welcome to the second day of marks now the symposium  at the goethe institute in coordination with the brooklyn institute for social research my name is suzanne schneider i am the deputy director of the brooklyn institute as well as one of our core faculty members i'm also going to be moderating this first panel today on marks and political identity i am a deputy director of the institute i'm a historian by training i focus on the history of the modern middle east and i'm very happy to be joined here today with two people who are not inside  academia and so hopefully have what will be a very fruitful conversation to my right here we have rafi ahmed who's a member of the democratic socialists of america she's recently elected to the dsa's national leadership as is her bio says you are a native new yorker red diaper baby and a cover a recovering economist and avid knitter and over here to my left we have kali akuno who's the director of cooperation jackson and emerging network of worker cooperatives and supporting institutions and kali comes with a wealth of experience in labor and political organizing and i'm just very excited to have both of these individuals here with us today just to give you a little bit of a sense as to what the mandate of this discussion is right marx and political identity what does that actually mean i think that in many ways this is one of the most kind of pertinent conversations that we need to be having  it's kind of our intention here is from multiple disciplinary positions and from kind of multiple i guess positions in work in the work in the world we're going to take take up the vexed relationship between some modes of marxist analysis and those that argue for more specified treatment of race and gender this is kind of a an ongoing debates both not only that that happens in academic circles but certainly has ripples  outside of the university as well when it comes to how we should organize ourselves politically how we should think about political and social problems and particularly in light of recent debates about the role of identity politics right and and  recurring editorials and features in mainstream publications about the notion that progressives must choose between this like white working class and feminist or anti racist concerns on the other so this panel is going to explore how and why these lines of activism have been constructed as being mutually exclusive what types of power dynamics are operative there and hopefully we'll be able to offer some alternative frameworks to break out of this kind of binary thinking so with that i'm actually gonna kick it over to you ravi to begin and we're all going to just to give you a sense as the structure here we're all going to be sharing some i don't know reflections this is not a traditional conference where we're going to read conference papers that you mercifully that is not our format um but so we're all going to share some reflections and have a little bit of kind of cross talk among the three of us and then hopefully be also also open it up fairly soon to your questions and comments and be able to have a kind of a nice dialogue here in the room as well thank you so thank you for the invite i i'm really pleased that this is not a conference where we read lots of papers as some of you may be aware the new york city chapter of dsa which is closing in on four thousand members we had our city convention yesterday so i'm a little exhausted a little  still a little high it was a really great conversation about a lot of the issues that i'm sure will come up in the in the conference today so in starting my thoughts on sort of political identity in marks i did actually write up some comments which i will probably have to refer to yeah i'm writing the line between exhausted and over caffeinated so one of the things that i think about with mark with political identity as marxist trouble actually i think it's not the most useful thing about us it's lovely but you know how do we reckon with a tradition where our central ritual the rift the revolution so often fails right and not completely fails obviously revolutions are utopian dreams and if we're lucky our great successes become normalized and our failures become the grounds from which the next dreams from the next dream springs so intent on returning us to the th century where education and health are entirely private and people should be free to die of preventable diseases and hunger so political identity for marxists is caught between this this beautiful dream and the messy reality that we work in so i will just make a quick remark that the there is as suzanne mentioned a long and stor history of usually shouting at one another among marxists about class and race and gender and i i'm really just not so interested in in perhaps rehashing any of that i do however want to remark on some of the reading that i've been doing lately kali and i were talking about this earlier the the sort of slow and steady release of marx's personal notebooks has i think opened up a really fruitful and interesting vein of research and the development of political theory so i'm thinking about people like kevin anderson and heather brown who have talked about who've really delved into territory that probably rioted enough skya is one of the early people who started pulling open those notebooks and have exposed the degree to which marx and even the later marx as they say was just very very interested in issues of social reproduction of the family of the sava enslavement in pre capitalist societies and once starts to get a sense as one moves through that work that he's thinking about capitalist societies and how the engine of capitalism works was likely coming towards  transformation or towards an extension that we are you know obviously never going to to know what that might have looked like but it opens up i think a very fruitful strain of research for those who are so inclined and i think one thing that i that colleagues work for me has always been a touchstone is the current moment that we're in is a bit of an interregnum the sort of th the energy released by one thousand nine hundred and seventeen the anti colonial movements of the of the post war era even the sort of the sort of explosiveness of the s and s as that energy has died away as the left has become fractured into sects into single issue campaign organizations  we're at a point where we really where we're hopefully seeing a coming together of leftist forces into some sort of new formation and a lot of my thinking right now is about what we mean by party what we mean by you know the leninist party model i think is it never work particularly well in america and i have general concerns or sort of we can talk about that if you want but i think one of the things that's important about the concept of the party is the concept of institutions and one of the things that marx gives us that marxism gives us is a total analysis of the world in which we live there are lots of very interesting things happening there are lots of crises of capitalism that we need to deal with dealing with them individually doesn't definitely doesn't work dealing with them in a marxist framework is difficult rebuilding those that analysis for the moment building those institutions to carry that fight forward is certainly complicated but not engaging in that struggle is definitely gonna be a failure so i guess i'll close with a couple of remarks one is to go back to this idea of romanticism i think you know no political is going to be pure it's not the nature of political action in any sort of sequence if you watch too many movies or read you know i don't know comic books which is one of the things i do for fun you start thinking that stories are clear that historical narratives move forward in a planned way and it's not how life actually works and that's not how political parties work so one of the things that people say about dsa is oh my god your online culture is so messy i'm like can you imagine what overly aggressive and so forth so like you know let's also remember that that political activity is in fact a goddamn mess and i would hope that after so many centuries of struggling with these concepts of revolution we're hopefully at a point finally a point of maturity where we can let go of institutions and models and revolutions that don't work rather than holding holding on to them as though they were sort of religious totems the other thing that i think has been really fruitful about these tensions in in feminism with you know the black national movements here in this country and and around the world is that life is again complicated people's experience of class is complex and we need to actually face up to that trying to strip it away is not actually a recipe for political action it works in coffee houses and at bars it doesn't really work when you're organizing a strike or trying to build an institution we have to actually have the courage to experiment and to fail we have to have the courage to face up to complicated questions and not have answers which is something that i think a lot of marxists are maybe not so comfortable with our culture has been one where we are assumed we think we know it we have all the answers and and that's just again not how organizing work it's not how political action actually works so i guess i will with a call for courage intellectual as well as political to actually face up to these these kinds of challenges so i want to move towards like discussion and debate fairly quickly especially since we have two hours i think last night we started on a good conversation but we kind of got cut short just as i think it was starting to get real so i want to elect us to get more to the realness fairly quickly so i'm gonna keep my comments fairly brief  as relates to the overall peace i think one thing critical to kind of contextualize ourselves in a discussion so i come from a background that that in a tendency that i think loosely could be described as revolutionary nationalism as it's been practiced and struggled through within the united states and we know on many in many tendencies of the quote unquote historic left in the united states which for most means the white left you know that's a that's a trend and a practice which has always been either misunderstood or framed upon in many respects i bring that up to a situation im so you understand some elements of my history and where i come from and the thing that i always try to bring to a larger discussion is that when you look at the things like the people's movements you know speaking specifically in the united states so the black liberation movement the puerto rican