Political bloodsports debate

politics and that's really the problem.

We are committing to something.

Uh you know what guys, I'm not.

I'm not doing this.

I'm not doing this.

Yeah, it's not happening.

Um.

Faith, the problem that you'll find consistently with Second Thought or JT ununderstood by communist movements, since even

No, I mean that's great.

That's great.

Um

No, I mean, that's great.

That's great.

Um

This stream is not going to be sustainable.

There's clearly a deep underlying problem because this is the second time it's happened.

This stream is not going to be sustainable.

This is the second time this has happened.

So it will happen again.

And uh

Based on the goals I've set about to accomplish here.

It is just fundamentally unsustainable.

Um

It's just unsustainable, you know.

Like, I'm trying to create an uninterrupted VOD as well to be edited.

I could just make one manually instead of the stream, you know.

Um

You know, so

Yeah, I mean uh this is

This is pretty outrageous, you know.

This is ridiculous.

This is some bullshit problem.

Hold on, let me just wait and see if it's gonna.

Let me see how many people are still here.

But if it's just gotten so bad, then we're probably just gonna, you know, we'll see.

Let me check something.

This is pretty ridiculous, you know.

I don't know why it says

Nine hundred viewers

Not on the front page.

I don't know what the hell this is.

Uh I'm gonna give this time, but um

Yeah, uh uh this this format at least, you know, it's kind of difficult to fucking do when the the recording is d it's done.

It's dead.

It's like there's no way to recover it.

There's no way to do anything.

So.

We're gonna wait and see, but um

Okay, uh

Well, the JT video, I'm not going to be able to respond to it, guys.

I'm sorry.

Because I have to redo everything I just did.

Because I don't know where it fucking cut off.

Um.

Which is so fucking frustrating.

You know, should I just start from scratch one more time?

Once if I should start from scratch one more time.

Should I start from scratch one more time?

Okay, I'm gonna start from scratch one more time.

But if this happens again, um we are gonna call it a night, okay?

All right.

It's it's bugging again or what?

Buffering still.

That's so great.

I don't know why you guys are saying Twitch, Twitch.

Uh, I can't monetize Twitch, you know.

Uh, there's no, you know

I can't just do it on Twitch.

If I'm not gonna, if the stream isn't gonna be monetized, I may as well just do it offline because it'll be a VOD.

If there, it's not like we're having a debate right now, you know.

Um

It's fine, okay.

Well

Right.

Alright, I'm gonna respond to this again in a more concise way, I guess.

We're starting from scratch.

Let's go.

Do you believe in the kind of vision of like a more like there is a model?

I'm just crashing out because I know it's gonna be really fucking hard for me to fucking explain to the editors how to fucking deal with this.

Like, I know for a fact they're gonna be too confused to know how to fucking deal with this, right?

So it's pissing me off.

I have to be like, no, include the introduction.

Oh, which and what's the introduction?

What's the fuck my life?

Literally, fuck my life, right?

I'm gonna record this on my end and we're gonna just.

Start from scratch, okay?

Um

Alright, so KFM42, what's up?

Okay, I'm gonna end recording and start again.

Alright, so recently Second Thought or JT chimed in to comment about our party, the American Communist Party.

Now, I have a past beefing, I guess, with Second Thought.

I made a stream criticizing him.

He made a tweet attacking us.

And I don't care about any of that.

I'm willing to put all of that aside.

I don't know him.

He doesn't know me.

I'm interested in what it takes to build a strong, independent, left-wing socialist communist movement in this country.

And to be honest, I think that I'm pleasantly surprised by the conversation between JT and this podcast host because they do delve into some of the nuances concerning the challenges that face socialist patriotism in the United States.

Now, one of the problems you'll find in the video is that it kind of seems like he's just trying to distance himself from us while getting the right to participate in raising the same questions we do.

He just wants to make sure that nobody will accuse him of being associated with us, which is a shame because this individual, I think, if they didn't have that social pressure on them from these larger streamers, I think they would probably not really find any reason not to just join the American Communist Party.

Second thought is a I think he's a member of the CPUSA.

And from what I know about the internal discussions that were happening, which he was party to in the CPUSA, he kind of was kind of on like shared our position basically, you know.

I don't think he fundamentally disagrees with us.

I think he, as a large influencer, probably doesn't like the toxicity that is associated with our

When I say R, I mean infrared, not the party, the community, the movement.

But

Let's just see what he has to say.

I'll react to it.

Do you think will have to be done that's different from past socialisms?

That's a good question.

I mean, it's tough because the United States is so big, geographically diverse, and stuff.

China is too, but they manage.

But it's like you have groups like the ACP, and I'm going to get flack for this now, that are trying to do the whole patriotic socialism thing, which wraps up ideology of westward expansion, of manifest destiny, into the socialism thing.

It takes the the 50s aesthetic of the the dad and the boy grilling in the backyard, white picket fence, dog, you know, that sort of thing, and tries to marry that to vague socialist ideals, which generally just ends up being Mussolini-lite.

That is not

So, a few things.

One, the term patriotic socialism has no term patriotic socialism was not invented by our movement.

It was invented by bad faith actors who were trying to stick a label onto us that sounded like national socialism.

I noticed a lot of commenters online and on Reddit and elsewhere are like, oh, patriotic socialism sounds a lot like national socialism.

Well, that's why our enemies invented that term and labeled us that term instead of the actual canonical to use a word that I guess would be contentious, but it's just the truth within Orthodox Marxism-Leninism.

Meaning, what is a truism for every communist party on earth that has origins in the common turn and whose principles are founded upon Marxism-Leninism?

Socialist patriotism is the default position.

Now, mind you, socialist patriotism isn't just for ruling communist parties that are already in power and are building socialism in their country.

For non-governing communist parties, socialist patriotism was also the norm.

And the socialist patriotism is outlined and elucidated upon in Soviet introductory textbooks like Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, where they literally use the examples of Britain and France and Italy of the necessity of communist parties to be at the vanguard of their nation's history and of the common sense of national belonging and national history and champion all of the progressive

Forces of their nation's past in the Marxist sense of progressive, which means all of the actual decisive things that moved the history of a nation forward.

So, the very foundation of a nation's existence and its history, communists need to seize and lay hold of that, or else the bourgeoisie will and the fascists will.

So, this is proletarian patriotism and socialist patriotism.

It is the default Marxist-Leninist position.

For one reason or another, the, I guess, new left, which I'm not going to dismiss, you know, wholesale.

I think there were good things that came out of the new left, but nonetheless, it became a trend.

Uh, to go toward anarchism and individualism and this kind of petty bourgeois radicalism, which led a lot of leftists to just consider it not vogue or consider it more interesting and punk rock to just say, you know, all nations burn down, screw my nation, I hate my country.

Whatever.

I mean, that's not the traditional Marxist-Leninist view on the matter.

Square one is socialist patriotism if you're a Marxist-Leninist.

You may disagree and you may have criticisms of that.

I'll even entertain your ability to say, hey, you know what?

Things have changed.

Here's why.

I'm going to push back on it.

But to accuse us of being this new thing called patriotic socialism when all we've done is uphold the orthodox Marxist-Leninist position on the matter just goes to show, and again, this is a common theme in these response videos I do, how widespread illiteracy about the basics of Marxism-Leninism is contributing people to inadvertently aid and abet the rise of actual far-right and neo-fascist ideologies.

Because traditional Marxism-Leninism by itself actually speaks to the discontent among the masses and it makes sense of things in a way that's better and superior to the right.

But if you are stripping us of the ability to have those tools at our disposal to make sense of our nation's history, to lead that history, to be at the forefront of being the leaders of the country and so on and so on.

Other people are going to fill that niche and who's going to do it?

It's going to be the far right.

And finally, look, this thing about Mussolini Light.

Um once again

It's irresponsible to make those kinds of accusations when we're dealing with an environment in which.

When we're dealing with an environment in which

Um

Hold on.

Gate, sorry.

When we're dealing with an environment sorry, what was I even saying?

Okay, it's extremely irresponsible to call people Mussolini Light that are just espousing traditional Marxism-Leninism.

When you're you're engaging in a kind of historical revisionism that removes the context of fascism being a reaction to a very strong, already existing socialist, communist, left-wing movement.

And there would be no Mussolini, there would be no fascism if it wasn't an anti-communist response to an existing powerful Communist movement.

That doesn't exist in America.

Stop throwing around these accusations of fascism, especially against us, when there is no left or communist movement that is even strong enough to encourage such a response like fascism right now.

Fascism was a reaction in the fullest sense of the word to the October Revolution and its aftermath and its effects.

We have no similar such zeitgeist, and we have no similar such movement in America right now.

So fascism had to hijack a lot of the things that were actually from the Bolsheviks.

So for example, the Bolsheviks had a very strong militant collective spirit that was part of the whole proletarian revolutionary aesthetic and attitude and temperament.

And fascists stole that, right?

Explicitly stole it as a form of and weaponized it as a form of anti-communism.

Now, like a hundred years later, a lot of people associate the thing that originates with communism with fascism.

That's why you get a lot of left liberals accusing tankies of being fascists, not knowing that fascism was actually an opportunistic reaction to communism.

If you want to accuse us of that, you need to demonstrate what our today's equivalent of communism is.

In America, for example, what are we hijacking?

What are we stealing?

Again, it's a ridiculous and silly argument.

Finally, the third thing.

Uh this thing about uh th the the the the fifties and and uh white pickin census in families.

The American Communist Party hasn't utilized such aesthetics.

But if you want to talk about the kind of retrofuturism that the infrared community likes to experiment with in the American context, I think you're just over reading into it, okay?

That time period, of course, was very problematic.

And this was before the civil rights movement, and you know that there were all sorts of it's nothing to idealize, I agree.

But it is the most recent memory we have as a country of any kind of sense of shared community.

By invoking those aesthetics, shared community, shared community that's compatible with family, that's just a genuine sense of belonging and so on and so on.

By invoking those aesthetics, we're not detailing a 4K picture of what we want the future to be.

We're just trying to invoke something that makes sense to ordinary Americans about a sense of shared community as a bare minimum.

And I think for a lot of Americans, that is what it invokes.

Not necessarily all of them, and we understand that.

But you can't make something that's going to appeal to everyone simultaneously.

And you have to have a sense of good faith about what our intentions are here and who exactly we're trying to reach sometimes.

Most of the country, I think, associates that time period with the bare minimum of a sense of a shared community and shared belonging.

That also happens to be the time in which the power of the labor movement was the strongest.

The working class was the strongest.

There was the strongest social welfare programs being implemented at that time.

You had like an over 90% tax rate on the wealthy.

The New Deal institutions were still pretty fresh and had not been dismantled by neoliberalism.

There was a strong sense of social obligation and so on and so on.

It's not a socialist past.

It's not a communist past.

But as far as the pendulum of class struggle is concerned, the working class, by and large, had it a lot better back then.

And that's just a fact.

Notwithstanding all of the structural issues and the oppression of marginalized people, which never ended, by the way, overall...

For the working class, it was better.

And they had more power.

They had more leverage and they had more power.

So by attempting to read into it and say that we literally want to return to that past, you're being extremely bad faith and uncharitable as far as what our intentions are and what these memes by the infrared community actually mean.

And also...

You know, I'd also like to point out the fact that it's also a silly accusation given the fact that it's a kind of surreal retrofuturism.

