the fact that they were running the strong parties, they were unelectable.

Milosevic had used his propaganda machine to great effect. Any politician with a chance of being elected had been so demonized that no one would vote for him. So Otpor came up with a genius strategy. Since none of the front runners stood a chance against Milosevic, they'd rally behind an outsider, one with an untarnished reputation.

Now they just needed to make sure people would vote for him. Armed with 60 tons of electoral propaganda, they took to the streets.

Mass protest tactics are likely to be meet with the police, and the more you lower the risk for the people to participate, the more the people will participate. So the less-

So the less likely people think they are to get shot, the more likely they are to come and join you.

Absolutely, which is why we stick to the street theater type of actions with the element of humor.

They wore silly outfits, played volleyball outside police stations where activists had been detained. They danced, played music. Then there was the time they painted a metal barrel with Milosevic's face on it, put a coin slot in the top, and left it on the road next to a baseball bat. People took the hint and spent hours bashing it.

And that was the beauty of these actions, is that police didn't know what to do. If he or she reacts to your prank, he's going to look stupid. If he doesn't, people will understand that they can get away with it, and everybody will start doing it because he's going to look weak. So between stupid and weak, you can choose, but both choices are bad.

"It was the only way they could defeat a state as powerful as Serbia's," he said. Instead of getting sucked into violent confrontations they knew they'd lose, they had to change the terms on which they fought. It's the same if you were trying to bring down Mike Tyson, the world-famous boxer, he says. You wouldn't fight him in the boxing ring.

You wouldn't stand a chance. I

would rather play Scrabble or chess with Mike Tyson because my life expectancy in a boxing ring with him is probably around 18 seconds. So picking the right battlefield is what successful movements do, and picking the battlefield of nonviolent struggle and nonviolent tactics is ideal when you're facing the state because the state has a monopoly over violence.

This laughterism, as they called it, seemed to work, and they combined it with campaigning, producing millions of leaflets and stickers telling people how to vote. Eventually, in September 2000, election day came. Millions turned out. Their votes were counted Milosevic had lost, but he wouldn't go down without a fight

His electoral commission says nobody won the elections, and of course, we were ready for the next step.

A few weeks later, they organized the biggest general strike in history And we actually brought the country to the standstill, leaving country without the electricity. The complete country was paralyzed.

On the 6th of October, protesters stormed parliament and set parts of it on fire. As black smoke billowed around the building, the crowds chanted one word.

Serbia! Serbia! Serbia! Serbia! Instead of defending their president, riot police took off their helmets. A few hours later, Milosevic resigned, and this, says Srdja Popovic, was the most important moment of the revolution, the moment when most uprisings fail

We started keeping the new government accountable from day one, that a lot of the people from the movement stayed outside institutions, putting pressure on the new government to deliver on their promises.

So that was not just replacing one elite with another elite. That was forcing new elite to deliver.

Fast-forward 20 years, and Srdja Popovic is now what you might call a revolutionary consultant. He gives advice to activists all over the world on how to run successful revolutions, and he tells them three things: one, unite your opposition; two, have a plan for what happens after you topple your leader; and three, if you're fighting against the state, don't use violence.

If you don't do that, listen on and you'll hear what happens.

Part four: bitter divisions

The first day of protests was January 25th, 2011. It became clear that something quite remarkable was happening, and I wanted to see it. I wanted to understand what was going on.

That's Michael Wahid Hanna, an Egyptian American analyst at the Century Foundation in New York. When the protests in Egypt broke out, he jumped on a plane and went straight to the heart of them, Tahrir Square.

The Tahrir Square protests were really gathering momentum, and I was there through the protests.

Protesters had been on the street for weeks, not just in Tahrir Square, but in the rest of the country, too. Unlike Armenia and Serbia, these protests were violent. Hundreds had been injured and killed by the authorities.

On February the 11th, the square was packed as usual. I was there setting up a satellite dish on top of a disused toilet so we could broadcast live on the BBC. Then suddenly- In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate. Egypt's vice president appeared on state TV and made an announcement that no-one had expected.

President Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down as the president of the republic. The square erupted.

People were screaming and shouting. There were people crying, people hugging. it was a real joyous moment.

Soldiers lifted children onto tanks. People spilled onto the streets dressed in national colors, and cars honked their way through the city.

Nobody at that moment could have imagined the sequence of events that would really squander that opportunity that had presented itself on that day.

Seven years later, and Egypt is now under the grip of military rule. No dissent, no protests, and thousands have been injured, killed, or imprisoned.

I never call it a revolution. I think it was a revolutionary moment that has ended in failure and a resurgent form of authoritarianism that is worse than the repression that Egypt, suffered under Hosni Mubarak.

So what went wrong? Where was the revolution lost? It was during the 18 days of the uprising. This incredibly powerful but very loose tactical alliance of opposition forces didn't share a lot in common with respect to what should come next. For 18 days, Islamists, intellectuals, businessmen, preachers, and students had come together, united by one thing: their hatred of President Mubarak.

Now he'd gone, the cracks appeared. Unlike in Serbia, there was no post-revolution plan. Instead, there was division and infighting. The opposition fell apart. And the primary beneficiary was the military. Egypt's most powerful institution. It was the military who'd pushed Mubarak out. After he'd gone, they stepped in, and for a while, they were popular.

The military is seen from that moment when it deploys to the streets as a kind of neutral arbiter and not associated with the day-to-day repression and torture, and they are greeted as such in the streets. But all that would change.

It soon became clear the military had a very different vision of the future to that of the protesters. And in July 2013, in a violent coup- The military overthrew Egypt's new president and took power. The military, once seen as the savior of the revolution, had now hijacked it, and the opposition were too divided to stand against it.

The movement very quickly becomes a contest for power. That inevitably leads to fragmentation and competition. And so that bred a kind of existential distrust among these forces that was never able to be overcome. It's been a real failure and disappointment.

It's easy, he says, to look back and blame the opposition for what went wrong, but the odds were always against the protesters. Egypt is far more divided than Serbia ever was, so creating a united opposition movement was almost impossible. But there are still lessons to be learnt from its failure. As we've heard, revolutions live or die by the people who fight for them.

If they can stand together and, most importantly, come up with a post-revolution plan, then maybe, just maybe, they'll succeed.

Right now, Nikol Pashinyan, the Armenian politician you heard about at the start of this program, is beginning his time in office. It may look as though the hard work has been done, but this is just the beginning. Its revolution is hanging in the balance.

I think the interesting thing about Brand to me in the... when thinking particularly about this conjuncture of, the post-financial crisis period, what broadly, you could look at as a period that lasted between the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the autumn of 2008 and the initial lockdowns related to COVID-19 in early 2020.

He, w- you know, we know he became famous through things like Big Brother. He was a TV celebrity. In some ways, a lot of the figures who ended up dominating the 2010s in politics had careers in areas such as the media. When you think of someone like Boris Johnson, has a similar sort of charisma, similar, status within the media as someone who simply just had to be himself and be witty and, a- and somehow drew attention towards himself.

A- and that was obviously the Brand pre-2008 Brand. I think the interesting thing about that decade, and this is wh- why I used Brand to try and, encapsulate something, was that one of the reasons he first, gained attention as a political figure was with the, with his, interview with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight in which he, said, "Really there's no point in voting."

But is it true you don't even vote?

Yeah, no, I don't vote.

How do you have any authority to talk about politics then?

I don't, get my authority from this preexisting paradigm, which is quite narrow and only serves a few people. I look elsewhere for alternatives that might be of service to humanity.

Alternate means alternate political systems

they being?

I've not invented it yet, Jeremy

Statistically, this wasn't actually a particularly unusual thing to, certainly to do. Turnouts in general elections had been falling, since 1997. The 2001 election was a historically low, turnout.

So you could say that, roughly a third of the, electorate had already made up their minds that it wasn't worth voting by the time that, that Brand gave that interview, with Paxman. But I think that what, the reason it drew so much attention was that he was expressing something about the failings of representative democracy, the limits of the electoral system that suddenly seemed charismatic, mobilizing, energizing in certain ways.

And then he said, i- in the wake of that interview, he said, "Really, the only thing that will work right now is a revolution." And again, looking back on it, i- in some ways it looks rather embarrassing that this would've been seen as, such a, a kind of an exciting, when it's anything to say.

And, the New Statesman has its own kind of role in this.

In 2013, the New Statesman invited Russell Brand to guest edit an issue of the magazine. This was called The Revolution Issue.

And then he wrote a book called Revolution, which was a big bestseller. And so i- I suppose what the language revolution hadn't been used very much, over the p- Over the kind of pre-financial crisis era, but in particular, this sort of recognition that there was a gap between what the people, in the kind of populist jargon, might want or need and what was expressed via the voting system was suddenly ga- gaining this kind of extremely, charismatic expression.

And then of course, we then saw all manifestations of that over subsequent years via Brexit and, Corbynism and that sort of thing. But I think that, he saw which way the wind was blowing, let's say.

But this was also a class issue. In his essay Exiting the Vampire Castle, writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote, "For some of us, Brand's forensic take down of Paxman was intensely moving, miraculous.

I couldn't remember the last time a person from a working class background had been given the space to so consummately destroy a class superior using intelligence and reason."

Yeah, the Mark Fisher essay, which became notorious and, I think something that I think i- in many ways, whether he regretted it, it certainly led to a lot of difficult, relationships in, in, in various areas, and it's also then got picked up by people I think that Mark Fisher would've been appalled by as you know- a critique of cancel culture and wokeism and this sort of thing. But yeah, i- in the essay the, Exiting the Vampire Castle, he celebrated, Russell Brand as being this example of someone who was proudly working class, proclaiming various truths that some, elite cartel of both, which engulfs both the media and Westminster had previously shut out in various ways.

A- and that was something which Mark Fisher was arguing, a- as you say, on, on a class basis, that this was, giving voice to something that previously had been there, but it had been silent. And it's true that when you ... if you're thinking about, disengagement from democracy, the people who were withdrawing from the, voting system from elections over previous years and decades tended to be the young and the working class.

But Mark Fisher wasn't the only figure on the left to embrace Brand and Brand's style of politics in the 2010s. He was a prominent voice at protests.

H- how much did you pay for your place?

It's rented. But, so but Oh, is it? Yeah. But no. What kind of rent are you paying? Oh, I'm not interested in talking to you about my rent, mate.

I'm here to, I'm here to support a very important campaign, and you as a member of the media have an important duty.

This is a issue that affects the 100%, because none of us can be happy as long as any of

us are treated with discrimination, as long as any of us suffer from inequality.

And during the 2015 election, Labour leader Ed Miliband took part in a major interview with Brand on his YouTube channel, The Trews.

I decided that some people were saying the campaign was too boring, so I thought I'd make it more interesting. A- and, but the, but the serious point to this is as follows: There are millions of people in our country who are not watching this election, who are not listening to this election, and who think voting doesn't make a difference And Russell Brand is one of the people who said in the past that voting doesn't make a difference.

Now, I profoundly disagree with that, and I'm gonna go anywhere And talk to anyone, to take that message out to people about how we can change this country so it works for working people again

What motivated the left to have this association with brand?

We know that if we go back to that kind of the, the first half of the 2010, so you've got, the coalition winning power in May 2010, introducing an austerity, program.

You've got the protests against tuition fees, happening at the end of that, the end of that year, and then the, those fees kicked in a couple of years later. You had this kind of, a drastic kind of delimiting of what was considered possible. The other important expression which happened around about then was, Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, which I think was published in 2009.

It became a book that many people... it was short, it was very readable, it was very, y- it, it brought into questions the affective state of neoliberalism in, in relation to his own depression and some of the cultural manifestations of a depressive culture which says that the future has to be exactly the same or worse than the present.

And that was what, so much of Mark's, writing, over that period was about. I think that, the, there was clearly what partly was being mobilized there was a generational phenomenon, and I think that's partly what Mark Fisher, helped to give some voice to.

But I think it also in different ways, it was partly the brand, we call a coalition, but certainly the kind of moment of excitement that here was, all sorts of people that felt that they didn't really have any kind of voice at all, and that, of course, the mechanism of the mainstream media and mainstream politics were, not serving them in various ways.

Now, one of the crucial ingredients in that was that in the past, if there were various people who's, who felt that they had no means of expressing their alienation from the mainstream media or mainstream politics, other than becoming pamphleteers, which of course, some people did via anarchist book fairs and that kind of thing, or writing letters to the newspaper, you didn't really have any other media with which to express that alienation.

Social media, which came of age during this period, I think I got a Facebook account 2007 and a smartphone- ... in 2010. So it was round about the time of the- You're an

early adopter

I don't know

Relatively ...

relatively, but I think 2010 was the big turning point with phones, with smartphones, and I think the big platforms were, social media platforms were round about then.

I think Twitter was a few years later. But what they did and do so with such u- unique capacity is to give voice to the discrepancy between the account of the world as given by the mainstream, in inverted commas, and how the mainstream feels to millions of people. And that's something which, you know, various anthropologists and theorists and ethnographers and sociologists have been interested in that for a long time.

But the idea that people themselves are able to basically mobilize and say, "That system over there..." I guess anti-war protests, which I come onto at the end of the essay as well, is it would be, where, if you think of the Iraq protests of 2003, one of the most kind of frequently seen, banners and signs in those protests is not in my name.

And again, there's that idea of the, that what is done via the mediums, media and the institutions of representation of the mainstream, I, they do not reflect me in any way. I'm outside of that, system of representation. And that's what I think social media does so powerfully. It's what Brand was picking up on.

I think Ed Miliband dabbled with it in 2015 because I think he thought it might win him some crucial votes for that election, which we know he, he ultimately, although relatively narrowly, lost.

The new assembly, the National Convention, abolished the monarchy and declared the establishment of the French Republic in September 1792.

The National Convention had divisions of its own, with one group arguing in favor of setting up a bourgeois republic, and the other, led by Maximilien Robespierre, pushed for increasing the political and economic power of the lower classes, of the working man. They called themselves sans-culottes.

Robespierre proved to be the more convincing leader. The convention judged the royal family guilty of treason, and by January 1793, King Louis XVI was beheaded by the guillotine, and Marie Antoinette met the same fate nine months later. The increasing outside threat from pro-monarchy military forces across Europe led to greater popularity for the more radical Robespierre-led faction of the National Convention in France.

His faction drove the pro-bourgeoisie faction from the National Convention in 1793 and imposed truly radical changes to the political, social, and economic landscape of France. They imposed government price controls, taxed the rich, created nationalized assistance programs for poor and disabled communities, called for free compulsory education, and confiscated and sold the land of the French nobles who fled before the war.

They even set up an entirely new calendar system and developed the metric system. For many in France, however, these changes were too much and too fast. Uprisings across the country against the radical National Convention led to harsh governmental crackdown against dissidents, known as the Reign of Terror.

The ten months from September 1793 to July 1794, during which three hundred thousand people were arrested, seventeen thousand of them were executed, and innumerable more died in squalor in their prison cells or were killed without trial. By the end of the Reign of Terror, opposition was so strong to this radical, violent government that Robespierre was overthrown in July 1794, and he himself was sent to the guillotine.

The National Convention quickly reversed course, getting rid of government price controls and abandoning the social laws and efforts towards economic equality. Another new constitution was written, which divided executive power from legislative power, putting the executive in the hands of a directory of five members and the legislative powers into two chambers.

But ongoing war with Europe and continued unrest within France weakened the power of the central government, leading to numerous coups, most notably by a little guy named Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799, who abolished the directory and became the leader of France, ending the French Revolution era and beginning the Napoleonic era.

During which time Napoleon attempted to bring the revolution to the rest of Europe with varying degrees of success. Now, what does all of that have to do with today, with this modern era? Where are the similarities? Let's discuss, shall we? So in 1780s France, you have great economic instability due to issues with trade, issues with crops and agriculture, and significant cultural unrest because of the growth of the middle class, of manufacturing, and the expansion of capitalism into more people's everyday lives.

You also have increased exposure to new enlightenment ways of thinking, but no one could really afford anything, while the wealthiest people had all the money and power. You also had numerous wars across the globe leading to significant national debt. That's a lot of similarities. Today, we have 50 years of the neoliberal experiment of fucking around, coming to a head, entering its finding out era, with extreme wealth inequality and large numbers of people barely scraping by, while the power, political influence, and money all rises to the top 1%.

You have extreme economic turmoil spurred on not only from 50 years of neoliberalism and monopolization, but also the COVID pandemic and a 30% cost of living increase in the last few years that incomes never caught up with. Couple that with the revolutionary advancement in AI in an extremely short period of time, leading to a panic of people thinking that it's going to take their jobs, or even worse, completely decimate the planet, either through the coming artificial general intelligence or, more likely, through the environmental destruction that AI will cause.

Add on to that the creation of social media, especially TikTok, and the short form content model, which means more people are exposed to more information more easily, leading to the creation of factions, but also the greater dissemination of more and more radical information, but also the greater dissemination of different political modes, different ways of thinking, different ways of forming a government.

At the same time, there is a dramatic breakdown of trust in institutions. We no longer believe that the Supreme Court can make logical and unbiased decisions. Media has conglomerated to the point that it's exclusively owned by evil, maniacal Lex Luthor types. The DOJ is exclusively going after enemies of the president while letting actual literal insurrectionists go free.

Congress has completely abdicated all of its power in the name of allowing the executive branch to walk all over it, and the executive branch is dominated by unelected fringe lunatics who don't represent the will of anyone. That being said, there are many important ways in which 1780s France is very different from 2026 United States, obviously.

The key areas where I think this is true is in our form of government and our economy. While yes, I think more and more people are being exposed to the ideas of communism, Marxism, socialism, especially democratic socialism, none of these ideas are as revolutionary as the Enlightenment was in Europe at that time, because they've been around for a while.

We've known about them for a while. Democratic socialism is an accepted style of government in numerous countries in Europe. The French Revolution was inspired in part by the revolution in the United States, and both created or attempted to create constitutional democracies or republics that had never existed before.

They were completely new experiments inspired by this revolutionary new thought brought about in the Enlightenment thinking. I don't think we have something that new or different or radical that I'm seeing being proposed by the people who want to see change happen in this country. Socialism, communism, everyone disappearing into the woods to live in communes off the land in harmony with one another, it's all been attempted before in some form or another.

None of this is a new invention of the twenty-first century. Odds are that even if there was some sort of revolution in the United States, that the fundamental form of government wouldn't change as drastically as France did from a monarchy to a republic and so quickly. Let's talk economic system. We are absolutely going through economic shocks right now.

People are uncomfortable. The way we do work has dramatically and completely changed over the last fifty or so years. For example, as a lawyer, I literally wouldn't know how to practice law in the 1970s. The internet, COVID and remote work, and now AI has fundamentally changed the nature of people's jobs, some more than others, in ways we're only really beginning to understand, but in ways that have laid economic inequality completely bare, whether you're getting laid off because of AI, or you were forced to work through a pandemic as an essential worker while making minimum wage.

We are feeling these changes in really dramatic ways. I'm not sure, however, that these changes are as dramatic as the changes that occurred between the feudal system and the system of capitalism in France in the 1700s. We are still existing in capitalism the same way we were 100 years ago. We're just engaging with it differently.

We have settled into our roles as consumers above all else in a way that just wasn't the case in the feudal system. To go from a strict three-tiered caste system to one where there was upward mobility, trade, manufacturing, that fracturing of the societal and economic system was a fundamental shift that I don't think we've seen here in the United States.

The shocks here compared to the shocks leading up to the revolution, they just don't compare. But I do still think there are things we can learn from the French Revolution that can inform how we move forward today Specifically, my central takeaway from this little comparative exercise is that even the most enlightened, forward-thinking, progressive movements can all go to shit.

That's not to say important things didn't come from the French Revolution. It established new norms and new ideas that even if they didn't come to fruition at the time, like universal compulsory education, for example, they planted a seed that later became a reality. And the nature of these types of big, bold political ideas is that you have to be willing to try and fail and tweak and work on them with the North Star of greater freedom and equality for more people grounding that work.