liberation movement this movement you know within the general field of what kind of poses as the left in the general field specifically will poses as marxism now some of it starts with some of the limitations of marx himself one of the speakers talked about the eurocentric framework in which marx of emerge and reproduced in many many respects being fair to the old man i think you more explicitly about the development of the practice as we understand it from the second international law and there i think much of the bad shit really got codified both in terms of practice and in terms of programmatic outlook and how certain assessments got made particularly about who and what the proletariat is and or was and therefore what our strategy should be overall towards relating to each other and towards the project of the transformation of society so if you have  somebody spoke about it yesterday if you have a view which only says that a small fraction of humanity and able bodied men are going to be the transformative agent of all the society which a lot of the the theory of the second international basically amounted to you were bound to fail from the beginning because you had no practice you had no no no program could speak to the other forms of labor in how they were exploited and necessary so domestic labor quote unquote no theory on how to deal with that ah to relate to that fundamentally the issue with with at that time how to relate to all the colonized subjects of the world you had no fundamental way of dealing with that and in fact it didn't necessarily for most to a certain extent in a second international didn't even really factor into the equation but all the practices  despite some of the theory how we understood what the party is and isn't most of that got framed during the second international how will you understand both strategy and tactics how we  what's the old phrase what mark says i am not a marxist right so there was a certain type of codification which really reduce everything down in ways that we are still trying to get out of which is why i think we're having this conversation today because the way in which it was interpreted was very narrow and did not and did not attempt to deal with a lot of fundamental questions on how do you actually deal with reality as opposed to how do you move  some of the things with the second international was very much focused on again a narrow political subject which is quite different than how do you actually transform the world and then what do you need and who do you need to both understand the world and transform the world so i'm bringing this up to a certain extent because i see there's a lot of conversation which may not explicitly be rooted in this but there's a lot of conversation throughout the broad left such as it is in the united states which is really going back in a minute respects and saying we need to look at the diverse the broadness in the open character of the party of the second international and that's what we should be emulating in our point in time because points to a more democratic orientation than the third international and everything afterwards i would say that there's absolute garbage and bullshit and i want us to debate that now that doesn't mean i'm a being a champion of the third international don't get me wrong what i'm arguing for is we need to think within the context of the reality that exists for us and do a concrete analysis of that that doesn't mean we shouldn't study history i'm one of the biggest history buffs that there profoundly different than even one thousand nine hundred and ninety one because history isn't static and the things that we have done and the things have been done to us both interrelate and they change dynamics they change politics and i think when we look at you know some of the the kind of emerging movements which i think some of this this this panel in particularly is trying to address like to make it real in concrete you know where is where it's class in the in the analysis of the black lives matter right you know where is its class and some of the the i don't know more or some of the indigenous movements which are cropping up  around the framework of a just transition or indigenous sovereignty right or i was just about to get there to the women's to the women's march so some of the new youth stuff that's emerged within the last couple of week weeks of our weapons right there's all these new social movements which are emerge which are at least on the surface and how they're written and approach very single issue oriented i think that's actually incorrect view of how to look and relate to all of them to all of those different movements and i think that the deeper piece is if we're just looking if we're just looking at that model going back to the second international particularly in the parties if you're looking at that as a way in which to frame and build power you're still going to wind up looking at everything else as in addition to right and not something that has a ground in the basis of resistance and transformation on its own grounds which is which relates you and orange you different towards the practice of solidarity so it's not just a practice of i think how some people frame which i personally don't like of the the meaning of it in its base terms of showing up i think is important but if the politics is just merely expediency of up i need your support so i'ma show up to your stuff you know in the hope that you show up for my doesn't actually deal with the the recognition that no actually we need each other beyond expediency we need each other in in all of who we are and what we are and what we bring to the table to transform the world it's a different orientation  i would just argue that that to a certain extent going back to at least my own personal approach i don't look at the me movement or the black movement for black lives or you know these things as being separate from my own ground in practice they may be separate from my own limitation of being able to engage in time and space but i think the critical thing is these are all correctives to some bad practices of our own and if we don't embrace them in that regard then we won't move forward so i that's that's what i will leave you know as a sharing and for us to open up thank you both of you so um i'm gonna share some thoughts as well before we kind of start talking among the three of us and then we say we quickly will hopefully be able to open up for discussion as well i'm happy that we have kind of two notes from real like practitioners in the field mine are gonna be a little more kind of scholastic given the nature of my my own work but hopefully you'll bear with me you know i want to take this moment to particularly think about that kind of question that marx and colonialism are kind of marks and post colonial movements particularly post colonial movements that really emerged with nationalism as they're kind of driving force and you know as a critique of a type of marxism that imagined that you know class could be the it would be the operative category here for emancipation of liberation and how that did not really correspond with the kind of specific violence of colonial rule and i want to talk about this through the lens of the palestinian critic academic the late edward saeed who is no doubt probably familiar to many people and and i want to talk a little bit about a transformation that i see in sides work from his kind of early days to the late days and why i don't think that this is just some sort of like inside baseball notes about a literary critic but actually something that might be very informative for all of us trying to think through these but not to make a flag from in ceasefire with the mongols i say that i'm going to make socks from the flag i'm not going to dedicate my life to a flag jean janee said that a homely is a stupid idea except for those who still don't have one going to solo the spanish poet answered him and when they have a homeland janay said let them throw it out the window ok so i wanted to start with this and kind of question about know take seriously this kind of notion of this being a stupid idea except for those who don't have it and what do you do once you get it well then you throw it out the window and and and and and as i kind of dive into kind  ian frameworks have worked their way into a lot of fields from medical anthropology to critical race studies they stressed the right centrality of cultural other in creating these discourses of dominance a subordination and have been part of a widespread pivot in the humanities away from marxian or materialist frameworks of analysis toward those provided by french theory and specifically in the kind of a post structuralist turned toward the work you know presents itself as a as a critical corrective to marxist analysis but you know there's a kind of a darker side i would like to argue to this scholarly turn and in the kind of politics  post structuralism we get in this kind of most rigid or vulgar forms a kind of a denial of objective knowledge the notion that all knowledge is signed is is it's constructed and socially mediated might be true but you know the icebergs are actually melting to give a kind of an example that's not just like a linguistic event and you know perhaps most importantly you know structuralist analysis rejects marxist approaches in favor of those like race and gender and it's true that they are certainly not given their due in traditional marxist analysis and you know there are some very important correctives that have to happen i think of someone like ceedric robinson for example  underscore how you know universe the universalism of marxism was based off of a pretty particular set of historical actors and that some sort of adjustment and our thinking might be required here but does that mean that then kind of off the table is there can can we can we only hope to kind of make progress either theoretically or politically on these kind of on the particular on the individual group on the women's march on the black l so i think that this divide between marxian frames and post structuralist is really quite meaningful for current debates about identity politics epistemic violence regimes of knowledge all of the skypes good stuff and it points to this very  of particular istic versus universalist frames for action so for all of this association with sayid with french theory and with popularizing post structuralism in the u s i think it's very fascinating to see that in the s in the last decade of his life he starts to express a lot of doubts not necessarily about whether these are useful analytic terms for doing