It's not a blanket endorsement of the 50s.

It's a kind of fascinating, strange, lost timeline where it's like it's a communist America that retains certain aspects of what we associate America, American community with, but still definitely kind of strange and alien in its own ways.

And that was also a quality shared by socialist realism, which was also a very conservative form of artistic expression.

So we're not trying to return to we're not creating pictures of what we want the future to be or what the past should be because it's clearly a more of an artistic kind of statement.

It's not a 4K picture of what we're fighting for.

It's just the underlying essence and content of what we're fighting for is a country ruled by the American working class that reflects the values of the American working class, whatever they so happen to be, by the way, where people can exist in some kind of shared community and have some kind of shared belonging.

There's nothing wrong with that.

You're being extremely bad faith when you say, oh, that means you want to retain all of these racism and all these aspects of the 50s.

And that's not true.

You're just looking at it in a one-sided way is the problem.

Not the correct approach.

Coming from some YouTuber.

But I think socialism has to develop on its own time, on its own terms, depending on the specific material conditions of the country in which it arises.

So like Thomas Sankara's socialism looks different than Castro's socialism, which looked different from Mao's socialism.

American socialism, if the United States exists as an entity the way that it does today, will look different from those, I think, if we can achieve it.

Some people think the U.S.

will have to balkanize in order to have socialist mini-states like Cascadia or something, where you've got like California.

Let's not try to scare the Norwegian.

So let's say if there isn't a USSA, a United Socialist States of America.

Let's just say it's just a bunch of socialist republics, because like it was, I mean, America just was a bunch of states.

Yeah.

So that's not like too far off, right?

Not unheard of, yeah, sure.

Let's say, and you live in the one which is most likely to be its own state, Texas.

I mean, like, the Texas socialist.

So look, we, if you read our program, have uh at least a bare minimum of a sense of America's future and what socialist America could potentially look like, maybe.

Um and

Hold on, give give me one second.

Give me one fucking second.

Sorry.

My phone is being blown up by my comrades and they don't know that I'm I literally just said I'm in the middle of a fucking stream.

Holy shit.

Yeah, I mean, okay.

So

Like literally, holy fuck.

Anyway, sorry guys.

Trying to make it easy for the editors.

And, you know, it's just yeah.

Alright.

So, anyway.

Um

While we in our party program do provide the bare minimum of a sense of our response to the national question in this country, we're committed to one.

And JT in second thought doesn't seem to be committed to one.

But that's fine.

But when asked about what possibly would the uh you know, what could it possibly look like, he kind of floats balkanization, which, okay.

The only thing he floats or entertains as a reasonable possibility is blanketly reactionary from the Marxist perspective.

If you read the various polemics and debates that were happening within the Bolshevik Party and toward other factions of the Russian socialist movement, like the Bundists, for example, and also the Zionists, you will find a complete critique of this kind of notion of nationalistic separatism and bourgeois separatism.

Now the nationalities policy, which was formulated by Stalin with well with the great help of Stalin at least, in terms of defining what a nation actually is when it was implemented, by those standards of what a nation is, America is one nation.

Now, national differences are blind to the dimension of race.

Race is a kind of uniquely American category.

They were dealing with questions of different peoples who had different histories and had different languages primarily, and also had different traditions of statehood historically.

So these were fundamental factors.

We have new challenges, I agree, because of things like race, which are factors here.

And which, in our view, have always played a role in obstructing and obscuring the acquisition of a unique American national existence, because America is torn between this future oriented civilization or nation that is in the process of becoming versus the vestiges of the old world and also of vestiges of groups that were already here as well.

And this is what led to a kind of process of racialization where people were lumped into these huge continental categories that ultimately came from the prejudices and from the conceits of the old world.

But those have consistently been a barrier to the national unity that was envisioned, at least, at the foundation of America as a nation.

Or at least not even necessarily just the vision as some grand ideology, but even the overall zeitgeist of the American Revolution, just this notion that we're just going to build a unified state together here, that is our purport.

I mean, sure, there are a lot of flaws and there are a lot of imperfections right at the beginning.

But there is this kind of, I would argue, irreducibly.

Genuine and sincere purport at the foundation of the USA that is pretty open-ended, which says we want to build a republic by for and of the people, a United States of America, where we the people are in charge, where there's a principle of popular sovereignty that that is um

that i that prevails and reigns supreme.

That that was a very radical and and genuinely revolutionary thing at the time.

Uh genuinely revolutionary prop you know, um uh how should I say uh

Development of history, you know, and it's in contrast to Zionism, for example, which, however, way you look at it, I mean, constitutionally, Zionism is a state only for Jewish people.

Now, America may have begun as a state only for wealthy white landowners, sure, in practice, yes, but constitutionally, and the overall essence of what America is as a nation doesn't necessarily have to be that, you know?

So it's a really fundamental distinction we're dealing with there.

And, you know, this whole thing about Balkanization, it reminds me of this movement in Germany called the Anti-Deutsche Movement.

And these are these people they're called the anti-Germans and they hate Germany and they're Germans themselves and so on.

But they ended up being the worst national Chauvinists.

They ended up being i racist and Islamophobic and so on and so on or whatever.

I hate that term Islamophobia, but you know, I guess I'm I'm speaking to second thoughts audience, I hope.

Maybe maybe uh they will give me a pass.

But in any case, um

This is just an inverse type of jingoism.

Inverse jingoism is qualitatively and dialectically pretty equivalent to jingoism.

It still stems from this same kind of refusal to accept the objectivity of national existence.

Neither super great, neither super terrible, just something objectively that exists that we have to take responsibility for.

Okay, let's continue.

Let's Texas the Texan Socialist Republic or the Socialist Republic of Texas.

I mean, I take the kind of disposition that you're going to have to adapt to the cultural conditions, not just the socioeconomic of that area.

I mean, like, you know, you're not for the PAT so the ACP approach.

I mean, what would you think is necessary to like have socialism in these areas?

Because like, clearly you don't like, you don't think, just asking, that you can just be like, Soviet-style communism?

Let's do that here.

Come on.

Yeah.

No, absolutely not.

We got Texas.

We got yolidarity.

Yolidarity is what it is.

No, you got to, there's, you know, the common tired phrase is meet people where they are, which to an extent, sure.

You can't be like, oh, you're racist?

Cool.

That works.

Yeah.

We can fold that into our socialism.

No, it doesn't work like that.

But there is, like, you have to, to some extent, respect where people are coming from.

Like, if you're coming from a deeply religious part of the South, for example, guess what?

That's probably going to be part of that group's conception of socialism.

You want to fold in, what's it called?

Something theology.

Help me.

Thank you.

Liberation theology.

Yeah.

Fold that in.

That's cool.

You know, in good faith, I'm going to respond to this because at the outset, you'd be pretty confused about how is this being contrasted to the ACP's position?

I mean, what qualitatively is the distinction between what he just said and our position?

Meeting people where they're at.

He said, well, if someone's racist, you shouldn't just acquiesce to them.

But that's not what meeting people where they're at means.

Meeting people where they're at basically means understanding that if there is a notion of shared national existence or shared, you know, having a shared country or a shared community or something like that, it's the people who are going to be decisive in defining that.

If you think you have wisdom the people do not have, and you're smarter and you know better than them, even if that's true.

That is still something that has to be proven through a dialogue with the masses that is successful, that you can successfully relate to.

I see so many leftists that fail to talk to ordinary people and then write them off and say they're irredeemable.

Rather than critique themselves and critique the way that they themselves are approaching it, they just give up.

I think that's wrong.

But in good faith, I think where JT is coming from in his understanding of the national question is that it seems like he's saying at extremely local levels, what ACP does is fine.

I mean, if you want to relate to southerners when it comes to their religiosity, that's totally fine.

Each community in America requires its own different special.

You know, conditions to analyze.

It requires its own special strategies and tactics and so on for the construction of a socialist movement.

And I think that is actually a position that is consistent with his overall view.

Although it seems like he's contradicting himself, it's not because it's all in line with what he just said about Balkanization.

His problem is the notion of any kind of unified, shared national existence across all of those differences.

So he's very much okay with socialist patriotism for the South.

He's okay for that with Cascadia, he's okay with it for all these localities.

But the notion of a shared, unified national existence, a principle that raises itself above

the various particular localities and represents, you know, a real unifying national principle, I think that is what he's having mo the most trouble with with accepting and comprehending.

It would be like if you were in the Bolshevik party

And you were trying to derive a sense of Russia.

And I'm talking about just the, not the other republics of the Soviet Union, just Russia, right?

And, you know, the Bolsheviks were, there was such a diversity of tactics and strategies across so many different villages and locales and geographies and even groups that did require special consideration of people's circumstances.

But they were still able to comprehend that this was an all-Russian movement.

Not exclusively Russian, of course, but encompassing at least that scale of things.

I mean it was the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, right?

So, um

It's the inability to have a sense of common, unified national existence that he finds to be difficult to reconcile with socialism.

And I think that mistake stems, and I'm going to criticize second thought here, and I'll criticize in good faith because I genuinely believe this.

I'm not even taking it as a dig.

I think he's too wedded to a specific version.

of America as a nation, which is institutionalized by the Democratic Party and its hegemony.

Now, he's going to disagree with that very strongly.

I doubt he endorses the Democratic Party.

I doubt he tells people to vote for Biden or Kamala.

I hope I'm wrong, but I doubt he does.

He kind of seems like a person who would agree with the criticism against, because I know from his position in CPUSA, at least.

But in practice, I think he takes for granted a specific version of the institutionalized America.

And that's why he's hesitant to accept the need for a new principle of unified national existence, because that would require really fundamentally and radically breaking from the imperial hegemony in such a way that would take you back to the basics of trying to derive a new sense of political authority.

And that's an ugly process.

It's an ugly process because it's inherently one that comes at the expense of existing political powers that be in a really aggressive, toxic, and radical way.

But that is what is necessary to have the foundation of a socialist movement in this country.

And a lot of people are not going to like this, or my audience will like it, but his audience will not like it.

That's where we were coming from with MAGA communism.

It wasn't about supporting Trump.

It wasn't about supporting Republicans even.

It was just about our recognition of the fact that in a lot of ways the MAGA movement did radically break with the dominant institutions of the United States in really fundamental ways.

And anyone in good faith should accept that.

Media, academia, even political institutions, you know, with the storming of the Capitol, you know, clearly these evince a radical break with the prevailing institutions of the United States of America.

And just the bare minimum of the commitment to an alternative unifying principle of what this nation is, rather than the one that dominates and prevails today in the form of the imperial hegemony.

A lot of people point out that, well, MAGA, you know, they're inherently wedded to a reactionary one, one that is worse.

That might be true, but it also might not be true.

That's the thing.

All we were insisting upon was this is an opportunity.

If we don't go in and propose a communist alternative, because it's an open door, you're probably right.

The far right that are already well established and well connected and well resourced will go in and do it.

But the whole point was that we should compete with them.

We should fight for that radical break with the system.

We should fight for it.

We should fight for the ability to initiate that dialogue with the masses, to have a shared sense of national existence in general.

Um, and again, all that is required is just a common purport.

That and I think that's what really distinguishes the United States, probably, right?

Is that our nation is founded upon a practical commitment and a purport to actually build a united state and a united nation.

