Latest / PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy / Pill Pod 18 - Socialism in Bidenland, Inshallah (ft. Shawn Gude)

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Pill Pod 18 - Socialism in Bidenland, Inshallah (ft. Shawn Gude) · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:08
  This meeting is being recorded for quality assurance. All right, so we're gonna
• 0:16
  post this on Tuesdays. We can pretend like the weekend or the elections a
• 0:20
  week out. And I don't know about you guys, but I'm ready for
• 0:25
  this game show to end. Yeah, hey, kidding me, keep it
• 0:29
  going on forever, just see how weird shit gets. Yeah, I don't
• 0:32
  ever want to be post political. I think it'll be weirder once it's over,
• 0:37
  because then we have to see what Trump's gonna do after the confetti falls.
• 0:41
  Yeah, I'm really scared of that, to be honest with you,
• 0:44
  unless it's like a major loss and stuff. I don't want to get into
• 0:47
  it because I have about all kinds of thoughts on that. Well, with
• 0:49
  his little lyfe's children, they can, you know, start a TV network.
• 0:54
  The Q Party attempts at Pooch in Washington. There go. Yeah,
• 0:59
  they'll start up Trump TV or something. It could be like NRITV, except
• 1:03
  you know, more gilded, less working class. So we can start by
• 1:07
  saying, of course politics is a spectacle. Trump let us know that it
• 1:12
  was a spectacle and the problem may now be at least for America, is
• 1:17
  how you go on believing in the legitimacy of government and institutions. After this,
• 1:23
  I don't know if you want to return to normalcy, but it seems
• 1:26
  like there's a deep libidness desire to return to a sense of normalcy. And
• 1:33
  this would be by the way ideology at its purest, In the most Gijekian
• 1:38
  lispy way I could say it is if everybody just decided to return to pulling
• 1:44
  the wool over their eyes and saying these four years that are happy. Of
• 1:49
  course, this is based on the large assumption that Biden wins next week.
• 1:56
  Yeah, I think that's a pretty big assumption. At this point, I'm
• 2:00
  relatively sure that if everything was fair, he would win. I'm absolutely I'm
• 2:05
  convinced that everything will be fair. So I'm pretty I'm pretty tired of the
• 2:08
  stress. I think after this we need to figure out like our should we
• 2:14
  be strategic voting or should we be voting from like the bottom of our hearts
• 2:19
  about who we really want to win? And if there's nobody to win,
• 2:23
  then we should just throw our votes away choice voting Before you can do that,
• 2:27
  this happened in Canada before too Everyone was discussed, well, should we
• 2:30
  strategically vote for Trudeau to get Harper out because he's been in for like twelve
• 2:35
  years, or should we Now I'm seeing the same thing happening on the left
• 2:38
  at least for the US politics is like, should we strategically vote for Biden
• 2:43
  to get Trump out? Or should we cash in twenty twenty four and just
• 2:47
  vote for Trump this time around? And like everyone's fighting about this shit now
• 2:52
  we need a final statement. Is strategic voting good or should we just not
• 2:58
  do it? Because we need to stop divide ourselves over this fucking issue.
• 3:01
  Well, we're not voting, so why don't we all know Sean what he
• 3:05
  thinks about that? Yeah, it's not our problem. We need to stop
• 3:07
  stressing out. I feel like as a Canadian, I often feel like my
• 3:09
  blood boil. I'm an outsider. You should introduce our guests. Yeah,
• 3:15
  it's guest with us. I'm going to. I'm going to. We need
• 3:19
  to get some b roll up in here. So okay, I'm just saying
• 3:23
  that despite what happens next week, we're gonna be haunted by the specters of
• 3:27
  Trump, and no matter what happens, his psychological decline is going to be
• 3:31
  on public display. Anyways, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Today. We
• 3:36
  have with us Jacobin, associate editor, the only one who might be voting
• 3:42
  next week. I don't want to presume none of us are, so well,
• 3:49
  ask him. So it's Sean's goody. Hey jo Hey, Sean,
• 3:53
  thanks for being here. Having we'd like to get your take on post normal
• 4:00
  and the post normalcy that we could hope for, that we may hope for,
• 4:03
  because everything that happens down there happens to ripple up here. Yeah,
• 4:08
  it does appear that way. Yeah, I you know, I think every
• 4:15
  socialist is hoping that socialists in the US, and I think abroad as well,
• 4:19
  is hoping that Biden wins, not to establish a return to normalcy per
• 4:28
  se, but I think just to give us a little breathing room, and
• 4:30
  also too, you know, I think the most convincing thing that people on
• 4:35
  the left these days say when it comes to voting is that you want to
• 4:41
  you want to try to pick the person that you can fight against, that
• 4:44
  you have the best odds of beating, or that you that you can actually
• 4:48
  you know, challenge and win some stuff from. So I think that's generally
• 4:54
  what this is obviously a live issue and it, like to be honest,
• 4:59
  it like the question of whether to vote for the Democrat every four years is
• 5:03
  this quadronial problem and it's quite boring to usually. I think this this election
• 5:11
  actually is uh, it is more consequential. And I speaking for myself,
• 5:16
  I mean, I'm I live in Chicago and Illinois, which is not a
• 5:20
  swing state. But I'm going to vote for Biden because I think the more
• 5:27
  because I think the in this in this election, the difference or the disparity
• 5:32
  between a popular vote vote total and electoral college vote total is actually pretty important.
• 5:40
  I think there's just one case that it's it's important for Biden to like
• 5:46
  to really trounce yea Trump in the in the popular vote and if if there
• 5:50
  is this, if he does win, you know, handily, and then
• 5:55
  we have this electoral college fiasco again, it's gonna it's gonna, uh put
• 6:00
  more pressure on kind of American political institutions and kind of delegitimize some of the
• 6:04
  worst political institutions or further delegitimized than And so I think that is that alone
• 6:13
  is actually a reason to vote for by and at least the one that I'm
• 6:16
  that I've found compelling m hmm. Do you mind, Sean if I ask
• 6:20
  about, like kind of a biographical question about you. I'm kind of curious
• 6:24
  about maybe some of your background and how you came to consider yourself a socialist
• 6:29
  or if there was like anything in your background that led you to that,
• 6:30
  or if you've always held socialist views. Certainly not always. I So I
• 6:38
  grew up in the midwest, Midwestern America. I grew up in Iowa,
• 6:43
  which is just the west of just the west of Illinois, m and which
• 6:49
  is a fairly in terms like electoral terms, it's a it's kind of a
• 6:54
  moderate state. It's it's swall right in recent years. But certainly when I
• 6:59
  was growing up, it was a purple state or whatever you want to call
• 7:02
  it. But my my my parents were kind of formative, influential and influential
• 7:12
  to me. They they were I was raised like on the kind of Catholic
• 7:16
  social justice left, and so they weren't they weren't socialists, but they were
• 7:25
  certainly like kind of left liberals, and they my dad in particular, although
• 7:31
  my mom has similar similar sentiments. My dad revered people are like people like
• 7:38
  Oscar Romero and Martin Luther King and kind of like left religious figures, I
• 7:44
  guess, and was like very strong, strongly anti war, anti imperialists.
• 7:51
  Domestically, He's he's certainly moved the left, but he was like a little
• 7:56
  more moderate in those days, more of a mainstream like kind of liberal democrat.
• 8:01
  Yeah. So I think the the sort of common sense of my household
• 8:07
  was that, like, you know, progressive values are like equality and like
• 8:13
  egalitarianism, are like kind of values that any sort of decent person should hold.
• 8:22
  And they were both. They were also both public school teachers, strong
• 8:26
  union members, so that played a role as well. But I think the
• 8:33
  faith aspect actually loomed pretty large growing up. It's funny you mentioned that because
• 8:37
  my dad was Roman Catholic, also left Roman Catholic, and my mom was
• 8:41
  a teacher, and my fucking god, did she love her union. You
• 8:45
  know what I mean. I still remember to this day. You have no
• 8:48
  reason why you'd know Mike Harris, but he was the Premier of Ontario for
• 8:50
  a while who tried to smash the teachers union, and every now and then
• 8:54
  if you get like two or three classes of wine in it, she'll be
• 8:56
  like fucking Mike Harris, that bastard still thinks he can. Fucking yeah,
• 9:01
  most of our listeners will be interested to know that most of Canada is actually
• 9:05
  inside Iowa, if I'm not. So, We've invited Sean here today having
• 9:13
  browsed his work, and he is very into the historical side of labor movements
• 9:22
  in the United States, especially, which is definitely a weak point of every
• 9:28
  other person that's in this call here. So I was interested in the way
• 9:33
  that you always end with this call to action, which I really like,
• 9:37
  but you offer sort of a blueprint you have to yeah, yeah, but
• 9:41
  you offer a sort of blueprint of how this worked despite all odds. I
• 9:48
  don't know if you would describe your work in this way, but I spent
• 9:52
  the day reading it, so how they can succeed, how they did succeed,
• 9:56
  and then also how you get these eccentric characters that move in and out
• 10:00
  through the labor history organized labor history in the United States. So I was
• 10:09
  wanting to know, first of all, even though the figurehead of the state
• 10:13
  may be changing next week, if it doesn't, I don't even I don't
• 10:16
  even want to entertain that possibility. But just for now, we'll assume it's
• 10:20
  changing, and the people's psychic energy is no longer directed to this one fat
• 10:28
  focus. What do you envision as the purpose of the left, and specifically
• 10:35
  as a leftist journalist slash historian. I mean, I think the left on
• 10:43
  day one will be fighting Joe Biden. I think it's important for us not
• 10:48
  to have any illusions and Joe Biden is not gonna I think there's a real
• 10:58
  UH, there's a real opening, whether it's demographic shifts and the kind of
• 11:05
  opinions that younger people have, the really seismic changes in the kind of political
• 11:11
  economy of the US that have radicalized people. There there's a whole host of
• 11:18
  things that that do make kind of progressive change possible. But we shouldn't we
• 11:24
  shouldn't think that Joe Biden is going to be an ally in that we.