scholarship but whether they whether these frameworks lead anywhere politically and i'm gonna just share two very short  leotard and foucault we find precisely the same trope employed to explain that disappointment in the politics of liberation narrative which posits an enabling beginning point and a vindicating goal is no longer adequate for plotting the trajectory of human society there is nothing to look forward to we are stuck within our circle and side will kind of go on to critique how limiting this type of a framework might be similarly a human humanism and democratic criticism which is a work that's written two thousand and three right before his death i think that the critique gets even stronger and i'm going to read here for you a little bit at length he says although i was one of the first critics to engage wish with and disgust french theory in the american university james clifford correctly saw that i somehow remain unaffected by that theories ideological anti humanism mainly i think because i did not see and still do not see in humanism only the kinds of totalizing and essentializing trends that clifford identified nor have i been convinced of the arguments put forward in the wake of structuralist anti humanism by post modernism or its dismiss can be and still are moved by ideals of justice and equality and the south african victory in the liberation struggle is a perfect case in point and the affiliated notion that humanistic ideals of liberty and learning still supply most disadvantaged people with the energy to resist unjust war military occupation for instance and to try to overturn despotism and tyranny both strike me as ideas they're alive and well  not gonna go too much further here because i don't want to kind of belabor the point but i just want to note kind of to return to this kind of question of nationalism that i you know began with which is a almost a paradigm attic instance right of a kind of a particular istic move move  in a particular istic notion of liberation i think that it's also very fascinating to see that syed in himself he's known as a activist for palestinian nationalism that is in the united states if you haven't read his literary criticism that's probably how you've encountered sayid and that even this and you know you read his stuff from the s and it's like the romanticism of like the wonders of the plo is like it's extraordinary to behold and you see this shift in his thinking though as well  the extent that yeah you know he gives in he becomes kind of firmly binational in his political orientation toward the kind of conflict in israel in palestine in terms of what he looks for in terms of a future there and i want to just close with  a some lines from him that he gave in an interview to haaretz such as the kind of new york times of israel in two thousand and two kind of further hopefully drive this point home and and i'm quoting here as well adorno says that in the th century the idea of home has been come superseded i suppose part of my critique of zionism is that it attaches too much importance to home saying we need a home and we'll do anything to get a home even if it makes means making others homeless and the kind of pivots back to the his interviewer why do you think i'm so interested in the binational state because i want a rich fabric of some sort which no one can fully comprehend and no one can fully own i never understood the idea of this is my place and you are out i do not appreciate going back to the origin to the pure i believe the major political and intellectual disasters were caused by reductive movements that try to simplify and purify i don't believe in that at all i wouldn't want it for myself even if i were a jew i'd fight against it and it won't last take it from me ari he was speaking with ari sure beats take my word for it i'm older than you it won't even be remembered  and then re chevy says you sound very jewish and then sayid responds with of course i'm the last jewish intellectual you don't know anyone else all your other jewish intellectuals are now suburban squires from almost ohs to all these people here in america so i'm the last one the only true follower of a door no let me put it this way i'm a jewish palestinian and that's where it ends so with that i'm going to open this up for kind of conversation between the three of us and then kind of  turn out to the audience as well sure yeah i can opine with the best of them so  that was yeah so that i was it was nice to hear that later quote in his life yes people hold on to stories that's that's how we get through life right that's how institutions parties families the ors are essentially stories and experiences we weave together and i'm trying to remember who it was probably my friend and she's a catholic feminist theologian and i remember her we were bickering about something and she said something to the effect that religion like politics is something that we experienced together it's something that we create together and without that collective work religious faith doesn't mean very much and neither do political beliefs and i i spent a lot of my  reading a lot of really thick books i was in a in an economics program in india where my marxist professors thought that the way to teach economics was to make you start with adam smith and read everything in the original for like a year now a year or two before you were allowed to like actually engage with marx and so my primary exposure to rosa luxemburg and even to lenin like the first really really serious engagement i had with lennon was imperialism and i'm suggest that this would be helpful to people who get wrapped up in sort of meaning in theory you know when the rubber hits the road is when we figure out whether our theories of life and of political wor or political theory actually is useful and the back and forth between theory and practice practice is in fact where the marxism happens in my personal view it's where we actually understand you know precisely what kali was talking about the challenges of the second international for instance which yes they finally left the second international the one that that currently exists so those are the those are that's how we figure out these formulations are actually useful is when we go out into the world and try and do things and we're like oh right if your entire theory of change and of political  lever of political action is a bunch of white guys and hardhats you're not going to do very well and so i really encourage people who are trying to who are trying to unpick these kinds of things whether it's structuralism post colonialism all the posts and trying to figure out their their own way through the world is to really engage in a collective project that is really the most it really is a very illuminating way of making your way through these kinds of conversations maybe do a trend like a transition at all so how many people in here have read black reconstruction in america but by w i don't think you can understand this country without having read that  book i must say that definitively and the some of the fundamental contradictions that we've been circling around for you know two hundred plus years i think are addressed there in a way that hasn't been addressed by anyone in the u s before or since  so so black reconstruction by wd boys it's a book he wrote in the midst of the great depression  trying to was a number of things so one it's a it's a book about him if you want to like personalize grappling with his own limited notions of socialism he started to grapple actually with marks or marks on terms in the way he had before  he's looking at the question of what this great depression in his early stage is doing to the black community dispossessing primarily black landowners so fo once one thing is for instance when when there was all this talk about black kind of concentrated wealth and how much was lost in two thousand and six through two thousand and eight through the the of home ownership general narrative that most folks are given or even understand about black people or or how capitalism was actually developing with inside the united states and what the great term was from the great depression on and what the new system basically was set up and constructed to do and within that you know he's making some some critical raises some critical questions of how do you actually get black workers and white workers to address the central question of unity within the framework of a settler colonial empire so he brought that in in a way that really hadn't been treated you know i think would  seriousness and a lot of left in the u s before or since very rarely but there's a you know because there's this notion to a certain extent  there's a there's a particular way in which we talk about this empire as a democratic entity when in fact that's only been a limited democratic experiment for a small few and if it was never intended to be a democratic project for everyone and if i could just interject one of the most interesting  one of the most interesting so i worked at columbia university with a lot of very nice liberal people and one of the things that i've been able to turn people towards a more complex understanding of what's going on because it's very very obvious now the trump has been elected but that the different what happens with trump is that white people nice middle class white people are suddenly in danger of being treated like black and brown people have been treated this whole goddamn time and that that voter suppression for instance is in fact affecting white people now that structures around home ownership home loans business loans car loans student debt that these are things that are the differentials around how that works for different kinds of people are starting to become more widespread so yeah i absolutely agree that there is something very much baked in and when we talk about settler colonialism we're also talking about a into in a way that i don't know i've ever seen a theorist ever do but as a fiction writer she's able to explore the interrelationship between gender gender norms gender in the hole in the so i mean one of the things i wanted to kind of talk to you both about is right this you know this narrative we mentioned it in the description for this comp for the panel and that is it is really pervasive that certainly looking towards two thousand and so there's this notion that this you know that were kind of our activism is kind of cleaving apart and and that we have to make this choice i want to get you both of your thoughts as to where that narrative comes from why it is so pervasive  and particularly because i've seen some like really