But even if you have the best intentions and the most enlightened ideas, the cult of personality, the fervor of revolution, the drama and fear of instability can lead to, let's just say, heavy-handedness. It can lead to violence, violence that is often unnecessary. Revolution, as you can see displayed in many revolutions across time, may start with lofty ideals and theories, but can end in tyranny when the inevitable backlash happens when you try to change too much too quickly.

The instability that comes from a too much too fast approach can lead to the death of a nation. Many great things came from the French Revolution. It is also a cautionary tale. And when we think about our current moment, I, as someone who runs in pretty leftist circles on the internet and in my own comment section, I often see people calling for revolution, for armed revolution, for a push for dramatic changes as quickly as possible.

I see a sense of impatience, which is totally understandable. I feel it too, and most things feel too little too late. Most things feel like, well, if they wanted to, they would. But even if they wanted to enact some progressive change that seems like it would make everyone's lives better, the reality of politics, of running a country, especially one as big as the United States, that's another difference to France, which was largely racially and religiously homogenous in the 1700s and contained within a much smaller land mass than the US, the reality is that there is always a backlash.

There is always a ripple effect of largely unintended consequences for every decision in governing, and something that seems obvious or straightforward often is not. It makes me think of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's stance that the court's decision in Roe v. Wade created a change that was too much too fast, and it would have been better to push abortion rights through the legislature, where it would require a greater will of the majority.

And we did see 50 years of backlash after Roe v. Wade that culminated with Dobbs, but continues today in the fight over mifepristone and the ongoing fights in the States. And that's not to say Roe v. Wade caused all of this, but it's hard to know how abortion rights would look in this country if they had been written into law instead of ordered by the Supreme Court.

Who knows if we would have ever even gotten them? It's hard to know. But the point is that too much too fast can backfire, and we saw that in the ten months of terror during the French Revolution when these supposedly enlightened leaders in favor of equality and freedom guillotined literally 17,000 people because they didn't fall in line.

Okay. So is the United States headed for its own form of the French Revolution? I don't think so. The shocks to the system today are bad, but not like the shocks to the French system in the 1700s. And as a pacifist, personally, I'm okay with that. Though as my video from earlier this week discussed, that doesn't mean we won't see continued political violence.

The people are mad and they need an outlet for that anger, but I'm not sure that it's gonna rise to the level of a full-blown bloody revolution.

When you strip away collective action, when you strip away the ability for people to come together to address a real problem, to address collective anxiety, the problem doesn't go away. The anxiety doesn't go away. What ends up happening is a collective problem becomes shifted to an individual problem.

Collective action becomes individual action. It becomes, "What are you going to do? What is your plan for saving yourself and your family?" Because that's all you can really focus on at that point There's an idea, I've talked about this before, about the permanent underclass. This is an idea that's been going around recently surrounding AI, which is that at some point in the near future, there's gonna be a split, a bifurcation, the K-shaped economy.

Some people are gonna be on the good part of the K on the way up. Some people are gonna be going down. And the permanent underclass is something that you have to escape. If you make the right moves, if you make the right investments, if you follow the right career path, you can be one of the good ones.

You can get to the good part of the K while everybody else is stuck in the permanent underclass. This issue, the way it's being described, it has the same language as the Rapture. It has the same logic as, you know, Jesus coming back and taking the, you know, the saved. It is an event that is being described as inevitable.

It's gonna happen, therefore, your job is to make sure that you're on the boat. Make sure you are setting yourself up for salvation, because you don't wanna be left off the boat. It's gonna be scary.

And this kind of anxiety, this kind of, you know, the anxiety that it produces is real. People can feel economic precarity. You are not imagining that But nobody stops to ask, should there be a permanent underclass? Nobody asks, is this okay? Is this something that we just have to accept as a event that is about to happen?

Nobody stops to ask Can't Jesus just take everybody? Because that's not an option. If that was an option, the event itself wouldn't have the same kind of urgency. You wouldn't be able to sell something behind it. And that's what this permanent underclass thing really comes from. It comes from some kind of guru guy online who's trying to sell you a course.

This is, "If you pay me this ninety-nine bucks, I'll give you the answer so you can escape the permanent underclass." They are trying to resolve your anxiety for you through purchasing. "If you follow my movement, then you can be one of the saved and, uh, you know, Jesus will take you while everybody else, I don't know, they go to hell or something."

But the thing to think about with the Rapture, I've talked about this in the past too, but

The rapture as a concept, the idea that the world is ending and that it is going to happen soon. Sometimes they give you an actual date. "This is when everything's gonna go down, so get your affairs in order. Walk to the top of the hill." This happens again and again throughout history over the last centuries.

People keep thinking it's about to happen, and when it doesn't happen, the idea doesn't really disappear. It just gets pushed further down the road. This isn't because people are stupid. This isn't because people are gullible. The reason it keeps coming up is because even if the event doesn't happen, the anxiety doesn't get erased.

You still end up with the same problems you had before. So the same thing is happening with the permanent underclass. Nobody can ever give you a date for when that split's gonna happen. And when it doesn't happen, if it doesn't happen, all they're gonna do is push it further down the line. All they're gonna tell you is, "It hasn't happened yet, but that's why you still have time to buy my course.

That's why you still have time to save yourself."

But the key to understanding this is seeing that- the solution they're giving you is always going to be individual. It's always going to be focusing on saving yourself, focusing on an individual solution to what is clearly a collective problem. And when you go down that path, you lose the ability to collectively address anything.

You lose the connection that got us to where we are. This is how you end up with paranoia. This is how you end up with conspiracy brain, because you have lost the ability to trust anybody. You have lost the foundational trust of humanity, of collective action When we talk about the importance of learning history, you hear about it as trying to avoid the mistakes of the past, and that's part of it.

But the real value of history is understanding mechanism. It is understanding what the fights were about in the past and how we got to where we are now. Because where we are now is not a permanent situation. The catalytic converter under your car is vulnerable. It can be taken away. The things that we have now, the things that feel invisible, that feel solved, they can take those away too.

Everything is on the table. The importance of learning history is understanding what it took to actually get this and what we might have to do again And that's the thing, the real problem I have with this narrative of the permanent underclass. The problem is that the idea kinda makes sense There is an underclass, obviously.

Society is stratified in a certain way. There is hierarchy and growing inequality. My problem with the permanent underclass as a concept is that it's supposed to be permanent. Because if there's a permanent underclass, that means there's also a permanent overclass. There's a permanent dominant class, where if you get there, you're just in.

Jesus has taken you up, and now you're in heaven. And once you're there, the thing is done. You're safe now. That's ridiculous. History is a story of people thinking they got there and then finding out they didn't get there. They got there for a while, and then they fell back. Increasing inequality, the rapid movement of resources and wealth upwards.

This means that it's never over. You're never there. You might think you got there because you were clever and you did the right things for a while. But once you get there, they can still take that from you. Of course they're gonna take it from you. You will still always have the option of falling back.

And once you do fall back, you're gonna be with the rest of us. Because as much as you fought to be the individual who overcame the odds, the individual who broke the narrative and found the path forward, at some point You're gonna be down here with the rest of us

political violence tends to beget more political violence and add to long-term instability.

The World War was a red nightmare, and it seems incredible that it should have started with such a relatively unimportant event as the assassination of the Archduke Leopold of Austria.

When people think of the strategic removal of one person

I'm delighted to welcome Alex Churchill. Alex is a historian and presenter with a fresh perspective on the opening year of the First World War.

As the government is arguing that Cole Allen did when he went to the Washington Hilton, there's all

these excuses that people come up with for getting involved in the war.

There's very little control that one person has in terms of what they're doing.

But the really big driving factor for everybody is imperialism. It's stuff And is being the biggest player on the world stage at the end of it.

Meaning the results often have little to do with the thoughts or views of the person who went to commit violence.

On the 28th of June, 1914, a 19-year-old Bosnian-born Serb called Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Leopold It's a miracle he pulled it off, because he and his friends were grossly incompetent.

Violence often morphs and warps and does harm far beyond the intentions of the person or party or government that inflicts it.

What Austria-Hungary does is seize the assassination as an excuse to put them in their place. Now, they're not trying to start a world war. I think

what practitioners

imagine as righteous violence You couldn't afford, if you were a major imperial power, not to have a seat at the table at the end, and really, that's the excuse.

often as not gets hijacked, interrupted, and corrupted.

The big, long list of causes, long and short-term, are important, but really the only cause that matters when we talk about the outbreak of the First World War is imperialism.

The second reason is that y- you can't win gains without strategy.

C.T. Vivian, a close friend and advisor to Dr.

King.

You can't be strategic without discipline.

Senator Barack Obama, in 2007, called him, "The greatest preacher to ever live."

Discipline in action is important to build community and coalition.

50 years ago, Vivian was punched in the face by Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark on the courthouse steps in Selma as he tried to escort a group of African Americans inside to register to vote.

And while communal violence can be disciplined and can build interpersonal bonds in some cases, it often does so in really destructive ways that are hard to transition to non-violent models.

The punch was so hard Sheriff Clark broke his own hand. C.T. Vivian began by talking about the power of non-violence.

If you never manage to transition to a non-violent model

What was given to us from its very beginnings is an understanding that we could not win by killing.

communities organized principally around committing violence don't have a great long-term track record.

Light doesn't come because of darkness.

And the third reason is one that really just boils down to personal preference in some ways. Non-violence is what I've studied, and I know what tends to work within its frameworks, and even am aware of its shortcomings. If I'm going to be strategic, I'm gonna use the tools I know how to use. Sometimes that might limit my toolbox, but I feel a responsibility when I swing a hammer.

I wanna know what I'm building and how it's gonna be put together.

May I interrupt you there, Dr. King? There are today certainly people who are forced to endure a kind of injustice that neither you nor even Gandhi in his time had ever seen.

Don’t forget that nonviolence isn’t refusing to embrace or to use power.

I feel that, um, nonviolence, organized I should say, organized, uh, nonviolent resistance is the most powerful weapon, weapon that oppressed people can use in breaking loose from the bondage of oppression.

It’s learning to develop it and use it in different ways.

I think it, uh, should apply in every situation in the world where individuals seek to

break loose from the bondage of colonialism or from some totalitarian regime or from the system which we confront

in America. At the same time, I understand that violence is the default for many facets of American society. In the

wake of the George Floyd killing, most Americans have now come to realize that the police

need sweeping changes.

But the question is, why has it taken so long? We are an extraordinarily policed society

with violence as a core part of daily life. Why did so many people, particularly white people, think until now that police are just

fine the way they are? We can see this in the allocation of money to law enforcement in our municipal,

state, and federal budgets.

Well, one reason is that most Americans don't actually have much actual experience with police. We see it in the fetishization of law enforcement and the military as quasi-religious figures

to whom the state enthusiastically gives power over life and death. How are they forming their opinions about the police?

Well, a lot of

it comes from the same way I form all my opinions about Klingons. We can see it in the impunity that law enforcement has to commit violence

against and kill non-citizens and citizens alike. It's actually crazy how every cop show has police just regularly using violence to help them do their job.

To be clear, nonviolent efforts often get met with state violence anyway.

According to cop shows, whenever cops are breaking the law, it's only because they have to.

We can't just break protocol because we think it's right at the time and expect to get away with it.

Whatever practice you use for social change, I think it’s good to ask what your strategy and tactics hope to accomplish.

In real life, beating a suspect is a great way to get them to confess to something they didn't do, which means you've locked up an innocent person and you've let the real criminal walk free.

So why not commit violence if you might be met with violence anyway? Because I grew up with violence, and I’m interested in creating power that is not violence, that chooses to act outside a frame of violence and actively doesn’t replicate it.

But that is hard and slow work, and it's frustrating for a lot of people.

Since the early 2000s, Erica Chenoweth, Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School, has systematically and empirically assessed historical and contemporary mass movements, focusing on the efficacy of nonviolent campaigns.

Non-cooperation, nonviolent resistance, boycott strikes, there's so many ways of using power, even physical power, in the pursuit of a political end without committing violence against other human beings.

The idea is that when people use these types of techniques in sequences that increase their political pressure over time against the opponent, while also managing the risk to people for participating, that they can achieve extraordinary political, social, and economic breakthroughs that kind of surprise observers who kind of maybe underestimated how powerful people power can actually be.

I want to build something different than some kind of police state-like society.

The most important thing to know about why nonviolent resistance is so effective, I think, is that it's a truly inclusive method of resistance.

In our current society, law enforcement has the power to commit violence.

Damn

straight!

Political actors often make the public afraid in order to be able to make the argument that you are in danger, and the state needs the ability to commit more violence in order to protect you.

Here now to weigh in is White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller.

Stephen, this week the president doubled down on that promise to take on sanctuary cities, saying, "They do everything possible to protect criminals at the expense of American citizens."

This brings more power both to those politicians and to law enforcement.

ICE, over and over and over again, goes out into the community to find and arrest these fugitives who have since committed additional egregious crimes after they were released by Fry and Waltz and Ellison.

These are acts of insurrection against the laws of the United States and against the sovereignty of the United States.

It may sound obvious, but in my experience, a system that increasingly puts its resources toward a capacity for greater violence will lead to more violence.

Pete Hegseth told a House committee that the Pentagon is asking for a war-fighting budget.

Hegseth says the military needs $1.5 trillion for the next fiscal year. That's a 44% increase.

I don't want to contribute violence to a violent system because it rarely ends the violence, and instead, usually produces more.

This leads to another one of our long-term causes, which is militarism By this, we mean that countries became kind of obsessed with making sure that they had the biggest army they possibly could.

And, and in some aspects, they're concerned with having a bigger army than their neighbor.

I'm not saying it's never worked, but I'm saying it doesn't have a great track record.

The First World War was and still remains the bloodiest war ever fought in the history of the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Belgium, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

And as I've said before, the involvement and persistence of determined people who keep showing up is under-girded with a different kind of power, a different kind of pressure, implicit pressure, both physical and psychological.

What this really suggests is just that people power isn't just about a huge number of people being in the streets, but it's about that building of pressure and the building of momentum.

The implicit psychological dynamic occurs when you make your position the normal one in society, the reasonable one that people come to accept and get it to be perceived as such, so that those who embrace hate and violence and targeting vulnerable groups feel those ideas are the outliers, and put them outside the social norms in a way that will be upsetting to some of them.

We've just heard clips starting with

The Inquiry examining what separates successful revolutions from failed ones, looking at both Serbia and Egypt as two defining cases.

The Politics Show traced how Russell Brand's rejection of voting, his 2013 New Statesman Revolution Issue, and his 2015 interview with Ed Miliband made him a focal point for left disillusionment after the financial crisis.

Leeja Miller walked through the French Revolution to argue that while today's US faces real instability, the shocks don't rise to the level that would trigger a full-blown bloody revolution.

Dan Harumi drew a parallel between rapture theology and the "permanent underclass" narrative, showing how both manufacture urgency around an inevitable event to sell individual salvation while making collective solutions unthinkable.

And Degenerate Art drew on WWI's catastrophic origins and Erica Chenoweth's empirical research to explain why organized nonviolent resistance consistently outperforms violence as a strategy for lasting change.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

But first, speaking of failed revolutions, I’m just repeating the sad news about our new show, SOLVED! that we had to put on indefinite hiatus due to sudden economic instability and ad dollars drying up.

Right now, I’m rethinking everything and said that I’ll be keeping you posted on our progress as it develops. So, in short, I’m reimagining our entire social media strategy from the ground up for unpaid marketing, while also working on building a strategy for a paid marketing campaign, while also rethinking what our members-only content looks and sounds like.

No big deal, just that.

So, to our members supporting the show, you’re really getting us through right now and we appreciate your patience while we work on cleaning up this mess.

Thanks to everyone who is a member or has made one-time donations. And if you haven’t signed up yet but are thinking about it, each episode of Best of the Left takes about 25 hours of human labor so it’s not particularly cheap to produce and essentially every dollar we can spare right now beyond basic costs will be going toward finding new listeners.

So, if you get value out of the show - and think others would too! - and want to get it delivered ad-free to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support - there's a link in the show notes - through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app.

Plus, if you’re worried that signing up for a membership won’t be impactful enough for the struggles we’re facing, that’s why we offer higher membership tiers so that you can voluntarily give us more money. But if those options still don’t seem like enough and you want to cut a check to help fund our marketing campaign, just drop me a email and we’ll sort that out.

If you have a question or would like your comments included in the show you can record a voice message - re-recording until you're happy with it - by tapping the link in the show notes,

You can message us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,

or you can simply email me to [email protected]

Speaking of members keeping the show going and leaving voice messages, we got a voice message from one of our members who’s helping to keep the show going.

 Hi Jay, Amanda, Dion, and Aaron. This is Jared from Baltimore. I've been listening since I was a sophomore in college in 2002 when a dear friend put me on. Longtime listener, first time caller. Uh, Solved has been a genuine joy. Hearing your team off script, learning about their thoughts and fears and obsessions, and hearing their perspectives. Uh, shout out to Dion for the sports metaphors. I'm not a sportsball person myself, but they always make sense to me. Um, when you shared that, uh, dried up ad revenue is threatening Solved, I decided to triple my subscription, so I have officially graduated from professional protester to radical leftist. Um, I wish I could give more. Your synthesis of the structures beneath the systems we inhabit is some of the finest fucking journalism around. You have brought clarity and understanding during one of the most difficult periods in, in history, and we need it now more than ever. So thank you, and thank your whole team. Please keep it up.

Thanks for that message Jarrett. Just one small quibble, he couldn’t have been listening since 2002 because the show launched in 2006 but that just opens up more questions. But can I just say, on the topic of voice messages in general: In the early days, we used to have a really vibrant voicemail segment on the show and people would regularly say that it was their favorite part of the show. But about 15 years ago, things began to shift and we entered a sort of death spiral where the fewer voice messages we got, the fewer people felt like it was a good idea to send voice messages, which decreased voice messages even more, and so on and so on.

But I think we’re due for a revival so I’m going to begin asking a discussion question in each episode to kick things off but you should also feel free to respond to anything you heard on the show, including other voice messages.

So, here’s today’s question: Research discussed in the show today suggests that nonviolent movements succeed because they're radically inclusive — anyone can boycott, strike, or refuse to cooperate. What's one form of nonviolent pressure you've personally participated in or witnessed working, and what made it effective [or not]? I would love to hear.

If you have a response to share, send us a voice message by tapping the link in the show notes. For you old school listeners who have our old phone number saved in your phone, don’t be tempted to use it because I don’t check that system anymore.

Now to my comments on today's topic,

One of the first things I learned when I did a stint working at a climate change organization was that every event you put on has to give people a way to stay connected. Capture the contact info, hand them the next action, keep the momentum going by keeping the relationship going. It's the most basic piece of organizing infrastructure there is.

I went to a Sanders/AOC Fighting Oligarchy rally in a giant outdoor park last year, tens of thousands of people, the kind of event that takes massive organizing infrastructure to pull off. I've also been to some No Kings rallies and I know that building events like these is genuinely hard work, which is exactly what makes it tragic that after all that effort to get tens of thousands of people in one place, there's no giant QR code on the screen sending everyone to a signup page with a next action.

During my time at the climate org, when we had a rally we would have been frantically sending around staffers with clipboards through the crowds asking people to put down their contact information. These days it would be so much simpler to send people to a signup page that they can do on their mobile device in the moment and be added to the organization list immediately and given guidance on what their next personal action could be to stay plugged in.

Now, there are technically reasons why event organizers don't do something like that, usually having to do with the intricacies of being in a coalition or the legalities of organizations with different statuses avoiding legal exposure from the IRS. So, these people aren't clueless. It's not like I'm telling them something they've never thought of before. But I am urging organizers to prioritize this because the most basic piece of organizing infrastructure is creating the next step for people, and at our flagship events I found the next steps to be missing.

And that’s the whole problem in miniature.