We don't know what that will look like necessarily.

We're not claiming that it will be perfect or we will be perfect at it, but the bare minimum of a commitment to that is a very profound thing.

It's a very profound dream.

It's a very profound idea, you know.

That we do, we are full of differences, just which JT is very strongly emphasizing here.

There are so many differences geographically, even, that constitute what the USA is.

But through these differences, not even necessarily at their expense, by the way, but even through them, we can derive a common unifying principle.

And I think it's not possible to even understand the differences within America as a nation without also comprehending how those differences form in response to that unifying principle itself.

Meaning, even the peculiarities of the Pacific Northwest and the South and the East Coast and the Midwest, sure, these all represent different locales, but are they different nations?

No, because all of them are forming as unique responses to a shared sense of national existence.

They're just responding to it in a different way.

And

One of the great things about our country is exactly that, we have this very blank check of a unified state, and we open that to interpretation for a lot of different peoples to interpret that in their own way and figure it out in their own way.

And that could be very bad, but it's not necessarily the case.

And i there there I think there are things there worth sh salvaging for a socialist cause or project in this country.

Like, I think the Soviet uh suppression of uh of religion was a big old mistake.

And I think uh somewhere like the United States, especially in the South, it will have to be folded in in some capacity.

And frankly, there are a lot of churches that I've seen that do the socialism thing kind of well.

There are a lot that are I always tell my leftist friends, like especially the Catholics, actually.

Yeah, not these, not the like the gen alpha, like Crusader fan cam ones, but like the actual, yeah, I've known Catholics that are like back in the day, the Catholics were more opposed to socialism, the Protestants were more warmer, but now it's like the opposite.

It's funny how Protestants are super reactionary, and it's like have the Pope is saying, like, well, but maybe maybe capitalism is not the best thing.

Maybe just a little socialism, yeah.

Like, Christianity is socialist.

It sounds Marxist, but it's socialist.

Yeah, this brown guy beat the shit out of the moneylenders, and then like he's told me to sell my stuff and follow him, and he's feeding the poor.

And like, that's why I'm like, yeah, they would conservatives would execute Jesus on the spot if he came back.

But it's like, yeah, there's no whatever it takes to get people to the point where they are caring for their fellow man, fine.

Like, well, whatever.

We can, we can, it's not like there's gonna be a magic switch that flips and now we go from all right, we're socialist now.

It's a constantly evolving process where like we're grappling with with how things were before, we're grappling with what people think now, we're grappling with faith, or we're grappling with the the mindset shift of moving to a different, perhaps different mode of production or at least having some form of economic democracy in the workplace where that hasn't been that hasn't really existed before in the United States, and that'll be a tremendous mindset shift for people.

It's like, wait, who who do I report to?

You know, stuff like that.

Like, of course, oh, I elect this guy.

I don't like this guy.

Can we?

So it's like again, the i if you are unable to have a

Sense of a a common

Unifying national form of socialism, not just the various different locales and communities, but a unified nation, and that be part of your socialist movement and project.

The problem is, you'll end up just having to acquiesce to the existing dominant institutions of your state that are unified, right?

And that's why it's part of the class struggle.

The class struggle also extends not only to the form of the nation itself, but also the nation's history.

The class struggle extends even into how we interpret the past and how we make meaningful sense of it.

And that should not be readily given to the far right and to the bourgeoisie.

You know, the proletariat needs to fight and wrest control over that.

And that's really all we're saying.

You know, JT seems to have the idea down, which is very good, that you shouldn't hate your neighbors and you should love your communities and fight for your communities.

But you do need a unifying political principle.

And that political principle has to be national in form because.

You cannot, for example, impose that upon Mexico or other countries that have separate revolutionary traditions and do have actually separate national existence.

As a Michigander, I have no problem setting out to impose a common sense of national existence upon someone who lives in the West or in the East Coast or whatever.

Because I know we're all part of the same nation and we're all part of the same nation because we all share this sense of history that is founded upon a revolutionary change and development, right?

And revolutions are the locomotive of history and of nations.

All nations are founded upon revolutionary beginnings.

Revolutions are the sole locomotive of historical development.

And that should put into perspective what the meaning of a nation even is, right?

It's a nation is a shared community that forms in response to a shared revolutionary lineage.

That's really just true.

Even, for example, in feudalism, where you had the monarchical form of state power in a lot of cases.

In a lot of cases, what you had was a revolutionary beginning for a lot of those.

Maybe it was a thousand years ago or so, but there was a peasant revolt and some guy led that revolt and I guess became king because of that.

Especially when you really start seeing the nation-state take form in early modernity.

You have the English Civil War, you have the French Revolution.

Revolutions are at the foundation of every sense of shared national existence.

I think people really underestimate that.

Can we boot them?

And there's got to be all sorts of problems with it, but it's a work in progress.

So, like, socialism in Texas will look way different from socialism in Vermont or whatever in California.

California's never close socialist.

I'll tell you that right now.

They're more reactionary than Texas.

But yeah, I'm not sure.

Elaborate on that.

I agree with you, but that's not a popular take, actually.

I think left would find that odd.

Why do you think that?

I agree with you, by the way, but I want to see if we have the same reason why.

Yeah, so the only I've been to California a number of times and the Pacific Northwest.

And without exception, the kinds of racists and reactionaries I find there are far more gross and rabid than the ones in, say, Texas or Alabama or South Carolina.

And that's, of course, anecdotal.

But I've found that there is a particular kind of nastiness in a place where you get to where you get to put the laurel on yourself of progressive, where you say what you are doing is for the good of XYZ, like a group of people.

You pat yourself on the back for being so forward-thinking, forward-thinking.

But if this I don't know, it's in Texas, for example, a racist is still a racist, but at least they're like not sneaky and vindictive about it, which is similar to the gripe.

Yeah, once again, look, if you actually listen to this guy, it's baffling that he's not already a member of our party.

And I mean that.

If you can say that, if he can just say what he said, which is that Texas has more revolutionary potential than California, um.

You know, I don't know why he hasn't joined us.

Why not?

I mean, what is holding him back?

I don't understand.

He already sees it the same way we do.

He already understands that liberals, that it is, and this is what he wants to say, which is true.

Rural people in the South have way more revolutionary potential than urban liberals.

Just say it.

Now, nobody's dog whistling anything, okay?

So 'cause sometimes when I say urban liberals, people are like, oh, you mean Jewish people?

And then

I'm like, that's what you said.

Maybe that's a you problem, that you think all urban liberals are Jewish when the majority are not.

But to be clear, that's just what it is.

That's just what we've been saying.

I mean, he's literally just saying what we believe.

And why he doesn't just join us makes no sense.

Well, it does kind of make sense.

And again, this is a shame.

I don't want to have to say it.

I don't want it to be true.

I'm not even necessarily saying it has to be true.

I'm just saying there seems to be some evidence that points in the direction that he is just worried about the consequences on social media.

he I think in terms of principle he aligns with us.

I think if he knew what our party does and he met our party members, he would really like us.

I just think that he would get in a lot of trouble for it.

He would probably lose a lot of the connections he has.

There would be smear campaigns against him, he would be attacked pretty relentlessly, he would really start feeling the heat, he would literally get harassed so much and maybe he just doesn't want to deal with that.

And

I I would be sympathetic, but like look dude, if you're gonna rep

These revolutionary traditions, you gotta kinda be ready for the heat.

I'm not telling you to be an insane adventurist, but you at least have to have enough thick skin to risk getting the kind of backlash that you will inevitably get.

Um, by associating with us.

It's just a fact.

But

But you know what's even ironic?

It's like you'll get backlash.

But in the long run?

you will be so much more able to reach the masses than you were before.

You will be so much more effective at it.

You will get more.

I mean, even economically, even if you're an opportunist,

I hate to say that we don't want opportunists, but we are the future.

We have the ability to tap into masses and masses of people that these gatekeepers that try to hold Second Thought by a leash and prevent him from reaching, they're limiting him severely and they're limiting his potential big time, you know?

And it's a shame.

I have with the liberals.

It's like, I'm not saying liberals are worse than conservatives.

Like Malcolm X said, you know what the conservative is up to.

Because that's what keeps him left wedded to the Democrats.

It's like, oh, we don't like the Empress part of it.

It's the Republicans.

It's like, in America, they've switched sides all the time.

Yeah.

I mean, the lesser evil thing is just a tremendous roadblock and it needs to be destroyed.

There is no lesser evil.

But the point is, I know a conservative racist.

I know what they're about.

A liberal racist, that's scarier to me a lot of times because, say, you've got, you know, say you're Hispanic and your brother is undocumented or whatever.

And what do I like?

You have to be on tetrahooks with the liberal because they'll smile at you, but then they're going to call ice.

Whereas, you know, okay, I'm just going to avoid these Republicans because they're out about their racism.

It's like, and it's just different flavors of the same social ill.

I think, generally speaking, it's a nastier, more insidious form of reaction that has taken root in places like California.

There's also a lot of wealth there, like the Silicon Valley stuff.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

Well, people think progressive means left, and that left means socialist.

And I think that's a very dangerous way to think.

I mean, the

Isn't it isn't it crazy?

Like, look.

What what's what's the point of all these divisions?

I mean, it kinda just seems like we're all on the same page here.

If you can agree that in terms of what it means in America, that l the liberal progressive is not the left, that they're not the same thing,

What are we being crucified over?

I mean, I understand Jackson has said inflammatory things.

I know that I have, but.

You know, um, 99% of Americans have said in crazy offensive jokes, okay?

You have to, on a practical level, we are not a force of hate.

We're not a force of like we're not targeting marginalized groups.

We're not going after them in practice.

Um, if if we tell jokes and we whatever, it's like, okay, it may not be your cup of tea, but it's like, why does that have to hold socialist construction back?

Why does that have to hold back the possibility of like building a strong, powerful left-wing, independent left-wing politics and movement?

It's like, you don't even have to join our party, although.

I kinda don't see why you wouldn't.

But even if you don't join our party, at least form a coalition with us.

I mean, what is what is actually the point of this division if we can agree on things as fundamental as this?

I don't understand it.

Californias is so incredibly capitalistic.

And I think a lot of this sort of woke progressivism is often more capitalistic.

It's better, smarter capitalism.

It's capitalism adapted for the 21st century.

Oh, 100%.

The techno-libertarian thing?

If you're a racial capitalist, you're just going to screw your business.

You want to hire people of different groups, and you also want to appeal to people of different groups to expand your market.

This is out of date to be, you know, believe in an old.

But it's also the phoniness, you know, like the phoniness of Silicon Valley capitalists is that when they try to be so we're so yeah, no, man, no, but yeah, that's like the whole techno-libertarian thing, the Musk thing, the teal thing.

It's all deeply evil.

It's a pretty metropolitan place.

I mean, America, like, give one generation.

You're American.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, black president.

I mean, like, I know that I'd like to say like that means like, oh, sure, yeah.

It does say something.

Like, you're not going to have it in France.

No, absolutely not.

No.

No.

I want to bring back the ACP briefly.

I know you, it's a kind of.

Because you mentioned them.

I was expecting more mention in the back room.

Because this thing, like, I also am with you that the way they do it is cringe.

Like, it's ridiculous.

Like, it seems like this, like, here's a bunch of things reactionaries like.