fascinating empirical data coming out of minnesota recently that shows that it's actually false you know the group called our minnesota future actually did this wonderful kind of test and have eight hundred different voters both white voters and and people of color about and looking at kind of how they respond to different narratives and in fact kind of narratives that kind of tie race and class  together and and make a case for how race functions within a broader system of economic exploitation we're the ones that were most attractive to people much more so than kind of either at just class based one or something else so you know given that we do have some data that that this framing is is not actually that doesn't really hold much water why do you think this is still the dominant way of talking about these issues because the mainstream media is really stupid i mean that's right you know or it's an easy story to tell or the democratic party finds that a useful narrative to explain why they do stupid shit i mean like the democrats love to lose we could talk about that for like yeah we could talk about that for hours and we could certainly go back relitigate you know bernie sanders campaign and both the stupid things that he did as well as some really interesting things michigan is a great case right where a lot of the way in which he operated part of the reason why he won that aside from a really solid ground game that he somehow didn't create in new york state was in fact that like he's a jew and like arabs really like him because he's super honest about hey israel really sucks like what's happening is not helpful that you know extending the police state into the muslim communities is terrible really obvious things and i think the thing that people have i would say the most important thing to keep in mind whenever you you read or hear these narratives is that close to half of the people in america don't vote so when you're talking about how voters behave you're talking about a subset and in non presidential years you're talking about an even smaller subset of people donald trump got what twenty nine percent or twenty six percent of the potential electorate because barely half the country actually voted and we have in many parts of this country an absolute regime of voter suppression but people are also like why would i vote right and that has been something that like the the limiting of our democratic practice in this country has gone back you know twenty years and you know google the mercer's and and the koch brothers and you can read all about like how that policy got put together who were the think tank people who spread it the model legislation that has been shared from state to state it operates precisely as the abortion fight does as the gay bathroom thing does or the trans bathroom things does there are think tanks that create model legislation and send them out all over the country that's why you see the same thing over and over again i mean yeah this to me i think we need to flip some of this on his head and i think you touched upon it so on average for most of what the last sixty years roughly forty five to fifty percent of the people in this country who could vote don't vote and i don't think we want to do on a serious interrogation as to why and i think we need to do on a serious interrogation as to why can i push you on that cuz i this is something i've been thinking about and writing about actually it's like the phenomenon of kind of voter suppression is one thing but there's also almost like a sense of like self disenfranchisement formal shift in neoliberal economics in the united states and i think the fundamental piece is there's nothing for a lot of people on on at least within the reign the framework that i've worked and i'm gonna put it that way  obviously had a certain level of politics but just kept it real and was they look i'm not going down there to vote for any damn thing because capitalism is not on the ballot i don't get to vote that away and if i don't get to vote that away you coming in or somebody else coming in you're fundamentally going to just determine how to try to manage the contradictions of the system which ultimately can't be managed by the own rules and logic of the system so you're just there to be a stopgap measure so it's like whoever's there is going to do some variant of the same thing right and then try to justify why they're very end up doing the same thing makes sense for some form of immediate gratification or relief so i think rather than seeing i want to be flippin on his head i don't think that that that whole fifty percent of people who don't vote i don't think that's apathy right i think there's a deep criticism that's that's there about this is not the way in which the society is going to be transformed but there is no organized expression or there is no organized force which then says well what is the program how do we move beyond this so there's nothing that speaks to you know that transformative politics and i see like in our experience in jackson where we've done the most eye thing to actually mobilize working class forces  when we actually articulate a politics that goes beyond electoral victories and strategies and but the thing that gets the most kind of press and the most attention from most of the left are the electoral victories so there's a gap there right that who are we actually speaking to what are their interests what can they move what do they do and even in in in the jackson case and say oh our in our experience you know and i think if we really break that down didn't move also to really break that down and jackson is roughly about a hundred and twenty thousand people who can vote right but the the electorial contest and jackson are typically determined by forty five thousand people so fundamentally it's a popularity contest amongst at forty five zero people as to you know whether you will you could or you win would with elections and so you can either orient your program towards moving and convincing than forty five zero or you could say wait a minute there's roughly seventy five to eighty thousand people who are not touched who are not engaged and nobody speaking directly to that if you could win even a significant sector of that it actually could double the existing force but the problem is most of those folks are not necessarily willing to engage in the reinforcing the structure right because they they're they're like that structure is going to maintain what exists one way or another and how do we get beyond that program are they plan to jettison neoliberalism in any fundamental way certain extent i think about getting real is that trump is willing to bring the terror that the united states practices on the rest of the world home but that terror has been exercised and existed by all of these bastards from day one right right so until we come to grips with that right you can delay that inward cannibalism for a little bit longer but the actual did takes of capitalism determined that there has to be a major restructuring of the world that's coming here regardless of who's sits in that white house or who sits in congress and what is our program to deal with it kylie i want to jump in here with a question for you about kind of the the in the immediate term right what and you know ravi you mentioned before right we we don't have any sort of pure politics so this is not the way that political action really really really actually works so you know on a practical note you're choosing between two bad options that one of them might be slightly less bad what do you do is there i mean do you i do in favor of kind of just sitting out the election until there is some sort of candidate on the ballot that you think is reflective of this kind of broader social economic political transformation that is needed or do you say well okay these are you know we have  two highly flawed and imperfect candidates but one of them is ever so slightly less so than the other and that's worth standing behind what do you practically do with when you're faced with the kind of reality that we are faced with i mean for me there's a thing that we've been trying to articulate within cooperations action the general framework generally it's building fight and they have to be done in equal measure and if we're not trying to build up the practical institutions in our local ground up you know communities around things that actually transform the immediate you know the transform our local economies on a neighborhood basis to build people's actual capacity to move to have agency to govern themselves electing the lesser of two evils is not going ultimately change anything because i don't actually gain any strength i don't actually gain any power now does that mean you sit out you know electoral politics absolutely not i think if you see a good fight you get in it right but i think the question is what are we demanding and what do we have the power to demand of anybody who's going to engage in that arena and if we let the electoral candidates and the parties that they they currently exist determine the agenda you're going to get the minimum the question is how do our build activities both you know build a framework build power that then has then reorients what whoever's running in office you know stands for and i think the thing that we have to we have to sometimes accept is that winning offers does not necessarily mean you're building power building power means you're moving people to actually exercise agency which may not always win you elected office but if you can engage in electoral politics for instance i think what we've tried to do in jackson is engaged in electoral politics to actually build strength then you can have an orientation that whether i win or lose a particular campaign is minimal than to the power  and i'm actually accruing on the ground well so there's i think probably restate some of what kali is is saying in slightly different terms which hopefully will be helpful for some of the people in the room the idea that candidates do things is i think a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of democracy right i mean that's one of those lies of liberal democracy like that's just not how anything works in any government ever you've got in capitalism you've got organized power you've got organized people and whoever can do better it gets to decide what the program is for your government like that's just again like the nature of power i spent last summer reading a lot of carl schmitt it was a very much a wake up call highly recommend reading him i think there's something about the nakedness and i think part of the reason it