The work to fill a park with tens of thousands of people is enormous. What we keep failing to do is everything that should happen after the park empties out. And it can't always be the short-term stuff like calling Congress to put pressure on your representatives, or donating to the right cause, or even organizing turnout for the next election. Long-term success depends on long-term planning and that should be part of the regular rhetoric we hear from movement leaders.

The right has been doing nothing but that kind of work for fifty years and that asymmetry is most of why we're losing.

First, the big picture. The Heritage Foundation has been doing personnel-pipeline work since 1981, when they delivered their first Mandate for Leadership policy book to Reagan and watched about 60% of its recommendations become policy. They've kept iterating on that book for over forty years. Project 2025 was the ninth iteration, plus a database of pre-vetted appointees ready on day one.

A year later, in 1982, a handful of conservative law students started the Federalist Society as basically a campus debate club. Forty years later they had used it to put six of nine current Supreme Court Justices on the bench.

Skip ahead to 2010. The Republican State Leadership Committee ran a project called REDMAP, spent roughly thirty million dollars on state legislative races nobody was watching, won them, and used the wins to gerrymander congressional districts that locked in Republican advantages for the next decade. David Daley laid the whole story out in his book Ratf**ked.

But it wasn’t all organizing behind closed doors, elements of the conservative movement also called in regular folks to be foot soldiers.

In the early 90s, Ralph Reed at the Christian Coalition kicked off the school board project, using what he openly called "stealth" tactics. Run on vague language, downplay religious motivations, win in low-turnout races. By the mid-90s the Coalition had captured thousands of these seats nationwide. Moms for Liberty inherited the playbook and are using it to this day.

Then in 2021, Steve Bannon spent the year on his War Room podcast telling MAGA listeners to fill empty Republican county committees, the local party seats that decide who gets on the ballot and who staffs the polls. ProPublica found at least 8,500 new precinct officers signed up in just the 41 swing counties they tracked.

These aren't one master plan, they're overlapping projects across conservative factions that often hate each other. But the work is identical, the same boring, patient pattern.

Of course, a lot of what the right has been doing patiently is also nakedly anti-democratic. REDMAP was gerrymandering, and Bannon's precinct strategy has election subversion built right into it. But that’s part of what creates the motivation asymmetry here.

People pushing for revolutionary change like Christian nationalists wanting to drag the country back to some imaginary version of itself, or run-of-the-mill MAGA cult election deniers are always going to be more motivated to show up to a Tuesday meeting than people who basically just want local politics to function the way it's supposed to, with regular people just trying to do their best for their communities, not trying to usher in a theocracy.

That's just how it works, radicals show up. We shouldn't have to fight this battle on this terrain, but we can't cede it to people who are being told that taking over their school boards will help bring about God’s plan for Trump to end the world.

On the left, the boring logistics have always been under appreciated.

Jane McAlevey, the labor organizer who died two years ago, spent her career on one basic distinction. There's mobilizing, which is turning out the already-convinced for an event, and there's organizing, which is the slow patient work of finding the natural leaders inside a workplace and building a base that wasn't there before. Mobilizing makes spectacle, organizing builds power. Inside organizing circles this is basically conventional wisdom, McAlevey has been required reading for years. The problem is it hasn't gotten through to the broader progressive imagination, to the people who go to the rallies and post online and donate but don’t have a local meeting to attend.

A giant QR code at a rally that gives people their next step is one way of bridging the boundary between mobilizing and organizing, and at our flagship events, I’m not seeing how they’re trying to bridge that gap.

So why does the left keep skipping the boring part? Part of it is that capitalism has gotten very good at letting the explosion happen, filming it, selling the documentary, and absorbing everyone back into precarity once the news cycle moves on. But there's a deeper thing going on, I think, which is that the left has an institutional problem with power itself.

It kind of makes sense. If you've spent your political life fighting people who have too much power over others, authoritarians and corporations and billionaires, your instinct is to reject the structures that produce that kind of power. But that instinct ends up rejecting the systems that would create power within the left, too. Building power requires institutions and structure, which means somebody being in charge of something, but that pretty quickly starts to feel uncomfortably like the thing you've been fighting. Occupy is the obvious example. The movement actively refused to build an organizational framework or name any leaders, and when reporters kept asking what their demands were, the movement treated the absence of an answer as a virtue. The point was to model a different kind of relationship to power, one without any of the compromises that come with organizing.

Protesting feels pure and unsullied. You can show up with whatever sign you want and whatever opinion you brought with you, and the experience feels inclusive precisely because nobody has to sit down and hash out which values the organization is going to be built on because rally attendees aren’t building an organization.

But building power requires exactly those conversations, the ones where compromises get made and a coalition has to be assembled out of people who don't fully agree with each other. That work feels less pure almost immediately and less righteous. So a lot of people would almost rather stay on the outside, sign in hand, feeling like they haven't compromised anything, than sit down at the table where messy alliances actually get built. But it’s those messy alliances that are exactly what produces the kinds of change huge supermajorities of the left actually say they want but that we’ve been struggling to achieve for decades.

Another concern, isn't compromise and coalition building just liberal incrementalism in a new outfit? No. Incrementalism is settling for less now. Building power in preparation for a boring revolution is building the muscle that lets you actually win later.

You can't have a successful general strike without unions that have been organizing for a decade beforehand, and you can't have a transformative administration without a personnel pipeline ready to staff it. The right understood that the moment requires the preparation, while the left in general and Democrats in particular have spent decades pretending we could skip that part.

The cleanest contemporary example on the left of doing this right is what the UAW did under Shawn Fain after the Stand Up Strike in 2023. After six weeks of strike, the Big Three auto companies caved on raises and cost-of-living adjustments and ended the wage tiers. The strike got the footage but the more important move came after. Fain deliberately set the new Big Three contracts to expire at midnight on April 30, 2028, and publicly called on the rest of the labor movement to align their contracts to that date, so May Day 2028 could be a coordinated mass strike across industries. That's five years of patient calendar-alignment work to build the conditions for exactly the kind of moment the left usually just romanticizes.

And it's actually moving. At the 2024 AFT convention in Houston, the American Federation of Teachers, with 1.8 million members, overwhelmingly passed a resolution endorsing the call, with the Chicago Teachers Union leading the push. The American Postal Workers Union signed on. Other unions and AFL-CIO labor councils are joining. The general strike everyone fantasizes about isn't going to be a spontaneous explosion, it'll be the product of years of unglamorous calendar coordination across dozens of bargaining units, by people doing the work nobody is filming.

So, what to do? Embrace the boring work. Go to your local school board meetings and run for a seat if you need to. Join your county Democratic precinct committee, most of them are starved for members while Bannon's people are filling theirs. Volunteer as a poll worker. If you're already in a union, ask your local what its position is on aligning the next contract with May 1, 2028, and if it hasn't signed on yet, urge them to. Look into Run for Something, they recruit and train candidates for the small offices nobody else runs for. And read Jane McAlevey's No Shortcuts.

These actions aren’t equally available to everyone, and if you're juggling three jobs or caregiving or disabled, showing up to a Tuesday school board meeting might actually be impossible. But supporting the people who can show up is also the work; money, childcare, rides, whatever lowers the barrier.

And one specific ask for anyone who runs rallies or events. Put a goddamn QR code on the screen and follow up with the people who scan it within a week and actually build out the ladder behind it. The person who scans at the rally needs a local meeting to show up to next, then a small team to plug into, then a real path into a leadership role, because without those rungs in place, the people who show up at rallies and are ready to do more just end up alienated and demoralized when their energy is given no where to go. The most basic piece of organizing infrastructure is bringing people in and keeping them there. It isn't optional and it's a thing we could fix this month.

Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them! Link in the show notes.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up;

Section A, ANATOMY OF FAILURE

Followed by Section B, REVISITING THE RECORD

Section C, THE CURRENT MOMENT

And Section D, STRATEGY AND PRACTICE

this is something that is hard to remember for those of us that lived through it, and I find nearly impossible to get like Gen Z to, to believe when I tell them that's, that in, say, 2009 or 2010, almost everyone, almost everyone from left to right, but certainly mainstream, um, uh, media in, in North America of the ty- you know, the types of outlets that I always worked for, really believed that if something happened because of the internet, more specifically if something happened because of social media, it was necessarily good.

It was going to push his- humanity forward. And now we believe almost the exact inverse. I mean, if you think about a hypothetical, quote-unquote, "Facebook revolution" now, if you think about a large group of yarge- largely young men storming the capital of some country because of a post they saw on the internet- Mm-hmm

our first reaction in 2023 would probably be, "Ooh, red flags," rather than this is, this is gonna, you know, usher in global democracy. And so this is something that we discovered over the 2010s, that the internet is a, is a tool that anyone can use, number one, left, right, center, reactionary, communist, atheist, Islamist.

And two, we didn't get the internet in general. We get a particular type of internet that was shaped by powerful men in California, my home state, that re- reengineered a lot of our, the online experience, um, to maximize their profits, and I think, I think that really matters.

Okay, so, uh, uh, let's... You- you've talked about Egypt, and, and I wanna, I wanna go there for s- a second.

So Tunisia was the first uprising in the Arab Spring, but Egypt really seemed to confirm that something big was happening, and something big could happen, right? So people probably remember the scenes from 2011, uh, of like just mass gatherings in Tahrir Square in Cairo, calling for the end of Mubarak's 30-year rule.

Egyptians filled Tahrir Square in the center of Cairo, protesting for weeks. These protests

have gone on all day long. It's now almost 5:00 in the afternoon. It's two hours after curfew has begun, but still the square is packed with people, and these protests will likely go well into the night

And, you know, it worked, right?

It led to him stepping down. But then if you follow that further out, and this is kind of the, you know, the, the thesis of your book, right? You follow that further out, it sort of turns into the, the upside down, right? Like it... How did, how did that pan out after Mubarak is, is ousted?

So as you mentioned in the case of Brazil, the organizers and activists that put together the protests of January 25th, 2011, had no expectation that they were gonna be in a position to even ask for the fall of Mubarak.

They believed that they were going to do a protest against police brutality. Hopefully some activists would come out. Hopefully the, the, the, the, the same group of people that usually come out to the streets would show up and they wouldn't get repressed too violently. Um, they knew that the example of Tunisia should matter a little bit.

Anger erupted onto the streets today. Riot police rushing a crowd carrying banners reading, "Yes we can," using tear gas and then live rounds to disperse them. It was enough to bring down the government and force the nation's president to flee.

They hoped that people had been paying attention to this, by Egyptian standards, relatively small and, and sparsely populated nation in North Africa.

You know, Tunisia's not a big reference point for Egyptians. The, by far the most populous Arab nation. Um, but way more people come than they expect. And then on January 28th, way more people come than they expect, and they end up going to battle with the police, and they end up winning.

Egyptians young and old, men and women, pouring into the streets, their numbers growing exponentially.

It's

a revolution in Egypt now. Just Egypt enough. We, we hate these people. We hate this, all this government. We hate it. We want a complete change. The

people on the streets now convinced they're on the cusp of a revolution.

Now, at this moment, a lot of people now look back and say, "Oh, we could have done anything.

We could have taken anything. We could have taken over the centers of power. We could have taken over the television station and broadcast out some kind of a revolutionary message." We weren't prepared for that. We wouldn't even have known how to decide who would do it. So what they did is they took the square, Tahrir Square.

And those images are incredibly inspiring. And if you look back on them now, even knowing how it all ends, it's, it's, it's very easy to understand why so many people around the world found this to be such a powerful movement of Egyptians from different classes, different religions, rich, poor, uh, old, young, coming together to ask for the end of a dictatorship.

The way in which it actually ends, the actual concrete resolution that is imposed upon this explosion where everything is possible ends up mattering quite a lot. And what really happens is the military seizes power and promises to put on elections.

The generals say their rule is temporary and will only last until democratic elections are held.

But with civil rights groups claiming scores of protesters have been detained by the army, and some are being tortured, the question now is whether the military will keep their word.

The- And as the military starts to commit abuses over the next year, the Egyptian revolutionaries only really have one tactic.

They try to take the square again, but they don't, they can't reproduce the numbers that puts effective power, uh, puts effective pressure on the military.

They return to Tahrir Square, thousands of Egyptians, to chant the same chant of the revolution. People want the downfall of the regime. They feel the revolution is not only incomplete, but

under threat.

So you get the group that has been organized for a long time, the group that has been organized for longer than the Egyptian Republic has actually existed, the Muslim Brotherhood winning the elections that the, the Egyptian military does put on in 2012.

Mohamed Morsi is the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood.

He's the first Islamist head of state

to be elected out of these Arab Spring revolutions. The main- You get a movement in 2013 in Egypt which pretends to be the same kind of deal as 2011. It pretends to be a grassroots group of young people that are organizing to fight autocracy. And, uh, they put it... And then a protest movement builds out of this.

But what happens is this protest movement is used as a pretext for a real military coup, not this provisional kind of 2011

coup. Fireworks and jubilation erupted in Tahrir Square tonight as the military announced it dissolved Egypt's constitution and deposed President Mohamed Morsi after just one year in office.

It turns out that this, uh, apparently grassroots movement had been funded the whole time by reactionary Gulf states, uh, most importantly the UAE. And then Sisi, when he takes power-

The shooting started at 7:00 AM as snipers fired from surrounding apartments. Panic started. Hello. Problem? Yeah, big problem.

Yes,

yes. oversees the massacre of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood who, as imperfect as they are, as much as I don't, uh, I don't sympathize at all with Islamism as a political project, as, as much as they had committed errors during, uh, Morsi's one year in power, were the only movement to ever win a democratic election in Egyptian history.

And Sisi just kills 1,000 of them In another square. And nothing happens. So if you look at Egypt right now, you're looking at 10 years later, essentially the long consequences of the 2013 Sisi coup.

I want to talk about what, what we've learned in, in retrospect. So you, you know, you, you talk to a lot of the movement's leaders after. But I guess before we get into that, I, I want to understand why at the time this, this leaderless horizontalist approach that kind of underwrote all these protests, why that was so popular back then.

Yeah. And I think that, yeah, so I think there's a mix of both ideas and material factors. So you do have a preexisting ideological current on the anti-authoritarian left, which emerges out of s- in some ways the 1960s in the United States and France, that is very anti-hierarchical, that really believes in reshaping power rather than taking power.

This is, this is a trend that has existed, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, um, seems to c- cast even further or a, or, or a longer shadow on the legacy of tightly organized and bloody-minded organizational, uh, attempts at, at, at changing the world. But in places like Egypt, a lot of the people that put together January 25th and January 28th really would have loved to have a revolutionary party, a large labour union that could go on strike and, and force, uh, the government to give concessions, civil society organizations that could throw their weight behind, uh, the movement, or a set of organizations that would help to carry out a true revolution.

They just didn't. And it wasn't because they didn't believe in them, it was because they had been destroyed by the Mubarak government. And so you had a particular response that became very easy to do, and you had actors on the streets and in the media seeing structurelessness, spontaneity, leaderlessness, horizontality as good things when maybe they aren't always good things.

So you've talked to the organizers, uh, a, a lot of them in retrospect. Uh, what, what kind of advice do they have for today's generation of, of young activists?

Trying to summarize 200 and 250 interviews is a little bit difficult, but one, one way that I can attempt to do so is to say many activists, revolutionaries, failed revolutionaries, or revolutionaries that have failed so far came to the conclusion that they wished that they had been more organized before the explosion came.

They never expected that it was gonna come so quickly and come when it did, and when it did, it came too quickly for them to put together- an organization at that moment. They said essentially you have to build in the off season. You need to come together with other human beings that share your vision for a better world and, and create the ways that you can act collectively and democratically no matter what comes.

Because what's coming is not what you expect is going to come. You need to create the kind of bonds with other people that allow you to, to be nimble but also firm. But a lot of them came to this conclusion that proper collective action means building power with other people, and proper collective action might mean delegation, it might mean some kind of a structure, but that's okay as long as you keep it democratic.

It's, you can keep your movement democratic and win if you're prepared for anything that comes.

After overthrowing dictator Hosni Mubarak, Egypt found itself at a crossroads.

The revolution had been led by labor unions, secular activists, military factions, and the Muslim Brotherhood, and while they all agreed that Mubarak needed to go down, ideological disagreements showed the cracks between them the moment the revolution was won. See, officially, Mubarak passed on power to the Supreme Council of the Egyptian Armed Forces, who went on to dissolve parliament, and then pinky promised, definitely crossed my fingers and hoped to die, swore that they would only hold onto power until things calmed down.

But then suddenly it's de facto martial law, and when the constitutional assembly is finally allowed to gather, the secular politicians clash with the growing Islamist faction, who disagree on whether this new state should be based on liberal human rights or the Quran. And the armed forces, well, they want to enshrine themselves as the ultimate executive authority in the Constitution, and when the elections are finally allowed to take place, it's the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood who wins, with their president, Mohammed Morsi, taking power.

Needless to say, chaos. The left-wing labor unions clash with conservatives, the secular with the Islamic, the Christians with the Muslims, and Morsi only lasts a couple of years before being replaced by the army's presidential candidate in 2014. Despite promising freedom of expression and end to police brutality, a stable democracy, and better working conditions, very few of these are at all realized because of elite infighting, and there's been democratic backsliding for some years now.

Even though it's in a better place than it was before, it's still fallen short of a lot of those aims. The revolution did not ultimately succeed because the revolutionary masses failed to keep united and continue their push for change after Mubarak's resignation. Existing elites, particularly the military, have become the biggest obstacle to change.

Ideological disagreement is especially poisonous for revolutions given revolutions tend to attract people of more radical ideologies, be it political extremism, religious extremism, or ethnic extremism. Stalin used the power struggle between Bolshevik leaders over smaller and smaller ideological issues to throttle the revolution and marginalize his competition till he ended up with autocratic power.

In a transition period like revolution, people need to have faith in the institutions and political system like democracy that they're supposedly meant to hand over power to, but if they don't think that they can achieve their aims, what they revolted to do, through that new system, even something like democracy- Why would they give up power to it?

You gotta remember that it's very easy for a democratically elected leader to slide into becoming a dictator. Disagreements breeds gridlock, gridlock breeds collapse, and collapse breeds chaos and war, and we're back on that cycle, half-measures and civil unrest once more. And often, old social, religious, and ethnic tensions are gonna bubble to the surface again Revolutions are important forces in society, forcing change in static, often terrible systems.

But beating the dictator is only the start, and they've got a long way to go

before

they're really successful. I know it's a YA book, but I've always admired how The Hunger Games doesn't shy away from those post-revolution difficulties. Symbolically, perhaps, but it does acknowledge them. President Coin assures the world she will pinky promise, cross my fingers, hope to die, only take power in her interim government until democratic transition is possible, right?

The revolution, though, turns on itself pretty goddamn quickly. You know, Katniss ends up having to kill her. People espouse these values, but when they wanna do stuff, things like democracy can suddenly become an obstacle.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, democracy simply doesn't work.

But more than that, how do you deal with a significant faction of people who are gonna want revenge on those who were in power?

And not just the politicians and dictator, but the civilians aligned with them. Like, the Egyptian revolution wanted a public trial for Hosni Mubarak, but what about his supporters? And the districts publicly executed Snow, but Coin wanted to go further. She wanted to hold a new Hunger Games for The Capitol's children.

There's revenge in that, the people who benefited from and perhaps supported Snow's regime. How far do the punishments and trials go? The representatives, their families, the people who profited from it, the children who happened to be benefiting? If revolutions are down ethnic lines, then they'll often end up targeting the people who happen to be the same demographic as those who were in power, even though they may not be directly responsible.

But it's complicated because they benefited from it, and it's not necessarily right for them to keep what they have. If it's down class lines, well, let's just say the phrase, "Eat the rich," is there for a reason. So when you're writing revolution, you're gonna wanna figure out where these cracks start to appear, and importantly, you're gonna have to figure out kinda one of the only three ways that they deal with it.

