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[00:00]
A
Foreign.
[00:11]
B
Welcome to what's Left, a weekly political discussion challenging the mainstream left. My name is Andy Libson and I'm joined by Michael Hoffman. And Eduardo is not here right now, but he will be here in, like, 10 minutes. You can find us online@whatsleftpodcast.com Please subscribe, rate, review, turn on notifications, share your favorite episode and jot down our information wherever you found this episode. Also, if you're interested in a T shirt, we can make you one if you're interested. And you'll see a sample of that down below. But you'll see today, we have a third person on the screen right now. His name is Pham Bin Fam. Bin lives in New York City and is a former member of the International Socialist Organization. His writings on history, revolution and social strategy have been published by Occupied Wall Street Journal, Occupied Wall Street Journal, Counterpunch, znet, and other publications. Welcome, Pham.
[01:06]
C
Hey, guys. Happy to be here. Happy to be here.
[01:10]
B
Very good. And let me just say that I've known Fam for a long time. I knew. I. Did we ever meet each other in the ISO, like, at a district, national something or another?
[01:22]
C
I think. I mean, I have emails. I have some emails exchanged with you going back to 2006.
[01:29]
B
Okay.
[01:30]
C
Because there was, I guess there was some argument at the time about whether the Taliban counts as a national liberation movement. I don't remember what the heck we were talking about. Well, the. I did. I did see you and Brian Belknap at probably at a convention, probably in 2000 or 2001. But, like, we didn't, like, shake hands or anything. But I remember you guys gave interventions. I basically was pretty impressed with, you know, you guys, both of you came off as being very serious revolutionaries. You guys had, like, sharp questions and formulations. And I thought it was, you know, cut through a lot of the BS that sort of happened at the speech, making that happen at those type of events. And I remember. I remember Brian wearing something orange and black.
[02:17]
B
That's his deal.
[02:18]
C
Something that was orange and black. And I was like, that's a cool shirt. Like, it wasn't until I saw the podcast that you guys did together where he's dressed up in orange and black. Where I was like, oh, that's like his thing.
[02:28]
B
That is his thing.
[02:29]
C
I didn't know he was an artist. I didn't know. Or like a musician. Like, yeah, I had no idea. Like, yeah, yeah.
[02:35]
B
And someday, I believe there's a guy who's working on a documentary about him that hopefully will Come out. But we'll, you know that he is. He's an amazing musician, so. But yeah, fam, I would say the same about you. Like, you've always kind of been a person who, like when things you wrote that were for our conventions and things like that, I were like, oh, that. That person, like, is not just pitching a line or just. There was some creativity and some independence of thought that I had seen in that. And then as we started to move our way out of the ISO, I really remember thinking that some of your criticisms, and particularly some of the stuff you've written in response to the ISO's understanding of Leninism and Tony Cliff's understanding of Leninism, I just thought was really brilliant, actually, and really impressive. And so. And then even afterwards, I had thought you were part of the Renewal faction, but you had just written about them and written in things, kind of supported some of their ideas. I probably read some of your stuff then. So when you reached out to me maybe a month ago and said, hey, I see you're still doing what's left, you know, can I be on? And I was like, yes. I mean, it was almost like a long lost. Well, certainly a long lost political friend just coming and saying, hey, can we, can we catch up? So this is very exciting for me because many ways, Eduardo and Michael aren't just going to get to know you. I'm going to get to know you more because I think there's a lot of things to talk about and we're not going to talk about them all in one episode. I think we'll have you on possibly a series of episodes coming forward, but I want to start today just getting to know your background, who you are, and, and then kind of come to bring, bring us forward to today.
[04:27]
C
Okay. Wow. Yeah.
[04:30]
B
Oh, and I, I want to have Michael, because, Michael, you sent us a bunch of things to read. Maybe Michael, if you want to say just your impressions just from that, you know, without getting into the subject, because we can't do that. But I wanted to see if there's anything you can say, impressions you've had of Fam, either from his writings or just maybe you've been familiar with him.