was so illuminating is he was a nazi and the nakedness with which he talks about the state the absolute lack of illusions the fact that he goes back not too liberal enlightenment concepts but completely different concepts of the state is enormous illuminating and to read somebody like that at the same time as you're seeing donald trump and everything behind him right the nakedness of what has been happening in the rest of the world what has been happening in our own settler colonial state the openness of which with which that assault is now coming on the rest of us who have had the protection of class and region and coastal elites and all that like we're fucked but it's a very illuminating practice and i think for a lot of the academic left and the organizing activists left power is very depressing to think about when you don't have any and so one of the things that has been really that has been really as an observer of a lot of what cooperation jackson has been doing has been really great is that is that grappling with what power actually is and where does it exist and so in dsa one of the things that we talk about in our electoral work is that we are not interested in access to candidates we are not at all interested oh we'll canvass for you and maybe you'll like us in six months and we'll get some like that doesn't work like stop pretending that that works in electoral work it's accountability it's actual power and that comes from being able to mobilize people in that district to put continuous pressure on elected that's the way electoral work works and reading about how the tammany hall machine was created and how it functioned here in new york again highly recommend that was power it was raw and ugly and it was power it was based on relationships on neighborhoods on what matters to people what were the narratives and stories that could move people to the polls who would turn out to defend these deeply corrupt horrible people but like why does that work so i think understanding those things understanding the nature of power is really important and you have to do it without illusions which is extremely difficult i highly recommend therapy  drink because it is no it really is very dislocating for one its own class identity to think about how little power we actually possess and that for many in in sort of middle class our sense of control over our own lives has been deeply destabilized because all these illusions of liberal democracy are sort of falling apart right now and it's very very dislocating i'll put plunkett of tammany hall on the reading list next to black reconstruction if you haven't  not as a mandate like australia and there are countries which had a third option none of the about to choose many rewarding like in india they experimented with that so how about we have those two mandate voting and have a third option none of the above i have not yet regrettably have not yet read black reconstruction in america but i have read i am in the process of reading choko by paul butler and it is in that context that i would really love to hear more about how kali relates to the nitu movement because one of the things that struck me in that book is that police abuses of black men especially in relation to stop and frisk are highly ginger and that it's not enough to think about it just as  on the street it's a lot more than that it's ritualized and to some degree of right of size violence and so i see me me too properly understood as an opening for bringing all the stuff that we want to bring together together in terms of race class  thank you my question relates to a few of the terms that you know came up in the in the last hour the question of humanism power and complexity and you know  size and by national state and so forth and schmidt as well it seems to me that you know this kind of complexity in which you are not making distinctions between us and them where you have you know the notion of  or we eat and be constantly making we have been historically constantly evolved to make these distinctions and i'm wondering that kind of romanticism and idealism that one of you talked about when we think of marxism if this may not be part of it that we result of our evolutionary history which makes us draw these lines in the sand make us distinction distinguish between friend and enemy and engage in politics on that basis whereas this kind of thinking in complex we  for shorthand so let me let me start there and bring it back to marx and what i find to be most relevant is within the methodology  the ability to constantly shift and move between the universal and a particular way i would i would describe it and the way in which i know politically me and the folks i've worked with we constantly make actual distinctions between friend and foe and constantly make distinctions between permanent interests versus temporary interests which means that are given a particular issue or given a particular time enemies can become friends friends can become enemies and and operating within that paradigm where and within that context to see that things are always shifting always in motion actually try to direct the change and being able to make that distinction and analysis you know i think is where we have the greatest power to exercise where we're going to move to and i think this gets to the the  ece to a brown to me too so it's one of those things using that same framework a part of it is is both exhilarating and another part of it is terrifying  i'll start with a ladder i think there's there's a particular type of people without power exercising micro power in in  certain types of moral power and moral indignation and with that kind of lens if we do it then i can condemn each and every human being on the planet for something right  me to actually practice solidarity with you and engage in a struggle with you as opposed to recognizing your imperfections and trying to come up with way ways in which to address them right because i'm is in it's fucked up and is in human in some respects as anybody and then then the other so the other the other piece i do think is empowering is where i agree with you i think that that there is a way in which some aspects of the framing and i think some aspects of the moment actually forced us to look at the terror that is this country and abroad broader way so a couple of years ago myself and a comrade arlene e imperfect study because primarily it was like one and a half people arlene did most of the actual research and me was doing most of the framing and in the methodology basically was scouring in newspapers of cities they had more than i think it was three hundred thousand people and just looking at the like the reports of who was killed so an in many respects what we came up with i would argue as a gross under count okay a gross under count because of the limited tools resources that we had but the thing that we wanted to do and just haven't even made the time i had the resources to do was let's take that that type of analysis that type of investigation and let's apply it to harmony chicanos and latinos get murdered by the police how many indigenous people get murdered by the by the police of some force of agency of the state and then lesson count how many people die in prisons how many people die in the immigrant detention camps those that we know we don't know about and if you our guests w if you add that all up it would amount to thousands of people arbitrarily extra traditionally killed by the you now states government year after year after year but it's a disappeared figure that actually distorts the true level of state violence that is being committed amongst folks and this was during the obama era not even the trump era right and the point that we were trying to really point out is their actual attack and the assault on people by both capitol in the statement our present era has been grossly misunderstood grossly ignored even by forces on the left and i think part of the argument we were trying to make then and now is that if you are if the left is not paying enough attention to the reality of this terror you actually open the door for a force like trump that was an argument we actually made you know some some preliminary forces and pieces in that piece in and twelve and one more the municipal piece is complicated it's very complicated and we started off with the notion that this is where we could build power in a way to be transformative but we're always mindful of the fact that we're not going to build socialism in one city right now like it's just not going to happen in that way and so it's in some form or fashion our experiment our efforts were going to have to link up you know first and foremost with other  municipal projects and then from there work to transform an art bernard notion it was to work to transform the states before coming to a notion of how do you engage the federal but that's just a shorthand that i think needs some adjusting but we can talk helpful concept i think for thinking about you know the how we get divided and kind of lose sight of you know of the kind of the guys on top i wanted to just say real quickly on this kind of question of you know of a voter turnout and if kind of people really staying home one of the interesting things that came out of this experiment that they did in minnesota was that i'm just gonna reach for a little bit from the article here  to determine whether a class only message leaves voters of color cult respondents of color were offered a third option besides supporting either candidate and that was sitting out the election which is as we know actually something  that people do kind of in math and in fact people of color were twice as likely or to report they would stay home when shown the class only message compared with that that kind of put race and class together so i just want to kind of share that  this kind of question of humanism and kind of you know pivoting a little bit back to sayid i think there's something helpful here that say he talks about when he speaks of humanism that can also be quite useful for thinking about practice right kali mentioned before that marx says i'm not a marxist that you know what we have here is a set of tools a style of criticism and a analytic approach for thinking about challenges which are necessarily new in every generation and you know also i think this kind of reflects what you were saying in terms of kind of a romanticism and a codification of certain practices no such thing should be possible because what at least in the way that i kind of understand the the use the usefulness of this type of analysis is something that is kind of ever evolving very much in the