• 11:30
  I think it's going to be up to you know, people progressives and socialists
• 11:35
  to you know, continue to build movements, whether it's a labor movement or
• 11:43
  you know, stuff around housing, housing rights. It's it's it's important to
• 11:48
  like, it's important to build you know, working class power and flex or
• 11:52
  muscles. That's that's really what UH has has brought about change, you know,
• 11:58
  in the US and elsewhere. And so I think I think the environment,
• 12:03
  the political environment will be It will have some possibilities, but there will
• 12:09
  be like it will very much be like up to us. There's a lot
• 12:13
  of contingency. Contingency here, I guess. Yeah. My argument is usually
• 12:20
  twofold right, one is a good argument and one is a bad argument.
• 12:24
  I should just say right. My good argument is more or less the nome
• 12:26
  Chomsky point, right, which is that real politics does not stop. Real
• 12:30
  democratic politics, for that matter, doesn't stop on election date. Right,
• 12:33
  you vote Biden in, you minimize the damage that Trump can cause for the
• 12:35
  next four years, and then, as you said, you immediately start pushing
• 12:39
  against the Biden wing of the Democratic Party, and you try to engage in
• 12:41
  progressive reform and build unions and labor movements on the ground and all the other
• 12:46
  important stuff that we need to engage in to actually build genuinely progressive movements in
• 12:50
  the United States and for that matter, elsewhere. Right. My crappier argument
• 12:54
  circuit contract points is just the sheer shot in Freud that will come from seeing
• 12:58
  trumple is and not being able to wrap his brain around it, and having
• 13:03
  disliked the man from Afar for a very long time. I have to say,
• 13:07
  that's a pretty powerful motivator to me. M it would be very nice
• 13:13
  to have him out of office if it happens. I'm curious, Sean,
• 13:18
  what do you think, because I know one of the things Chomsky was talking
• 13:22
  about, right, this this difference between real politics and then electoral politics.
• 13:26
  And I guess, you know, during the primaries with with Bernie Sanders,
• 13:28
  give any views on what went wrong there because I know, obviously we're alluding
• 13:33
  to that like bad Faith podcast that was pretty controversial on the online left.
• 13:37
  He people have been talking about it for a while, right, and I
• 13:39
  think thought got canceled, didn't he or something? But he got this enjoyed
• 13:45
  In any case, I one thing that I like that Brianna Joy Gray.
• 13:50
  I think that's Brianna Joy Gray. That's it, uh, you know saying
• 13:54
  that like a majority of Americans, right, Like she kept on citing these
• 13:58
  stats, right these like these are these polls about like the majority support all
• 14:03
  like a Green New Deal and they support a But then like when it came
• 14:05
  primary time, they picked Joe Biden, Like a lot of people picked Joe
• 14:09
  Biden. And I know there's maybe like, I guess controversy about funding and
• 14:13
  like and advertising, But I don't know, do you have any opinions about
• 14:16
  what was going on there? Uh? Yeah, I mean I think actually,
• 14:22
  I mean others have made this point too, But I think it was
• 14:24
  much harder for Bernie to get out of the Democratic primary than it would have
• 14:28
  been for him to win a general election. Hm, and just because of
• 14:33
  the Democratic primary electorate, it is I don't know. I I think it's
• 14:43
  it's both true that your average Democratic primary voter supports generally Bernie's agenda, generally
• 14:50
  supports Bernie's agenda, but also takes its cues in a way that Republican voters
• 14:56
  don't take. Takes its cues from Democratic elite and kind of opinion makers so
• 15:05
  MSNBC and other the New York Times, and it trusts these institutions in the
• 15:11
  way that Republican voters don't. So obviously there there are differences, you know,
• 15:20
  the reasons why Bernie wasn't able to get through the Democratic primary and Trump
• 15:24
  Trump was able to get through the Republican primary. But yeah, I think
• 15:30
  Bernie, uh, it was, it was always going to be incredibly difficult,
• 15:33
  and once once the sort of establishment got his act together after Nevada,
• 15:43
  after South Carolina. I guess you know it was going to be very difficult
• 15:48
  at that point because again, and it wasn't. It wasn't. I think
• 15:52
  last time there were like more there were actual like Shenanigans and stuff. This
• 15:58
  time, I mean, Bernie just lost in the forces a raid against him
• 16:02
  were incredibly formidable, and he wasn't able to win. But it is It's
• 16:10
  also true that again, I guess the reason why he didn't win was because
• 16:17
  Democratic elites were able to to sort of send the send the message basically that
• 16:22
  Joe Biden was their preferred candidate and Joe Biden was the best general election candidate.
• 16:26
  Crucially because Democratic voters, I mean, all the polls showed that the
• 16:30
  thing that Democratic primary voters wanted was to get Trump out and and and they
• 16:37
  were effective in making this argument. Democratic elites, Democratic establishment, and the
• 16:44
  kind of opinion makers like an s NBC, they were effective at making the
• 16:48
  argument that Joe Biden actually, no, I guess it wasn't Joe Biden because
• 16:52
  they that was like a kind of hail Mary at the end. But the
• 16:59
  argument was made throughout the primary that Bernie Sanders would be like electoral suicide,
• 17:04
  and that that was an argument that resonated with a lot of Democratic primary voters,
• 17:10
  despite I would say, despite their policy preferences. Yeah, I was
• 17:15
  gonna say, I think the biggest media endorsement that Bernie got from, like
• 17:18
  conventional newspaper medium was something like the Detroit Metropress or the San Francisco Guardian or
• 17:25
  whoever it was, both of which are just papers that have a circulation that's
• 17:27
  something about seventy thousand. Yeah, thanks to the tanks. A lot to
• 17:32
  them. You know, that's no, not slacking their efforts, right,
• 17:33
  But you compare that to the kind of vast apparatus you no on CNN and
• 17:37
  the fear Munger and MSNBC and people talking about how it's not required. It's
• 17:41
  a lot to go up against, right. Yeah. I mean I was
• 17:44
  actually pretty surprised, to be honest, I don't know, I thought I
• 17:48
  felt like Bernie. I don't know. I mean, I guess I wasn't
• 17:49
  paying that much attention. I tend to not pay that much attention to primary
• 17:52
  politics, but it felt like to me, like Bernie versus Trump would be
• 17:57
  like strong win for Bernie. But maybe maybe I don't know. Now I'm
• 18:02
  seeing like people talk about these like suburban women or something as being this like
• 18:06
  factor that Biden's doing a really good job of grabbing, and maybe Bernie wouldn't
• 18:10
  have been as good a job. But I feel like maybe Bernie would have
• 18:11
  had a chance of like getting more of the working class whites. But I
• 18:15
  don't know, you, I don't know if you have thought about that.
• 18:17
  Yeah, I think there were different pasts to victory. I don't think it's
• 18:19
  it was like the crude leftist argument was that like only Bernie can be Trump,
• 18:27
  and I don't think. I mean, it's like there's just a certain
• 18:32
  amount of plausibility, but I don't think it was necessarily true. It's like
• 18:36
  a fun argument to me, because it's easy to bless your opponents with that
• 18:40
  sort of with that sort of logic or whatever. But I don't think it
• 18:45
  was necessarily true. I think there were, Yeah, there were different pass
• 18:47
  to victory, and there are states in play for Biden that wouldn't have necessarily
• 18:52
  been in play for Bernie. Florida being one of them. I mean,
• 18:57
  yeah, Florida because of because of the Kiva stuff and just because of anti
• 19:03
  communism, anti socialism, any any kind of stink of that. But Bernie,
• 19:11
  like Bernie could have I think Bernie could have could put in play,
• 19:15
  although it's it's hard to say because Biden is doing like he is pulling so
• 19:19
  well at this point that and this isn't necessarily because of his strength as a
• 19:25
  candidate, but he is pulling so well at this point in places that he
• 19:29
  is putting in in in play states that you wouldn't ye associate with the Democratic
• 19:36
  candidate. It seems like Texas is almost almost Bernie would have won. I
• 19:41
  think Bernie would have won Texas, and I think interesting Texas, but I
• 19:45
  think Bernie actually would have won Texas because he was so he did so well
• 19:48
  with Latino voters. That was really his base after a while. You saw
• 19:56
  it in Nevada, like he destroyed in Nevada. Is because like working working
• 20:00
  class Latino voters loving interesting. That's interesting. So yeah, I was living
• 20:07
  in Mexico at the time, right before the crisis came, and he was
• 20:11
  pretty popular there also, right, not maybe amongst the more conservative elites,
• 20:17
  but definitely amongst a lot of like the people you would talk to, right,
• 20:21
  I mean, part you know that was better he was benefited from the
• 20:22
  pack that in Mexico, anybody, anybody was better than Trump, right,
• 20:26
  but stuff, I feel like, yeah, I was just gonna say,
• 20:32
  I feel like these these more theory oriented to guys are getting bored with are
• 20:34
  like, are like more more bread and butter politics talks. I don't know
• 20:38
  if you always want to change the topic to like more a more theoretical question.