Let's put it and then put socialism and then package it.

But I'm not against inherently the idea of patriotic socialism because you can be patriotic about some things and be very against other things.

Because America, it has simultaneously a legacy of so you know, he's, I know everyone seems to do this where they're like, ACP does this or that when they're probably talking about the infrared movement.

And, you know, I would just say, why don't you re-evaluate what terms like reactionary even mean anymore?

Because reactionary is a political term.

I think it's been turned into this cultural term where it's referring to people who have a sense of grounded traditional values and are skeptical of you know cultural liberalism.

But reactionary is a political term.

And what that means is it is with respect to a matrix of political differences that is formed by revolutionary change at the level of politics and political power.

So.

As time goes on, we start to see things like LGBT acceptance in the media, for example, increase.

I'm not going to even comment or say good or bad, I'm just going to say we witness changes like that at the level of structural hegemony.

And it's change.

Definitely, it's a change.

But within the traditional sense of what reactionary or progressive means within Marxism, those kinds of changes are not meaningful.

They are not meaningfully progressive.

And it is meaningless to call someone reactionary based on their attitude toward things like that.

If someone is being a man-child about video games and complaining about them and saying, I am so sick of how much feminists have ruined all of our video games, I think it's pretty cringe.

I think it's pretty childish, and I think it's pretty immature.

But from a Marxist perspective, it is meaningless to call that reactionary.

Because reactionary is about political power and where you stand toward that.

If you are trying to resist revolutionary change at the level of political power and be a counter-revolutionary and res that that makes you a reactionary.

But for example, the terms progressive and reactionary don't mean anything at the level of culture wars or Kylie Jenner's Pepsi commercial.

That does not inframe or define in any kind of way the meaningfulness of terms like conservative, reactionary, or progressive, at least from a Marxist perspective.

So that's why people often overlook that oftentimes progressive liberals are the most reactionary, the most trying to resist and turn back politically the wheels of time.

Trump's MAGA movement caused a lot of disruption in politics.

Biden's presidency was objectively a reactionary regime, in the strict sense that it was trying to return to politically the era of neoliberalism.

And it was a political change that had happened that they were trying to reverse.

Now, this vague notion of like evoking the imagery of the past in your ideology.

That does not necessarily equate to anything reactionary.

And I'll give you a few examples from the revolutionary movement of that.

The Bolsheviks venerated and idolized the Paris Commune and the French Revolution, and they constantly utilized imagery evoking those events and those periods of time.

The Chinese Revolution did the same with the Bolshevik Revolution.

So the Soviet Union, throughout the duration of its existence, constantly drew from the past and from history as a source of legitimation for its sense of what the future should be, right?

You see this repeatedly through movies, through art, through cinema, I already said movies, through paintings and so on, through literature.

Today in China, Xi Jinping is evoking a kind of retro futuristic nostalgia for the Mao era.

That is not reactionary inherently.

Reactionary is something very specific to politics.

You should not use it blanketly toward every kind of, you know, sense of longing or nostalgia for the past in general.

That's too vague and it's too nebulous to qualify as what reactionary actually means in the real sense of the term.

That the the the past, the present, and the future are all part of one

integral totality of historical existence.

There is nothing wrong with drawing from the imagery of the past, necessarily.

To do so exclusively, of course, as Marx said, this is the province of the bourgeoisie,

Um, specifically in its attempt to farcically repeat I mean, you see this today.

What is the epitome of bourgeois politics today?

Trying to LARP the civil rights movement in twenty twenty five with the Kylie Jenner Pepsi thing and and and uh trying to pretend that, you know, that the

Protesters today against Trump are are the reincarnation of MLK, that's the bourgeois politics quintessentially, right?

Um so, you know, y y y you you have to understand that the the past is a dynamic reality.

And not every

Not every kind of vague evocation of it is reactionary.

Imperialism, expansionism, but also as a legacy of isolationism.

You know, for a very long time, America differentiated itself from Europe on the basis that it's not war-like.

Like, isolationism is a strong force, and it's kind of returning.

In fact, I think it's a big reason why Trump wins because he pretends to be an isolationist, but he's very much not.

But that works with both sides of the spectrum.

Like, Americans, I actually think, are much less pro-war than people really give them credit for, like, traditionally.

And there's many things to be proud of in an American tradition, like, you know, civil liberties, free speech, like being the first country to be founded on ideas, not a race, right?

There's a lot of things to embrace in an effective way.

I mean, like, Martin Luther King, he says, he, you know, he cites the Jefferson speech, all men are created equal.

And his thing is not to say, like, oh, yeah, that's why America is perfect.

His thing is like, no, we were supposed to be fulfilling these ideals.

We need to actually fulfill them.

We need to fulfill the ideals of the American Revolution.

We're hypocrites if we don't.

So it's patriotic from a stance of not what your country is, but what it could be.

I think patriotism is fine.

And it's good, actually.

All socialist movements are patriotic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One caveat I might offer is that there's a difference of patriotism in somewhere that has been colonized or oppressed, say, Ireland under the British, something like that, for example.

To be a patriotic Irishman is different than being a patriotic apartheid era South African or an Israeli, for example.

Anything founded on the core principles of, even if it's not spoken, genocide, replacement, something like that, extermination of the locals, the indigenous populations, then it's harder, I think, to justify patriotism as a critical component of your socialist.

So you should be.

I think that would uh I would agree with that i if the examples are Israel or apartheid South Africa, but I think that second thought misses the point.

The reason why that would apply to Israel and South and apartheid South Africa is because you are talking about nations supposedly they're na they're not really nations, but at least a shared political community that is founded upon an explicit principle of racial exclusion.

That is not necessarily true for the USA, essentially.

There are multiple different versions of what the USA can be.

There's a degree of ambiguity there right at the founding where the founding fathers could have had the intention of creating an all-white state.

That could have been implicit for them, sure.

But it is not necessarily the case that the common principle of shared political community and existence

that lies at the foundation of what this country is, has to be that.

You can have an America, a USA, that is uh devoid of racial uh exclusion.

Don't take it from me.

This is what Martin Luther King Jr.

believed.

Okay.

This is what the civil rights movement believed.

And, you know, okay, one person's pointing out that in the first naturalization act, it was explicit.

That's true.

That was a particular law that.

Could uh that the already that the institution already had in place mechanisms for amending or changing in the future or revising.

It wasn't like this fundamental inceptual principle of what the USA necessarily must be.

That was the policy they definitely chose, among many others, of course.

But you don't have to discard the idea, I guess I would call it, at the foundation of the USA and that entire revolutionary tradition just because

That these of the specific circumstances and conditions at the time led it to take on a specific form.

You don't have to discard it wholesale.

There is already a kind of framework that is vague enough, I guess I would say, to allow for other interpretations.

of what America can be.

That's not true for Israel.

That's not true for the apartheid system.

The apartheid system literally uh means uh apartheid separateness.

It's baked into the beginning explicitly and constitutionally.

Israel, conceptually and constitutionally, is a Jewish state that in its own way necessarily excludes non-Jewish people.

You know.

Plenty of states were founded upon horrific acts and crimes committed against other people.

But they that doesn't mean they necessarily are illegitimate if within a constitutional framework, for example and I mean constitutional not only in the formalist sense of the word, but like in terms of what historically and qualitatively this state is defined as.

That doesn't always mean that uh that that that framework uh excludes the possibility of of justice or excludes the possibility of reconciliation between groups.

Sometimes the opposite is the case.

So, you know, that's very important to keep in mind.

Be not proud of.

You should be.

Say your country sucks.

No, not necessarily.

I think, like I said, with Texas, I'll defend Texas, right?

Because it's not, it's not the shit people think it is.

I think the Texas Revolution has way more baggage than the American Revolution.

Yeah, but all I'm saying.

Texas Revolution is what people, leftists, think the American Revolution is.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And we've had our bourgeois revolution, yeah.

I think it's perfectly fine to be like, you know, I'm proud of this town that I live in.

We've got some cool history here.

We had the first soda factory in Minnesota or whatever, you know, something like that at that level.

But like to enshrine in your movement visuals that are inherently tied to the exterminatory practices of the earliest periods of your country.

So for example, like the Western Expansion, Manifest Destiny, stuff like that, which is often used as kind of the symbolism of these patriotic socialist movements in the United States.

There's separate eras, I just want to add, though.

The founding and the Manifest Destiny are very separate eras.

By odd that today we speak on this part of the same thing, but they're very separate eras.

Yeah, some different things happen to be to put it like that.

The whole conception of scientific racism got invented in the 1800s.

It's there before.

There wasn't this conception of that.

So I think the Loody, thank you so much.

Core issues that, how do we, if we do believe it is important enough, you know, patriotism as an idea, to marry that to our revolutionary project or our social project, if you want to use the term revolutionary?

I think it's fine to use the word revolutionary.

I just mean like you know that stuff we're talking about that people are like, yeah, we want to storm the White House.

Yeah, I'm sure that'll go well.

But how do we differentiate that?

How do we dis not distance because you need to grapple with it, but how do you make sure you're not valorizing the elements of, say, American history, American symbolism that are inextricably tied to racism, brutality, genocide?

And is it worth it?

That is the calculus.

Which parts?

What do you mean?

Like, what is unexpected to them?

So I think the whole, there's a strong might makes right component to the more gung-ho patriotic socialist movements in the United States, you know, a strong tendency.

I don't know.

I don't like the way they agree with you there, but I mean, like, like I said, I think the way they do it sucks balls.

Yeah.

I also don't.

I mean, also, like, all the socialists that have succeeded ever managed to kind of, with a rare exception,

So I'm going to respond in the following way.

Firstly, he says there's nothing wrong with being proud of your community and your town, but when you have this overarching sense of a unified, shared national historical existence, what about all of the problematic aspects of that history?

What about all of the things that are inherently?

problematic or let's just say incompatible with the values of a contemporary socialist movement for our g for simplification's sake.

And you know, it's interesting because this was actually a debate that happened in the early days of the Soviet Union.

where people were raising the following question.

How can we

associate with Russia's shameful backward feudal past when it is so mired with

Problematic events and circumstances and practices that are fundamentally incompatible with our contemporary revolutionary socialist values and principles.

How do we reconcile ourselves with that past?

How do we endorse, so to speak, the past?

And that was a big debate that they had in the Soviet Union.

And it resolved itself in the following way: if we don't lay hold of the past, if we don't seize the past, if we don't show how there's a rational kernel in the development of the past, regardless of all of the horrific and terrible things that had happened that eventually led to the possibility of the culmination into our contemporary revolutionary present, the enemy will seize the past.

And Dmitrov in the 1930s, when he was describing that this was the most crucial.

Guide for progressive and communist forces to combat fascism.

He said, if we don't lay hold of the past, the fascists will.

We cannot allow the fascists to have a monopoly on the past.

Your past may be problematic, there may be problems, and so on and so on, but you cannot discard it wholesale and entirely.

So, JT is asking the question: well, how do we do that while avoiding the inherently problematic or let's just say irreconcilable aspects of it?

Which is not an unintelligent question, I think.

I think it's an intelligent question.

And my basic response would be very simple.

First of all, we need to understand what inherently means.

If it were possible that socialists could take a time machine.

back to the founding of the United States of America, I think it would very much be possible for the rational kernel of America's inceptual revolutionary ideal to be mired with socialist values.