[04:50]
A
Well, I remember when you wrote some things about Tony Cliff and the idea of stick bending and then. And I think I didn't really, because I was. I had drunk the Kool Aid and we did many study groups on Building the Party and there's a three book series and I do think there are some. Like, I do. I'm glad I read that, and I'm glad now I have a critique of it, you know, but your criticism of, you know, like, stick bending as being, you know, just completely intellectually dishonest and then also, like, it would create complete distrust, and this doesn't actually fit with what we understand about the actual Bolsheviks. Was very important, I think, to the folks around me. And I didn't understand because basically I didn't read any of that. I didn't read deeply the newer books around Lenin until after Andy and Brian left the ISO. And then I, shortly after was like, there's nothing. There's not much left, especially in the Bay Area of integrity. Right. So they. With them went all the sort of integrity that I saw in the organization amongst other folks like AJ and anyway, so your. Your arguments clearly, actually at that time were influential to my close political friends. And reading through your other stuff, though, I'm like, I'm very curious to see what your assessment of things like Occupy Wall street and. And the. Because I. Because I think that question of organization is so crucial, like, how. How can you actually build something that will have enough power to disrupt the, you know, the very enormous power of US Imperialism backed by world finance capital? Like, how do we do that? And what does that look like? And how can we use that to understand the fate of things like Occupy Wall street or the Arab Spring or any of the other kind of almost revolutions?
[07:28]
C
Okay, so I guess that's a big question. Yeah, I'm not going to jump into the question, but.
[07:33]
A
So, yeah, maybe just start with, like, what radicalized you?
[07:36]
C
Sure.
[07:36]
A
You know, how did you get started?
[07:38]
B
Or even. I'll even go back further. Just go back as far as you want to. To what would. What do we know about. What's to know about your past to understand where you are today politically?
[07:49]
C
Sure, yeah. I'm gonna start. I'm just gonna try to run sort of chronolog chronologically. You know, the thing is, I joined the ISO at age 16, so this is like 20 years of history. You know, I mean, if you want to do. If you know, like. But it's good to hear. It's also good to hear, though, that, like, that some of the stuff I was publishing actually mattered to people or made a difference, because that was hard to tell at the time that all these sort of Internet polemics were happening. It's just like, is this just a pissing contest? You know what I mean? Like, I was publishing stuff because I felt like. I basically kind of felt misled once I started investigating things on My, on my own and then know, comparing. This is what I was told and then this is what I found out. And then this is what I told. And what I found out either flatly contradict each other or, you know, what I was told is like cherry picked history. So I only got 1% of what actually happened and then I found out the other 99% or, you know, something like that. And then, you know, it changes everything. It changes everything once you have more context, you know. And that's part of why I liked Lars Lee's book Lenin in Context, where he's like, you know, quoting leaflets of people who, you know, you never heard of this guy. He's just some, some guy in, some, in the Urals, you know what I'm saying? But he's repeating some of the, you know, so you see through, through other people's eyes, you know, I don't know, whatever. So I'm glad that you guys had some benefit from that because it was hard to tell. Does this even matter? You know, who's reading this? Who cares? You know, because if nobody cares and if it's not impacting anything in a positive way, like, what's the point of writing? What's the point of doing this? So in terms of my biographical sort of background, I mean, I'm, in a way, I'm a bit of a red diaper baby. Like my mom, my mom is like 5th generation Irish, Irish American. And she's like a big fan of the ira. She's like an Irish nationalist, like Jerry, Jerry. Photos of Jerry Adams in the house and stuff like that. And my father, my father is Vietnamese and he fled to America like most Vietnamese people who are here fled after 1975, after the south lost the war. Communists take over. Everybody who was scared of Communists for one reason or another, you know, hightailed it out of there. And then some people came over in the 80s as economic refugees, as so called boat people. My father came here in 1971, four years before the south fell, like in the middle of the war basically. And he's from a southern, he's from a town in the south and in Southern Vietnam. And so he was. My, my grandfather basically sent him here to be a draft dodger because he didn't want him to be. I mean, the casualty rates of the South Vietnamese army, you know, enormous. You know, I don't know what they are offhand. So, you know, he sends his, his, his, you know, he get, you know, he gets. My father comes here, he's at University of Buffalo. It's the first time he ever sees snow. You know, his first job here in America is shoveling snow. And he gets caught up in the anti war movement here in America, you know, because it's, you got to think, it's a