• 20:42
  And actually, Sean, I'm curious. I don't know if you do
• 20:45
  you have a background in like in like more of the theory side or more
• 20:48
  practical politics. I mean, I know I read a couple of your articles
• 20:51
  and you talk more about the history of socialism and stuff. It seems like,
• 20:55
  yeah, I don't have a background in theory. I mean basically what
• 21:00
  I know about socialism is just my own reading. No, that's cool,
• 21:03
  And so I didn't and I didn't go to I didn't go to college for
• 21:08
  that or anything. I was a political science major. Right, it was
• 21:12
  rather useless since I was in a very mainstream political science department crew. And
• 21:21
  you're going to get me fired if you say that. Oh, I well,
• 21:26
  I mean that I looking back, like one of the biggest indictments we
• 21:30
  didn't even read like someone like rof miller Band, who is like any should
• 21:34
  be taught in any political science department. Yeah, that's true, right,
• 21:38
  I mean a lot of the stuff, you know, you just don't really
• 21:41
  see in a lot of American curriculums. Right. And it's strange because Augustine
• 21:45
  will be there and Aristota will be there, but you would never ever hear
• 21:49
  about some of the Eugene depths unless you took a very specific class on the
• 21:53
  history of labor movements in the US or something like that. Right. But
• 21:57
  actually, I was going to say that the kind of conceptual question that I
• 22:00
  thought would be kind of fun to mince around is you're a very passionate proponent
• 22:03
  of the idea that one of the virtues of socialism is it means democracy or
• 22:07
  democratization broadly, right, that we're going to democratize that you work for us,
• 22:11
  We're going to democratize the means of production, we're going to democratize various
• 22:15
  years of life that hitherto have been dominated by hierarchy. And this, of
• 22:18
  course runs very counter to, let's put it, the standard reactionary narrative,
• 22:22
  which is that socialism is about state control bureaucratic management, even technocratic management and
• 22:29
  stuff. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about why
• 22:30
  you think socialism is so centered around democracy and how you think that we can
• 22:36
  change the narrative around socialism. Let's just put it this way. A younger
• 22:40
  generation, right that maybe is more open minded to hearing that kind of story.
• 22:45
  Yeah, I guess I'll take the second part first. I mean,
• 22:48
  I think it's just important for us to you know, talk about this sort
• 22:52
  of conception of socialism and just frame it in those terms. It's like,
• 22:57
  certainly what I try to do in my writing and the stuff that I commission
• 23:02
  and work with people on its it you know, mostly goes back to that,
• 23:08
  because I think it is number one. I think I think there's like
• 23:12
  a both a kind of ethical claim and then there's also sort of a practical
• 23:18
  claim. And the practical one is I think that people are generally on board
• 23:22
  with idea that democracy is good, and so you can sort of establish that
• 23:26
  with your you know, your average person, and then and then you can
• 23:30
  say, you know, well, if it's democracy is good in the in
• 23:34
  the political sphere, why shouldn't we have more of it? And why shouldn't
• 23:37
  we also extend it to the economic sphere. Why why shouldn't we also think
• 23:42
  about, you know, hierarchies elsewhere and in our society. And obviously some
• 23:48
  hierarchies can obviously be justified, but we should at least be asking those questions
• 23:53
  about, you know what, what sort of relationships we actually want? Human
• 24:00
  relationships you want in society. I mean, you're not saying that we need
• 24:02
  to achieve a quality of outcome across every spectrum of human activity. I mean,
• 24:07
  you've got to consider the lobster shown, you know, and we need
• 24:12
  to recognize that hierarchies exist in human relations also. Yes, no, I
• 24:19
  mean that's very interesting, and of course it's one of the reasons I was
• 24:23
  gradually converted as well, you know, to the cause of democratic or liberal
• 24:27
  socialism. Right, And it's impertan because I've always considered myself a democrat first
• 24:32
  and foremost right, I don't believe that there are certain groups that should be
• 24:34
  able to tell others what to do, at least without there being very strong
• 24:38
  participatory mechanisms that allow everyone an equal say in the decisions that I made.
• 24:45
  Putting in really simply right, and gradually what I started to realize once time
• 24:49
  went on, is that I was really eliminating myself by just focusing on the
• 24:52
  classical liberal political sphere and the kind of decisions made by the liberal state and
• 24:56
  ignoring things like the workplace or if we took feminist perspective of the family.
• 25:00
  Right. So that's gradually how I kind of made my transition, at least
• 25:04
  theoretically, right. There were other biographical reasons, not least of which was
• 25:07
  working a lot of crappy jobs with people who are badly mistreated, right,
• 25:11
  So that always helps. But like you know, this notion of democratizing the
• 25:17
  different spheres in life, I think is what really resonates for me about the
• 25:21
  idea just as much and sometimes even more so than the idea of establishing like
• 25:26
  a more egalitarian distribution of goods, resources and so on in society. Yeah,
• 25:32
  I mean, I literally wouldn't be a socialist if I if I didn't
• 25:36
  think that that was the best way to democratize society. And it's it's interesting
• 25:42
  because my sort of shift to kind of embrace socialist politics is pretty that's pretty
• 25:48
  similar to yours. I mean, it was theoretically it was like I had
• 25:52
  this sort of you know, just core commitment in my bones to democracy and
• 25:57
  just that idea that people are of equal worth and and that there's there's no
• 26:04
  justification for you know, someone being able to dominate another person. That's just
• 26:10
  a moral and so you know, once I sort of took that rather basic
• 26:15
  ethical concept and sort of looked at the world around me and and like you
• 26:21
  also working in some shitty jobs. And also Occupy was was formative for me
• 26:27
  in college and twenty eleven, and then Occupy sprung up that and so that
• 26:34
  sort of opened up kind of more possibilities kind of conceptually for me to think
• 26:40
  about what what was actually what's actually possible, I guess, and like what
• 26:47
  a what a more just world would look like. So yeah, I I
• 26:52
  guess back to one thing you were saying, Matt, I think I sort
• 26:56
  of agree as well, because like in terms of egalitarian distribution, and I
• 27:03
  think I think that stuff is absolutely central to social but I think it's often
• 27:07
  central because we want people to have more power over their own lives. Like,
• 27:11
  yeah, we wanted, we wanted, you know, in this in
• 27:15
  this shortened medium term, like build a welfare state, because it means that
• 27:19
  say, like women can leave abusive relationships, and to me, that's the
• 27:23
  question of democracy and domination. So that's, uh, yeah, that's that's
• 27:30
  sort of how the general way that I think about things. Yeah, And
• 27:33
  I thought that was really nicely articulated by Bernie Sanders back early in the days
• 27:38
  of the primary right when he was talking about why it is that you can't
• 27:41
  really consider yourself free if you don't have access to something like decent healthcare,
• 27:47
  right, because how are you really going to lead a free and decent life.
• 27:49
  You can't be sure if you break your arm, right, you're gonna
• 27:53
  be able to use it again, or you're gonna have to face a choice
• 27:56
  between getting in a basic health care or going out ten thousand dollars of throwing
• 28:02
  your family into poverty for a long time, right, right, right.
• 28:06
  So I'm curious, uh, Sean about your your particular vision of socialism.
• 28:10
  I don't know if you if you have one, anyway, I'm not sure
• 28:12
  how specific you get. But you know, there's some leftists that I like,
• 28:17
  we're some leftist views of socialism that I personally find really unappealing, that
• 28:22
  like that relate more to like the democratic aspect of it. And I've I've
• 28:26
  talked about it before, but you know, there's that joke about freedom is
• 28:29
  an endless meeting, you know, and it's like, I don't want to
• 28:30
  be at a meeting every day, Like that's just the worst. So totally
• 28:33
  okay, okay, cool, So you don't because you know, there's some
• 28:37
  leftists have this dream where we every day we go to some participatory council meeting
• 28:41
  and we discuss how we're going to do everything every day, and that just
• 28:44
  sounds like hell to me. I don't. Yeah, I've spent enough time
• 28:45
  in boardrooms to know that that would be a special kind of health. Yeah,
• 28:48
  exactly. Yeah, No, I think our I don't sort of have
• 28:53
  a vision per se. I think that's other people are working on working that
• 28:57
  out. And I think I've certainly thought through some stuff. I think,
• 29:03
  yeah, you have to. I think like thinking about institution building is really
• 29:10
  important, and thinking about you know, mechanisms for delegation and these sorts of
• 29:17
  things are really important, because yeah, I I I I think actually I
• 29:26
  was. I was rather romantic, like sort of early on when I became
• 29:32
  a socialist, and then I sort of experienced some of the worst parts of
• 29:37
  occupy and that just abused me of the notion that, like, I want
• 29:41
  to be in this meeting. So I yeah, I think it's important for
• 29:45
  people like myself and others that that sort of take this as a central part
• 29:52
  of the socialist vision to actually think through how to instantiate it. But I
• 29:59
  think there there are certainly like existing institutions that do a fairly good job of
• 30:06
  representing people. I think unions are certainly unions can be need to be democratized
• 30:11
  and stuff, But there are like existing institutions that at least people some power
• 30:17
  and control over there over their lives. So yeah, I know, like
• 30:21
  Richard Richard Wolf talks a lot about it, I guess democratizing in the workplace,
• 30:23
  which I think came up in one of your articles as well. Yeah,
• 30:30
  like democratizing the workplace? What what would that look like? Do you
• 30:36
  have a do you there? There's you know, there's like the classic socialist
• 30:41
  problem of to what extent do you want to have like basically worker co ops
• 30:47
  or some form of worker co ops or when do you when do you start
• 30:51
  to utilize things and nationalize things and basically delegate those decisions to uh, either
• 30:59
  a parliament or a kind of bureaucracy that's hopefully somewhat responsible to responsive to to
• 31:07
  citizens. But those are like really tough questions and there isn't like any easy
• 31:12
  answer. I think it's important for us to like keep in mind that that
• 31:17
  those are tensions and we can't just like sort of assume that those problems are
• 31:22
  going to go away. Yeah, and actually, what do you think about
• 31:26
  I mean you mentioned romanticism before, and I think like the occupy is a
• 31:27
  great example, right I read this book maybe You've Heard of a Twitter and
• 31:30
  Tear Gas by zaneb Twofechi. It was like all about like activist movements and
• 31:36
  like the problems they run into that are usually mobilized from online. And she
• 31:40
  talks about Occupy quite a bit there. But like in general, romanticism on
• 31:45
  the left right now, I think is an interesting like kind of thought because
• 31:49
  I do feel like online, like you know, being an editor for Jacobin,
• 31:52
  you might you must see, like you know, the reaction online to
• 31:56
  certain kinds of articles, and there's seems to be this desire for like a
• 31:59
  peer already like a pure form of socialism or like a pure form of Marxism.