I think things like manifest destiny corresponded to genocide, it corresponded to crimes against humanity, horrific, horrific violence, all manner of avarice and just naked greed and plunder that is so tied to just the history of modern capitalism in general.

Maybe even extraordinarily so in that case.

However, I think to reduce

Um

I think to reduce the

This is this is there's no way this is gonna sound good because it's like

It kind of sounds idealistic almost, right?

But

If you understand the kind of logic at play in the idea very vaguely of manifest destiny.

And and how you see that not just manifest itself in terms of the horrific crimes of the westward expansion, which were crimes of capitalism, but also in something like Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech.

There is a similar kind of

Logic and structure as far as how our nation uniquely relates to the future and how we derive a shared sense of belonging with respect to achieving a common goal in the future.

There is something about that that I think socialism should draw upon and must draw upon, and communism does draw upon.

And that is the only sense in which anyone in infrared has ever talked about manifest destiny.

I think Jackson made a tweet about Canada, but I don't know if you're worried about Justin Trudeau being a victim of genocide.

Canada already committed a genocide against its indigenous population.

And Jackson's tweet was before the party.

But in any case,

I I don't think that

You have to downplay the crimes and horrors and ugliness of your nation's past.

But I also think you're misunderstanding what patriotism is.

If you're reducing it to a sense of fanatical enthusiasm and jingoism, which depicts a myth myth of your nation as somehow a pure ideality that has no flaws or imperfections or problems or contradictions or whatever.

This, I think it's kind of like what Parenti described as super patriotism, right?

Where you just have this blank, it's like team sports, where just like someone is cheering for a sport, you're cheering for your flag and your country in that same way.

I actually don't think that is the most profound form of patriotism.

I don't think that's even the form of patriotism that was at the founding of America in the beginning.

I don't think it's the form of patriotism that even.

what characterized the majority of American patriotism throughout history.

I think it's a pretty modern thing actually.

Uh since neoliberalism and Ronald Reagan, we've had that kind of patriotism, right?

Um, which is a kind of jingoism in a lot of ways.

Um

I uh patriotism is not about

Deciding that your country is ideal.

It's the opposite.

It's accepting the objectivity and material reality of your national existence and taking full responsibility for it.

And that responsibility as the square one and the subject, in a way, of socialist construction.

Class struggle begins not from the premise of individual subjectivity and conceit, but a collective principle of class, the unity of the proletarian class.

Well, when you extend that same principle to the national question, when you accept the class struggle as national form, you have to understand that the subject of class struggle.

Or the form of class struggle is the nation.

That's what you're fighting over.

The proletariat and bourgeoisie are fighting over the nation.

They're fighting over supremacy within a given nation.

That is our nation.

For better or for worse, that's what it is.

All of the imperfections, all of the flaws, all of the problems, all of the good, all of the bad, all of the struggles, all of the pain, all of the suffering, all of the joy, all of the injustice, all of the justice, all of the progressive aspects, the reactionary aspects.

That forms one integrity and totality of history that is internally characterized by class contradictions.

And the fight is not finished.

It's a fight between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

The crimes of America are the crimes of capitalism and the capitalist class.

But do the crimes of the capitalist class give them the right to define and characterize essentially and fundamentally what our shared nation is?

Why should we cede to them that right?

Why not insist upon the truth, which is that for all of the crimes of the capitalist class in the history of America, there were also lost and suppressed revolutionary movements?

There were plenty, plenty of truly revolutionary, proletarian and working class, even spontaneous movements in the 19th century of poor whites and poor black people coming together and fighting the system.

And they lost and they were suppressed and they were martyred.

But why should we forget them?

Why should we spit on their memory by saying that our nation is fundamentally irredeemable?

By neglecting and discarding that our nation is a history of struggle.

It's not a one-sided pure dominance of the ruling class and the pure dominance of the capitalist system.

It was a struggle.

Sure, the working class and the proletariat was on the losing side of that struggle nine times out of ten.

Just like throughout almost all of history, the oppressed and the exploited were on the losing side of things.

The revolutionary forces throughout history were more often than not on the losing side of things.

But what did Lenin say about what made the Soviet Union unique?

For the first time, the oppressed, the exploited, the masses were in charge for the first time ever.

So if we believe that's possible for our country, we have to accept that there's a people's history of the United States.

It's not just the history of the United States presided over by the ruling capitalist class.

There's also a lot of lost potentials, lost futures, lost struggles.

There's a lot of dead martyrs who fought for that and dreamed for that and took bullets and died for it.

And why should their memory be desecrated just because they lost?

That means we lose today.

That means we throw in the towel here and now.

If we believe that just because the martyrs of the progressive national history of this country, that we're fighting for justice, that we're fighting for humanity, that we're fighting for morality and so on and so on, if we believe that they are discredited because they lost, why are we fighting right now when we haven't won yet?

The whole point of Marxism is to take the lessons of past failures and learn from them, build on them and scientifically improve.

That's what the American Communist Party is committed to.

That's what we're committed to.

That's what we're trying to do.

We are not trying to say that there are no contradictions in America's history.

We're saying the opposite.

We're saying thus far we have had a history presided over by the ruling capitalist class.

But what about the forgotten history?

What about the people's history?

What about the history of the working class?

What about the history of the poor peoples?

What about the history of the emancipate, the slaves fighting for freedom?

What about the history of the poor whites and poor blacks coming together and how much they were suppressed and manipulated to turn against each other by the landowners and by the capitalists?

You know, we have our own version of what America is.

We have our own nation.

And yes, you're goddamn fucking right that we are patriotic for our American history.

Our own proletarian working class history of the United States of America.

We have our own.

It doesn't just belong to the bourgeoisie and the ruling class.

That is all we're trying to say.

I'm not trying to get emotional and get angry.

But why is this so hard to comprehend?

I don't get it.

It's if you don't accept.

That history is a battleground littered with the bodies of martyrs of our struggle.

You're disrespecting and spitting on them.

It's disgusting.

It's national nihilism.

Rare exception of the October Revolution, but that's also a civil war in which they got selected continues the war.

And that's not the only time you can be like, fuck my country.

It's in the middle of a war.

But like, you know what I'm saying?

I'm very skeptical of this kind of this kind of idea that you can't be proud of anything in your country or be patriotic just because they did, it was like genocide and that there were all kinds of things.

Because if we're being perfectly honest, all of Latin America is founded on a certain degree of genocide.

Sure.

Again, this host is incredible.

Like what they're saying is literally like what we would say.

It's pretty incredible, you know.

I know he criticizes us or whatever, but it's like he's what he's saying is exactly what we would say, you know?

And some of them are founded in far worse ways, actually.

Like, you look at Argentina, they exterminate all of them.

Or you got like Bolivia, you got apartheid told me very recently.

And still, I mean, Amila, thank you so much.

Appreciate it.

Appreciate it a lot.

Thank you.

I was shocked just going to Mexico.

Mexico is supposed to be like the least racist, the least racist American country.

And you can see class is literally black and white.

It's like the poor people, you can tell by how rich someone is by their skin color.

It's like so night and day, the structural racism there.

I think one thing is like there's a much things to be proud of in the Mexican tradition.

Like Benito Juarez, or like, you know, you can be part of the Mexican Revolution.

Even though there's all kinds of weird stuff, like they had conflicts with the indigenous people, and you had like all the revolutions had their contradictions.

Like, especially the Bolsheviks.

Sure.

They say, like, oh, the Russian Revolution or even October is all bad because of what they did to the peasantry later.

Yeah, we're getting back to like the nuanced stuff.

Is this a bad revolution or a good revolution?

Yeah, and I think that's important.

But I think one thing about the whole patriotic socialism thing, at least in the United States, is like we have to, I think, analyze the premise a little bit.

And the premise is that Americans are patriotic.

And I don't know that that's necessarily the case, at least for a plurality of Americans these days.

I don't think patriotism is a core component of being an American.

I think it certainly was up until like Vietnam, maybe something like that, where it's just like, yeah, I'm proud of my country.

You know, I stand for the flag.

You know, it's better than whatever country.

But these days, you ask anyone under the age of like 35, do you believe America is the greatest country on Earth?

What?

No.

I just paid.

Comrade Thomas, thank you so much.

Six thousand dollars to have a baby.

They're like, No, my job.

Sucks, you know, stuff like that.

So I think it's it's important that we take a look at like whether that claim that it's important to be patriotic necessarily applies to places like the United States before we go all in in like the branding and the and the terminology and stuff.

So I think here, right?

So I think so so second thought is basically making the argument that

You know, if you're just being patriotic to appeal to people's sensibilities, what about the fact that young people seem to be have seem to have lost touch with any kind of sense of national belonging and they don't really care and they're indifferent to their nation and its history?

And I would retort by saying that

Well, it's complex.

First of all, among America's blue-collar working classes that are still definitely enmeshed with the history of the labor struggles and the labor movement and the union movement, they are still definitely patriotic in that way.

But second of all, the principle of socialist patriotism is not a cynical strategy to manipulate people by appealing to their sensibilities.

It is a principle in its own right, which is based on reclaiming and standing by your nation's revolutionary and progressive historical existence.

And claiming that and claiming ownership over it and having a sense of shared existence, collective common existence based on that, and understanding that is the context of class struggle.

Now,

In a circumstance where young people have lost touch with their national existence, it is not because they are becoming more connected with the entire globe and they're becoming global citizens and they're transcending their national existence.

They very much still do have a national existence that is very much still American.

It's just that they've become alienated from it, much like they've become alienated from their communities, from their families, from their life in general, from themselves even.

And that is not necessarily something socialists should encourage or play up or even accelerate.

A socialist movement should

Restore a sense of community, restore a sense of patriotism in its own unique way.

And the things that JT are talking about are consequences of not even just capitalism, because capitalism is very old, but a very specific type of nihilism that is taking root in the whole country.

I mean, that is being expressed at every level, a lack of purpose and meaningfulness in general.

People still objectively have an objectively American national existence.

They are just not taking responsibility for it and they've lost touch with it.

Socialist patriotism is about

Reestablishing that relationship.

Or at least uh establishing it objectively.

Not necessarily just appealing to people's existing sensibilities.

I'm not saying I don't care very much about the proudness.

Why do you be proud of a country?

It's like people just aesthetically trying to make something seem familiar.

But if you bring in, in general, just at the very limbic psychological level, people are just very resistant to anything that's too new.

And especially something that's for a time pretty bad legacy in their brain, right?

And no amount of trying to say, oh, well, actually, it was only this many people died and not this many.

It was 50% less than what the numbers say.

People are still going to be kind of at a distance.

But when you blend stuff with what is familiar, what is new with what is familiar, it's a very powerful thing, you know?

Like, trying to say, well, actually, it's not like I really like your socialism video, actually.

Socialism in America, because I actually think you very much overstate the degree to which socialism existed in America, but it was very well done.

That's all the damn socialism is really good.

It was really as a piece of just convincing because you're like, they've been here.

We've had social.

You know, if I was anyone else, I'd be super bitter and like upset about this because it's like, wow, we got so much flack for doing exactly that.

And, but, you know, again, I'm not taking it personally because, again, I don't know any of these people.

They don't know me.

And, you know, everything is like high school in life, I guess.

It's all high school micro-social politics where, you know, you can't sit at that lunch table, I guess, because it's bad.