way that people might think about like a legal text is something that kind of are a creative build upon one another and are always dealing with new circumstances i think that is so much more helpful than thinking of a kind of a codified set of practices just a quick aside i think one of course is that most of continental europe the legal system is a codified set of rules so it's not surprising that that's where certain kinds of people end up i guess cuz i work on like religious law which which is actually incredibly much more flexible than that and just a couple of thoughts and then to deal with the idea of other electoral systems i think one of the tensions that i think political action really needs to political identity political action all of these things we're talking around has to write out is is we all need dreams like just because i'm saying it's a utopian dream doesn't mean i think it's a bad thing right like why would you get up in the morning if you thought you know if you don't have dreams or hopes for a better world it's that we can't turn those into religions right we can't turn those into into totems and we must always be prepared to wake up from our dreams we must always be prepared to wake up and say okay that dream is over what do we do next and in terms of the question about other electoral systems there are i think well look i mean i will say about all all these flights of fancy about the american electoral system and how we could make it better there are a couple of underlying issues one is that we don't have a single electoral system in this country people may not be aware of this we have fifty minimum and we have in dsa as in every other left grouping what i one might call third party dead enders right they are completely devoted to this idea of some radical transformation of the american legal system and that's nice but unless you have a fifty state strategy to actually get us there it's not helpful right we actually need somebody who cares enough about these kinds of crazy ideas to sit down and explain how to make it work in nebraska and new york state how to actually get these changes to the ballot and to electoral law to actually work so i will say there not a lot of things that i have zero interest in talking about but i will say that without real strategic thinking and practical thinking third parties are of zero interest to me right now ballot line quite like ballot like the ballot line question for those who are into that sort of thing is to me a tactical decision based on your local circumstances green like i don't have any sort of caring or opinion about whether we should be running on democratic lines de palette lines or not but i don't want to talk about third parties until you can tell me how to get there in state in the union um i'm gonna just see other other kind of questions from audience members okay hi i have a question on what you just brought up about sort of third parties and then bringing it back to the original question that was like what is a party could you fear and this is really like very theoretical it's not very practical but like could you sort of think about sort of the idea of like the social media movement or just like the essential materiality of social media and like digitized engagement could you also think of that as its own sort of party because it's both sort of i don't know turning over the structure of what like normal a journalism would be your like the access to information so does that fit into your ideas about party systems that is an awesome question that is literally something i was thinking about this  morning so thank you so much so one of the this is like turning into a lot of reading lists basically like i want all the people i know to read all the books that i'm reading and then like tweet about and we can all talk about it together so i am  situation would have gone down if they'd had twitter i like to think about that sometimes when i'm annoyed about left twitter so here's what here's what i'll go back to your question like what is a party and i feel like the thing that we've got going on right now to my mind a party is an institution it's something that is not ephemeral it is a it's the mechanism by which we take aspirations and plans and conversations and ideas and gestures and experiments and we make them durable so when i think of social media so jodi dean has this book called crowd and party it's very it's a great read not every political theorist is writes good prose so i'll plug her for that i really like the way she engages with social media and online spaces as well as sort of crowd sourced in in real life movements to think of them as crowd to think of them as like the pre riot or the actual riot and so it's really fun to watch her take this like very th century concepts and apply them to the internet and her whole idea about the party which i think is is really very much where i'm at is that the party is the institution that takes that impulse that longing for justice right that takes all the quips and the memes and all that shit and turns it into something which is durable something which actually acts in the world in a collective sense so a party is both collective as well as intentional and it's about power again so these are all things that that i think distinguish it now when i say party i don't mean i don't necessarily mean  organizational form whether when it's even when it's not necessarily directly engaged in electoral politics so i think you're absolutely right and where does the crowd where does  generalized sort of feeling of the moment form and how do we as how do we act as part of that you can't move a crowd you can't move a twitter mob if you're not in it which is like a fundamental discussion that like people have about when they moderate online spaces right if you're not actually in it if you're not in the conversation you can't move it and if you're not in the crowd you can't be like hey there's  when it comes to electoral politics in this country i actually don't think it's helpful to think about it in terms of parties because that's not i would argue that's fundamentally that's not what we have in this country right you don't have a in either side fundamentally you really don't have like a core platform that people didn't have to ascribe to and then there's members of the party apparatus which determined who the candidates are like that form of where that term comes from from europe the united states does not have that what i would argue for that we have here historically or you have different social tendencies that then get mediat forces of capital as to who they're going to support to reinforce the system or to reform the system right and here i think it's always critical to note that you know for the for the most part in the united states you vote for people right you don't vote for platforms and you don't vote for policy truth be told right some states you have data referendums and stuff like that but fundamentally on a national level you don't vote for policy you vote for people and then those people quote unquote your representatives then determining the the policy within the narrow confines at which they work and i think a lot of our argument around party in this sense confuses the question right like the the electoral piece is like how do you mediate the tendencies that might reflect your interests and the ballot lines to a certain extent can go anywhere based upon the fifty piece right and i think we get lost lost in that right and so i don't think to me the fundamental question is third party not third party i'm one of the things that you you need to try to orient towards building a third force that gives you some more choices right but this notion of trying to build another electoral vehicle quite honestly to me is for the birds on a deep level doesn't mean i don't engage in it but it's kind of for the birds because i think there's that there's another vehicle of a party right that engages in politics far beyond  electoral politics that is abstinent which is missing within the united states that we have yet to fully been allowed to build or really attempted to build at least on a broad mass level and that doesn't mean the experiments of the evil ism and i was wondering thank you there's a just a basic response that that's sort of like you know asking about more liberation ism and that that becomes like the key focus for how like we is like a broad left you know from like anarchists a socialist communists and like hopefully some of those liberals we can kind of come along and transform their own selves that that becomes a real weren't part of sort of what we need to think about and that that some of that i think just can't you know just when i'm listening to kind of connects to like this notion of like body powers and the ways that it can be really depressing to talk about like how much power we don't have but then focusing on the power that we do have like within our bodies to sort of get free from the sort of constructional conditioning that this system has taught us like all the weights like the words that we use to identify our own selves particularly for folks who like like myself who  have been taught growing up to like see myself as white and it's masculine you know and as you know a compulsory had of a sexual sexual and you know sort of like to sort of develop a kind of like booj wha way of thinking but still them to like fight out of that to get a working class consciousness and how that kind of like connect all the way to like thinking about the power system of intersectional state capitalism and how it's really important i think to like form like an existential basis of truth and care like as a superstructure inside our own selves that we then know how to pike practice with each other you know every day and i i kind of think like the work of cooperative model and i'm in newark you know is a model that it really can be like transformative lis inclusive you know in a way where you know the markets that can kind of work to sort of like you know exclude you know black folks you know the teaneck spokes queer trans you know disabled folks you know work of cooperatives become a way of like including everybody but also transforming the system and maybe abolishing markets at the same time if we really get good at it so i was just wondering like if that all becomes part of like this notion of like more liberation if this thing you can cane act in a very practical way to an idea that angles had shared you know about elections that elections are you know a sort of moment that work is a vehicle to sort of like count the massiveness or the non massiveness of our forces