• 32:02
  And you know, Matt wrote some stuff that was talking about some compatibilities
• 32:07
  between liberalism and socialism, right, and then you know, I'm sure you
• 32:09
  saw some of that Twitter reaction and how so I wonder like what like how
• 32:14
  like your whip way probably way more in ameshed in in like the socialist like
• 32:20
  online world than I am. I'm guessing maybe not, And I'm just kidding,
• 32:23
  like what do you how do you see that purity dynamic or that's that
• 32:27
  maybe romanticism. Now, I can tell you the favorite response to that article,
• 32:31
  you know, the one I we published not too long ago, liberalism
• 32:36
  and socialism, that kind of stuff what somebody called me Hi manas more like
• 32:40
  mccainis. It was amazing. I was like, I haven't heard since I
• 32:45
  was in grade six or something, Right, It's been so long, and
• 32:49
  I'm like, it's like a classic making it comeback home words. Anyway,
• 32:52
  just in a full disclosure, everybody, Shawn and I have worked together before.
• 32:57
  He's edited every piece I've ever published with Jacobin end Up done a really
• 33:00
  great job. So I'm very grateful for that. But anyway, go ahead,
• 33:04
  Well it's it's always a pleasure to work with you. Mat Yeah,
• 33:09
  I don't know. I I'm sort of two minds about this. Certainly,
• 33:14
  like you get annoying critics, but also I think it's you know, it's
• 33:19
  obviously good to have pushback and stuff. You just would like the pushback to
• 33:25
  be as substantive as possible, and I think sometimes it's less so than others.
• 33:31
  But you also, you know, you have to have a thick skin
• 33:36
  if you're going to be putting stuff out there into the world. And also,
• 33:40
  I don't know, I mean in terms of I think a mature this
• 33:47
  is part of the kind of maturation of the socialist movement in the US,
• 33:52
  which for many years has been non existent and is still you know, quite
• 34:00
  weak in many ways. Like DSA has dsas try and get one hundred thousand
• 34:06
  members and you know, this is obviously in a country of three hundred plus
• 34:09
  million people, and you can you can punch above your weight and stuff,
• 34:13
  and DSA. You don't want to underestimate the the power that DSA does could.
• 34:19
  Certainly establishment democrats have at times and they've they've been unseated or they've you
• 34:24
  know, they've they've sort of felt the ground shift under them, and I
• 34:28
  feel like they have to support policies or at least like offer some sort of
• 34:32
  rhetoric, some sort of nod to to a policy that they they you know,
• 34:37
  thought was beyond the pale, like last year or something. All that
• 34:42
  said, Yeah, I mean, the socialist movement in the US is growing,
• 34:45
  but we still have like ways to go. So and it's it's both
• 34:52
  young in that way and also young and the people that that sort of people,
• 34:58
  uh, that populate it. So I mean it's weird because like,
• 35:04
  you know, I've I'm thirty one, I've been a socialist I don't know,
• 35:08
  for probably a decade or so now most of my don't basically my whole
• 35:13
  adult life. And I feel like somewhat of a of a veteran because there's
• 35:19
  so many, so many young people in D s A. And you know,
• 35:23
  and you know, people getting involved in you know, Black Lives Matter
• 35:28
  and all this all all the other kind of radical ferment that that's going on
• 35:34
  in the US in various ways. So so all of that is good,
• 35:38
  but part of it is part of it is kind of inescapable that in it
• 35:46
  in it number one in a very deep politicized country and in a in a
• 35:51
  movement that is still a fledgling movement. You're going to have people that don't
• 35:57
  necessarily like I don't want to be condescending, but like don't really know how
• 36:01
  to argue politically and make things very personal and think that disagreements are personal and
• 36:09
  rather than you know, the difference of opinion about strategy or you know,
• 36:17
  you know what relevant certain historical events have or whatever. So I think it
• 36:23
  I my hope is that like in the coming years, because I think this
• 36:28
  actually has improved in recent years. My hope in the coming years is that
• 36:35
  you know, people continue to you know, arguing, debate and stuff,
• 36:38
  and they also I think, rather essentially also sort of figure out how to
• 36:45
  be sparring partners without getting too personal, I guess. But yeah, And
• 36:52
  of course one one of the things that sorry, I'm gonna say, one
• 36:54
  of the things I had in mind was just like you know, this talk
• 36:57
  about tankies and like uh like with a dirt bag left as they say,
• 37:01
  and whatever. I don't know if you see that as like a constructive to
• 37:06
  the movement or if you like sometimes worry about that being like alienating. But
• 37:08
  I think you're like, you're right. I think DSA seems to be I
• 37:12
  mean, I think it's come a long way like in the short amount of
• 37:15
  time overall. So I don't know, No, I totally agree, and
• 37:19
  you get a just storted picture of what DSAY is online too. I mean
• 37:24
  they're both people are both like more comradely in person and also like doing like
• 37:31
  really important work in person and not getting kind of you know, they're not
• 37:37
  like they're not slinging personal attacks at each other in meetings and stuff. So
• 37:45
  yeah, I think I think DSA is making progress and hope it continues.
• 37:52
  I had a question actually, and this is gonna be a bit of a
• 37:54
  personal question for all of us, right, so we all consider ourselves leftist
• 38:00
  but kind of lefting theorists or academics or intellectuals, however you want to comment
• 38:06
  on that, And I'm just wondering what you think of the role of intellectuals
• 38:10
  as being in progressive movements, since obviously there's a bit of a tension right
• 38:15
  between the work of class roots of socialism and what it is that we're aspiring
• 38:20
  to do and the kind of elite education that takes a lot of time and
• 38:22
  money to be able to achieve that you find with a lot of progressive academics
• 38:28
  right on the other hand, going back to your earlier point. I think
• 38:31
  that there's a role personally for leftists academics and leftist intellectuals, since if we're
• 38:36
  not good at anything, we're good at arguing right typically, since that's what
• 38:39
  we're paid to do. So we can play a role in popularizing certain ideas
• 38:45
  for people. We can also play a role in trying to win the battle
• 38:49
  of ideas with right wing intellectuals and so on. It. You know,
• 38:52
  I like doing that, right It's kind of my hobby at this point.
• 38:54
  And there are a variety of other things that could go on, But I'm
• 38:57
  just wondering what your thoughts are on the very good question. And it's also
• 39:02
  it also kind of gets back to having a democratic movement. You want,
• 39:08
  you want a kind of vibrant movement with uh, you know, participation and
• 39:14
  people having some say over the direction and the strategy and the ethics of the
• 39:20
  movement. And if it's being handed down high from a bunch of intellectuals,
• 39:24
  that's a that's a bad thing. It's I mean, it's unfortunate. I
• 39:29
  guess this is less true and probably other places. Is probably the worst in
• 39:32
  the US, but I mean, historically I think the best there is still
• 39:37
  a divide, But I think historically the best way of bridging this divide is,
• 39:44
  you know, having having intellectuals and academics and wonks or whatever you want
• 39:50
  to call them, actually rooted in working class institutions, whether it's unions or
• 39:54
  parties or you know, uh, you know, communit organization that's fighting around
• 40:02
  rent control or tenants rights or something like that. But it's very difficult in
• 40:07
  the US because the labor movements so weak and the funding question is just so
• 40:12
  central, like how do you how do you actually build Like I mean,
• 40:17
  Jacobin is is kind of amazing in that sense because like, we don't we
• 40:22
  saw very little money. But even like, you know, whether you think
• 40:28
  Jacobin is cool or not, like, it is rather remarkable that we have
• 40:32
  a somewhat sizeable staff and we're putting out socialist stuff every day and there aren't
• 40:38
  that many. Obviously, you want to see this in a lot of different
• 40:42
  spheres. You don't. You don't just want socialist media. You want you
• 40:46
  know, academics that know a lot about you know, uh, shifting the
• 40:52
  balance of power from the global arts the global South and how to do that.