Do they, one, compromise, two, are they ousted, or three, do those aims get achieved? Counter-revolutions, like in 2014 ousting Morsi, are incredibly common. You know, these factions turn on each other in the struggle over who gets to decide what this new world will look like. While The Hunger Games, yeah, it's not the most complicated exploration of these issues, it does at least acknowledge them and how they can threaten revolutionary aims, easily slipping into an oppressive cycle.

This is kinda what happened with Stalin as well. Despite the revolution's aspirations of a democratic, liberal, socialist republic, ideological disagreements led Stalin to slowly concentrate power in himself, using the chaos of the post-revolution world to eliminate competition and undermine the role of the Soviets till it was just him The ideological disagreement prevented the perhaps more popular other factions from working against him, and his rule was a simpler way out of the chaos.

And while people in Russia rightly wanted revenge against the uber wealthy, Stalin also used that desire to persecute demographics he wanted

marginalized, often against the aims of Lenin's original revolution.

But it's not just ideological disagreement. The elite and powerful will often join a revolution in hopes of gaining something else, power or money or position, to stay within the circles of power when they know it's coming, and the Egyptian military can be read this way.

Egyptian history is a record of the army guarding the interests of the secular state and their own elite position in the system of power. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces did not intend to be sidelined either, nor did it want to lose its self-ascribed role as the guarantor of constitutional legitimacy and security and be stripped of its economic privileges.

In other words, the military could see the writing was on the wall for Hosni Mubarak and wanted to ensure that they weren't excluded from the circles of power. And so- revolution. And we can see this, by the way, in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. Tywin Lannister doesn't revolt against the Mad King out of a sense of morality or justice, but because he's been alienated from the circles of Targaryen power and wants to get in on Robert's new regime.

He knew that if he didn't help, then there was no chance of it, and taking King's Landing put him in a powerful position to do so. When the Soviet Union fell, Russian oligarchs saw a huge opportunity to seize state assets and make a ton of money, and that's a huge motivator. You know, they don't ever care for pesky things like human rights or the vision of the revolution.

It's about getting a better position from a world falling apart. Chaos is a ladder. And the question is, these elites, the powerful, the rich, what happens when they don't get what they want? How does the revolution survive without their support, without their money, without their men, without their resources?

So don't just think about how elites might help the revolution happen, but where their interests might diverge and what that point of tension, how, you know, how is that resolved? Because it can lead to a counter-revolution or an impotent government or another civil war. One detail I really like, and I think it's The Mandalorian, is that after the revolution, after the evil empire is overthrown, we get all these evil scientists and soldiers who have committed atrocities.

What do you mean to do with them? Well, supposedly, they're seen to be rehabilitated and taught the error of their ways. But in reality, the rich and powerful basically tell them in secret, "Oh, we're just happy to have you on our side, you know, on the side of the Republic." Rather than it being about justice like the revolution claimed, they instead bring them in, make money off them, put them in positions of power, and use those skills again, just from a slightly different angle.

They superficially supported the revolution, but spoil its aims when it comes down to the brass tacks. They don't care about justice, just money and power Part two, international puppeteers. Many revolutions live or die on international support, money, people, aid from other countries, and all too often this comes in return for trade guarantees, access to resources for their own security interests, i.e.

the entire Cold War in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Lebanon, and a myriad across South America. Over and over, Western powers have stifled communist revolutions with sanctions and blockades and sabotage, preventing them from integrating with the international community.

What followed the Arab Spring was the Arab Winter, a time of resurgence of authoritarianism and religious extremism throughout the area. We're still hearing about it to this day, but it has different names.

We call it ISIS. We call it the Libyan Civil War, the Yemeni Civil War, the Syrian Civil War. We call it the European migrant crisis. Protests, even massive protests, by themselves don't create change or revolution. Take a moment. It's a sobering statement. But also remember that this is just the spark. How do these rebel groups recruit?

How do they spread from the fringe organization to something that changes governments?

And so when I think about revolutions, what makes some stick and some not stick, or in other words, why some grow and coalesce into this larger movement, forgive my, uh, elementary framing, but you have to have a lot of people that are ticked off at the status quo.

And so some revolutions will ultimately become successful in recruiting because of repression by the government, a lack of rights, mistreatment by the, by the government, extrajudicial behavior by the government. In other words, imprisoning people, killing people, repressing them in ways in which it's gotten to a point where it's intolerable.

Oftentimes, we see success when protest movements pick up within a country. Uh, those protest movements inspire.

So what else do you need? You need, uh, separation between the powerful and the ones in power. That may sound like weird wordplay, but bear with me. Just because you're in charge of the government doesn't mean that you're all of the elite, nor does being an elite mean that you are automatically in power in the government.

Think of the American Revolution. The Founding Fathers were not in charge of England. England controlled the government of the colonies. However, they were all rich landowners. These people were the powerful of the colonies. They held all the resources. As such, they had access to the wealth and power, were highly educated, and possessed the necessary skills required to operate a rebellion.

We're talking people managers, veteran soldiers, commanders, accountants, lawyers. These were people of letters, learning, money, power. I know how much of a gut punch it is to hear that garnering the elites to your side is necessary for a revolution, but history has shown us time and time again that it is necessary to any successful revolution.

It happened in Russia, it happened in China, it happened in the United States, and the French Revolution, and many, many others throughout history. You can probably see how lacking this was a death blow to many revolutions before they even began. The issue becomes, how do you get the elites to care? Well, that's where number three comes in.

You need something that is powerful and unifies people across class. You need something that brings the majority of the population behind the revolution. Corruption, uh, an economic downturn, things of that nature. In my opinion, this is a little duplicative of number one or two. Other similar theories don't include this one, as widespread protests and inclusion of revolutionary elites kinda already covers these bases.

But one can look at the military as part of the elite as well. They are literally the ones with the guns. More often than not, revolutions are suppressed by the military. Historically, they're very good at this job.

I think it's the military looking out for their best interest and making a calculated gamble on what they think will be better for their institution, whether it's a post-conflict setting or a post-protest setting

Care to take a tangent with me?

The United States military has the largest budget of any military on the planet. Our defense spending is greater than China, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Heck, it's larger than the next nine top-spending countries in the world combined. It's over one-third of the budget. In 2017, of the $734.34 billion we spent on defense in the United States, 250.8 billion was spent on benefits and payments, 34% of the total amount of the budget.

It's designed to keep the military in a privileged position, to maintain them at the 70th percentile compared to civilians' pay and benefits. We don't generally think of having a warrior caste in this country, but we, like most nations, do create a separation in their military. They try to separate them from the civilian population by sequestering them on bases and creating their own cultures within those places.

Consider the People's Liberation Army of China. Consider the current protests in Iran and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iran's done a really good job of empowering the Ireve- the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, more or less insulating the regime in a different way than Tunisia might, might have had.

Similar to something like the, uh, Chinese Communist Party and the relationship with the People's Liberation Army, where you've empowered this institution in a way that ensures they're getting kickbacks. You know, they're in privileged positions within society. You name it, they're kind of the elite military institution in Iran.

I think there's loyalty there that will ensure the regime is more or less insulated.

Getting the military on your side could be the determining factor in a revolution. But something to consider, non-violent protests historically garner more military support. The more a revolution turns into a violent rebellion, the more the military feels justified in killing civilians.

In fact, the army would be seldom deployed against peaceful and orderly demonstrations, and if it were, it would rarely suppress them violently. To be sure, occasionally even peaceful marches are crushed by the military, but it is certainly a rare occurrence and tends to foreshadow a regime's uncompromising stance towards demonstrations.

So this becomes a balancing act. Do you test what you can do against the military? Do you fight them? Do you attempt to curry favor with them? Depends on the situation. There's no gaining support from an occupying foreign army, but when it comes to a domestic army, the situation is a lot more complicated.

Fourth, the state must find itself in a crisis that weakens its ability to fight off the protest. When the cat's away- The mice will play. Look at something like China during the revolution. China had come off of losses to the Japanese in the first Sino-Japanese War, but the Chinese revolution really comes in during the 1920s.

Mao and his revolutionaries began the revolution in rural areas, counting on the central government's inability to combat them so far away from their centers of power. The first years of the revolution did not go well. In 1927, the Chinese Communist Party lost thousands to massacres by the Republic.

They even tried to stage a large-scale military rebellion in 1927, and they lost. China, even under the strain that it was in, was able to weather the storm of the revolutionaries. By 1928, things looked grim for Mao and his revolution. Then the Soviets invaded. Oh, I'm sorry, did you not know that the Soviet Union invaded China in 1929?

This further weakened the Chinese central government. The communists launched another rebellion in 1930 as a response, and it failed again. Then in 1931, the Japanese army fabricated a terrorist attack on the railways as a pretense to secure their hold on more territory in China. Forces came in and occupied Korea and invaded Manchuria.

This was a precursor to the eventual invasion of China by Japan in 1937. In the last, we usually measure World War II as starting when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. In Asia, the war started years before. The Japanese invasion ravaged the Chinese Republic, and all the while they were still focused on the extermination of the communists, and the Chinese economy goes into a depression because of an influx of cheap American goods.

I'm sorry, the irony. History is a wild story when you really get into it, folks. The pendulum swings. Time

is a flat circle.

So we have a country ravaged by war. A military of the government was shrunk due to massive losses in the conflict against Japan. The economy had grown feeble and had a lack of real international support.

The United States was more interested in keeping its economic interests and really not dedicated to the full support of the Chinese Republic, while the communists had the assistance of regional powers like the Soviet Union, Mongolia, and even North Korea. Which brings us to the fifth factor: international permission.

Foreign support matters a lot. Are these organizations, these rebel groups, successfully attracting international resources? And that can be formal, informal. That can be as little as legitimacy provided to the rebel organization from an outside actor via the recognition of them. It could be something like the Islamic State developing fringe organizations or franchises in other countries.

Just that recognition that you are a member of this, this more powerful organization in another territory can generate recruitment success. It could be something more tangible. Are you receiving foreign support in the form of money or guns? Even recruits in some cases, or, uh, you know, another government sending foreign fighters to your, to your organization.

The Soviet Army, who was stationed in Manchuria, refused to leave after the Japanese surrender. They supported the communists. The central Chinese government could not sustain the conflict. Conscripted peasants were deserting en masse and bringing their equipment with them to support the communists. Then in 1949, after 28 years of revolution, in Tiananmen Square, the new People's Republic of China was established.

And all was well in China from there on, right?

By any measure, revolutions are big events in history.

If I can be forgiven for using the term turning points, that does apply to revolutions. Even people who don't know that much about revolutions can usually name a few major ones. The American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution of 1789, Russian Revolution 1917, and the Chinese Revolution, which began in 1911 but took about forty years to run its course.

Due to the convergence of a series of revolutions, near and near revolutions in the last decades of the eighteenth and first decades of the nineteenth century, some historians, notably Eric Hobsbawm, have even named that whole time the Age of Revolutions. Coups, however, are a little different. We tend to associate coups with countries that are viewed as unstable or undemocratic.

Most of us are aware that coups, usually by military leaders, have occurred often in Latin American countries and sometimes the Middle East. Augusto Pinochet of Chile is an example of a leader who came to power in a coup. So was Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Coups may resemble revolutions in one highly visible way.

They both involve a change of political leadership on a national level. But aside from that similarity, in fact, the phenomenon are quite different from one another. Simply put, the difference is this. Coups involve a change of leaders. Revolutions involve a change of systems. To explain what I mean by that, let's look at some historical examples.

In 1789, there was a major political and social upheaval in France. Animated by the ideas of the Enlightenment, and particularly the American Revolution, to which it was related in many ways, the people of France rose up against the monarchy of the Bourbon dynasty and the king, Louis XVI. There was an extended period of political chaos within France, which eventually spilled outside its borders in the form of wars between France and its neighbors.

What happened in France between 1789, the storming of the Bastille, and 1799, the takeover of power by Napoleon, was undoubtedly a revolution. We could spend weeks talking about the reasons why this event happened. But what's obvious is that France underwent a fundamental transformation of its entire society, not just from the top down, but at all levels.

Yes, the king and eventually the queen got their heads chopped off, but the taxation system also changed, the legal system changed, the people who decided cases and built roads and ran the schools, they all changed. For a while, even the calendar changed. That was how transformative the French Revolution was.

Let's contrast that with what happened in Libya nearly two hundred years later. In 1969, Libya was a monarchy ruled by King Idris I. Formerly one of the poorest countries in North Africa, Libya achieved economic prosperity very suddenly after the discovery of oil there in 1959. The king made sure that the revenues from the oil flowed to a very small group concentrated at the top.

On September 1st, 1969, a group of military officers led by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi used military force to surround the key government buildings and media establishments. They overthrew the king and took over the government for themselves. Notably, there were no casualties suffered in this event. Gaddafi was motivated by the ideology of Pan-Arabism, which was championed by the Egyptian leader Abdel Nasser, who also came to power in a coup.

At first, these events, Libya in 1969 and France 1789, might look superficially similar. Both were changes of government. Both abolished a monarchy and established ostensibly, in the case of Libya, a republic in its place. Gaddafi, in fact, tried to spin what happened in Libya in 1969 as a revolution, but this was largely just public relations.

Libya remained a dictatorship under Gaddafi's control until he was overthrown by a revolution, not a coup, in 2011. Yet it's easy to see the difference between the French Revolution and the Libyan coup. The events in Libya in 1969 were a change of leadership from the top down. The end of the Idris regime wouldn't have happened if Gaddafi and his toadies hadn't plotted to overthrow the government.

By contrast, the monarchy in France by the late 1780s was almost guaranteed to crumble from one proximate cause or another, and the causes of the monarchy's decay were primarily economic and social, not political. Admittedly, in some cases, the lines between coup and revolution can be a bit fuzzy, but I chose these examples because they're very stark illustrations of the dynamics of each one.

Now, back to the Capitol rioters. It's abundantly clear that a revolution is not what these people wanted or even thought that they wanted. They were motivated by a single rather narrow goal, to keep President Donald Trump in power despite the results of a free, fair, and legitimate election that went against him in November.

There was no program in the wind for large-scale societal or systemic change. What these people demanded was that a particular leader be installed to the exclusion of another one that they didn't like. That is a coup. It's not a revolution. Historically speaking, fealty to a particular political leader is never the driving force behind a revolution.

The American Revolution didn't happen because people thought they wanted George Washington rather than King George III as their leader. In a true revolution, the specific person who occupies the leadership being overthrown is generally not important or sometimes totally irrelevant. Almost nobody can remember the name of the dynastic ruler who was overthrown in China's 1911 revolution.

His name was Puyi, for the record. And despite their hatred of the abuses of the French monarchy, King Louis XVI was actually pretty well-liked by many people in France before their revolution in 1789. Puyi and Louis happened to be sitting in the chair when the revolutions happened, but the revolutions did not have a lot to do with them personally.

Typically, leaders of overthrown governments have public rage in a revolutionary society focused upon them, such as the Shah of Iran did in nineteen seventy-nine. But the driving force behind the Iranian Revolution was rage at the system the Shah and his dynasty represented, not so much the Shah himself.

That's an important distinction. Revolutions also tend to be led by a revolutionary elite. Sometimes the members of this elite spend the bulk of their lives clawing their way into positions of dominance and figuring out how to use their power. Lenin in Russia, Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong in China, and the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran all spent most of their lives building the revolutions that brought them to power.

The elite of the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, and so forth, they all had to do a fair amount of career building before the revolution got started. The revolutionary elite is different from what you might call a cabal, which is merely a group of conspirators, like what happened in Libya in nineteen sixty-nine, or even how Napoleon took over France in seventeen ninety-nine.

Napoleon was not a member of a revolutionary elite. Mao Zedong, however, was. Just for the record, this guy who stormed the Capitol last Wednesday was not a member of a revolutionary elite. For these reasons, revolutions usually take a long time to build. The climactic moment when crowds rush through the streets or a new flag is hoisted over the Capitol, that happens at the end of the process, not the beginning.

Historically, you can argue that Russia's revolution began a century before nineteen seventeen as countless revolutionary leaders, thinkers, politicians, and theorists slowly built and refined the political and economic movement that took power after the tsar was deposed. China, too, was full of revolutionary sentiment for decades before nineteen eleven.

A very large war called the Taiping Rebellion took place in the middle of the nineteenth century and was one of the many false starts before Sun Yat-sen finally brought off the revolution in nineteen eleven. The American Revolution happened fairly quickly by historical standards, but even that began in seventeen sixty-three, almost a decade and a half before the events at Independence Hall that we commemorate on July fourth.

Revolutions take generations, not days or hours, and they sure as hell aren't organized on Parler or 8chan. Another reason why revolutions are long-term and often multi-generational projects is that in order to be successful, they must generally have complex and well-developed ideologies behind them.

They must above all offer the people of the society a clear and positive alternative to the existing order. In communist revolutions, this has tended to be the promise of economic equality. In the American Revolution, it was the promise of liberal representative democracy and economic self-determination.

In Iran, it was the nation-- the idea of a nation built on Islamic principles. The thinkers and theorists of the world's great revolutions, Che Guevara in Cuba, Thomas Jefferson in the United States, Mao in China, have in many ways harder jobs than the military commanders who fight to defend revolutionary principles.

The French Revolution of 1789 went badly awry, in part because it wasn't undergirded by a coherent ideology. The same was true of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. A successful revolution must not only convince the people of a nation to say no to an existing order, but to simultaneously say yes to something else, something that they must be convinced will enrich their lives.

The insurrection at the Capitol in January 2021 had none of the hallmarks of a revolution. It was an attempt at a coup, pure and simple.

Next, Section B, REVISITING THE RECORD

why do you think that Western countries, and particularly the US, misread the situation in Iran so badly and continue to do so today?

Right. Right. Yeah, absolutely. This, this almost sounds, it sounds a bit facetious to say, but I think the reason the American, the ultimate reason why the Americans so missed the boat is because they just could not imagine Iran.

It was, Iran was, the Shah's Iran was such an important ally to the United States They just couldn't imagine kind of life without him, so they didn't imagine it. They-- But the who- the whole apparatus of both inside Iran, or the Iranian government and the American government, everything was geared to seeing no problems.

The Shah hated it when Western ambassadors talked to even his moderate opposition in Tehran. He would, he would, he would call the ambassador in the next day and would give him a dressing down. So very qui-- as the more important Iran became as an ally, politically, militarily, uh, economically, the less the ambassadors would ever risk it.

Certainly, Americans didn't. So the, the whole... And, and then on the American side, everything was geared to only see sunny skies in Iran. So the few-- A-added to the problem that the CIA was doing no domestic, uh, intelligence. One of the-- The CIA station in Tehran was one of the biggest in the world. Did no domestic intelligence.

They were all focused on spying on, uh, on, on the Soviet Union, which is right on the northern border of Iran. They got all their domestic intelligence from the Shah's secret police, uh, which so they were just in this, in this loop. Um, the few people at the embassy, th-there was very few people at the American embassy, which was three hundred people.

Yeah, one of the largest embassies in the world. Ver-- If you, if you could count the number of people who spoke Farsi, the Iranian language, certainly on two hands, if not on one at any given time. Um, the few people who did speak Farsi, they often saw problems because they were out in the street actually talking to, not to government ministers, but to people in, in the bazaars and stuff, and they would warn that this was coming.

And, uh, one-- in one famous case, so a, a, a g- a guy who I spent a lot of time talking about in, in my book, he, he would raise it again and again, and not only was he ignored, he was punished for, for raising these issues and finally sent off to a provincial, uh, city to be a consular officer. So the entire apparatus of cer- of certainly of the Americans was designed to see no problems, and this was...

A-and it was... Once the revolution got started, it just kept perpetuating, and it, it never really stopped. Uh, it, it, um, and, and the bizarre thing is it even r- was replicated in the period after the revolution happened, uh, in, in February of nineteen seventy-nine through the next nine months until the, the American hostages were taken in, in that November.