And, you know, you could literally one for one espouse our position and it's okay.

But if you do it as us, it's a problem because we have taken a principled political stance that is just like way too radical in terms of how severely we insist upon breaking from established politics.

Socialist ideas, I mean, there's, and that's an element of truth there.

A lot of element of truth there.

You know, it's like if I was trying to say to Canadians, right, about socialism, I'd say, you know, do you know the Conservative Party at one point adopted aspects of socialism?

They're called Red Tories.

Yeah.

At one point, we have our guy, Tommy Douglas.

He's our socialist icon.

You got to have your icons.

Every icons, like China, what they did before the, you know, one way the communists legitimize themselves is they would be very big on valorizing Sun Yaten.

Like Matt would always say, you know, they're trying to go a step beyond that, but they would value Sun Yat Zen.

And it's like in Canada, I think we have much less to be proud of, honestly, than America did more like imperialism and stuff.

No, not a revolutionary, I guess we just don't.

We got Tommy Douglas.

You guys have plenty of revolutionary symbols to co-op.

You have MLK.

MLK?

That's a great socialist icon.

But even like, look, this one is a little maybe, maybe they can't do this one anymore because of the way this reputation has been a little tarnished by certain types of thinking.

But like, Jefferson used to be the one that left it.

Because Jefferson was the radical of the founders.

He was only him and Paine, Thomas Paine.

Pain can still be.

Again, second thought is being perfectly conciliatory to someone who's espousing a position that has gotten us crucified multiple times on the D program Reddit.

It's just pretty incredible to witness co-opted.

Yeah, you can still use Paint.

Yeah, I mean, you can still, to an extent, even if it's just because it's a little bit lesser known, but like it's pretty radical for the time.

Very.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's like the whole.

I'm just, I'm, I'm very hesitant to go all in on it on any given aesthetic, which I think is my knee-jerk reaction to the patriotic stuff.

It's like, I think we need to cast a wider net than that.

Because if you go all in for the patriotic stuff, you're going to end up with a lot of people.

You're going to alienate some people, yeah.

Yeah, you're going to alienate a bunch of people.

You're going to alienate people, like, for example, the most marginalized who do not see, say, the American flag.

So I had a knee-jerk reaction to this where I was like.

Okay, but

And then the host actually just says what's on my mind.

And I just, it's incredible.

I want you to witness it like fathers as things that are good.

You don't, you know, you're going to have people who identify.

I wouldn't assume that, actually.

I wouldn't assume that.

I think that's a trap also.

Marginalized.

In my experience, the proudest people of America and Canada are immigrants.

This is always what I tell anti-immigrant people.

I just really believe that as a fact.

It's from my experience.

People who come from a poor country are so proud to be there.

And when they raise, they understand struggle in a certain sense.

And they'll be proud of trying to adapt.

They'll be very eager to.

Because people do, immigrants really do want to brace American values.

Because for a lot of American values is like freedom.

And that's the thing.

I think we should, like on the left, the purpose is to actually have those ideals mean something.

Because in the time we are now in a corporate oligarchy, it's like.

What do these words mean?

Yeah.

I would

I would add to that.

It's not just immigrants.

Indigenous people, rural Indigenous people in America tend to be more patriotic than college-educated urban liberals.

And you know what?

Black people in America are extremely patriotic, especially today, where they are trying to distinguish themselves from other African immigrants and assert their own particularities and peculiarities.

I think it's a real hallmark of being out of touch with black people in general in America when you make these statements like, oh, black people feel uncomfortable when they see the American flag and they see symbols of America and they don't feel like that's justifiable because they associate it with all the crimes committed against them.

And it really, just really overlooks

How much there is strong patriotic sentiment among black Americans.

And by black Americans, I mean black Americans who were descendants of slavery, not immigrants who have come here more recently.

And I'm only making that distinction because black Americans who have been kind of indigenized in this country feel a very strong attachment to this country.

And they understand, of course, that how unjust the history has been and so on and so on, but they very much feel like they are Americans.

at least in comparison.

Uh this is a generalization.

Generalizations are never one hundred percent accurate.

But I would say in the majority, they are definitely

On average, pretty patriotic for America, you know, and by for America, I mean a sense of belonging to this country and being a part of this country.

Obviously, that has failed them, and they often feel that this country has failed them and they are feeling excluded and alienated.

But the reason for those feelings is because they have an expectation, a reasonable expectation that they should be treated as Americans, that this country should be looking out for them and treating them as a citizen instead of some kind of foreigner or alien, you know?

And that's one of the reasons why you had things like the civil rights struggle.

The civil rights struggle was not black people saying that, you know.

Uh, we hate everything this country.

No, it was people saying that we.

We are American citizens.

This is our country.

We helped build this country.

And we want a piece of it just like everybody else.

Just like what Paul Ropeson said, you know.

Because Paul Ropeson was asked, why don't you leave and go to Russia?

He said, well, because my father was a slave, my grandfather was a slave, his father was a slave, and generations passed by of my people building this country up.

And he said, I'm here, and I'm going to have a piece of it just like anyone else.

This is my country.

And, you know, I feel like it's really just kind of like a white liberal thing to just assume all or even most black people do not have patriotic sentiment.

Now, I'm not saying that there are no black people who don't espouse views that condemn fully the U.S.

or America as a nation and say it should be Balkanized.

I'm sh I plenty, but to say that it's the majority or even the only type representative, you know, view of marginalized black people, it's just extremely wrong, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, the base of the Statue of Liberty and all that.

Yeah.

Stuff I've talked about in videos in the past.

I was like, these words don't mean anything if you don't live up to them.

But when I'm talking about marginalized, I'm thinking more specifically like underserved black communities and stuff, overbolised black communities.

Like, there's a reason the Black Panthers existed and were probably the most successful socialist organization in the United States history.

It's because they.

Yeah, let me talk about the Black Panthers.

Now, we uphold the Black Panthers as part of America's revolutionary history, and we think that the Black Panthers genuinely contributed to the history of socialist communist organization in this country.

However, we should also analyze and think critically about why the Black Panthers failed.

The Black Panthers did not articulate a very coherent or fleshed-out strategy for the national question.

They did a very good job organizing their communities and creating an organization, but they ultimately fell victim to the realization, which is true, that in order to take it to the next level, they are going to have to form a coalition that is unified with other groups.

And that was, for example, the Rainbow Coalition.

And from there, they had a semblance of a beginning for the creation of a much larger thing that was going to actually be, in fact, national in scale.

And by national and scale, I mean not just encompassing black people, but a bunch of other different groups, including white people.

But the reason that strategy failed, I think, is because they just tried to unite a bunch of different particulars.

They could not discover an irreducibly inceptual unifying national principle that really was about national unity.

Um and not just the sum total of various different groups.

And I think that is where they fell short.

And it's because of their a failed national strategy that they were able to fall victim so easily to the FBI, to Cointel Pro.

Now, that's a really harsh criticism on my part, and I accept that.

I understand that the FBI and the CIA they were using new methods against the Black Panthers to target and destroy them that were pretty unprecedented.

So I'm not necessarily blaming them wholesale, but I am saying it would have helped to offset that to have a larger national strategy.

Because for the very simple reason that if you confine yourself to a minority population.

And a as a marginal group

It's easier for the US government to isolate you and target you and get away with it.

And that is the sad truth, you know.

Just like if you're an individual by yourself, it's easier for you to be targeted and for you to be neutralized and for the culprits to get away with it.

So the Black Panthers, we regard them as an authentic part of genuine America's national history.

They are an all-American phenomenon, in our view, you know, and we have a lot to learn from that.

But we also have a lot to learn when it comes to not only building from the particular, but unifying the particular with a kind of sense, a universal in the strict sense of a shared common existence that is irreducible to the sum of its parts.

And that is what a nation is.

It's just that that principle itself acquires particular determination historically in the form of nations and unifying political traditions in general.

They were brutalized by the police, over-police.

The kids were thrown in jail at massively over-inflated rates.

So they had to take measures in their own hands.

They had to do their own educating, their own health stuff, their own food programs, stuff like that.

So that's those people would not have seen the American flag, American police, you know, all these icons of, you know, whatever you want to call it, American service, civic duty, stuff like that.

They would not see those the same way that like a a white person.

I think that we um

I think there's also a big misunderstanding when it comes to Pat Sox that they accuse the ACP of or whatever.

Our socialist patriotism is not an institutional civic patriotism.

It is not the patriotism of America's state institutions.

It is a patriotism rooted in the revolutionary history of the American people.

It is not rooted in some kind of slavish acquiescence or kind of bootlicking toward the ruling authorities and institutions, civic society institutions like police and

And even firefighters are not bad.

I'm not saying these things are inherent.

Firefighters are inherently bad, but it's like that is the civic institutional bourgeois patriotism.

That is not our patriotism.

Our patriotism is rooted in the revolutionary history of the USA.

Proletarian patriotism is not a civic, institutionalized version of what patriotism is.

In an institutionalized version of patriotism,

A shared sense of existence comes from having shared institutions, uh which are impersonal, of course, but which are bureaucracies.

So it's a kind of bureaucratic patriotism that he's talking about, which we are often accused of of being characterized by.

We don't have a bureaucratic sense of patriotism.

Our patriotism is not rooted in the bureaucracies created by the New Deal.

Our patriotism is rooted very authentically.

in a sense of shared, unified national existence that comes from the three revolutions of America's history as formulated by the Midwestern Marx guys.

First was the American Revolution of 'seventy six, the American Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement.

Those revolutions have not culminated in any kind of institution which we can say we are loyal to.

We are loyal to our party.

Our party is that institution that's going to carry the fourth revolution, which is about class struggle.

Um

So there is a profound difference as far as our understanding of what patriotism is versus the kind he's talking about, which is associated with the police and so on and so on.

She very much pushed back on that.

MLK very much like drawdrew on all that.

And MLK, MLK, it was not the Black Panthers, though.

Black Panthers exist because MLK got shot.

It's incredible that this guy is pushing back in ways that, again, we would.

Nobody would have gone that route if it wasn't for MLK getting shot.

That route was unthinkable.

It was because they decided to make MLK's approach to shut that down.

But people were like, well, okay, we're going to take up arms.

And I don't know who's to blame them.

They're right.

No, absolutely right.

We have to look at the context.

Because look, this is the thing us leftist, many liberals who forget anti-this is the kind of thing we forget about the American Revolution.

It's easy to look at like slavery and stuff like that and like racism.

Because how could they be so revolutionary if they still had in the South Maya?

Because they did in the North abolished slavery before everybody did.

Most countries did.

But it was the South who took so long to abolish it.

And after you fight Revolutionary War, it's pretty damn hard to now force the whole South to abolish slavery.

I mean, it didn't take like 100 years for that, not quite took another generation quite a while for that to happen, right?

I mean, that's a Derry Jefferson's reason for why you can't force the South to get rid of slavery to provoke a civil war.

I mean, that's what happened, right?

Like, because, and people say, oh, there's still like racism, right?

Of course.

And I just want to add, you know, they say all men are created equal.

Well, that didn't include black people.

Look, in England, white people weren't equal at the same time.

Okay.

In most countries where aristocracy still existed, white people were considered like people of different classes.

I can't even believe what I'm hearing.