• 40:57
  And you know, if you have this ethical commitment how do you actually
• 41:00
  make that a reality? But yeah, it's it's it is. It is
• 41:07
  really really difficult, but I think that would be and it's I guess it's
• 41:13
  aspirational and hopefully it's a kind of outgrowth of a kind of burgeoning movement that
• 41:19
  is, as you, as you get stronger, you can you can bring
• 41:22
  people in and so they're not as isolated in academia essay, But it is
• 41:28
  it is still a problem, still a problem, I think, yeah,
• 41:32
  yeah, can I just add to that, And I want to say that
• 41:35
  I think I think intellectuals, uh, theorists if anything, or maybe part
• 41:39
  of the problem on the left because like they get into stupid shiit fest,
• 41:43
  but well that's not real Marxism, Like Marx didn't say that. And I
• 41:46
  feel like sometimes that can be a little bit of it that can like contribute
• 41:50
  to I don't know, more of more like animosity or like I don't know,
• 41:54
  it's like it's kind of like beside the point of just trying to organize
• 41:59
  and like you know, do practical things that will further like worker advantage.
• 42:04
  But then I don't know, Yeah, yeah, reminds you of this Monty
• 42:08
  Python movie has to see in The Life of Brian. Yeah, yeah,
• 42:14
  yeah, So you remember there's the scene where he comes up to them's like,
• 42:16
  are you the Judea And People's friend is like, no, fuck off,
• 42:19
  We're the People's front of Judea, right, And you know then they
• 42:22
  explain their differences like no, you know, we're in a narcosynicalist not a
• 42:25
  democratic in narcosyndicalist commune, and the difference is everything, right, And it's
• 42:30
  like, and I actually think that those debates can be important, right,
• 42:32
  and I think we need to have them. Uh, you know, interpreting
• 42:36
  Marx, interpreting you know, Kowski, whatever it happens to be properly is
• 42:40
  in vital intellectual task. And you know, I know you and not Victor,
• 42:44
  we played our role in that, right. But I do think that
• 42:45
  you're one hundred percent right that sometimes people looking at at left wing intellectuals thing,
• 42:50
  we're all just engaged in a bunch of pedantic debates about you know this
• 42:52
  term, that term, what it actually means, you know, a million
• 42:57
  years of debating what the dialectic actually stands for stuff, and it's sometimes difficult
• 43:01
  to say and what's useful coming from this? Right? Yeah, well without
• 43:05
  even debating that, oh I've been silent for a long time, Eric,
• 43:08
  you have to Yeah, no, Blessed is the man who, having nothing
• 43:15
  to say, abstains from confirming it. So my question is, like Biden
• 43:22
  day when way back to that, do do workers want co ops? Do
• 43:29
  they know what co ops are? And like extending that, what happens to
• 43:36
  Trumpian populism when Trump's gone? Because they're probably not turning to Jacobin to articles
• 43:42
  obviously no offense, but that's not what they're going to be turning to.
• 43:45
  So what is like I don't I don't want to. I don't want to
• 43:49
  phrase it this way because like I make YouTube videos. I don't think any
• 43:52
  any Trump supporter is going to be like, oh Trump lost, I suddenly
• 43:58
  have an interest in deluz Delizia philosophy. Yeah, so I mean I'm probably
• 44:01
  myself in this too, But why, like, what is the where's the
• 44:07
  turn? I guess to make something that's such a small portion of the population
• 44:13
  in seeing communism as not something satanic? Which is which is a comment no
• 44:17
  communists or all either. You know. I made a video on Marx and
• 44:22
  the amount of comments that had Satanist in them, there was more than a
• 44:28
  few. So I just mean to say, like, where does where does
• 44:31
  that gap go? And does it meet in activism or does it meet in
• 44:37
  just like creating content? And where do where do those two things meet?
• 44:42
  I just want to say, I can imagine Sean's utopian scenario. There's just
• 44:45
  this ideal world where everybody who reads the Daily Wire follows Ben Shapiro and reads
• 44:51
  The Federalists just like magically transmits itself over to reading the Jacobin. You know,
• 44:54
  the day after the election, they're like, oh, fuck it,
• 44:57
  We're done with that. You know, we're going to go play for the
• 44:59
  other two. No, I don't mean to downplay the project, which it
• 45:05
  sounds like that you're doing that. I don't mean to downplay the project despite
• 45:07
  the fact that you write for them. But no, you know, like
• 45:10
  there's a there's a transition, and it might be one hundred year transition.
• 45:15
  I don't know, but like kinda, I just want to know what the
• 45:17
  goal is. I should say I love Jacobin, right, And i'ts just
• 45:21
  saying that because I like writing for them when I get the chance, right,
• 45:23
  But it's just because you know, I've started reading them. Actually,
• 45:25
  I think the first time I saw it was twenty eleven or something, and
• 45:30
  I just thought, you know, I've never read something that was this left
• 45:31
  before that looked professional and slick and had good writers. Yeah, they canceled.
• 45:37
  We got to be that bold to cancel the canceled. I don't know.
• 45:42
  They said he was a morose lib. I think, oh, yeah,
• 45:45
  that's right, or whoever wrote that article. Anyway, that's not a
• 45:47
  bunch of all of Jacobin into that. Oh. I know that there was
• 45:51
  also parent Affairs. They wrote their article about Jijik. That was the one
• 45:54
  that was really really really controversial. But no, no, I really like
• 45:59
  Jacobin and think it's extremely important. And you also like to Jack too,
• 46:01
  I do, like, yeah, anyway, that's that's not that's the bomb
• 46:05
  shown. I don't know if I have a great answer for this other than
• 46:10
  I don't know. I mean, the role of the role of socialists in
• 46:16
  the US is to be long distance runners. Is other people have put it,
• 46:22
  and you build institutions and you, you know, try to persuade people
• 46:29
  and you you know, uh intervene in class conflict where it is and uh
• 46:37
  fungal growth. Yeah, that things get better. I mean, I don't
• 46:45
  know, that's That's what I've been That's what Jacoban has been trying to do,
• 46:47
  That's what other other people have been trying to do. And I think
• 46:52
  we made we made some progress. But in terms of a turn, I
• 46:57
  don't. I don't know. I mean, I certain I hope that obviously
• 47:02
  hope that when I die, like America in the world is socialists. I
• 47:07
  don't think that's very realistic. I hope, I hope. Basically, my
• 47:12
  my realistic hope is that the US is a robust social democracy when I die,
• 47:16
  and that the world is more democratic across across countries and everything, and
• 47:23
  US empires collapsed, or is at least there's at least some some sort of
• 47:29
  distribution of power across countries that isn't so that isn't so brutal and un democratic.
• 47:35
  So you're in this for the long haul. You have a tombstone inscription
• 47:38
  written already. Yeah, Well, I had a question, actually, I
• 47:45
  like just to follow up on that. Could you tell us a little bit
• 47:47
  about what inspired you Boscar and others. Boscar is one of the founders of
• 47:52
  Jacobin to actually start the magazine and carry onwards, and can you talk a
• 47:58
  little bit about your experience in the world. I guess left wing publications what
• 48:02
  has been like, what are the good things? What are the bad things?
• 48:06
  Because we're all trying to basically popularize left wing ideas also, but we're
• 48:08
  just getting our start with it, right, So, as an elder statesman,
• 48:13
  as he puts it, put it, do you have any advice for
• 48:15
  those of us? Yeah, I guess we'll start with our origin story.
• 48:21
  Yeah, boss Cars started Jacobin when he was in when he was in college
• 48:25
  in his dorm room. He's like a junior in college and started it.
• 48:30
  And yeah, obviously a lot of other things outside of his control converged and
• 48:38
  political conditions changed, and a lot of people are more open to socialist ideas,
• 48:44
  and so that explains a good chunk of Jacobin's popularity to the extent that
• 48:50
  it is. And and then you know, I think that we've been effective
• 48:54
  at I think the design and has been really central and also just trying to
• 49:01
  write with clarity but not not kind of dispensed with rigor or anything like that.
• 49:09
  I think that's the basic project. I got involved in twenty twelve,
• 49:15
  I guess so fairly early on. And and then and then came on a
• 49:22
  couple of years after that as a as a full time editor. So and
• 49:27
  we've I mean in those six six plus years or so, about six years
• 49:30
  I guess that I've been working full time for Jacobin. We've grown a lot
• 49:37
  when I when I started, see, when I started working full time,
• 49:42
  we our circulation was probably about maybe about five thousand, I would guess,
• 49:51
  and now it's now it's now we have sixty thousand subscribers and our and our
• 50:00
  traffic is way way higher. Our traffic is like two or three million a
• 50:05
  month. Sean as a traffic follower, because I follow our traffic, when
• 50:13
  do you see those biggest spikes in your readership growth? What are the events
• 50:17
  that prompt those boosts? Good A question. It really just depends on I
• 50:25
  mean, they're obviously general events like we unfortunately, I would say, we
• 50:31
  get way more traffic during the election. But beyond that, it's just it's
• 50:37
  just articles that do especially well. Yeah, we're talking a little bit about
• 50:43
  that. Well, we talked about that quite consistently. Right. It's hard
• 50:45
  for someone say what makes an article successful? Right, because sometimes you know,
• 50:52
  things are put out on controversial issues and they don't go anywhere, and
• 50:54
  sometimes they just need to get trending, and everybody suddenly has an opinion,
• 50:59
  right, like that you are a MAZONI piece I wrote response to and actually
• 51:01
  we did a pod criticizing it. Was really surprising because it just completely took
• 51:07
  off, right, and I was seeing it trend everywhere, and all kinds
• 51:10
  of senior people are like Ted Cruz were talking about it, and Cruise talked
• 51:15
  about your piece. No, no, no, no, you are Amazoni's
• 51:19
  piece. Oh okay. If Ted crews were to insult me online, I
• 51:22
  would take that as like the most serious badge of honor I've ever gotten.