The-- So this nine-- So this nine-month period where the revolution was, was, uh, solidifying itself and Khomeini was taking over and s- and calling America the great Satan It w- e- even then, it was this weird d- d- delusionary optimism. It's like, well, yeah, okay, the, you know, they'll let them do their little anti-American thing for a while, but they're, ultimately they're gonna come back.

They need us. You know, all their weaponry, all their weaponry is American. They, they need our e- economic expertise. They need to sell their oil to us. Uh, you know, all these things that made them think that, okay, let, let Khomeini k- kind of rant and stuff now, but it's all, you know, it's all gonna work out in the end.

So it's just, you know, delusion from beginning to end.

The subtitle of your book is The Unmaking of the Modern Middle East. To what extent do you think the events of 1979 in Iran have a bearing on what's happening in the region today?

Yeah, I, I, I think it's not just the unmaking of the modern Middle East, I think it's the unmaking of the modern world.

Because what I th- what Iran did was it unleashed this, this era of religious nationalism that you are now seeing not just in Islam, but you're seeing it in every religion. You're seeing ... I mean, even Buddhists. People always have this idea that, you know, Buddhists are so pacific and everything, but, you know, the, the, the Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka were the ones who kind of started the ethnic war against the, the Tamil Hindus.

Um, certainly in this country, the, the Christian nationalists in the United States who this whole marriage of them with, with kind of the Neo-Nazis and stuff. So there's been this ... So I, I can't say you, you, the roots of all this are from Iran, but Iran was the first religious counter-revolution the world has ever seen, and I think it, it hit something that was maybe below the radar at the time, that there was this kind of counter-revolution happening in thought, in, in political discourse around, around the world.

Uh, this kind of reje- maybe a rejection of modernity, a rejection of women's liberation, and that kind of made it burst, uh, open. And so certainly, uh, you know, I've, I've been covering conflicts in the Middle East every, almost ever since the Iranian Revolution, and I see traces of what happened in Iran everywhere.

Uh, and not just ... Though the obvious ones are, uh, Iran's proxy, uh, allies in the region, Hezbollah in, in Lebanon or, uh, uh, the, the Houthis in Yemen. But it, that whole religious fervor, uh, uh, you know, of course ISIS was, is on the opposite side of the, the, the Shia regime in, in Iran. But again, this kind of religious militancy and, and I, you know

I mean, the Iranian regime has, has killed people in the name of Allah, as has ISIS. I mean, ISIS obviously is a far more kind of homicidal group, but y- you know, this, this is le- legitimating murder.

Yeah. I, I find it quite a huge irony that the Iranian regime propped up Bashar al-Assad, who actually was far closer in many ways as a ruler to the Shah than- To what came after, who was then himself felled by, as you say, this kind of religious fundamentalism that ultimately was inspired by the Iranian revolution, whether Sunni or Shia.

That's right. That's right. And, um, yeah, the, uh, that's, you know, the the circle of ironies in that region is amazing and, you know, the one I talk about briefly in my book is that, you know, Iran and Iraq, uh, uh, uh, w- uh, under the Ba'athists in, in Iraq, both before and, and with Saddam Hussein, they were the mortal enemies with the Shah because, you know, he was an imperialist and, and, uh, you know, k- kingdom and everything.

So they helped prov- you know, they gave asylum to Khomeini, and Khomeini was operating out of southern Iraq for fourteen years. But at certain points, Saddam Hussein realized, you know, th- this Shia resurgence in, in Iran has a really good chance of blowing back on us because we have a huge Shia population also.

So he actually offered to kill Khomeini t- uh, to the Shah. And to the Shah, uh, turned him down. Um, so the, the-- Khomeini ends up getting kicked out of Iraq, uh, goes to Paris, where he's available to the entire world's media and, and that just... You know, this is only two, three months before the, the end of the revolution, and it-- this just accelerated everything dramatically.

If he had stayed in Iraq, you know, they could've kept him kind of bottled up, but that just made-- that made the Iranian revolution the world's attention at that point,

what should we understand about the founding of the United States?

We should understand that July 4th 1776 in many ways represents a counter-revolution. That is to say that what helped to prompt July 4th 1776 was the perception amongst European settlers on the North American mainland that London was moving rapidly towards abolition.

This perception was prompted by Somersett's case, a case decided in London in June 1772, which seemed to suggest that abolition, which not only was going to be ratified in London itself, was going to cross the Atlantic and basically, uh, sweep through the mainland, thereby jeopardizing numerous fortunes, not only based upon slavery, but the slave trade.

That's the short answer. The longer answer would involve going back to another revolution. That is to say, the so-called Glorious Revolution in England in 1688, which among other things, involved a step back from the monarch- for the monarch, the king, and a step forward for the rising merchant class. This led to a deregulation of the African slave trade.

That is to say, the Royal African Company theretofore had been in control of the slave trade, but with the rising power of the merchant class, this Slave trade was deregulated, leading to what I call free trade in Africans. That is to say merchants then descended upon the African continent manacling and handcuffing every African in sight with the energy of demented and crazed bees, dragging them across the Atlantic, particularly to the Caribbean and to the North American mainland.

This was prompted by the fact that the profits for the slave trade were tremendous, sometimes up to 1600 or 1700%. And as you know, uh, there are those even today who will sell their firstborn for such a profit. This, on the one hand, helped to boost the productive forces both in the Caribbean and on the mainland, but it led to numerous slave revolts, not least in the Caribbean, but also on the mainland, which helped to give the mainlanders second thoughts about L- London's tentative steps towards abolition.

Hmm. Uh, Gerald Horne, one of the things that struck me in your book is, uh, not only your main thesis that this was a, uh, in large part a counter-revolution, our, our, our, the United States War of Independence, but you also link very closely the, what was going on in the Caribbean colonies of England as well as in the United States, not only in terms of, uh, among the slaves in both areas, but also among the white population.

And in fact, you i- indicate that quite a few of those who ended up here in the United States fostering the American Revolution had actually been refugees from the battles between whites and slaves in the Caribbean. Could you expound on that?

It's well known that up until the middle part of the 18th century, London felt that the Caribbean colonies, Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua in particular, were in some ways more valuable than the mainland colonies.

The problem was that in the Caribbean colonies, the Africans outnumbered the European settlers, sometimes at a rate of 20 to one, which facilitated slave revolts. Uh, there were major slave revolts in Antigua, for example, in 1709 and 1736. The Maroons, that is to say, the Africans who had escaped London's jurisdiction in Jamaica, had challenged the Crown, uh, quite sternly.

This led, as your question suggests, to many European settlers in the Caribbean making the great trek to the mainland, being chased out of the Caribbean by enraged Africans. For example, I did research for this book in Newport, Rhode Island, and the main library there to this very day is named after Abraham Redwood, who fled Antigua after the 1736 slave revolt because many of his, quote, Africans, unquote, were involved in the slave revolt, and he fled in fear and established the main library in Newport to this very day and helped to basically establish that, uh, c- that city, uh, on the At- Atlantic coast.

So there is a close connection between what was transpiring in the Caribbean and what was taking place on the mainland. And historians need to recognize that even though these colonies were not necessarily a unitary project, there were close and intimate connections between and amongst them

So why this great disparity between how people in the United States talk about the creation myth of the United States, if you will, I'm not talking about indigenous people, Native American people, uh, and this story that you have researched?

Well, it is fair to say that the United States did provide a sanctuary for Europeans. In- indeed, I think part of the quote genius unquote of the US project, if there was such a genius, was the fact that the founders of the United States basically called a formal truce, a formal ceasefire with regard to the religious warfare that had been de- bedeviling Europe for many decades and centuries.

That is to say Protestant London, so-called, versus Catholic Madrid and Catholic France. What the settlers on the North American mainland did was call a formal truce with regard to l- religious conflict, but then they opened a new front with regard to race. That is to say Europeans versus non-Europeans.

This at once broadened the base for the settler project. That is to say they could draw up on those defined as white who had roots from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains, and indeed even into the Arab world, if you look at people like Ralph Nader and Marlo Thomas, for example, whose roots are in Lebanon, but are considered to be quote white unquote.

Uh, this obviously expanded the population base for the settler project, and because many rights were then accorded to these newly, uh, minted whites, it obviously helped to ensure that many of them would be beholden, uh, to the country that then emerged, United States of America, whereas those of us who were not defined as white got the short end of the stick, if you like.

Hmm.

And, uh, Gerald Horne, as a result of that, during the American Revolution, what was the, uh, the, uh, the perception or the attitude of the African slaves in the US to that conflict? Are you... You also, you talk about during the colonial times, uh, many slaves preferred to flee to, to the Spanish colonies or the French colonies rather than to stay, uh, in the American colonies of England.

You are correct. The fact of the matter is, is that Spain had been arming Africans since the 1500s. And indeed, because Spain was arming Africans and then unleashing them on mainland colonies, particularly South Carolina, this put competitive pressure on London to act in a similar fashion. The problem there was, is that the mainland settlers had embarked on a project and a model of development that was inconsistent with arming Africans.

Indeed, their project was involved in enslaving and manacling every African in sight. This deepens the schism between the colonies and the metropolis, that is to say London, thereby helping to foment, uh, a revolt against British rule in 1776. It's well known that, uh, more Africans fought alongst the side of the Redcoats, fought alongside the Redcoats than fought with the settlers, and this is understandable because if you think about it for more than a nanosecond, it makes little sense for slaves to fight alongside slave masters so that slave masters could then deepen the persecution of the enslaved, and indeed, as happened after 1776, bring more Africans to the mainland, bring more Africans to Cuba, bring more Africans to Brazil for their profit.

there are some accusations of bigotry that can be fairly levied at Che. So let's take a closer look, starting with the accusation that he was a racist. There are many fake quotes that are wrongfully attributed to Che in the attempt to paint him as a racist. One of which goes, "We are going to do for black people exactly what they did for the revolution, by which I mean nothing."

This quote, while damning and definitely racist, can't be definitively traced back to Guevara. It's circulated heavily by Cuban-American conservatives like Humberto Fontova, holy fuck, I killed that pronunciation, I think, who regularly spews outright falsehoods like Che helped to herd gay people into forced labour camps, which we will debunk later in this video.

And Fontova is the source of this banger of a quote, "The lily-white Che Guevara and Fidel Castro overthrew the mixed-race Batista." Is bro trying to imply that Batista's mass murder campaigns were okay because he was mixed race? What kind of identity politics bullshit is this? I refer you back to the CIA document about Batista's brutality.

Also, I have a hard time believing that Fontova gives any semblance of a fuck about racism, considering he collaborated with Bill O'Reilly, who made a litany of unsavory comments regarding race. Fontova also authored a book about Che, and it's genuinely insane. It's just a really bitter, incoherent polemic that author Rolf Potts referred to as slightly schizophrenic.

The Fox article from which I pulled these Fontova quotes also can't make up its mind on whether or not Che was a racist. Right here it says, "Many of the people Che was sending to the firing squad were members of Batista's army, and these disproportionately tended to be black and mixed race. Batista himself was mixed race."

And then literally three lines later it says, "Guevara also at times, however, called for more black people to be represented in institutions and had black fighters under his command." What are we doing here, guys? However, there is a genuinely racist quote that was written by Che, and it is worth talking about.

Remember how I mentioned that Che was born in a well-off white family in Argentina and had a sheltered and privileged upbringing? Well, this upbringing came with blind spots. When he was a young man in his early 20s traveling around South America on his motorbike, he kept a personal diary, which is now a famous book called The Motorcycle Diaries.

In this book, he wrote a horrific and inexcusably racist passage about Black people. It goes like this: "The Blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave, the Portuguese, and the two ancient races have now begun a hard life together, fraught with bickering and squabbles.

Discrimination and poverty unite them in the daily fight for survival, but their different ways of approaching life separate them completely. The Black is indolent and a dreamer, spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink. The European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself."

Jesus Chr- Yes, this is really bad and indefensible, and the man Che grew to be and the man Che was when he wrote this are very different. In order to fully grasp the context of this quote, we need to understand that this was written by a spoiled rich kid who had been largely sheltered from any form of intersectional analysis and was extremely racially insensitive.

This is a quote from the beginning of his journey, and if you actually read the book, you can see this young 24-year-old grow into a very different man. He met with many indigenous people during his journey and noted how much better he was treated as a white man compared to them. At the end of his journey, he notes that he is no longer the person he was when he embarked on this trip.

Quote, "The person who wrote these notes passed away the moment his feet touched Argentine soil again. The person who reorganizes and polishes them, me, is no longer. At least, I am not the person I once was. All this wandering around our great America with a capital A has changed me more than I thought."

Clearly a story of growth and self-improvement, yet people like Marco Rubio feel the need to embellish and push a narrative that just isn't true. No, Marco Rubio, Che Guevara did not write extensively about the superiority of white Europeans. In fact, Che's efforts to remedy his disgraceful writings are impressive.

In a 1959 letter to William Morris in Miami, Florida, Che Guevara writes, "Esteemed sir, I received your letter to pass on to our commander-in-chief, which I have done, but I would like to say that if any vestiges of racial discrimination remain in this country, our revolution will put a complete end to them.

You can be absolutely sure that within a few years, any difference between white and Black will be solely a question of skin color, as it should be." It's important to note that the US in 1959 was racist as hell. The Civil Rights Bill had not even passed yet, and the president who ended up passing it, LBJ referred to it as the N-word bill, but that's a different story.

Che was also loudly against apartheid in South Africa, and he even gave a now famous speech on this topic at the UN where he said, "Once again, we speak out to put the world on guard against what is happening in South Africa. The brutal policy of apartheid is applied before the eyes of the nations of the world.

The peoples of Africa are compelled to endure the fact that on the African continent, the superiority of one race over another remains official policy, and that in the name of this racial superiority, murder is committed with impunity. Can the United Nations do nothing to stop this?" He then, in the same speech, went on to detail the crisis inflicted upon the people of Congo and the role of imperialism in the appropriation of their land and resources.

He actually cared so much about Congo that he left his post in Cuba, relinquished his Cuban citizenship and all creature comforts that came with it so he could personally go to the DRC and try to spur revolution. This is not just some guy who overthrew a dictator and then bathed in the glory and lived a comfortable, hedonistic life.

For a guy who supposedly wrote extensively about the superiority of white people, as Marco Rubio claims, everything he wrote and did as an adult seems to directly contradict that claim.

Was Che homophobic? Similarly to his distasteful comments in regards to race, a young Che Guevara could also be quoted making a definitely homophobic remark about a gay person. He referred to a man as a pervert and then followed up the quote by saying, "Apart from being a homosexual, he had been very nice to us."

Yeah, really bad, indefensible, and just like his racist remarks that we touched on earlier, he said this as a young, sheltered, rich kid in the 1950s, and then he grew up. But see, if the conversation started and ended there, I would have no problem conceding the point that Che had said some homophobic shit.

He is, after all, just a man. But that's not what his detractors do. They, they go on to say that he rounded up gay people and forced them into concentration camps after the Cuban Revolution. Some dishonest actors go as far as to claim that he murdered people for being gay.

Che Guevara executed gays, right?

This is a guy, when you wear a Che Guevara shirt, you're wearing a Hitler who was, uh, less successful in being charismatic and duping people.

Now, this is just blatantly untrue. There is no verifiable record of Che killing people for their sexuality. What is often being referred to when people make this point is the UMAP system in Cuba.

The UMAPs were military units to aid production, and people who opted out of military service had to serve their country in a different way, and they were sent to these forced labour camps. At the time, gay people were not allowed to serve in the Cuban military, the same way they weren't allowed to serve in any other country's military, and they were subjected to forced labour in these Cuban camps.

It is worth noting that draft dodgers in the US were sent to prison, where the 13th Amendment turned them into literal slaves But that's another story. Yes, the UMAPS were despicable and unjustifiable. No, just because the Americans did similar shit does not make it okay. There are also reports of gay people being mistreated and abused in these camps.

It undoubtedly was really inexcusably bad considering Fidel Castro felt the need to issue an apology for this dark period in Cuban history saying, "If anyone is responsible, it's me." The dreaded UMAPS system ran from November 1965 to July of 1968. Three years too long if you ask me. But again, this video is not about the Cuban state.

It's about Che Guevara. So what was he doing during this time? Oh yeah, he was in Congo. In April of 1965, Che relinquished his Cuban citizenship and left the country to spread revolution abroad. He left Cuba three months before the UMAPS were established. In a farewell letter to Fidel written by Che on April 1st, 1965, he says, "I formally resign my positions in the leadership of the party, my post as minister, my rank of commander, and my Cuban citizenship.

Nothing legally binds me to Cuba. The only ties are of another nature, those that cannot be broken as can appointments to posts." Che died two years after writing this in 1967 and the UMAPS ended in 1968. During their runtime, Che was in Congo and then Bolivia and then he was killed. He had nothing to do with them.

Now, could Che have done more to stick up for LGBT rights in Cuba, especially during a period of machismo and ignorance towards gay people? Yeah, I'm sure he could have and that would have been cool as fuck. But again, this was the 1960s. That doesn't make it right. Homophobia was never right. But apart from a single homophobic passage written when he was in his early 20s, he was 24, Che was not this raging homophobe who rounded up gay people and threw them into camps or killed them.

That just isn't true. In summary, in his youth, Che wrote racist and homophobic things. We know he grew out of his racism as his later actions showed. We can't say for certain whether or not he grew out of his homophobia, but we could infer that as he matured and became a Marxist, he rid himself of these bigoted ideas and focused on solidarity.

There are no actions or writings from his adult life that suggest that he was a horrific homophobe. But without new evidence, we'll never know for sure. It's not uncommon to meet people who hate Che and the Cuban government for anecdotal reasons. I have people close to me who lived in Cuba under Fidel and they really loved him.

But that's why we don't use anecdotes and we stick to empiricism. History is not made up of great infallible people. It's made up of people reacting to their environments and material realities. There's no such thing as a perfect person, but I agree with Jean-Paul Sartre when he said that Che Guevara was the most complete human being of our age.

DeFreeze brought Wheeler to Oakland to meet the people who had been harboring him since his escape. In a cramped one-bedroom apartment that many former Venceremos members breezed in and out of, DeFreeze shared his plans for something he'd been working on since his time in prison. It was the Symbionese Liberation Army, SLA, a new leftist guerrilla group that he was attempting to form from a bewildering gaggle of revolutionary stragglers.

Vin McClellan writes in his book, The Voices of Guns, that the notebook DeFreeze handed over to Wheeler, adorned with a seven-headed cobra on the front, contained plans for guerrilla warfare that would have made even the most fervent Venceremos member either howl with laughter or break into a frightened sweat.

Quote, I told him it was a bunch of garbage, said Wheeler, as reported in The Voices of Guns. It wasn't realistic as far as revolution was concerned. It was bullshit. It was suicide. End quote. But it was too late. One of the people harboring DeFreeze, Nancy Ling Perry, under the pseudonym Faiza, had already penned and mailed out the SLA's declaration of war to the media, and lists of potential targets were being assembled.

Despite Wheeler's objections, the SLA let their presence be known on the evening of November 6th with the assassination of Oakland's first African-American public school superintendent, Marcus Foster, over his proposal to issue identification cards to students to eliminate drug dealing on school campuses.

Residents of the community originally assumed the murder was racially motivated. The vanguard of East Bay radicalism, the Black Panther Party, called for the immediate apprehension of the culprits. When the SLA delivered a communique to the media the next day revealing their motives, it added to the public's confusion over the murder.

Were SLA members so lost in their never-never land of revolution that they didn't notice how tone-deaf their actions were? Made up of a garbled mess consisting of politically righteous jargon, shoot-on-sight orders targeting the rest of the Oakland Board of Education, and home-brewed conspiracies about Foster's ID program being fashioned to reflect the apartheid system in South Africa, the message ended with, To those who would bear the hopes and future of our people, let the voice of their guns express the words of freedom.

Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people. When this abruptly assembled group of cartoonish radicals somehow pulled off the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, the 19-year-old daughter of media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, in February of the next year, it resulted in a barrage of articles from Bay Area media connecting the SLA to the recently disbanded Venceremos.