and if the becomes like a real practical idea of like saying like you know forget all the candidates in two thousand and twenty but let's all just write in you know more liberation ism and see how much that number can get to to count the folks that are actually practicing liberation in their everyday work and you know whether that becomes a number that's in the thousands that then mass media then has to say oh we have to actually include this now in our like post election analysis and that it then that puts liberation unlike sort of like the national agenda for something that's really seriously being you know done i just wonder what folks think about that notion okay thank you i think we have some other questions if we can maybe just pass the mic yeah please that's a hard question to follow i wanted to bring the teacher strikes into th space and to talk some about like what those mean in the formation of like i'm thinking a lot about what you're saying ravi about party and places where people can test for new forms of  participation and so i just i don't have a particular question but i didn't want us to talk this morning without talking about the teacher strikes both what's inspiring and what how they might speak more to these kinds of questions culley that you mentioned about being stuck in that second international framework thanks and i just want to piggyback on the excellent question about like the digital and social media movements and how that sort of affects the kind of work and thought that people are doing here and i'm asking because the idea that capitalism began and the idea that it might end are like  seriously esoteric fucking knowledge here and people don't know about this stuff and there's no class consciousness really and is it possible do you does the panel think that changing the messaging or yes even the branding is a way to create that and the social media does the digital space have potential to change that no thank you guys i wanted to ask about on the conversation of party form and also some of the motion happening to rejuvenate socialist politics in the u s looking at the recent example of cerissa and viewing the goal a unified left or a coalition of the radical left that comes together to contest here's an example that seemed that not only did the masses of people through plebiscite in greece reject the austerity the neoliberalism that hit them the old socialist party which was utterly corrupt and the old communist party which was politically demobilized as a constituency group were then superseded by the rise of this new coalition and then when the question was called we got all euro no communism right and in fact that coalition of both revolutionary marxists and people who were euro oriented seems that in many ways for the topic of the discussion shattered around the question of identity that is to say is greece going to be a european country subject to the rules of social democratic welfare within a european context when that's being demolished likewise in germany since we're in the g institut here we have a society that nominally has full representation a variety of different political parties but one party they don't have is a communist party and they don't have socialist parties which operate to achieve working class socialism that are international on bases and that are in many ways a continuation of the long series of white nationalist social democratic practices and it seems like those political lines despite the fiasco of greece of the most promising experiment on a socialist reformation in a crisis zone where there was massive autonomous political organizing including anarchist medics farmers everything across the country and when the question was called in the legal forms of europe the answer was let the youth of greece move to germany and work for them so how do we face that situation rabi mentioned this idea of you know we have to have fifty state strategies for x y and z the last time i would sort of put forward that those questions were called it was quite the opposite we had a civil war and troops from new york went down to georgia and took care of business and so on that discussion of the the reconstruction and where that's happened in our own national history where the question of full and trant and franchise men of the population was brought to bear even though the political leaders weren't asking forth that required  an ongoing fifteen twenty year political civil war that required some degree of political clarity so going forward and then i just wanted to ask one question sort of about why we continue to discuss questions of identity and politics through oppress nationalities or people whereas that question of again what is a what is white nationalism and if we're gonna have it is it really so different if modi rises up in india if the saudis are now dictating to us what is islamophobic right if we're supposed to view al qaida operatives in syria as freedom fighters which the only people who still promote are people who call themselves on the left so we start having this thing called  left a left of what cropped between having two parties and gerrymandering and everything and you had talked about building power through like torille politics whether or not the candidate wins and my question is so like how do we maintain that power that we're using through electoral politics and like so what's like the end goal of that if at the end of the day it doesn't make sense to have a third party and the rest of the systems so fractured that we don't yet have the power to change that and then also sort of in this situation where you have some politicians that just won't be moved regardless of the power you have through campaigning and then how then what difference does it make the power that you've used whether or not your candidate wins the power that you've built if at the end of the day the change that needs to be made is through a politician that's not making that change regardless of what you do right and part of what he what he's talking about and i think this is it's a concept that people have used in variety of ways over the last you know however many years essentially like fighting on a cultural front and i think one of the things that people forget is that gramsci still a marxist and so fundamentally wars a position wars of narrative cultural sort of interventions the thing that often gets forgotten is the material basis for those interventions whether you have power or not so for instance i remember around occupy we had a we had a puppet gills and they make great puppets they were awesome and at one point one of the puppeteers sort of turns to me and says you know i mean we really love making these puppets but i don't know that they're really doing anything  because again the spectacular the the super the sort of the a lot of the the thing about about culture is when it actually works it has to have some kind of a material basis you have to own something right and a lot of the challenge is the things that people like about the internet is that it feels like it's a free space and we nobody owns it  say don't engage with that right because i think you're getting to something that's really important about the lived experience of capitalism for a lot of people is through a lot of the reason why people engage in the internet is that it's this possibility of connection and it's a possibility of meeting other people and we have been able to move lots of people through those kinds of things but what we have not had is a place a long term structure to move them into we have not had a i would encourage you to really dig into when you are thinking about these questions of branding these questions of position and cultural stuff think about who owns what medium message  who are you speaking to who are you not speaking to who is creating the content who owns it who controls narrative those are things that can actually be really exciting organizing projects with people who don't necessarily get to set narratives  so i would i would think about those kinds of questions in that in that frame in terms of the teacher strike i'm really glad you brought that up because i think it's it's still ongoing a lot of what's happening in that world and i think it loops back to the me to question earlier on there is no question that a lot of the activism happening around the teacher strike is deeply gendered it is about an immense sense of being fed the fuck up right and if you look at like you know the bands playing whatever songs like these are like some very like middle class white ladies from you know from all sorts of random places right like this is a this is a particular there's a culture and a class like this is a group of people who are starting to feel their own power and it's very exciting there is the question again of institution if anybody tells you that west virginia was this great insurgent rank and file thing that's not true  you know again we have this legal framework in which unions simply cannot strike in certain states so how do you handle that when you run a union who owns that infrastructure how are people allowed to move through it so i absolutely think those questions are very interesting i am not i'm not somebody who thinks every strike means the revolution is around the corner because that's just silly those people exist mostly on the internet i think or possibly selling a newspaper outside so but i do think this is an interesting moment to talk about and i think the role for socialists in that's in those spaces is to really say like okay yeah but how'd you get here like it's awesome you're angry and you're pissed off and you got thirty five people and your kids in your class and no textbooks that's great why did you get here how did you get here how do you what can you what can you and we do to make sure this doesn't happen again right like what's the ongoing not boring but engaging an empowering experience that needs to happen out of these strikes to create durable power and durable places for people to work out those issues and then i think i should turn over turn over to kali calming it toss it back and forth sometimes are some great questions folks i don't know if you know trying to touch on all of them is gonna be difficult so maybe soundbite it a little bit  changing the messaging and branding is insufficient there has to be an organized force that even has the ability to move in a coordinated fashion that messaging and branding doesn't mean that we shouldn't be invested in doing more effective propaganda which is in essence using the old term what it is  you know but but it it has to support something it has to reinforce something