• 51:24
  Right that my resume number one, number one, right, like insulted by
• 51:30
  Ted Cruz, please hire. I don't mean particular articles, but my suspicion
• 51:36
  would be like Bernie campaign one and Bernie campaign two would have been like huge
• 51:42
  spikes. Is that true? You are true? And what about Trump winning
• 51:45
  the election in twenty sixteen? That too? Yeah, we got a lot
• 51:50
  of I'm trying to think. I think traffic increase too. But this is
• 51:55
  this is sort of a this is the kind of way that Jacoban is part
• 52:00
  of the broader kind of political environment and left ecosystem. To some extent,
• 52:06
  because obviously DSA saw a huge spike after spike in membership right after Trump,
• 52:10
  and we saw a huge spike in subscriptions, and I think traffic to some
• 52:15
  extent. I just remember subscriptions went way up, but traffic probably did too.
• 52:21
  But I think we're all and this is kind of a personal point,
• 52:23
  but we're all roughly the same age, and there was never talk of socialism
• 52:30
  communism when we were young. Probably there was like old academics and universities that
• 52:37
  we're talking about it, but this was never part of the broad discourse I
• 52:40
  think until Bernie probably and maybe a little bit before, but I'm not I
• 52:45
  think Sean, you would be the expert to ask about that. I started
• 52:50
  noticing people talking tentatively about it shortly after two thousand and eight. I think
• 52:55
  it's spent. A lot of millennials graduated from university were pissed off at the
• 53:00
  fact that there were really no job prospects, and then we're starting to look
• 53:04
  for bigger answers than just while things up right? Now, what can I
• 53:07
  do about it? Right? And then I really saw a big spike during
• 53:09
  occupy, which is weird. I went I arrived in Toronto to start my
• 53:15
  PhD, just when Occupy was going on, and I noticed there was something
• 53:17
  different in the air because people were really pissed off. So that's when I
• 53:22
  noticed there was a bit of a shift, at least, well you can
• 53:23
  confirm for me, but I remember socialism being like ten million dead, Nazism
• 53:32
  being six million dead. And this was basically my high school education, which
• 53:37
  is actually what makes uh which is actually what makes like emphasizing democracy as like
• 53:42
  a key feature of socialism so important, I think because like so much of
• 53:45
  those myths are based on the totalitarian, authoritarian version of whatever communism. So
• 53:52
  I didn't come from a very like political family, so I just got all
• 53:54
  the cliches like Europe is socialist, America's capitalist. In Canada is somewhere in
• 54:01
  the middle. We don't really know where. It's a moving target. I
• 54:06
  remember my friend described Canada as radically centrist. That was our thing, centrist
• 54:10
  between the two extremes of public services versus complete free market. Yeah, yeah,
• 54:19
  yeah, I don't know if I don't know if all you guys are
• 54:22
  are from Canada, but I think the context is probably I don't know.
• 54:28
  It's obviously different to some extent, but not I'm sure not that much really
• 54:34
  in terms of like you're what you were taught in school and everything, and
• 54:37
  probably very but yeah, I went to public school growing up and all through
• 54:43
  college and everything, and I think I had to fairly and you know,
• 54:47
  it was in a fairly moderate state too, so there wasn't any like really
• 54:54
  far right you know, stuff that you would uh here if you like were
• 55:01
  raised in Texas or something like that or the Deep South. But yeah,
• 55:07
  I mean I I didn't. I didn't. The thing is that I thought
• 55:10
  was just like that anything left of liberalism like wasn't serious that there, that
• 55:17
  these were people that like hadn't really thought this stuff through. And I associated
• 55:23
  the left with like just like hippies that didn't really that didn't really like they
• 55:31
  had these like kind of vague ethical commit convictions and commitments, but they certainly
• 55:37
  wouldn't know how to like build an institution or something, and you wouldn't trust
• 55:44
  them to, like, uh, I don't I don't mean to be too
• 55:47
  technocratic, but you wouldn't trust them to like staff your central bank or something.
• 55:53
  So yeah, and and that sort of changed for me in and around
• 55:59
  Occupy actually because more people were at least talking about this stuff, and there
• 56:04
  were people that I respected more so, and then reading socialists that were very
• 56:09
  serious and thought this stuff through, and I thought provided like much more compelling
• 56:16
  ideas about like the way the world actually worked, and who are these people.
• 56:21
  I'm curious that you were reading, like your number or your favorites.
• 56:23
  Ralph Milliban was a big one, and Michael Harrington too. I should say.
• 56:32
  One of the most personal things where I noticed there was a sea change
• 56:37
  is so I was a pretty left center guy up until I'd say about when
• 56:42
  I was twenty two that that's when I really started to transitioning on the occupy
• 56:46
  again right, and I started looking into these things more seriously. But the
• 56:50
  most conservative guy I knew from high school who I always got into big arguments
• 56:53
  with. We're still kind of a friend of these, right, but you
• 56:57
  know, I always got into a big arguments. He decided that he had
• 57:00
  had enough. He joined the New Democratic Party in Canada and now he's a
• 57:04
  Burner supporter, right, so he was left party. Yeah, the New
• 57:07
  Democratic Party are basically like a social democratic party, the most lefting party arguably
• 57:13
  in Canada. Right. And when I noticed that he was changing. I
• 57:15
  thought to myself, like, gee, you know, there might actually be
• 57:17
  an opportunity to really kind of push things a little bit further, and it
• 57:21
  motivated me to start looking more seriously into both the problems with the existing system
• 57:27
  but also some solutions to it. Well, I think we can refer to
• 57:31
  since we're talking about Canada, the nineteen thirties labor movements in Saskatchewan were huge,
• 57:38
  Like they took over, they took over the province, the Saskatchewan what
• 57:43
  was it called it? It was basically farmers that were opposing the federal government
• 57:50
  based on the government of Commonwealth Federation. This goes along with I think the
• 57:53
  article that I read of Shawn's. Actually it's funny because Tommy Douglas was the
• 57:58
  leader of the CCF. Actually for a while, I'll have the only socialist
• 58:01
  government, overly socialist government in North America for a little while. And uh
• 58:06
  interesting only he's the only progressive, like bar left figure who any Canadians really
• 58:10
  had general respect for since he instituted public health care and gradually he just kind
• 58:16
  of swept the nation. H once people realized that this was just a good
• 58:20
  thing to do. You're thinking of Eugene Debs pills. Oh, Eugene Debs.
• 58:25
  That was a cool article. I read that too. I didn't know
• 58:28
  any about any of that history. That was pretty interesting. How did you
• 58:30
  come across that? Like, des isn't very obscure in American socialistm He's like
• 58:37
  one of the central figures. So it wasn't me like going into archives and
• 58:43
  telling people about someone that they hadn't heard of. But but he is.
• 58:47
  But it was a while ago, but it was. It was the height
• 58:52
  of American socialism in some ways, I guess you can you can, uh,
• 58:58
  you know, they're different metrics, but certainly it was one of the
• 59:01
  at the very least, it was one of the peaks, and he was
• 59:04
  like the central leader at the time. Yeah, I mean it seemed really
• 59:07
  hopeful reading like at the time, you know, reading your article, it
• 59:09
  was just striking to to like you like, you did a good job of
• 59:15
  expressing sort of the optimism you know that was in the air, and you
• 59:16
  know, you could see you can imagine being there at that time, and
• 59:20
  like it just did seem like such a sea change, you know, like
• 59:22
  this is going to change, We're going to do it, you know,
• 59:24
  And so that was really interesting. I wonder if there's a connection here,
• 59:29
  because I mean, first of all, we have like four listeners between Saskatchewan
• 59:35
  and Manitoba. We really only so they're really not in favor of our of
• 59:39
  our of our takes on this stuff. But I was wondering, uh,
• 59:43
  should have anybody in Alberta? Oh lots. I don't know why. Really,
• 59:47
  Alberta is some sometimes called Canada's Texas their hate they're hate listening, probably,
• 59:52
  okay, although that's not really fair anymore since Texas is, like you
• 59:54
  said, kind of gradually becoming a purple state. But I can't tell you.
• 59:59
  In the last twenty eight day, not a single person in Manitoba has
• 1:00:01
  listened to this podcast. So, Sean, I just want to ask you,
• 1:00:08
  is there a similar rural socialist movement in the States in the Midwest counteract
• 1:00:15
  the more popular or well known ones that occurred in the cities and the factories
• 1:00:20
  in the nineteen thirties. I also think it's a really good question for today
• 1:00:23
  because if you think about something like the squad, right, a lot of
• 1:00:27
  it come from working class backgrounds, people like AOC, but they definitely have
• 1:00:30
  this urban quality to them, yeah, right, that you don't necessarily see
• 1:00:35
  with Trump as populist right here, more willing to embrace country music. Yeah,
• 1:00:38
  that's kind of that's kind of what the question was going for. Is
• 1:00:42
  there this this history we can mythologically draw up on mm hmm, that's a
• 1:00:46
  great question. I mean, actually, the I'm sure you guys know him,
• 1:00:51
  but the political scientist Seymour Martin, which wrote a hook in the late
• 1:00:55
  fifties. I think it was called agrarian socialism. It was about the CCF
• 1:01:01
  and it was comparing it to some of the sort of strands of Agraean socialism
• 1:01:07
  and populism in the US that that took root about, you know, the
• 1:01:14
  same general geographic area just just south of south of the border. So the
• 1:01:20
  populist tradition obviously in the late eighteen hundreds, and then in the first few
• 1:01:25
  decades of the of the twentieth century you had the socialist movement, and then
• 1:01:31
  you also had these they weren't they weren't socialists per se, but it was
• 1:01:37
  it was sort of a kind of blend between kind of populism and socialism.