I mean, it's like, I don't know how this guy is not getting canceled and having tomatoes pelted on them because this is just straight up our position.

Like, it's incredible.

We're different species.

Aristocracy was seen to be a blood-related thing.

And that if a handsome kid was picked up off the street and was poor, they would assume he was a bastard child.

Like, this is so, like, when we look at that historical context, it is extraordinary.

It's why like the French Revolution is made possible.

And then I see like all of them, like the French Revolution, Haitian Revolution, Russian Revolution.

These are all kind of progressions, right?

And it's like the goal is to move forward.

But it's like, that's why I'm very against kind of like saying when this guy says that he just finds us cringe, I kind of feel like that could just be a constructive criticism.

Like, why don't you join our movement and pioneer better aesthetics?

And if they work better, we will probably follow suit and start adopting them.

I feel like people really underestimate how open source and pragmatic we are.

We go with what works and what is effective and what also is compelling to us as well.

And we, of course, in our own taste, find good.

We don't sit here and, as a consequence of some pathology, just utilize a specific aesthetic direction because we're asserting dogmatically some ideology or something.

It's like, I feel like people don't understand how dynamic our community is.

I'm talking about infrared here.

Moving it back, like Frederick Douglass, he also praises the American Revolution, but he, you know, much earlier civil rights activist, of course, famously.

He says, you know, well, this is, we're not fulfilling the ideals of the American Revolution if we have this, you know, this extremely racist system.

You know, all men are created equal.

And even he gave him at the time, he doesn't quite consider women, right?

You know, all the people like Thaddeus Stevens.

It's so funny.

All of them, they're like, all the people who are, you know, part of the anti-slavery, they're like, yeah, slavery is stupid, but like freedom for women.

Nuh-uh.

I mean, it's like progress takes time.

It's like what I tell these liberals who criticize Palestinians saying, oh, they're, you know, Palestine's homophobic.

Look at Israel.

They're more pro-gay.

And I say, like, they'll get to gay.

Okay, right?

No, they're fighting colonizers, right?

It's the primary contradictions.

It takes a while for progress to develop.

I think we disagree with this guy about what constitutes progress.

You know, alternative sexualities are not necessarily progressive.

Okay.

Because.

I don't want to be problematic here, but it kind of seems like if we're going to go with a vulgar, linear view of history, the opposite is actually true.

Modernity is what created a rigid sense of, you know, culture and stuff like that.

Before then, you had the practices of the aristocracies of feudal societies were by no means.

Uh, conservative, okay.

So, you know, I don't know what where this idea came from that, like.

It's somehow progressive to have these bohemian trends or whatever.

It's really not.

I really think Americans be less harsh on your revolutionary tradition.

I think this is a Canadian with some Native American ancestry, funny enough.

I don't think a lot of them, I don't think there's anybody who's native sees a Jefferson statue and like, well, but they would be critical, I think, which is where I agree with you fully in your ACP criticism, is that they uncritically praise all these things.

They act like, oh, that is not true.

We don't uncritically praise anything.

It's just that we don't always apologize for our utilization of national imagery.

We don't always add caveats and constantly explain ourselves over it.

That's what you're referring to as lack of critical awareness.

We have the critical awareness, okay?

We know that the crimes of capitalism at the founding of the USA and throughout the course of its history are very real.

No one's been denied those.

The sense of uncriticalness you're referring to is the fact that we are a mass online movement.

I'm not saying that to say that we're huge in number, but we operate as a mass movement in the sense that, like all mass movements, we share memes and slogans and imagery that are not just pre-packaged, discrete forms of theoretical contemplation.

They are characteristic of a movement.

Okay.

You're confusing that with a lack of, you know, critical.

of uh of critical thinking, but y you're confusing two different things.

On the plane of intellectual, reflective and contemplative criticism,

There's so much nuance that's possible, and there's so much meticulous theoretical reflection.

Theoretical reflection is not the sole form of discourse or sloganeering or agitation that is possible.

In order to agitate, you don't need to qualify every form of expression with academically precise, meticulously wrought out theoretical explanations and reflections.

Um, guys, you may be frustrated by how I'm talking right now.

I am not asking you to replicate this form of talking.

I am gonna try to talk to this guy's audience and these Redditors because you know, maybe five percent of them would see this video and be like, you know what, these guys are pretty reasonable.

So, I'm speaking the language of them, the PMC.

Uh in order to basically

You know, we are have our own sense of progressivism, right?

The lack of glasses wearing in our community is more progressive than the petty bourgeois academicism, pseudo-intellectualism that prevails on Reddit.

That is more pro unironically, Sun Guerrilla, everyone do a Sun Guerrilla march right the fuck now, just to prove it.

This is more progressive, but we are being patient with these backward elements and reactionary elements and trying to bring them on a pipeline where they can acquiesce and submit to the proletarian.

Comprehension of subjectivity and expression, which is collective in nature.

uh you know, devoid of this soy nonsense, bullshit, glasses wearing, overly contemplative, overly reflexive, uh, you know, r rev basically like

It's like it reminds me of like you're at the gym.

And you're unable to lift a weight because you thinking too much about the meaning of lifting weights.

Which is something I'm guilty of, and I'm critical of myself because of it.

When I get started, when I'm lifting,

I don't have that problem, but sometimes I have this one exercise I do, which takes me a long time to do Spartan curls.

Because I think a lot about lifting the weight before I lift it.

And I'm thinking too much.

But you gotta just fucking do it.

And once you do it, you can't stop.

Right, you just gotta fucking do it, and that's what our movement is online.

We're just fucking doing it, we know what we're doing, we're not apologizing for it all the time.

The risk is valorizing, I totally agree.

If you are patriotic and just to like appeal to people, well, how do you why if you're just so proud of how everything is, why do you want people to change it?

Right.

The point is the legacy, right?

Claiming the legacy, saying, Oh,

Well, again, the sense of pride comes from a sense of confidence that together, as a people, we can reach the highest mountaintops.

We can reach the summits.

We can move mountains.

We can overcome and prevail over our common obstacles.

That's where the pride comes from.

It's a pride in what we can do and our abilities and what we have done so far.

It is not a pride in the existing state of affairs, which are changing rapidly anyway, by the way.

Oh, we the socialists, we're the legacy of freedom.

What did the Republicans do?

What are the Democrats doing for freedom?

Nothing.

That's the kind of approach, I think.

Yeah, myth building.

Yeah, all that.

Everyone does it, especially.

Yeah, oh, yeah, not moralizing there for sure.

Myths have to be largely true to work.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And you need a story to tell people.

Like, without a story, why wouldn't anyone follow you?

But I think, just to see if I can get this a little bit, we have to assess whether the patriotism thing is really so important.

Like, is that the most important thing?

Is that the core of our message?

Is that the core of how we want to present ourselves?

Or is it...

And maybe this is the sticking point.

Maybe the sticking point is that for the right in the United States, patriotism is just decking yourself out in the flag.

It is crying at the national anthem.

It is saluting and saying thank you for your service or whatever.

All the things that you're not supposed to do, right?

You're not supposed to wear the flag as a garment.

That's one of the things.

You're not supposed to salute.

If you're not the military, all this stuff.

But they do it anyway because it's the aesthetic that they've chosen.

And that is the kind of patriotism that I see being applied to patriotic socialist movements.

We're getting the definition thing here.

It's like, is it the aesthetic of the flag and the national anthem and all that stuff?

Or is it a radical care for your fellow man within the boundaries of your country?

Like that?

If that's patriotism, okay.

If the patriotism is the aesthetic, we're treading on thin ice there.

100%.

Yeah.

Because if you have.

I don't know if this is gonna be the conclusion, 'cause we're gonna watch more to see if there's more, but

To that I would say very simply that

Well

the qualities he is talking about as far as the vulgarization of patriotism, which admittedly does come from the neoliberal era, but it also comes from an era where mass movements started to become um

Started to take the form of mass media.

And there started to be a s started to be a symbiosis between the emerging information systems and information age culture with mass movements.

And therefore, forms of cultural self-expression started taking on a mass form.

And that kind of patriotism, although it's vulgar and it's trashy and you're not supposed to wear it and so on and so on, I think it's fair to say that we definitely can be characterized, not ACP, but the infrared movement, for example.

We do have this sense of patriotic.

of patriotism.

But that is just patriotism as it takes the form of any kind of mass movement.

Mass movements are by nature vulgar.

Well what does vulgar even mean etymologically?

Look it up, think about it, you know.

Uh Vulgarians

Are uh it's the opposite of the aristocratic taste.

I'm looking that up in case I'm stupid.

I don't actually know the etymology of vulgar.

Yes, I knew it.

Common people.

Okay, I just wanted to make sure.

Anyway.

Just wanted to make sure.

Um

Yes, it's vulgar, but that's in the etymology of vulgar is the common people, okay?

That's the origin.

So I think, look, I'm not gonna call names, I'm gonna make a good faith criticism of second thought.

I think he has a lot of petty bourgeois hang-ups that are a consequence of a petty bourgeois attitude toward things.

He has this kind of.

And he has this

Thank you, NASCAS, so much.

I think Second Thought has this kind of almost elitist disdain for the Vulgarian sentiments of the masses.

And there is an uneasiness he feels toward mass movements in general that, you know, are not apparently wholesome chungus in every kind of way.

And I think it's easy to be in America and laud and approve of mass movements in Venezuela or like the South Africa's EFF.

But when it's your own country, the class dimension of your position, not necessarily saying your personal class background, but the class dimension of your politics starts to be put to the test in much more fundamental ways.

I think if Second Thought lived in Venezuela, I think he would have the same attitudes toward the Chavismo.

They're too vulgar, they're too rowdy, they're too unreflective.

If he lived in South Africa, I'm sure he would have the same attitude toward the EFF.

He approves mass movements abroad because those do not subject him to confront

The class dimension of his politics.

I am not saying this to.

Attack him.

I think that everyone has different levels of how much they're learning about Marxism and adjusting to a Marxist worldview.

But part of that process is a proletarianized, you have to prolet, you have to submit to the proletarian discipline of a kind of collective subjectivity.

And you do have to discard a lot of petty bourgeois sentiments and forms of elitism and this whole thing about how, oh, we live in idiocracy and everyone's just dumb and so on.

It's like you do have to kind of discern the wisdom and the rational kernels that are given expression by the masses.

You have to have the intellect to do that.

It's one thing to be snobbish and say, I know better than everyone else.

Everyone's so dumb.

I wish everyone was as intellectual and as smart as me in advanced.

It's another thing to start comprehending phenomena on a social and collective level and understand that these forms of expression, although they seem vulgar and stupid at an individual level, are quite profound and meaningful at a shared collective social level.

And that, I think, is the difference between the petty bourgeois and the proletarian attitude.

The proletariat can see things, proletarian intellectuals, I should rather say, can see things in a collective social way.

They don't just reduce every social phenomena to some kind of

Position of the individual intellect.

They have the same aesthetic as like right-wingers, but without very clearly different substance.

I mean, what's the point of that?

You're gonna end up with the right-wingers, which is why we see on the CESS pool that is Twitter a particular type of person associating with the quote-unquote patriotic socialist movements in the United States.

I just call them mega-communists because it's like they're feeling like patriotic socialists.

I don't think we should stigmatize that as a term.

I think that's that.

I think that ship has sailed.

I think it's gone.