The papers were quick to point out that Joseph Ramiro, the SLA member now in prison for the murder of Marcus Foster, was a former weapons expert for Venceremos, and when a composite sketch of Thero Wheeler was released as one of the three people who kidnapped Patty Hearst, newspapers started referring to the SLA as a break-off from Venceremos.

Still unemployed after being fired by Stanford two years earlier, an obvious embittered Bruce Franklin flatly denied knowing any of those tied to the crimes, bluntly telling the Stanford Daily that the allegations were, quote, getting me pissed off. People will go through the goddamnest mental contortions I ever heard to link the SLA and Venceremos, end quote.

Other former members of Venceremos released a statement simply discrediting the SLA as, quote, anti-working class, anti-revolutionary, anti-communist, end quote, while declaring, quote, terrorism cannot help accomplish the seizure of power by the working class, but only set it back, end quote. Others didn't see it that way.

And still don't. Quote, Venceremos and the SLA were one and the same, Don Criswell says very matter-of-factly. Quote, whether they were or not, that's the way they were viewed by us in law enforcement. Venceremos were on the losing end of things by that time. They had been being busted, harassed, and beaten up, and their following drifted away.

This was them transfiguring themselves from Venceremos into SLA, end quote. This connection only seemed stronger when Hearst magically changed from rich kid to radical overnight, joined the SLA, and signed her commencement communique by exclaiming Venceremos at the end. It might be a coincidence. It might be not.

But still, it's strange. Asked about the connection between Venceremos and the SLA, Bruce Franklin is curt in his response. Quote, we vehemently denounced the SLA. We thought they were counter-revolutionary from the beginning, and I've continuously made my personal opinion about that very clear, end quote.

Others describe the possible links between the two groups as less concrete. Quote, it was a radical community with people floating around, remembers Jim Waltman, a lawyer who worked with Venceremos. Maybe someone goes up to Oakland for a meeting and meets someone, and they meet somebody.

Chapter 4. Back Where You Came From By the time the revolutionary soap opera of the SLA finally came to a close in the fall of 1975, with the capture of surviving members Bill and Emily Harris, as well as Patty Hearst, the revolution seemed like a distant memory for some, the equivalent of a dance craze or hairstyle fad.

Despite articles still being published painting him as some kind of communist Charles Manson, Bruce Franklin quickly landed a book deal for his revolutionary memoir, Back Where You Came From. He also secured a new faculty position at Rutgers University. Throughout his long tenure with that institution, no one seemed to mind his radical, rabble-rousing past or the introduction he wrote for the book, The Essential Stalin, while also racking up a bevy of teaching awards and having books published on topics ranging from the Vietnam War to science fiction to the menhaden fish, before retiring and moving back to the West Coast in 2016.

A few weeks prior to the Beaty breakout, Aaron Manganiello resigned from the Central Committee of Venceremos, stating he felt, quote, incapable of providing strong leadership for the organization, end quote. Quote, I think Aaron fell out of favor with the rest of the group, suspects Don Criswell, especially when Venceremos became more about some vague idea of revolution and less about Chicano causes, end quote.

During the FBI's investigation into the Patty Hearst kidnapping, Manganiello was approached by agents for information and surprisingly spoke very frankly with them. Burnt out on Palo Alto politics, Manganiello admitted to knowing former Venceremos cadre and foster murderer Joseph Ramiro well and expressed regret over the Beaty incident.

According to the agents, quote, Manganiello believes he is somewhat responsible for Hobson, Holman, Burt, and Seebach facing long prison terms inasmuch as they followed his revolutionary rhetoric, end quote. Later, Manganiello operated a substance abuse counseling service out of his home until suffering a stroke that led to his death in 2009.

Looking back on his time chasing Venceremos around the Bay Area mid-peninsula, Don Criswell feels empathy for the younger members who got caught up in the radical adventurism of the times. Quote, a lot of naive young people were brought into this organization and cause and suffered consequences whether they were arrested or prosecuted or spent time in prison, he says.

Hundreds of them went to jail. The leaders of Venceremos are responsible for a lot of people having their lives ruined, including that Chino officer. The leaders were smart enough to know better, and I don't know what they got out of it, end quote. Soon after the sketch of Thero Wheeler was released to the press, eyewitnesses asserted that the other male who had abducted Hearst was not Wheeler, but Bill Harris.

No one really knew where Wheeler was, and over the following year, he bounced around America's radical underground in an unsuccessful pursuit of a doctor to help with his bleeding ulcer. When he got back to Oakland and heard that the SLA was actually after him for knowing too much, he kept moving until he found a job in Houston that offered him health insurance.

Employed under the alias of Bradley Bruce, he finally got the surgery that he had so desperately needed for years. The fact that the job was working on an assembly line making burglar alarms adds on a very thick coating of irony. Wheeler got comfortable in his new life. He got married and had a daughter.

Then in July of 1974, he entered an emergency room with a gunshot wound after attempting to break up an altercation between two men. He was arrested soon after and returned to California to finish out his sentence. William Shockley's number one opponent, Ho Kwon Ping, moved back to Singapore to become an investigative journalist, but ended up doing hard time due to some of his articles.

Quote, "You realize in solitary confinement who you are and who you are not," Ping told the BBC in 2010. "I realized I was not Nelson Mandela. The causes for which I might have been imprisoned for were not the causes that I really could identify with." End quote. Realizing that he was not cut out for the brutal life of a radical political journalist, Ping did a 180.

He embraced capitalism and went on to found Banyan Tree, a global chain of luxury hotels and spas. Seven years ago, Forbes estimated his net worth at $345 million. It's nice to see that the revolution worked out for somebody.

Now, Section C, THE CURRENT MOMENT

"Fascism is, in the last analysis, destabilizing." He continues that fascist regimes could not settle down into a comfortable enjoyment of power, and that the charismatic leader had made dramatic promises to unify, purify, and energize his community. And finally, it's worth pointing out the inherent ambiguity about succession in authoritarian or fascist regimes.

Almost half, 47%, of authoritarian regimes end in collapse when the leader dies or needs replacing or some other crisis happens. In other words, succession is really hard. It depends on the flip of a coin, and personalist dictatorships tend to struggle on until the bitter end, dragging their country down into chaos and catastrophe with them.

Again, order is promised and chaos is the reality

Just eight years after the end of World War II, in 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the structure of DNA. Since then, we've learnt so much about genetics, ethnicity, heredity, evolution, and everything in between. This has, of course, had many ramifications, both scientifically and culturally, but there's one huge crucial consequence for our story.

It's meant that many parts of Nazi ideology, these parts that we looked at in how to make a fascist, have been totally discredited. Remember, the Nazis believed in a pure Aryan racial archetype that existed in the deep past, which was being, like the French and the Americans, contaminated and made impure by degenerates, whether Jewish, or gay, or disabled, or Black, really anything that wasn't archetypically Völkisch German.

Modern genetics has shown that variation within races and other groups, the variation between individuals within those groups, is greater than the variation between races and other groups. We all come from the same, quote, unquote, "Ancestral Eve," that all humans share 99.9% of their DNA, that environmental factors are as important, if not more so, than genetic ones in determining the outcome of our lives, even our biological lives.

So all of this has done much to discredit the eugenic and racial thinking of the late 19th century, and has done much for the idea of universal human rights, the very kind of thing fascists were arguing against. The Nazi idea that the Slavs are biologically incapable of ruling themselves, or the idea that the Portuguese or British are biologically suited to colonizing and teaching large parts of the globe, holds, I think, little water today.

That's not to say that similar kinds of things don't persevere, only that something very significant that served to legitimize fascist ideology has changed because of scientific advances. Take this quote on eugenics from historian Richard Evans talking about German racialists. He said that first they believed heredity played a significant role in determining human character and behavior.

Second, which followed on from this, was that society led by the state should manage the population in order to increase national efficiency. The fit had to be persuaded or forced to breed more, the unfit to breed less. Thirdly, however these terms were understood, the racial hygiene movement introduced an ominously rational and scientific categorization of people into those who were valuable to the nation and those who were not.

Low quality, the German term was minderwertig, literally worthless, became a stock term used by social workers and medical men for many kinds of social deviance before the First World War. In other words, we have to remind ourselves, like we did in How to Make a Fascist, that society since Darwin leading up to World War II had become seen through a biological struggle for survival, fit and unfit eugenicist lens all across Europe and America The idea that the state should have any role in persuading the fit to breed and the unfit to breed less has become, let's say, unfashionable.

Of course, race science still persists in the minds of many, but even they have to argue in a completely different scientific field, one with different truth claims, and language, and terminology than the 19th century racialist one, the one that informed the rise of the Nazis, where this sort of view was entirely normal.

More than this, it de-legitimizes the idea of Völkism entirely. Völkisch thinkers, again, thought there was something transcendental about races, something pure, like platonic forms existing outside of space and time, the archetype of Germanness, for example, a model that existed deep in history that had something spiritual and special about it, united people, language, spirit, forest, poetry, philosophy.

Anything outside of that, anything mixing with it could only pollute it. Of course, no one serious today, anyone with any grasp on science or genetics or history argues that, say, Englishness or Americanness are eternal and biological. These kinds of arguments have moved much more from the biological into the cultural realm.

So any political ideology based on that will shift with that too. That's not to say that nationalism obviously isn't still a dominant force in modern life, maybe still the dominant force. But there is an interesting irony here. On the one hand, nationalism is maybe more powerful than ever. You could argue that.

It has good claim on being the most successful, the most enduring ideology, other than religion maybe, that has ever existed But that also means that nation states with fixed borders and identifiable languages and cultures and peoples are much more entrenched. In 1920s Europe, borders were more porous.

Nation states were new. Empires were the norms. Again, you had rulers and the ruled, and you had the weak and the strong. It's much more difficult to make a legitimate claim to the right to rule over a particular area today because nationalism is so strong. In some sense then, the Nazis and the Italians, they weren't nationalists at all.

There's a very important distinction between nationalism and ultra-nationalism because nationalism is based on the assumption that there are nation states and that nations have the right to self-determination. Ultra-nationalism is kind of a mix between this new national identity ideal and old ideas of power and imperialism, that it's a kind of, um, negation of nationalism.

In that kind of world where you have a mix of empire and nationalism, the reasons given to occupy another nation, to protect them or to steward them or to enslave them or to educate them or to civilize them, all of that carries much, much less weight today for the same reasons that racialism has declined.

It has become much, much more difficult today to essentialize a people based on their biology and to justify doing something to them based on that biology, based on their inferiority, say, what the Nazis thought about the Slavs, that they were incapable of ruling themselves. Because we're much more aware of the scientific flexibility of man, the migratory history of people, the evolutionary facts about humanity.

None of this was available in the Nazi period Figures like Putin might try and make these kinds of arguments, but they don't land in anywhere near the same way as they would in the 1920s, say. Instead, they strike us as ridiculous. Putin's interviews are ridiculed widely, whereas in the 1930s, many in the US and Britain, many serious figures, influential figures, looked at some of Hitler and Mussolini's early territorial ambitions and claims in places like the Sudetenland or in Libya as perfectly legitimate.

The ultra-nationalism of that period, in fact, came from a kind of weakness of nationalism. Nationalism was still developing. It hadn't evened out. Most nations weren't countries. Empires were the norm. Take the Italian case. It's easy to remember Mussolini as an ultra-nationalist. We forget that this happened because of how un-nationalized Italy was.

In other words, how little nationalist consciousness Italians had. Italy had only just unified, was very weak, had little sense of national identity. Only 2.5% of Italians spoke Italian. The peasants didn't care about World War I, and Bolsheviks were internationalists, not nationalists. Mid-century ultra-nationalism was also a response to the universalist claims of Bolshevism or the jealousy of globalist empires like the British.

In other words, and the book Five Roads to Modernity by Liah Greenfeld is a great book on this, ultra-nationalism is a response to something from the outside, a threat. Either defense against another nationalist incursion into your own culture or territory, or a response to an incursion by some kind of universalistic claim or aim, like the Bolshevik one in which workers of the world would unite, or something like international law being applied to everyone equally.

Something that, of course, is more topical than ever right now.

the Russian Revolution showed that capitalism isn't eternal. Uh, it showed that working people can overthrow the current system and start building a society that establishes democracy, uh, in the economy and not just in politics. Second, it shows that the strategy to get to that goal is class struggle, not a strategic alliance with liberals or capitalists.

Third, to overthrow capitalism, workers need their own party, and Marxists have a central role to play in making that party effective. And finally, the class struggle is international, and the struggle of workers, uh, in every country is deeply interlinked. So these are huge points, uh, really important. I talk about them a lot in the book.

But I, I think that they're, um, points that we agree on, so I'm gonna focus, uh, for the sake of discussion, on where I think we disagree. I could be wrong. Uh, remains to be seen. Uh, and I would summarize it as follows. To put it simply, I think those in the Leninist tradition, um, including, um, organizations like Socialist Alternative, tend to overgeneralize strategy from the Revolu- Russian Revolution, uh, to context of capitalist democracies.

And the fundamental flaw of Leninism in my view, and this comes from, uh, the research I did and, and organizing experience as well, was to assume that a form of revolution and a form of party that was appropriate to autocratic Russia, uh, can more or less be transplanted to capitalist countries where civil liberties and democratic institutions are significantly more robust, even if they don't go as far as we'd like And so more specifically, I think it's wrong to claim that the revolution illustrates the universal validity of, one, a new conception of revolution as laid out in Lenin's State and Revolution, according to which the entire, uh, existing state would have to be o-overthrown everywhere through a mass uprising, uh, to set up council republics.

And s-two, um, it supposedly showed the necessity for a new form of revolutionary party, one committed to democratic centralism and a revolutionary Leninist program. And by new here, I mean that this was a different form of party and revolution than the position long articulated, uh, by the left of the Second International, most notably by Karl Kautsky.

Um, and the founding myth of Leninism, I think I show in the book, and we can talk about, was that supposedly the secret to success of the Bolsheviks in nineteen seventeen was that they broke from Kautsky's strategy, known at the time as revolutionary social democracy, and that supposedly all other socialists should follow, uh, them in doing the same.

But as I show in the book, this is just historically wrong, and it's politically flawed. Unlike in Germany, where Kautsky's revolutionary theories were ignored by the party leadership, in autocratic Russia, uh, this theory was implemented not only by the Bolsheviks but by all the other nationalities that led working people to conquer power in nineteen seventeen, eighteen, including in Finland.

And this revolutionary social democratic strategy was premised on a correct understanding that class struggle and revolutions would develop qualitatively differently in autocratic and democratic contexts. And it was precisely this understanding, this distinction between politics in autocratic, uh, and democratic capitalist countries, that Leninists tended to drop from nineteen and eighteen onwards, or at least minimize, uh, excessively.

According to Leninists, the Russian Revolution shows that socialists should seek to overthrow the entire existing state, even when a democratically elected parliament exists. The problem with this claim, um, is that As it doesn't actually follow from what happened in the Russian Revolution. Uh, they say that the Russian Revolution proves this, but there was no democratically elected parliament in Russia to be overthrown or to exist.

And pre-precisely because of that, Soviets or councils were able to fill the vacuums. So it's hard to generalize from the Russian experience, at least beyond Finland, uh, to countries where such a democratic parliament does exist. And all the experience then during and since 1917 shows that where a democratic parliament does exist, workers will try to use it to meet their demands, including for socialist transformation.

And that's the basic reason, uh, why a Leninist revolution has never come close to taking place in a capitalist democracy. And we should acknowledge that and, and sort of adjust accordingly. One of the underlying flaws in Leninism then is its assumption that workers in all countries of the world will sooner or later behave as radically as workers did in Russia in 1917.

And honestly, I, I really wish that it turned out to be true. It would be fantastic if it turned out to be true. It hasn't turned out to be true. And so we should acknowledge that and orient to the working class as it is, um, not as we might wish it to be. And If we do that, it will help us avoid a tendency of Leninists and others to excessively blame, like bad leadership, misleaders, which, of which is often a real problem, but to excessively blame that for holding back the revolutionary instincts of the masses.

There's a lot more going on for, um, what it's gonna take to overthrow capitalism in different contexts. The main reason capitalism hasn't been overthrown yet isn't that socialists have strayed from the correct revolutionary line. The main reason is that capitalists are very powerful, and that most workers in capitalist democracies have oriented to making the state work for them rather than trying to overthrow it.

Of course, it's true that if socialists win a majority through parliamentary means and begin to push for socialist transformation, capitalists will resist this with all the means at their disposal. There's no reason to expect that the capitalist minority will peacefully submit to the majority. But it doesn't follow from this that universal suffrage and parliaments are necessarily a form of capitalist rule, as Leninists claim.

It just means you need to leverage the mandate, legitimacy structures of winning a democratic election in order to effectively de- defeat the anti-democratic capitalist minority and the undemocratic structures of the state, like the police and the army. And so what I show in the book is that's precisely...

This is precisely what happened in Finland, the one part of the Russian Empire which had a sustained political freedom, um, tradition and universal suffrage. There, socialists won a majority in nineteen sixteen. They proceeded to try to implement the program in nineteen seventeen. Then when the capitalists undemocratically, uh, resisted, Finnish socialists led workers to power in early nineteen eighteen to fulfill their mandate.

And to be clear, my argument isn't that we should try to copy Kautsky today, uh, or that Finland is some sort of new universal model to be replicated. I, I think m- it's more narrow. I think what Finland does show is that revolutionary social democratic strategy could guide workers to power, and that the class struggle, and this is a big point, tends to develop very differently where there's political freedom and where real parliaments exist, as opposed to contexts where they don't.

And the fact that the US today is the least democratic of the advanced capitalist countries doesn't mean a Leninist revolution is on the cards here either. It just means we need to dramatically democratize the US state to make both social, democratic, and anti-capitalist transformation possible.

Lenin's claim Uh, that quote, "The Democratic Republic is the best possible shell for capitalism," end quote, which is often quoted by Leninists, um, severely underestimates the extent to which democratic parliaments were won by and for working people, that what democracy we have is a conquest, uh, to be defended and expanded.

And it undercuts, uh, this, this conception of Lenin that the Democratic Republic is just a shell, the best shell for capitalism. This conception undercuts our ability to make a coherent case to working people that it's always the right, not the left, that wants to undermine universal suffrage and democratically elected parliaments, which we've seen most recently through the rise of Trumpism and the January 6th insurrection.

And to be clear, I'm really glad that Socialist Alternative, um, explicitly states that they want to base socialist revolution on a majority rule of the population. I think that's great, and we agree on that. But the fact is that both Lenin and Trotsky and, and other Leninists, uh, particularly in these early years, explicitly argued against this.

They explicitly argued, and I can give you dozens of citations, saying that Marxists shouldn't wait to win under capitalism majority of the population for socialist, um, mandate through democratically elected parliaments, that they should win a majority in Soviets, which doesn't represent the full population, and after that, they can forge and win the majority, uh, after having taken power And I think that's a conception we should reject.

It's, it's not helpful, and I don't think it, um, helps move in the direction we need. As I mentioned before, and I'm gonna go more briefly on this last point, the second major flaw in Leninism, uh, was its claim that the Russian Revolution demons- demonstrated the universal validity of a new party model based on democratic centralism Uh, and strict organizational separation from socialists who didn't adhere to Lenin's new conception of state and revolution.

And to summarize a big history, the story severely exaggerates the organizational coherence and programmatic unity of the Bolsheviks. Uh, and in practice, this conception often tends to lead to sectarianism. Because Bolsheviks operated in an autocratic context in which top leaders had to live abroad and which, uh, local committees would constantly get broken up by the police, the actual organizational practices of the Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries in Imperial Russia were extremely decentralized and fluid, way more than any organization since, uh, Lenin's organization since 1917.

So the historical record just doesn't correspond at all to the image of a tight and united party that Leninists have, uh, tended to try to replicate. Moreover, the secret sauce of the Bolsheviks, uh, if you wanna think about it that way, and other successful Marxists in the empire, like the Latvians or the Finns or others, was that they operated as relatively loose, fluid, and organic currents within a broader multi broad tent, big tent party.