• 1:01:43
  I guess you could say these third parties in North Dakota and Minnesota. South
• 1:01:50
  Dakota too, I think, and so those were strong. Those were strong
• 1:01:55
  through the twenties and thirties. And in Minnesota, the Farmer the actually the
• 1:02:04
  Democratic Party in Minnesota is called the Democratic Farmer Labor Party because they actually emerged
• 1:02:10
  at some point. It was in the in the fifties, I think,
• 1:02:14
  but the Farmer Labor Party used to be a third party that was trying to
• 1:02:19
  obviously bring together workers in the cities and farmers in rural areas. Yeah,
• 1:02:27
  so there is this tradition in the US, and it is like the kind
• 1:02:30
  of I remember when I was even when I was like reading more about politics,
• 1:02:37
  you know, when I was younger and playing college and stuff, and
• 1:02:39
  was you know, just trying to like kind of root myself because I grew
• 1:02:44
  up in the Midwest. I went to college at the University of Iowa,
• 1:02:47
  and so I was like looking for this sort of tradition that that that was,
• 1:02:54
  you know, my people sort of thing. And there definitely was that.
• 1:03:00
  And again in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, although it kind
• 1:03:06
  of sort of an aside, but it actually passed over Iowa. There wasn't
• 1:03:09
  really any radical populist education. There wasn't really any strong there was like individual
• 1:03:15
  figures. Henry Wallace actually later on FDR's vice president sort of represents this and
• 1:03:23
  then individual socialists and populous but really there wasn't a strong movement in Iowa.
• 1:03:30
  But anyways, so that was present, but that is that's basically gone.
• 1:03:38
  And one of the main reasons is that kind of social base of that has
• 1:03:44
  basically disappeared because of because agribusiness and oral parts of the country are so strong
• 1:03:52
  and you don't have a kind of classic social base of populism is a small
• 1:03:58
  farmer. And obviously there was like there was, there were tensions and stuff,
• 1:04:02
  and that that wasn't totally that wasn't the entire social base. And uh,
• 1:04:10
  it's it's a little more complicated than that, but that was like a
• 1:04:13
  strong part of it, and that that's basically gone, right, And like
• 1:04:17
  Iowa was, Iowa doesn't have small farms at all, So it is it
• 1:04:26
  is. It's no longer really about trying to unless there is I guess,
• 1:04:32
  I guess it's a little more complicated. I'm sort of revising what I was
• 1:04:35
  thinking. But if you did have a major shift, say if there was
• 1:04:41
  a Green New Deal and it really shifted the way that agriculture has done in
• 1:04:45
  the country, and the kind of existing agribusiness uh is sort of challenged and
• 1:04:56
  you know, overrised, really, then there could actually be another kind of
• 1:05:00
  social base that that was comfortable to that. But what we have right now
• 1:05:05
  is basically a divide between in terms of left politics, you have a divide
• 1:05:13
  between urban workers and rural workers. And rural workers like rural workers just like
• 1:05:19
  everyone else, if they do vote, which which is the US is certainly
• 1:05:25
  not a given, but if they do vote there, they're probably they're probably
• 1:05:30
  voting for a Republican and then in the in the in the cities, it's
• 1:05:33
  it's it's quite different. So there's just like this rural urban divide that is
• 1:05:39
  different from you know, previous previous eras. And I certainly think it's really
• 1:05:45
  important to try to bridge that because I think certainly left policies are are there
• 1:05:51
  are lots of left policies that are very good for rural America. I think
• 1:05:56
  it's just not Unfortunately it hasn't been a folk because and you know, because
• 1:06:01
  we have like Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and stuff and other
• 1:06:08
  like very clearly like elitist liberals in the city that I certainly do have contempt
• 1:06:15
  for people in real parts of the country. It's not very difficult to to
• 1:06:21
  sort of get that message across that that, you know, progressives and people
• 1:06:27
  on the left like don't don't have anything off the I guess, yeah,
• 1:06:30
  what did actually Obama say in two thousand and eight. It was something like,
• 1:06:33
  there are plenty of people in this country and they cling to guns and
• 1:06:35
  God, and you know, they just haven't really entered modernity. Was kind
• 1:06:40
  of the implication of it, right, And it's extremely patronizing thing to say,
• 1:06:43
  right, Yeah, even just brings me Yeah, well I can go
• 1:06:46
  on finished. No, No, I was just gonna say, even if
• 1:06:49
  certainly the latter part is always or sorry, the former part about guns is
• 1:06:53
  always frustrating for me, but go ahead. Yeah, I was just gonna
• 1:06:56
  say this. This kind of brings me to a question I want to ask
• 1:06:58
  before, Like this urban world divide seems really important, and you know,
• 1:07:01
  I kind of I like to sometimes keep tabs on what like the far right
• 1:07:04
  are doing, right, and like, you know, even white nationalists and
• 1:07:08
  when at white edentitarians, and I do notice that like someone like Richard Spencer
• 1:07:12
  and others who I follow on Twitter and just to you know, do tend
• 1:07:15
  to support actually a lot of socialist policies, right, Like they're not really
• 1:07:18
  interested in being capitalists. Of course, this is a pretty fringe movement,
• 1:07:23
  Like I don't want to overestimate like how important they are, but I do
• 1:07:27
  think they're you know, there's a there's maybe not necessarily like the kind of
• 1:07:31
  racism that Spencer has that that will disincentivize like maybe more rural white voters from
• 1:07:38
  moving leftwards. But you know, there is maybe a discomfort or like a
• 1:07:43
  tension with like urban I don't know, maybe like identity politics or ideas that
• 1:07:46
  like that are in the left. And I just wonder if you have thoughts
• 1:07:49
  about like the tension or like the goal of trying to win over you know,
• 1:07:54
  these white work who, as you said, have an interest and we
• 1:07:58
  can see even really far right fringe people who like get attracted to like white
• 1:08:00
  identitarianism. They're they're on board with those more socialist kind of policies when it
• 1:08:04
  comes to economics. But I wonder if you have like how do we try
• 1:08:10
  to win those over without obviously like wanting to buy into any of their racist
• 1:08:14
  nonsense, but maybe you know a lot of them more woke identity politics is
• 1:08:17
  like a huge turn off. And I wonder if you see that as a
• 1:08:19
  barrier, if you have thoughts about overcoming that, or maybe you don't think
• 1:08:23
  it's a concern at all. Yeah, I'll give you a personal example,
• 1:08:26
  actually, just from my own experience. So one of my best friends is
• 1:08:29
  a boiler maker. He's a really progressive guy. Right, But I go
• 1:08:31
  down and hang out at Sarnia with his buddies and we crack a beer and
• 1:08:33
  we hang out outside pre COVID. Right. Obviously, you know these are
• 1:08:38
  the kind of people. They'll sit there and be like, you know,
• 1:08:40
  the boss is exploiting everything. There's very strong union culture there. You could
• 1:08:45
  probably get them to sing the International within five seconds. But they fucking hate
• 1:08:49
  what they consider to be social justice warriors. And I've considered it kind of
• 1:08:53
  my mission sometimes, whenever we're sitting there having beers, to be like,
• 1:08:56
  look, it's not all that bad thing about you know, all the things
• 1:08:59
  that you know women bringing you you know, why is feminism bad? Think
• 1:09:02
  about all the things you know that migrants have worked really hard in order to
• 1:09:05
  achieve is that really so bad? But there definitely is this kind of cultural
• 1:09:09
  divide between what they consider to at least be worker activism and social justice movements,
• 1:09:15
  which are almost in very of the associated with kind of urban liberal elitist
• 1:09:19
  culture, rightly or wrongly, and I think in a lot of cases wrongly.
• 1:09:23
  But yeah, cool, Yeah, I mean, I think the most
• 1:09:29
  important thing, and this is really difficult, given the level of disillusionment in
• 1:09:36
  the way that people's expectations have been beaten down, I think the most important
• 1:09:41
  thing is you have to be able to persuade people, and I guess not
• 1:09:46
  even just persuade people, but to show people that left wing policies can actually
• 1:09:53
  make a huge improvement in their lives. I think that's what's actually going to
• 1:09:57
  shift people. And I sort of saw this. It's it's what I mean,
• 1:10:03
  it's somewhat of a different problem, but I sort of saw this like
• 1:10:08
  in the like the door knocking that I did for Bernie, Like it's it's
• 1:10:14
  really difficult, like not like people that aren't politically engaged and have turned off
• 1:10:20
  politics. It's like often for very rational reasons, and they know that politicians
• 1:10:28
  haven't delivered things to them. They haven't actually improved their lives. Politics is
• 1:10:32
  just this game that people, you know, play if you're interested in politics
• 1:10:38
  and you want to follow the news. It's a hobby, but it's not
• 1:10:40
  something that actually, like can make a material difference in your life. It
• 1:10:44
  can you know, mean that you actually have more freedom in your life.