it has to help move something and i think that's the piece which is still missing and i think the the challenge for us is we don't we don't like to be small but i don't think we want to deal with the reality that we are smaller than how do you move from there which is a different question right accepting like this is who i am this is where i'm where i'm positioned and this is where i have to move from so i want us to come to grips with that this this notion of body power i'm trying to figure out how to deal with with that piece so let me try to situate it within my own experience and again going back to you know one of the main things that that was central to and still essential to a certain extent within the the revolutionary nationals tradition the black liberation tradition right is self defense and protecting yourself and for many of us from day one from birth there's different aspects of the actual practice of learning all the arts of self defense that are imbued within that and i will tell you as someone who mastered a certain level of that and was brought up within that you know knowing martial arts actually makes me more aware of how powerless i am right not how powerful i might be in this body but actually how limited it is and to the extent that i might be able to fit in a few things off but you know the state has far more bodies to throw at me than my ability to throw one or two off and if i don't move other masses of people to confront this beast me being feeling power in this in this body it's actually not that critical it's not really gonna move anything now that doesn't mean that our ability to stand firm psychologically it's not important that those practices don't help build a certain type of you know psychological strength which i think is important for the struggling to maintain his own struggle but i think there's a limitation that we have to be aware everything that's been said but the thing that i want to see us explore more not to the exclusion of everything or anything that's been said but what is the actual from a strategic point of view what is going to be the actual economic act of the reforms that they have just won and how sustainable are they can tell you an oklahoma what i do know in oklahoma arizona west virginia those are paper compromises none of those states have the actual ability to come through on any of those things financially so what they've done i think hopefully is to accelerate their crisis or they themselves prepared to deal with that and are we prepared to deal with a movement i think becomes a larger question which leads to the question about cereza in the back to me then i'll stop and that is i raised it yesterday and i'll raise it again today i think part of this question in this notion of political leadership in the here and now which i think sarita definitely lacked is how do you prepare from having the bully pulpit which comes with with being at the helm of the state how do you actually prepare your social base to engage in the cinnamon in the with with the real consequences of the decisions that you make right i think that has to be one of the fundamental principles of political leadership in the era of neoliberalism is to say that we if we make certain choices to actually try to improve things let alone liberate ourselves the whole international capital and the state is going to come down on us like a ton of bricks and are we prepared to have a lower caloric intake for the next ten years that's a real question that we have to get ourselves prepared for meaning to be to strive to be free means they will try to starve your ass to death now which are we prepared to make that choice so that's the real question we keep levelup maybe i could tweak this and and you know the powers that be will actually accept that when you know the the whole thing of neoliberalism is to in my view we're going back to the sixteenth century whether y'all like it  t and uh and either either you go along with the program or you get crushed and we keep evading i think that real conversation as to what is it going to take to be free and to me i want to bring us back to something i haven't heard mention here which was some of the lessons from the haitian revolution where that question got poses like either we are going to be free are going to be slaves there is no mediation between that and  prepared to make that choice and is the political leadership willing to engage the masses of people and and and in a movement itself in a serious conversation of what that might take i want to just follow up on that and kind of speak to the kind of i guess the second half of that question that you know about you know issues also of national identity and whether we're looking at india whether we're looking at kind of you know trump voters in america or you know german kind of  ultra right parties you know for a long time historians and folks who work in ir right there is a certain accord around the you know about about a certain type of democratic politics as being interwoven with market capitalism and you know this is starting to fray quite severely at the edges and you know we have you know in in this room two of my this was incredibly illuminating was showing the extent to which this type of fascism was not an aberration within capital but actually something that worked quite well with with capitalism and this type of heightened sense of national identity and who is inside and who is outside and who the spoils get distributed to and who gets kind of locked out of that is something which is wholly compatible with our kind of current regimes of capital and so when we're thinking about kind of a heightened sense of national identity i push away from international you know body is whether you're talking with the eu they're talking about the un and this kind of reassertion of national sovereignty i think that we need to kind of keep in  themselves and function even more smoothly in this in this new era any other i'm sorry the world would be so radically different that like it's a little like saying like like people who are like what do you what are you gonna do how are you to abolish the police i mean part of this is like the socialist horizon and working backwards from it what is the world that we believe in and how do we get there so you know i could suggest some novels that i think do a beautiful job of trying to encapsulate what that might look like i'm a huge fan of science  fiction and there's some amazing shit out there that helps to imagine what that might look like and to then inform our political action and political theory in the moment but like you know who knows man like who knows would the u s even by my definition no is there an aspiration yes you know the the the most that you know and i do a lot of international travel connections i mean but but in in practice for me concretely to me it's like i'm going to see the world exploratory of experiments that are taking place in the world and from the tradition and i'm i spring from i see as my task is to dismantle this beast to give folks in the rest of the world the room that they need to transform their societies right to deal with the but you know the deal with the beast on its own terms  in its heart yeah i mean but but outside to a certain extent of offering in the here and now right now by measure power i can offer you some rhetorical support you know two different causes and some of them are very dear to me it'd have been like you know the the the palestine has always been dear to me  you know particularly from the first intifada because it always on a certain level to me demonstrated the extent palestine represents the extent to which imperialism will go because you got something that you know you could talk about struggles in africa struggles in asia none of them get the amount of attention that the struggle in palestine gets which is not the fault of the palestinian people but you can commit a crime that grave in front of the rest of the world and be able to get away with it for this long like there's a lot of lessons that have to be learnt from there and a lot of illusions that i think palestine constantly says has to be shattered but we still keep holding on to like there's going to be some mediators you know me from the imperialist forces around how this is going to play itself out as a folks on the ground finally you know breaking through with international solidarity making the distinction right until we get to that point of having an organized force they can help it's like we're offering rhetoric and we have to continue to offer the rhetoric to at least create some space but we shouldn't have any illusions that to a certain extent it's altering some things until we can actually you know make some material impact on how things move it's gonna be it's  eleven but i think this also goes back to one of the pieces that that was raised in the back that i didn't touch on the second we're gonna have to would like for us to deal with  part of the thing i think was serezha is mirrors i think some some illusions that we have deep within the united states and the big to me that was always problematic was they built a politics this may sound harsh but they built a politics on a european union that they wanted to be not upon the european union as it concretely exists and that led to some very  choices like asking people to vote no when you really always intended to go with what the troika was going to say anyway because you weren't serious about leaving right  in germany knew that off the top like okay you play that game and then what america do she hit him with even worse conditions afterwards like you would have got a better deal the first time i offer to you rather than going through this motion and then you know so now i have to teach you a lesson right you and the rest of the world a lesson but that was a politics i would argue based upon what people wanted it to be as opposed to what it is and a lot of the aspirations of the left and bringing it back around how we envision kind of multiracial unity and multiracial politics and you know the the what did obama say you know the imperfect union like you're describing a politics in the country that you want not the one that actually exists and until we deal with the one that actually exists and can see it clearly you're gonna come up with you know steal from fred hampton the answers that don't answer conclusions that don't conclude and on that i think we actually have to conclude and  ecology and technology once again grab a schedule grab a marx map they're great fun to let you guide you around marx related sites in new york and yeah thank you all for coming out