And though exiled leaders tended to squabble a lot, Bolshevik leaders on the ground and cadre on the ground were always focused on building and leading that broader party as good faith partners with other currents. They weren't primarily intervening in this party just to build to their own organization.

And because Leninists from 1918 through the present have tended to excessively wall themselves off organizationally from other socialist currents, and because they insist that only their particular conception of state and revolution is viable, their organizations have frequently devolved into, um, sects, sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller.

And I think then we should move away from that organizational conception, and our chances at building a majoritarian socialist movement depend on acknowledging that because there's never been a successful socialist revolution in a capitalist democracy, nobody can claim to have a precise strategic model for the way forward.

And I'm, I think we should be skeptical of claims that, um, that model exists and just needs to be replicated. So studying the Russian Revolution is great, but it's so studying the history of class struggle in a lot of other places, including after World War II in countries like Sweden, where workers and democratic socialists went furthest in capitalist democracies.

And so to conclude, what becomes clear, I think, um, from this history and, and rigorous, like looks at other history since, is that there are no formulas for socialist success in capitalist democracies. There are just strategic dilemmas to grapple with, which look differently in different political contexts.

And that's why effectively pushing the class struggle forward requires concrete analyses of concrete situations, a large degree of tactical flexibility, and an ability to mix revolutionary dedication with a dose of humility and open-endedness.

the article by David Cain, written in 2010 on raptitude.com, titled Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed. Now he starts off the article talking about how he had been traveling for some time as a kind of a backpacker. So he was a lot more conscious about the kinds of costs he was incurring and how he could reduce those costs as he went from country to country.

When he got back from his travel, he returned to a nine to five existence that, as he says, exposed something that he had overlooked before, that he had spent much less per month traveling foreign countries than he did working a regular job at home He had more free time, he was visiting some of the most beautiful places in the world, he was meeting new people left and right, he was calm and peaceful, and otherwise having an unforgettable time.

And somehow it cost him much less than his nine-to-five lifestyle in one of Canada's least expensive cities. And so it got him to thinking about why it was that he got so much more for his dollar when he was traveling than when he had returned home and gotten back into his job. And he references the example of the way that companies encourage us to spend, consume.

You know, I talk about some of these examples all the time. One of the examples he uses is that marketing psychologists found out that the best way to increase toy sales would be to target their advertising to children so the children would pester their parents. As he says, "Big companies didn't make their millions by earnestly promoting the virtues of their products.

They, they made it by creating a culture of hundreds of millions of people that buy way more than they need and try to chase away dissatisfaction with money. We buy stuff to cheer ourselves up, to keep up with the Joneses, to fulfill our childhood vision of what adulthood would be like, to broa- to broadcast our status to the world, and for a lot of other psychological reasons that have very little to do with how useful the product really is.

How much stuff is in your basement or garage that you haven't used in the past year?" Now, I'm not much of a consumer. I very much try to save as much money as I can, so the kind of barrage of marketing and hyper-consumerist culture, that doesn't really get at me. But I have noticed that the more that I would work in a week, the more likely I was to spend more money on stuff.

For example, if I worked really hard Monday to Friday, I would be more likely to buy outside food, for example, or treat myself to the occasional matcha. And this brings us to what Cain is talking about in this article, the real reason for the 40-hour workweek. He's only been back at work for a few days, but already he's noticing that the more wholesome activities are quick- are quickly dropping out of his life.

Walking, exercising, reading, meditating, and extra writing. The one conspicuous similarity between these activities is that they cost little or no money, but they take time. Suddenly I have a lot more money and a lot less time, which means I have a lot more in common with the typical working North American than I did a few months ago.

When I was abroad, I wouldn't have thought twice about spending the day wandering through a national park or reading my book on the beach for a few hours. Now that kind of stuff feels like it's out of the question. Doing either one would take most of one of my precious weekend days. The last thing I want to do when I get home from work is exercise.

It's also the last thing I want to do after dinner or before bed or as soon as I wake, and that's really all the time I have on a weekday. And this is a problem for so many people who are working nowadays, right? You spend so much of your time working that you don't really have anything left in you for anything else.

As technologies and methods advanced, workers in all industries became able to produce much more value in a short amount of time. You'd think this would lead to shorter workdays, but the eight-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours.

The average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in eight hours. But because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. So Graeber was talking about how much of our work is pointless and how much of our work is literally destroying the planet, and Cain here is talking about how doing that amount of work feeds right into the destruction of the planet.

You know, that kind of work day is profitable for big business because keeping free time scarce is the whole point. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

We've been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience, entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don't have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

And if we stopped buying so much, if people stopped buying so much, the economy would collapse and never recover because the economy is built on growth. It's built on this endless consumption. The culture of the eight-hour workday is big business's most powerful tool for keeping people in the same dissatisfied state where the answer to every problem is to buy something.

The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulgent during their free time, and somehow just getting by. Now, this article was written back in twenty ten. Let's see how much of this still applies, right?

Dissatisfied but hopeful. I'm not sure how many people are still hopeful, but maybe that hope is not necessary for being a perfect customer after all. Uninterested in serious personal development. I guess the key word there is serious in the serious personal development because a lot of the stuff that is being sold to people now is sold under this kind of markets and packaging of personal development, of things that will improve you as a person.

Highly habituated to the television. I would say while television is still relevant, more so highly habituated to shorts, reels, TikToks, whatever short-form content there is. Working full-time, that still applies. In fact, people are working overtime more and more. Earning a fair amount, that doesn't really apply.

Wages in a lot of industries have stagnated. Minimum wage has stagnated in many parts of the world, including my own. And yet people having less money to spend does not mean that they won't spend money. I've noticed that people of my generation will tend to spend on the little luxuries, you know, the creature comforts almost because they've accepted the fact that they will not be able to actually purchase long-term stability in the form of housing and that kind of thing.

And yeah, people are indeed still indulgent during their free time and somehow just getting by. So my takeaway with these articles was really that the work day, the traditional work day, is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for making the changes we wanna see in the world. And as I've spoken about on my channel before in my video on why nobody wants to be working class, unions have historically fought to change these circumstances, but modern unions are very much caught up in a reformist posture, and the nature of so many of our contemporary workplaces and approaches to work has left, I think, a lot less room for organizing.

I made a short post about this on Substack a couple weeks ago. I said, "Workers' nostalgia for the high point of trade unionism must confront the real conditions workers are facing in the twenty-first century. It's not just legal obstacles and corporate interference that limits unionizing efforts. People are unemployed, underemployed on precarious contracts and gig arrangements tied to BS jobs they want to get out of and/or productivist jobs that literally don't need to exist at all or need to be curtailed significantly, all in the context of a globalized, imperialized world.

I'm speaking to the service sector in the Global North and South, as well as the manufacturing sector and primary sector. A lot of these jobs need to not exist, which means people need to be looking to build escape hatches, not continuing to cling to institutions that presuppose the permanence of wage labour."

I highly question the ability of unions to break free from the terms set by the capitalist economy. I'm not saying it's entirely impossible. I just think the likelihood of it being the case is extremely low because over the decades, they have very much been integrated into the capitalist economy. They have very much capitulated to the permanence of capitalism as an economic system.

I continue in the post, "I'm not saying give up the labour axis of struggle entirely, but these issues can hardly be dealt with by funneling one's blind faith and energy into unions and electoralism, especially for those in the Global North who must attend to the fact that the rest of our economies," our being, you know, those of us in the Global South, "are subordinated for the benefit of your rulers who exist at the pinnacle of economic and political power and, to a lesser extent, your workers who deprive some benefit from imperialist plunder.

We need alternatives prefigured on the ground to set the foundation for a livable relief from this rat race and sustain further social revolution. Fighting to entrench jobs that are ecologically destructive and/or socially meaningless should be a much lower priority than building commons and alternative economies that can create a material basis for autonomy so that people can have the option to refuse exploitative, destructive work.

Not saying it's easy to organize, but to me that should be the North Star and establishing SMART goals toward that end," SMART goals being specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. I feel like having vague goals is not nearly as beneficial to us if we want to construct a better world than actually picking a goal, a smart goal, and sticking to it and seeing it through, developing a specific strategy that will get us toward that goal within a certain time frame.

You have to be step by step in your process.

one of the most powerful forces in moving the Overton window, the media. The more they focus on a story through a certain framing, the more that framing becomes fact and any other considered conspiracy The American mainstream media covered the story extensively and framed the story to be within the same world as the Diddy scandal, Me Too, and Harvey Weinstein.

That this is just about rich and powerful perverts being perverts, and ignored the other element.

And what happened in that massage room I assume was on video. This guy was the greatest blackmailer ever.

That this sadistic and horrifying network routinely abused children Most likely for blackmail and leverage.

The infamous Lolita Express, their private plane used to transport young girls and high-profile friends, including Bill Clinton.

She also told me in that meeting that the plane, the private plane that she and Jeffrey used, um, was wired for s- for audio, video.

And the evidence highly suggests that they were Mossad assets.

They were all essentially commodities to him, traded for the advantage of one single cause, which is Israel. That was the motive, and we know he had, you know, extensive high-level connections to the Israeli regime, to its government, to security, intelligence, uh, its financing circles, its business community.

That was the means that went with the motive. So it's a story about Israeli influence in the highest corridors of power and wealth.

Epstein had a very close relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who would stay at his apartment so frequently that Epstein's staff called it Ehud's apartment.

He was sort of an unofficial ambassador who could use, uh, this network that they had created together to be kind of a frontman and an advance man for the Israeli, uh, for the Israeli regime.

So Epstein served as an advisor to Barak, and he was facilitating introductions to tech investors and financial firms.

One of them was Palantir. That's the US-based data analytics firm founded by, uh, Peter Thiel, and they are deeply involved in government and surveillance. Here is a clip from a call between Epstein and Barak.

Palantir is Peter Thiel's company. Palantir, P-A-L-A-N-T-I-R? Yes.

Epstein tried to procure cyber weapons for Israel.

Aren't we done? Like, that's it. Like, does, y- is there someone who is not connected to a government and their intelligence agencies that tries to get cyber weapons for that government?

The mystery of the woman next to Jeffrey Epstein.

Ghislaine Maxwell, accused of being Epstein's right-hand woman.

Ghislaine Maxwell's father was Robert Maxwell.

A media and publishing tycoon who owned the Daily Mirror.

Was one of the most

important and powerful people in British public life in the '70s and '80s.

A man with long-suspected ties to the Mossad, who mysteriously died when he fell from his yacht.

His body was brought to Israel to be buried in Jerusalem's Mount of Olives.

That's a graveyard reserved for Israel's elite servants. His funeral was attended by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli President Chaim Herzog, and at least six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence and a lot of Mossad agents at that funeral.

Epstein quotes a book called Robert Maxwell: Israel's Super Spy?

in an email titled He Was Passed Away.

Epstein's lawyer was Alan Dershowitz

The informant believed Dershowitz was co-opted by Mossad and subscribed to their mission. So the confidential human source remembered Dershowitz tell Alex Acosta, the US Attorney Southern District of Florida at the time, that Epstein belonged to both US and allied intelligence services.

CHS shared phone calls between Dershowitz and Epstein during which he/she took notes. After these calls, Mossad would then call Dershowitz to debrief.

And Epstein's very close friends were these Norwegian diplomats who were famous for playing a key role in the Oslo Accords, the peace plan that many Palestinians see as having been a trap for Palestinians.

Was one of the architects of the Oslo Peace Accords.

The diplomat, Terje Rød-Larsen, quote, "Wrote official letters of recommendation to US authorities to secure visas for young Russian women in Epstein's orbit, claiming they possessed extraordinary abilities suitable for research roles."

He also calls him his best friend So why does mainstream US media suppress this story?

Can we discuss the blackmail operation that was taking place, and which government, that's a special ally of the United States, put him up to it? And do we really want to be allies with a country that kidnaps young girls, uh, for rape just so they can have dirt on American politicians and control our foreign policy?

Spoiler alert, uh, the topic was changed promptly to, uh, Epstein's relationship with Russia.

Possible connections between convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Russian intelligence services.

Growing suspicions of a Russian connection. Fueling speculation that Epstein could have been working for Russia.

Imagine if the story was Epstein tried to procure cyber weapons for China. Do you think we'd be talking about that non-stop? Of course. Everybody would be like, "China, our mortal enemy China." Or just a random country, Kenya. Ev- Like, I imagine New York Times, CNN would be like, "Whoa, Kenya is all over the Epstein files, and it turns out he was trying to get cyber weapons for Kenya.

He was trying to get America to bomb Kenya's neighbors on behalf of Kenya. Wow, what an amazing story." When it, when it's Israel, shh.

No, there, look, there- The Israel connection is undeniable. Ignoring this or letting this fact just slip by allows the idea of this happening to become acceptable and normal

Investigations are now underway in at least 10 countries.

Britain's former Prince Andrew has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

Norway is living through the crisis the US never had over the Epstein files. The country's former prime minister and top diplomats found themselves under police investigation and forced out of their roles.

Lord Mandelson had been sacked as US ambassador because more links with Jeffrey Epstein had emerged.

What happens in the heart of the empire doesn't stay there. What the Epstein files reveal is not just the moral depravity of a few individuals, but how the system that governs all of us works.

Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?

This guy's been talking-

And the reception of the files reveals how this system is able to sustain itself. It doesn't try to hide anything, but it reveals just enough in a world that's already been pushed too far to respond

Now we can see this as a push of the Overton window, or we can identify the common denominator involved in all of these elements

That's already been sitting at the far, far end of the spectrum for a very long time, Israel And instead of a push, maybe this is all a pull. Because the levels of moral depravity involved here have long been within the Zionist Overton window.

He described the dog attack as rape, saying soldiers laughed and recorded the sexual assaults.

We found booby-trapped children's toys and canned food planted by the occupation, meaning Israel, to cause more casualties.

It doesn't matter who your enemy is, you need to destroy their offspring to prevent them from creating more offspring

And that pull has become even more clear in the US and Israel's latest collaboration, the war on Iran.

A

heartbreaking deadly strike on an Iranian girls' elementary school on the first day of the war. They

were

students

ranging from 7 to 12

years old.

Lebanon's declared a day of mourning.

She was four years old and called Lamar, an angel to her family. When they found her body, she'd been decapitated.

They've hit the same benchmarks. Horrifying violence to begin. Repeated lies.

If we didn't hit within two weeks, they would've had a nuclear weapon.

Weaponized hopelessness. And media complicity.

For the long-term gain. Short-term pain for the long-term gain. Short-term pain be for long-term gain.

We're gonna have some short-term pain, uh, with long-term gain.

A world that has failed to stop the genocide in Gaza and failed to bring justice to the powerful around Epstein is what's paved the way for what is happening now, where the people of Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine are experiencing levels of savagery that were once debilitating for us to watch in Gaza.

My son was just out playing.

How can he be here now? I can't see him anymore. I can't look into his beautiful eyes. I have no words anymore.

The babies is good to kill. Really? In Lebanon? Yes, in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Iran. I kill children

What Jeffrey Epstein built on that island and in that house and in that ranch weren't anomalies. They were concentrated versions of how power already operates, spaces where the rules don't even apply. Even when it's exposed at this scale, nothing breaks. What we're collectively living through is a war on truth and justice and basic human decency.

We're being dragged towards accepting barbarism, of normalizing the lack of morality in power They try to constantly overwhelm us with increasing levels of violence so that we may somehow come to accept it someday. But it is our duty and our moral imperative to resist that, even if it's just within ourselves every day

if I believed that armed struggle was a thing to do today, I would be doing it.

There will be a time in the not-too-distant future when that will be the case, but that time is not now. China, say what you want, but is capitalist, imperialist. Read, uh, Lenin on imperialism, the export of finance capital. I would like to think that what's happening in China is just a, a temporary deviation in order to lift the economy so that, you know, they can be able to fight US imperialism or something like that.

And Russia, of course, is far capitalist. Although, US imperialism is keeping it boxed in, so it's not able to, uh, be as imperialist as China is. So these are very conservative times. Now, World War I was the product of inter-imperialist rivalry. The big brother imperialists had the global pie divided among themselves, and the little imperialists wanted their place in the sun, wanted their slice of the pie.

But in order to get their slice, they would have to take it From the big imperialists. And this resulted in World War I, a redivision of the world's resources. And that failed. And the same thing was true for World War II. Japan, capitalism must expand or die. That's the logic of it. And Japan and Germany, Italy, not so much Italy, but needed to expand.

Mussolini just wanted to go into Northern Africa and reclaim the glory of the Roman Empire or some shit like that. So once again, it resulted in an inter-imperialist war. Efforts to redivide the pie. Well, here we are on the cusp of World War III, where China is expanding into Africa, South Asia, South America, and U.S.

imperialism is outraged at this encroachment on what has traditionally been their slices of the pie. And so World War I brought in the Russian Revolution. World War II brought in the Chinese Revolution. What World War III will bring in is difficult to say, but judging from the last war, most likely it will bring a much devastated planet.

I don't have any answers for people, but the issue is Rosa Luxemburg said, quoting Engels, that the choice confronting people today, and as was true today as it was then, is between socialism or barbarism. And I mean, that's, the planet is dying. The left is anemic. I see no means of turning this around. I mean, there's some slight possibility that if armed groups were developed and were able to survive the hunt, that that could inspire others to do the same thing and ultimately bring about the change.

But, you know, where's the mass movement? You know, where's, the conditions are not here right now. And I wish I could be less pessimistic than I am, but I have a friend named Bill Dunn. He's still in prison. And he signs off each letter with, the future holds promise. And it doesn't . It's not looking good. So I don't know what to tell you in that regard.

Well, we'll keep the optimism alive for you, Ed, even if, if- Okay ... if it's hard for you to come by. But, but I hear you. So one of the things about the brigade that, that I really appreciated is your responsiveness to, to criticism, and also the admission of some errors, which in my experience is just something that it happens a lot less frequently than it should.

There's a lot of... I mean, historically in the US, in the left, but also currently among formations that wanna bring about socialism, you just don't see this level of response to criticism as well as self-criticism. So I wonder if you could say a little bit about that. Obviously, you know, you all felt the need to defend what you all believed, but you weren't afraid to engage the above ground from the underground, and you had a culture of accountability, I would say, with the public.

So just say a little bit about that from your perspective.

Well, first of all, you have to be honest with yourself, and you have to be honest with those around you, and you have to be honest with your critics. And we tried to maintain dialogue. But in our case, the tame left was just too freaked out by the brigade to be able to understand.

What they would do is they would take a, uh, they would take a word like terrorism, pounce that word on us, uh, and talk about how evil terrorism was, and not evaluate whether the work we did was terrorism or not. They were actually, you know, just helping the state. They were... But that's not anything new. The Communist Party of Cuba fought against the, uh, revolution right up until Castro and his comrades seized state power.

The Communist Party of France supported its own government against the, uh, national liberation struggle taking place in Algeria. The, the history of opportunism, right opportunism on the left is a sordid one, and it's even worse today. I mean, the American left with respect to, uh, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, is just pathetic.

But, you know, that's, that's the way it is. That's... There's not going to be any kind of genuine socialist movement- Until that left gets a hold of itself. I would go to demonstrations in San Francisco, and the organizers answer the, and I wore leaders would have marshals flanking the marchers to make sure that nobody did something evil, like started a fire in a dumpster.

When such a fire would've put the demonstration in the national headlines. But in fact, there's no mention whatsoever, one mention in one newspaper in San Francisco of the march, and most of that story was about Faulkner, the cop that Mumia Abu-Jamal allegedly killed, was about his brother being in town during the march.

The idea that 15, maybe 20 years ago, somebody drove by the, uh, storefront of the Socialist Workers Party in Chicago and threw a brick through their window. The Socialist Workers Party ran straight to the police demanding, and in their newspaper demanding that the police protect them. I mean, really? What kind of revolution are you gonna make if you can't protect yourself?