• 1:10:48
  So and they have very rational reasons to believe that. So I think Bernie's
• 1:10:54
  pitch, and he ended up failing because he wasn't able to turn out non
• 1:10:58
  voters in great numbers, was like his pitch was, Uh, there are
• 1:11:06
  all these good policies, and we have to create this movement and uh,
• 1:11:12
  and that's gonna that's gonna sort of force the powers that be to concede these
• 1:11:16
  policies, and it makes it makes sense. I mean that's the basic vision
• 1:11:21
  that I believe in. But it is difficult to Uh basically, I I
• 1:11:28
  sort of have come to think that you're basically gonna have to You're gonna have
• 1:11:34
  to pass policies that improve people's lives and then they might start turning out.
• 1:11:42
  And I think that's probably true for for rural America too. So I think
• 1:11:45
  it's I think it'd be a huge mistakes. Say, for I think it's
• 1:11:51
  a huge mistake for for the left to to write off rural America. And
• 1:11:58
  I think it's it's even a huge mistake even if they continue to vote against
• 1:12:02
  against even Democrats, much less progressives or socialists. That might happen with Obamacare,
• 1:12:11
  right, Like I was just thinking, if Obamacare actually gets taken away,
• 1:12:14
  right, I think there's probably a lot of rural voters to potentially rely
• 1:12:16
  on it. But I don't know what the numbers on that are anyway,
• 1:12:18
  But yeah, I mean it's it's hard because because Obamacare was such a convoluted
• 1:12:26
  policy, and I think the advantages of left wing policies is that, you
• 1:12:31
  know, if you have a universal policy and it's easy to understand, then
• 1:12:34
  it's like then you actually can see you could potentially see some movement I guess
• 1:12:40
  from people because you don't have to I mean this this sort of goes back
• 1:12:45
  to the I think it's too much to to to ask people to like have
• 1:12:51
  to like read the newspaper like just like for hours a day to be able
• 1:12:57
  to understand politics. That's insane, Yeah, Like ye, And these policies
• 1:13:01
  are constructed in very complex ways, and US system is super complex. There
• 1:13:06
  are all these veto points, So how are you supposed to hold who are
• 1:13:10
  you supposed to hold accountable for the way the economy is going or for this
• 1:13:13
  particular policy that you got? And wait, did did the Democrats push on
• 1:13:17
  this or did they not push as hard as they should have. It's just
• 1:13:20
  like it's really really difficult to figure out, even if you even if you
• 1:13:26
  even if you're following politics all the time, you have some sense of what's
• 1:13:30
  going on, but it's still really complicated. So I think delivering I guess
• 1:13:36
  that in short, I would say, delivering very clear policies that improve people's
• 1:13:43
  lives in rural America, and then you could you might be able to then
• 1:13:45
  you might see so I was wondering, Uh so, yeah, like the
• 1:13:49
  in terms of the rhetoric though, I guess I wonder, like I think
• 1:13:53
  that's a good point that if you can, if you can deliver some policies
• 1:13:56
  and then people see that they like it, Like, yeah, I think
• 1:14:00
  that's one way of doing it. But I also sometimes worry about the rhetoric.
• 1:14:02
  And maybe this is more of an issue here in Canada with like Justin
• 1:14:05
  Trudeau. You know, I think there's even though he's not he's not on
• 1:14:09
  the left party, right, he's on the Liberal Party, which is like
• 1:14:11
  I guess center barely left. But you know, there is more of a
• 1:14:15
  like identity politics or like like rhetoric that I know, like turns people off
• 1:14:20
  in it like a noise like I don't know, like I have no problem
• 1:14:23
  with it personally, but like I see someone like my dad and he's just
• 1:14:25
  like, oh, like, why is Trudeau like taught like obsessed with indigenous
• 1:14:30
  like simp like And usually it's symbolic too, Like that's I guess the thing
• 1:14:32
  that's frustrating is like sometimes there's this rhetoric that's symbolic that isn't actually doing anything
• 1:14:36
  concrete, And I just like worry about that rhetoric being like an important part
• 1:14:43
  of the left because I feel like it does potentially get in the way of
• 1:14:46
  attracting exactly those voters. But I don't know if that rhetoric is as intense
• 1:14:53
  in the Democratic Party, especially not with Joe Biden anyway, I don't know.
• 1:14:56
  I just want to follow that up by saying, I think your ugi
• 1:14:59
  dem point I say actually points to some of the reservations I have about people
• 1:15:02
  who say, like, well, maybe it'd be better to just drop a
• 1:15:04
  lot of these social justice issues and focus on becoming a workers party, Because
• 1:15:09
  my feeling is that racial justice and justice for women and justice for LGBTQ people
• 1:15:14
  is something that's absolutely integral to the socialist cause, right of achieving a world
• 1:15:17
  where all people are moral equals. So I wouldn't want to be part of
• 1:15:20
  any kind of movement that doesn't emphasize that. Right. However, there is
• 1:15:24
  this tactical difficulty that you're pointing to, Victor, right, and I'm really
• 1:15:27
  not sure how to overcome it. Right now, I'm really talking about the
• 1:15:30
  rhetoric, right, I'm not even talking I agree all those things, Like
• 1:15:31
  I wouldn't want to be part of a movement that doesn't do that, But
• 1:15:33
  I don't. But almost a part of me wants to be like, let's
• 1:15:36
  like not be so like rhetorically loud about it, like I don't know,
• 1:15:41
  let's do it, but I don't know, don't be like, don't make
• 1:15:45
  it such a show of that, because I'd like, I don't know,
• 1:15:47
  I don't know if that makes sense, But that's like my worry one of
• 1:15:49
  my Yeah, yeah, well, I think I sort of agree with both
• 1:15:56
  of you. My concern on this is is when the rhetoric is just like
• 1:16:03
  empty rhetoric and that doesn't actually isn't actually doing anything. And I think that's
• 1:16:08
  the main problem with or maybe that's that's the main problem with liberal anti racism.
• 1:16:14
  It's not actually anti racist really in any substantive way. If like the
• 1:16:20
  lives of you know, black people on the South Side of Chicago where I
• 1:16:24
  live or not improving, then it doesn't really matter that you know, Nancy
• 1:16:29
  Pelosi is donning uh, you know, m bay Cloth or something. Yeah,
• 1:16:36
  I would say cut that stuff out, Yeah, cut that stuff out,
• 1:16:44
  But I don't know, I mean to be honest. And this this
• 1:16:45
  is probably fairly controversial because Bernie got a lot of ship for the way they
• 1:16:49
  talked about racism and stuff. But I think Bernie was actually pretty good on
• 1:16:57
  this, and like he was, he emphasized the importance of fighting racism and
• 1:17:04
  he didn't give quarter to any anyone that would like downplay those issues. But
• 1:17:10
  he also talked about it in a way that like wasn't what number one wasn't
• 1:17:15
  superficial And also like I don't know, you can call it woke or whatever
• 1:17:18
  you want to call it. But we all sort of know the way that
• 1:17:24
  you know, like people that went to elite universities our school, and they
• 1:17:29
  like they know how to talk about this stuff in a way that like,
• 1:17:32
  you know, kind of indicates to their to their peers that you know,
• 1:17:38
  they're with it and everything, and that that stuff actually that stuff is bad.
• 1:17:45
  That's not good. It doesn't actually improve people's lives. And yeah,
• 1:17:51
  and I think Bernie was right that he knew that it like that's not that's
• 1:17:56
  not a winning in politics. It's not a winning left politics. Yeah,
• 1:18:00
  And I and I would and I would push back even on the sense that
• 1:18:04
  he was like less committed, because I think he's actually more committed because he
• 1:18:09
  is he is in the kind of politics that he represents. It's about building
• 1:18:14
  a kind of a mass politics that can actually improve people's lives rather than just
• 1:18:17
  software this rhetoric. Yeah, cool pills. Did you want to No,
• 1:18:27
  I feel kind of a no. I feel awkward being the wrap up person
• 1:18:32
  when I have not said very much. But I would like to say thanks
• 1:18:38
  very much to uh Sean Goody g U d E for showing up to talk
• 1:18:44
  to us, because really for smart people were really actually kind of dumb,
• 1:18:53
  you know. I well, I just keep getting reminded of it because we
• 1:19:00
  keep talking to people who know way more than I do about the one thing
• 1:19:05
  that I know about are supposed to know about anyway, Sean, is there
• 1:19:11
  any where you'd like to point our our viewers if they're interested in your down
• 1:19:17
  to earth, smooth but hopeful style of politics. Yeah, I mean mostly
• 1:19:27
  basically everything I write is at Jacobin, so you can just google my name
• 1:19:31
  and Jacobin. And I'm also working in the very early stages of writing a
• 1:19:36
  book about Eugene Debs. Oh nice, Oh yeah, very cool. Have
• 1:19:43
  to You're gonna have to come back to talk about that book. Yeah,
• 1:19:46
  for sure, because I didn't know that he was important. But I also
• 1:19:49
  don't know about American history at all. All right, so we are on
• 1:19:57
  what is this pillpot at? Thanks so much to Sean for showing up to
• 1:20:02
  school us. Yeah. Thanks a lot, man, It's nice meeting you.
• 1:20:09
  Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Thank you, and
• 1:20:13
  you'll hear a lot more from us this week. We're currently in the middle
• 1:20:16
  of a podcast civil War where we're publishing stuff all on our own, So
• 1:20:23
  are we yea Sean. Good luck with your entire country next week. Yeahs,
• 1:20:31
  appreciate it anyway, See you guys, thanks so much. I'm in
• 1:20:36
  even recording, all right,