I think all itself is patriotic socialists.

I just I'm talking about as a description of how it is.

Like, what I think has killed the left is this kind of like no one comes to power being like, my country is all bullshit.

Like, it just doesn't happen like nowhere.

Like, so what I mean is that it's your government's bullshit.

I think when Second Thought says that we espouse a lot of the positions of the right, so we're going to end up looking like the right, I want to know what notion of political difference he's coming from.

And granted, the one he's operating off of does seem to be the dominant one.

I'm not saying he's saying something outlandish, but I am criticizing him for not being critical enough toward that colloquial and conventional sense of political difference, which I think is changing before our eyes.

Yeah, there are a lot of things that make, I guess, make us sound like the right in America, but there's also a lot of things that make us sound similar to the left.

And what you're really talking about are Democrat and Republican voters.

And you're saying Republicans are the right and Democrats are the left.

And I think that's not really true anymore.

I think there are a lot of cases where you have a stronger right-wing position among the Democrats.

You have cases where Republicans can be more left-wing than Democrats, especially on foreign policy.

And on issues like even domestic policy like civil liberties and the FBI and so on and so on.

On the other hand, you have Democrats who can also be more left than the right sorry, more left than the the Republicans.

So I'm not saying it's one or I'm not saying the Republicans are the new left and the Democrats are the new right.

I'm just saying there is such a strong degree of overlap that categorizing one or the other as right wing is wrong.

When you categorize our actual positions as right wing, you should take a step back and think about the following question.

Would these positions be considered right wing?

In

Countries that actually have strong Communist movements and strong Communist politics?

Or would they be considered normal?

What you'll find is that our position is pretty left wing consistently by the standard of communist politics as it exists in other countries.

Yes.

I think this is the difference between a socialist patriotism as opposed to a kind of like status quo patriotism or a reactionary patriotism.

Like status quo and reactionary patriotism loves the country and is part of the country for what it is.

Socialist patriotism is part of the country for what it could be.

You know, like

To push back on that though, the problem of course is the fact that we do have a country that objectively exists, and it's not necessarily just about being proud of it in the sense of smell acting like your farts don't stink, so to speak, but it's a sense of taking responsibility and acknowledging a shared national existence as the context for class and socialist politics.

A a somber realism of accepting soberly your nation as yours, regardless of how perfect or good or bad it is, it's still yours objectively, is not the same thing as just defending the status quo and saying that history itself doesn't exist.

Because again, what is a nation?

It is a totality, a specific integration and totality of a shared and common history.

And history is in a process of continual motion and development.

Like, and what it could be has to be based in reality.

And like, I think, is America prime for socialism?

In material conditions?

Material conditions.

Material conditions very much.

I don't know what I do to deserve this shit.

YouTube fucking up like this.

Like, what do I do to deserve it?

Because and people say they'll just like racism, right?

Of course.

And I just want to add: you know, they say all men are created.

That's very simplified.

Rather than America not being prone to socialism because it's too reactionary or too racist, America had an aversion to socialism partially because it was too progressive.

My progressiveness is that America is one of the countries that it was felt that the revolution was already achieved.

Whereas in France, the revolution was what happened, but it was too much.

There's truth to what he's saying here, by the way.

This guy's not like a total retard.

Defeated, then there's like the five republics.

I mean, but like, you know, the third republic is an attempt to kind of actually rekindle the ideas after you had fucking Napoleon and all that shit.

You have so many errors in France and in Europe, like it's the proletariat that takes the battle of democracy in America.

You don't even need the proletariat to do that.

So it's like you have a sense in which it's achieved already.

And that's a kind of false sense.

It's a dangerous sense.

So, like, but that's also partially because it really was more radical than everywhere else.

It really was a place that gave suffrage before everybody else.

So, like, this is the trick here: it's a dialectic.

You know, America's both very progressive and also very not.

And it's because it's so found on liberal ideas.

He was able to frame collectivist communism as not just bad or you know, whatever, but anti-American.

He didn't even have to co-opt it.

They didn't have to really co-op socialism in the way that Europe, you know, one point hooded with like social totalizing liberal ideology in America that does not exist in most other countries.

Like in France, there's a really hard on socialism with financial characteristics.

Alright, that was my full response to their thing.

So.

Let me find

Okay.

Start from scratch, okay?

Oh.

I did not save that correctly, apparently.

Oh fuck.

Start from scratch, okay.

Purdue, what's up?

I'm gonna end recording.

Hold on, then why did it- Oh, it is here.

Perfect.

Alright, so recently Second Thought or JT chimed in to comment about our party from the White House.

Perfect.

All right.

I have what I need.

All right, guys.

Great stream.

Uh, we will uh we're gonna wrap it up there.

I'll see you guys Sunday.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Space, n we're not doing a fucking space, all right.

Uh y w there's one thing they put in Space's content, which I'll even respond to now.

Have him state his opinion on Dugan and Lyndon LaRouche.

Comrade Kidd with the five, thank you.

Okay, I'll state my opinion on Dugan.

My opinion on Dugan is that he is a great philosopher.

Um and uh he is a profound thinker, one of the mightiest philosophers of the current age, and that for more, you should read my substacks and my interviews with him, more specifically my pinned uh pinned uh thread.

You know, just read that if you want my view on Dugan.

Lyndon LaRouche, uh, I have no high opinion of.

I think upon examination, he stole everything worthwhile from Michael Hudson.

His philosophy, though coherent and consistent, is fundamentally wrong and idealist in the most fundamental sense.

I think LaRouche was a terrible organizer as well, and he had no conception of political strategy.

I heard he had many reactionary stances in the 80s on many different foreign issues, and if that's the case, I condemn that fully.

But LaRouche is just, I have no high opinion of him.

Let's see.

Have him state his position on...

I have to click it.

Have him state his position on baristas and other workers in the service industry and all wage jobs who are mobilizing for Palestine against ICE and Doge.

I think those are very different things.

But I think most baristas and other workers in the service industry are part of America's working class.

It was always been our position, by the way.

We just thought we had some criticism over the notion that the labor movement needs to be led by baristas and that and that that was

See, we don't regard that as productive proletarian labor.

uh when reduced to the relationships to production that exist on the shop floor.

But I have said very, very consistently and very, very tirelessly that

They are overall working class because at the end of the day they are just ordinary Americans trying to get by and trying to make a living, however they can, according to what's available to them.

We just don't consider that to be the most advanced section of the working class.

First of all, second of all, we don't consider them to be traditional proletarians, or at the very least, the relationships to production.

If we reduce them and confine them to the relations on the shop floor of Starbucks, those are not, that's not a form of proletarian labor.

It's not.

Now, if we expand beyond the shop floor, are there interesting class relationships going on when it comes to rents and monopoly capital in terms of that, in terms of having to work other jobs to pay for their basic necessities, in terms of how their relationship...

toward um uh the the uh

The payment of rents toward financial capital in the form of mortgages and interest payments and so on and so on.

Does this at least make them working class in some kind of way?

I think yes.

I just think that.

It was such a very specific argument.

I just think a lot of people lost their shit because we just rejected the idea that baristas are qualitatively workers in the same sense that the labor movement of minors in the 20s were.

And it's just a fundamentally different thing.

Not just because it's aesthetics, not just because it's gendered in a different way, but because.

Um

Th they are not a proletarian movement.

The the the Starbucks movement's not a proletarian movement, it's a petty bourgeois movement.

The Starbucks United movement.

It's a petty bourgeois movement.

Now we're not trying to get in their way, we're not trying to sabotage them or stop them.

Um but that's our view.

Or that's my view.

May it's not an official ACP view, by the way.

It's my view.

That it's a petty bourgeois movement.

Which is disunited with the general cause of labor.

Other wage jobs.

You don't have to fit the standard of a productive proletarian laborer to be considered part of the working class.

It's a matter of strategy and what segments of the working class need to be prioritized.

It's also a question of should we be patting ourselves?

I'm going to sum up really simply the barista gate again for the last time.

I'm going to like you clip this, it'd be so simple.

The problem we had was not with baristas themselves.

Most baristas are probably just ordinary working class Americans.

We had a problem with liberal leftists opportunistically patting themselves on the back and congratulating themselves because they help pioneer self-serving, opportunistic, petty bourgeois movements like Starbucks United, which fundamentally distract from the elephant in the room, which is why is it that they have fundamentally failed to actually tap in to the cause of general labor and the blue-collar working classes in this country?

Failing to reach the majority of the traditional proletariat, they congratulate themselves and pat themselves on the back because they managed to actually get headwinds going or get something going when it comes to groups and demographics that just so happen to share their own backgrounds, which not always in every case, but tend to be heavily professionalized, petty bourgeois, you know, elite, at least compared to geographically the rest of the country living in extremely expensive, you know, New York City, Los Angeles, and so on and so on, coasts.

And we thought this was just opportunistic and self-serving and self-congratulatory w w and a way of detracting from and avoiding the more difficult question of why there has been a more fundamental failure to actually reach general labor, right?

Uh yeah, industry, agriculture, transportation, mining.

Why have you failed to penetrate these?

crucial sectors of the working class, right?

Why do you give yourself so many brownie points for unionizing graduate students and st stuff that is just so like

Like, so much just not a threat to the system at all, to be honest, you know?

So, yeah, I mean, that's really where we were coming from.

And you can scream and cry, and that's why you scream and cry and lose your shit.

Because it's easier for you to just say that all we're doing is just shitting on baristas and attacking them.

But our criticism is so much more nuanced and meticulous and insisive, and it just hurts way more what we say because you know it's true.

You create this straw man that we just hate baristas because gendered violence or something.

The truth is, you're just avoiding confrontation with our actual argument, and you're going to continue doing it forever because, for psychological reasons, you can't accept the truth, which is that we're just correct, you know.

Um, who are angry about the attacks on abortion rights and trans people?

I don't know.

I mean, can you point to examples of all of the workers in the service industry and wage jobs who are leading the vanguard of this protesting doge and stuff?

I don't know.

I haven't really seen it.

What is his strategy to win them away from reformism, anarchism, nihilism, and away from Bernie and AOC?

What is his pitch on why they should support A C P and revolutionary Marxism?

Well, our pitch is very simple.

If the working class is not united, if there is not one united working class.

and one general cause of labor, one politics based on the independent cause of labor,

The degree that there won't be leverage to keep any kind of principled politics in check.

Bernie and AOC.

um, will always be beholden to the moneyed interests because they don't have a base in the mass movement of labor to keep them in check.

So they don't have a foundation in that.

Lady Midwestern, thank you so much.

Now, regarding anarchism, that is a non-starter.

I don't know if we can dissuade people from anarchism because I think a lot of the people attracted to that ideology are mentally going insane.

And I don't think they can be really reasoned with a lot of the time.

But I would say it's a non-starter.

I mean, that's not a form of politics.

That's just a form of declassed lumpinization.

Regarding reformism, I think that anyone who wants to defend the current system, which is what reformists do, of the variety you're talking about, which are Democrats, are just the bourgeoisie and the upper crust of the petty bourgeoisie, who we probably will not be making any inroads among, to be honest.

So that's my answer.

Pretty simple.

Alright, guys, we are actually going to wrap it up for real this time.

And I will see you guys Sunday.

Hope you had a great time.

I hope it was a great stream, guys.

Bye-bye.