If you have to run to the state's apparatus and repression for help? Um, that's a pretty good metaphor for where we're at on the left today. The distinction between legal and illegal work. A revolutionary doesn't pay any attention to that distinction. It's bullshit. Revolutionaries don't go to the state and ask for permission to march.

They just march. They, uh... Okay, let's move on.

Right on. So one of the, you know, I kinda wanted to close in just talking about prison struggle a little bit, because you've been involved in some pretty, you know, I mean, you already talked about several of them. Some pretty amazing prisoner struggles, both inside and outside supporting as well.

You know, and for years you fought to foster, you, you struggled to foster that radical inside-outside relationship between prisoners, organizers, families, and the left. Mm-hmm. So when is that relationship at its best, and how do those of us who agree with that approach, right? What do we need to do to, to put this into practice?

Okay, here's the slogan that should be tattooed backwards on your forehead, so every time you look in the mirror, you see it. In the absence of class conflict, there exists a state of class peace. There can be no revolution As long as such a condition exists, period. Where is struggle? That's where you need to be.

And Finally, Section D, STRATEGY AND PRACTICE

Consciousness enables people to contemplate and alter their activity as needed. Radical education helps people to develop forms of consciousness which enable them to better understand, assess, orient themselves in, and change their society.

Now let's talk prefigurative politics. Mutual aid must be a foundational concept in any social revolutionary project. Put simply, mutual aid is a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions by building relationships, networks of reciprocity, and communal autonomy from the state.

Mutual aid may involve work to support people impacted by harmful systems and work to create alternative infrastructure. It can take the form of ride-sharing, disaster response, food distribution, and much more. However, those engaging in mutual aid must ask themselves if their actions are providing material relief, avoiding legitimizing oppressive systems, mobilizing people for ongoing struggle, and accommodating marginalized groups.

Mutual aid is not meant to be charity. Charity is its own thing. Mutual aid must actively cultivate liberatory skills, practices, and chief among all, solidarity. In Anarchism and the Black Revolution, Black anarchist and former Panther Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin wrote about the need to create survival programs to feed, house, and serve poor and working class people facing life-altering conditions.

Survival programs are based in a specific geographical region where members of community get together to meet specific needs in their area with the aim of building connections, consciousness, and eventually popular assemblies. A popular assembly is a free association of members of a community gathered with the aim of self-management.

Popular assemblies allow community problems and improvements to be identified and solved directly, drawing upon the ideas and experiences of everyone and enriched by discussion and debate. Decisions may be made via consensus or through other forms of decision-making, such as liquid democracy, majority vote, or supermajority vote.

Within a popular assembly, affinity groups may form to advocate their specific interests in a coordinated manner. The town of Cherán in Mexico provides just one example of successful community control, where the community armed themselves, kicked out the police, the cartels, and the local government, and organized popular assemblies to manage their own affairs.

Popular assemblies will need to network and confederate with other popular assemblies and revolutionary organisations in order to build their collective power and autonomy. For example, communities will need to develop their capacity to feed themselves. Urban agriculture might be able to supplement dietary needs, but ultimately, community-supported agriculture provides a more robust alternative in the long term.

Community-supported agriculture or crop sharing is a system that connects producers and consumers within the food system without a middleman by allowing the consumer to subscribe to the local harvest of a certain farm or group of farms. For the purpose of revolution, crop sharing can connect farming cooperatives with popular assemblies to develop an alternative economy.

A cooperative is simply an autonomous association of people united to meet their common economic, social, and/or cultural needs and aspirations through a collectively owned and democratically controlled organisation. Co-housing cooperatives deal with housing. Workers' cooperatives deal with various industries, including food, healthcare, transportation, construction, and clothing.

Credit unions deal with finance, including potentially financing revolutionary projects. Platform cooperatives deal with websites or apps, and utility cooperatives deal with the provision of utilities in a community or region. Makerspaces, coding spaces, and cooperative labs can create room for research and innovation in revolutionary projects, bringing together people of a diverse set of skills to collaborate and find solutions to the issues raised by the broader community As I discussed in my videos on the library economy and the commons, the reclamation of the commons is absolutely vital to revolution.

In brief, the commons refers to any collectively managed natural or man-made resource system, such as a community land trust, a local forest, a shared pasture, or a renewable energy system. Revolutionaries can engage in building fully-fledged library economies based on the commons. This can take the form of tool libraries, vehicle libraries, clothing libraries, furniture libraries, and more, in an effort to curb overproduction, end planned obsolescence, and provide access to an irreducible minimum to all.

Revolutionaries can also establish childcare collectives and free schools. Free schools are autonomous, non-hierarchical spaces intended for educational exchange and skill-sharing for all ages. They reject the subordination of students to teachers and organize classes in a way that promotes critical consciousness across a variety of subjects.

From nursery through college, in community centers, parks, libraries, and other shared spaces, learners and facilitators can collaborate to develop and self-manage an autonomous education system that can dispense knowledge and skills among the community. Free children beget a free society, and education should facilitate their freedom.

Communities must also develop methods of conflict resolution and new systems of justice. Mistakes and disagreements are inevitable, so there must be some means in place for discussing, deciding, and resolving conflict and incidents within and between communities, cooperatives, and individuals in a healthy and effective way, such as through arbitration, mediation, or conciliation.

Community defense against domination and abuses of power requires a system of justice capable of responding to harmful behavior. How that manifests is subject to much debate among anarchists and abolitionists, so I will reserve that discussion for a future video. Now let's visit a free commune, a radical few who chose to maroon.

They wished to abolish capitalism and more, but they left the city and its working-class core. Utopia was the goal, but it couldn't be accessed, solidarity made impossible between the commune and the oppressed. When the time drew near and their comrades would call, the commune folk didn't help at all.

Hey, T. It's me again. We're down here at City Hall downtown. We're striking, and we could really use some of your aid, just like old times.

What's up, Conrad G? You know we'd love to help, but the rains just came down last week, and we've been trying to fix our place. Plus, we're setting up this new irrigation system, just trying to get it up and running, so we just don't have the time to make it downtown this time.

But I promise you, man, we will be sure to help out next time.

Okay, T, but you know this is the third time this happened. What happened to solidarity forever?

Yo, of course, man. Of course. Solidarity forever, but we're just too busy, you know? Don't worry, we always got love for you. We'll support the movement when things settle down for us here at the commune, but for now, we just, we have our own fires to put out

But year after year, there was always a cause why the commune folk couldn't partake in class wars.

They shrunk to the background, doing their own thing, until the phone of revolution no longer did ring. A year or two down the line, money got tight. With no allies or comrades, new ambitions were in sight.

I think we should start a farmer's market.

Before long, these radicals took another tacit turn. A bed and breakfast was born with the money they'd earn.

Book a stay, one and all, at the Bread Book B&B. You pay for your room, the utopia is free. They once were merry, they once were gay, but they forgot to oppose and they lost their way. Oppose and propose. Propose and oppose. Confrontation, non-cooperation, and prefiguration. A variety of organizations and individuals undertaking a variety of roles, tactics, and strategies in a variety of settings in concert to develop the revolution.

Supporters unable to directly engage help and fund the projects of these movements. Ultimately, the social revolution is a movement from below, by and for the oppressed to achieve their own freedom. It is an ongoing process to make society more diverse, open, and free, expanding pockets of social change around the world until new examples of what life could be are made known to all.

Remember that even in struggle, it's not just serious business. Revolution can and should be fun. A carnival of the oppressed. It's about making life worth living. It's about emancipating people. As Emma Goldman said, if I can't dance, it's not my revolution. Remember that it always seems impossible until it is done.

why do we want revolution?

This is a relatively simple question that can be answered with many volumes, but I'll keep it simple. Capitalism is an untenable and unstable system built on the inherent injustice of market allocation, as well as the destruction of the environment and commodification of everything around us. It hurts us, the planet, and pretty much just about anything else.

A deeper introductory analysis of capitalism and its faults can be found in an earlier video I made here. Only through revolution, the overthrow of one class, the ruling class, by another class, the working class, can we finally escape the endless boom and bust cycles, the crises of overproduction, and the ruin of our common earth.

The system that will overtake and supersede capitalism is socialism, in which the market is done away with, the means of production are democratically managed, and the state machinery, in the hands of the working class, is made to work for the working class and society as a whole. For a deeper introductory dive into socialism and its inherent superiority over capitalism, take a look at this video I made here.

Now, that's all well and good, but how do we go about this whole revolution thing exactly? Two, the approach to revolution. As much as you and I would love to just flip a switch to achieve our goals, sadly, the real world is different. Only tireless work towards revolution and the appropriate material conditions can result in a situation that could possibly lead to the overthrow of capitalism.

What exactly does this tireless work look like, though? Simple. The building of organizations, education, direct action, mutual aid, applying the mass line, and ceaseless agitation, amongst other things. All of this will be touched on soon. Let's take this one by one. What's this about building organizations?

Three, building organizations and their importance. Human beings are a cooperative species. We rarely work alone, and anything worth doing requires collective efforts of the masses of people from their various walks of life. It goes without saying that anything you can do on your own can be done more quickly, efficiently, and cleanly by a dedicated organization, and politics is no different.

Now, what forms of organizations are we talking about exactly? Well, that's up to the material conditions of your region and the requirements of your community. Having an appropriate materialist analysis is of prime importance. These organizations can be political parties or women's groups or student unions or even standard workers unions, amongst many other things.

The point being, though, is that nothing can be accomplished without the proper organizations being in place. History has proven that organic mobilization, where people spontaneously mobilize, is, at best, easily fragmented and crushed or, at worst, nonexistent. Organizations exist to lay the groundwork for that crucial moment, or at least to nudge it along.

Once it comes around, though, there is some ready-made infrastructure with an appropriate analysis, the people's trust, and a detailed plan of action at hand. Now, the boring organizational aspects of these groups too depend on the material conditions. At times, a highly centralized leadership is necessary.

At others, a decentralized umbrella organization with numerous streams of leadership, but nonetheless a single goal. Leadership is fluid, sometimes centralized, sometimes running through multiple streams depending on the material conditions. There isn't just one answer at all times. Under capitalism, the issues people face from exploitation to the unjust distribution of resources according to profit rather than need, is painted as moral failings of individuals rather than systemic defects that need to be, and definitely can be, corrected.

In an organization, those that take part, as well as those that directly benefit from the work these groups do, help people develop an appropriate and correct analysis of the situation, and the undeniable failings of the capitalist system. In essence, organizations are the key to and school of liberation.

To summarize, the point of organizations and their purpose is twofold: firstly, to directly aid our communities, and in doing so, broadcast the failures of the capitalist system. And secondly, to build a preliminary form of dual power and equip the people with the necessary tools so that in that crucial moment, we can properly take advantage and win our liberation.

Four, education and its importance. Now, what of education? This doesn't mean only reading theory, although that is of paramount importance too. It also means organic education through organizing. Be it understandings of legal frameworks, public relations, basic medical knowledge, and computer knowhow. The reason theory is important is because it is a guide to action.

It is what allows us to properly understand the world around us and how to go about critiquing and, more importantly, changing it. If you're a new Marxist and want some advice on what you should be doing education-wise, take a look at this video here. If you'd like to get a basic reading list on socialism, take a look at this video here.

The point of educating yourself in the theory is to be able to develop your criticisms of capitalism and to confidently and accurately share your understanding with your community and those around you. This, combined with direct action, is what builds class consciousness, the very first block towards abolishing capitalism.

With that said, what about the other sort of education? Theory can be done on your own or in groups, which is highly recommended, but interpersonal communication skills, how to handle conflict, basic cooperative and democratic participation, accurately finding a solution to a problem found through said cooperative effort, all this is something that can only really be done in groups.

Finally, professional organizations tend to grow the, let's say, more boring but still very necessary stuff as well. From administrative skills and technical organization of transport groups, et cetera, to things like video editing and Photoshop skills, or creative writing in the forms of pamphlets or seminars and more Five, mutual aid and basic organizing.

With all the introductory stuff out of the way, let's get more concrete. Firstly, what is mutual aid? Mutual aid is collective coordination to meet each other's needs. We fundamentally understand that the systems we have in place are not going to meet those needs, and the aim of mutual aid projects is to develop this point, is to set up alternative sources of that which your community is in need of, be it medical attention or housing or whatever else, accompanied by constant education, explaining why is it that their needs aren't being met in the first place.

The best example that comes to mind, at least for the United States and other Western countries, is that of the Black Panthers. A dedicated Marxist group, they saw the direct injustices being dealt to their own African-American communities, educated themselves with the relevant theory, and got to work developing a free children's breakfast program, community protection, free medical clinics and ambulance rides, aid to the elderly and infirm when they run errands, educational initiatives, and much more.

Notice, they not only provided what their communities needed and weren't being provided in the first place, but also were delivering a clear and scathing criticism of the capitalist system and the systemic racism in the US. To use an old Sufi adage, they not only fed the stomach, but the mind too. This process of educating those who benefited from the mutual aid projects of the Black Panthers instilled in those communities a drive for change, which is what made the Black Panthers so successful in the eyes of the working class, and so dangerous in the eyes of the ruling class.

On a side note, the police, being the radiantly positive organization that it is, broke into the church storing the food for the Black Panther free breakfast program and destroyed it, mostly by urinating and stepping on it, just in case you ever doubted whose side they're on. We need to make something abundantly clear: mutual aid is not charity.

In times of crisis, the ruling class pushes very safe, sanitized, and fairly ineffective organizations revolving around charity, in which the decisions on what is needed, how much, where, and to whom are completely disconnected from the people who are most affected by them. These institutions aren't intended to get at the root cause of whatever the issue is, be it poverty or homelessness or drug abuse or whatever else.

Instead, it's designed as a pretty PR game for the rich and influential to beautify themselves and their ever so generous philanthropy without ever even attempting to correct the issue at hand. It's symptomatic treatment, not a cure, and it's intended to make humane a system that is inherently inhumane.

At the most basic level, a social revolution requires the cooperation of multiple people. One potential form that cooperation can take is the affinity group. Affinity groups are small groups of anarchists who work together to spread anarchic ideas to the wider culture. Their work requires a combination of actions that both oppose and propose, particularly in the realm of education, where affinity groups must simultaneously expand people's consciousness of systems of oppression and demonstrate the possibilities of alternatives.

Additionally, affinity groups seek to develop the anarchic powers and capacities of people in mass movements, unions, and communities to engage in direct action and learn to manage their own affairs without hierarchy. Affinity groups may host workshops and skill shares where they can disseminate skills and build connections in their communities.

Within affinity groups, folks can fill different roles developing agitprop, which is the intentional promotion of ideas through literature, music, poetry, theater, film, illustration, social media, and other forms of political art. Never underestimate the potential ripple effects a small network of affinity groups can have on the broader zeitgeist.

Political action to oppose can generally be divided further into two major groups: acts of confrontation, which require less people but involve more risk, and acts of non-cooperation, which require more people but involve slightly less risk due to safety in numbers. Technically speaking, acts of non-cooperation could fall under acts of confrontation and vice versa, but don't get tied up.

They're imperfect categories. Let's begin with acts of confrontation. Protests are a very public form of sometimes indirect, sometimes direct political action that anarchists may utilize in order to raise awareness and keep the spirit of revolt alive and well. Protest, when executed correctly, is a sign that people are thinking and acting for themselves and against what authorities want them to do.

However, protesting is very risky. Even non-violent protests can be subject to severe violent retribution, either from counter-protesters or from the agents of the state. Organizers have been assassinated, gone missing, or even been imprisoned. Plus, protests don't usually have much control over their messaging, making them vulnerable to the highly developed propaganda machine of corporate media.

Alternative media organized by affinity groups can help spread the truth about protests, but they can't always compete. Still, political protest in the context of a broader social revolution is both powerful and necessary to resist oppression. Keep in mind that anarchists' engagement with protests is not based on a desire to lobby those in power for change.

The lobbying approach typically results in a highly hierarchical and disempowered movement where the masses below do the work and take on the risk while an elite minority of activists rub shoulders with politicians and lose touch with the cause. Lobbying requires compromise while anarchists recognize that the unyielding persistence of a radical movement can produce reforms without ever limiting themselves to reforms.

The Zapatistas were able to gain and maintain the land they now hold because a government, even a progressive government, does not give away some of its power unless it's scared of losing all of its power. Rather than expending time, resources and energy trying to convince or change a government, movements can focus on building up a real threat that can drive a hard bargain through direct forms of action Direct action means working to accomplish goals directly rather than relying on authorities or representatives as intercessors.

But crucially, direct action requires a security culture capable of protecting its perpetrators from the law. Again, I'm not advocating for anything illegal, just describing how a fictional anarchist social revolution works. A security culture is an instinctive set of customs developed and shared by a community whose members may be targeted by the government designed to minimize risk.

The central principle of security culture is that people should never be privy to any sensitive information they do not need to know. Don't ask, don't tell. Don't make it easy for your enemies. Don't let paranoia override your movements, and don't put yourself or others at unnecessary risk. Alongside support networks that can lend transportation and safe housing for those involved, much like the Underground Railroad, having a solid security culture is necessary for the usually very illegal actions that seek to directly confront and dismantle institutions of power.

Obstruction refers to any actions that movements may engage in that seek to delay or cease the operations of those in power by making it physically impossible for them to proceed with their intended actions. Using sheer numbers or shrewd strategies, this can range from a DDOS attack to highway blockades to eviction resistance to the disruption of mining, logging, construction, or drilling activities that are damaging the environment and endangering poor communities.

Another usually temporary tactic is occupation, where a collective may squat and hold critical infrastructure such as factories, transportation systems, school buildings, shopping centers, public squares, parks, and empty land or housing in order to force change and construct counter spaces where protesters may reimagine and transform infrastructure in a way that is conducive to public need rather than state or corporate interests.

If sustained and defended, occupation can eventually lead to reclamation, such as when the workers' occupations in Argentina during the 2001 economic crisis led to the creation of self-managed cooperatives. The Reclaim the Streets movement is another example of reclamation, where communities have invaded roads or highways to stage a party with free food and music, opening up the space we have lost to car-centric infrastructure.

Land and housing can be secured, cooperatives can be developed, streets can be pedestrianized, and the commons can be reclaimed through sustained and defended occupation. Expropriation is another example of direct action in the style of Robin Hood, liberating food, medicine, money, supplies, or equipment from the rich and distributing them to the people.

Historically, many affinity groups have engaged in bank robberies and other forms of theft in order to finance their revolutionary activities, propaganda, and bails from prison. New African anarchist Kwasi Balagoon was imprisoned for an attempted bank robbery in order to fund Black Liberation Army activities, and Lucio Ortubia was a Spanish anarchist known for his practice of expropriative anarchism.

However, sometimes revolutionaries seek sabotage and destruction instead of expropriation. Whether merely threatened or actually carried out, destruction of property during riots or other political activities has a long and proud history of success, from individual acts of sabotage during slavery to MK guerrillas' bombings of the communications, transit, and energy infrastructure that helped run the South African apartheid economy to Indigenous activists in Canada sabotaging efforts to start fracking near their land.

Lastly, there are acts of confrontation that involve violence against humans, which I must repeat that I do not support. Keep your violence fictional, people. This violence can be either offensive or defensive, organized by militias or undertaken by individuals, but ultimately it aims to make being a rapist, a fascist, an officer, capitalist, or a politician a very dangerous position to be in.

In a society where the power hungry already rule, during the process of social revolution, people will gain their freedom by overthrowing every existing and would-be authority and defending against those who seek to re-impose that authority through self-managed forms of self-defense, because the freedom anarchists seek does not include the freedom to oppress others.

That's going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in.

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The additional sections of the show included clips from;

Front Burner

Hello Future Me

LegalKimchi

Sean Munger

Intelligence Squared

Democracy Now!

overzealots

Narratively Out Loud

Then & Now

Haymarket Books Live

Andrewism

uncivilized

Millennials Are Killing Capitalism

and Hakim

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