weird thing, like you're fleeing this country, you're fleeing your own country, trying to evade a draft. You come to America and then all these people are talking about Vietnam all the time, you know what I mean? Like, like, how could you not go to a demonstration or be cur. At least curious? Like, what is. You know, they're all talking about my country. You know, they're all against American foreign policy, all this kind of stuff. So. And what he told me basically was that like, he didn't know because he grew up in the south under the South's government, which was a police dictatorship. He didn't know about Dien Bien Phuket, which is where the communists inflicted a huge military defeat on France. And then that led to the partitioning in the country and all this other stuff. They didn't teach that in the schools at all because it made the communists look good. It made them look, you know, nationalist, you know, something to be proud of. You know, it's really, I think it's actually the first. It's one of the few cases where developing arm, developing world or third world countries, army militarily defeats, you know, an imperialist power. That's almost never been the case. So they didn't teach that in the school. But he learned about it here in America from basically leftists. And so he gets involved in the anti war movement. My mom was also involved in the, the protest movement against the war in Vietnam. And my dad ends up becoming a tanky or a, you know, supporter of the Workers World Party actually, because so he gets radicalized. So he's like fleeing anti communism. Most Vietnamese people are fleeing communism. He fled anti communism in a sense. And then he comes to America and becomes a communist. You know, it's such a weird, it's a very strange thing. And it put him, it actually put him at odds with like most of the Vietnamese community here and parts of my own family where like the other his brothers and sisters, they're not like, they're not ideologically like right wing, you know, because usually when you say somebody's an anti communist, usually that means they're virulently anti socialist, anti liberal, you know, aggressively pro Trump. You know what I mean? That's usually what somebody means when they say so and so is anti communist. Usually it's a whole. And with them it's more like, you know, they just hate the government that exists there because it's corrupt. And just, you know, especially in the 80s was really. It was. They were doing a lot of stuff they shouldn't have been doing, let's put it that way. After the war ended, so my family is, you know, his brothers and sisters and my, My grandfather were like, they're not pro government. But my father was pro government, you know, because he got mixed up in. He was a. He was part of a capital. Das. Capital reading group in Buffalo at the University of Buffalo. Like. Yeah, very strange. Yeah, I think it's very strange or very unusual, you know, trajectory or whatever. So that's kind of like my. That ends up playing a role in how I get radicalized. I mean, first of all, I have a Vietnamese name, right? And it's done the Vietnamese way. So the family name is first and then the personal name is second. So if Andy was Vietnamese, he would be Libs. And Andy, all the names, it's the same thing in Korea and China that the family name comes first and then the personal name comes last. And the reason that's kind of important is because, you know, all my. All my kindergarten teachers and first grade teachers, everybody, all my teachers, I had to explain to them the name thing. Why is my name. Why is my brother's name the same family name at first? So, like, I got. I kind of got stamped with the Vietnamese identity, even though I'm only half Vietnamese, you know, because I have the name and I had to constantly explain it to people. Like, it gave me. It made me more. It made like if my name was just John Smith. Like, I don't know if. I don't know if the subsequent path of radicalism would be the same, you know, because as I was saying, I was like a red diaper baby. So like in the 80s, my parents brought me to like, peace in El Salvador, rallies, like rallying against the Contras, rallying again, you know, in favor of the Sandinistas, all this kind of stuff. I mean, I was too young to understand what the hell is going on. But, you know, going to protest was like part of my growing up culture. When my parents split up in 1991 and my mom took me and my brother to Rochester, you know, we had gone to protest against the Gulf War in 1990 here in New York City. They were pretty big, you know. And again, I didn't know what the hell's going on, but seemed cool, you know, so. And My mom was very, My mom was also very.
[15:42]
B
Oh, one second family, 1991. How old are you then?
[15:46]
C
Eight years old. Okay, eight years old. So. But the protest I think were in 1990, because the Gulf War is like January of 1991, I want to say. And the protests were. Definitely wasn't winter because it was, you know, there was no snow on the ground for sure. So that was like fall of 1990. And yeah, I didn't, I mean, I didn't understand any of the issues. I didn't know what was going on. But know, I got exposed to this kind of stuff early. And my mom was also very into Vietnam Veterans against the War. She was, even though she's like ideologically or politically like a liberal, like she's all about. And she at the time, in the 90s, after she split up from my father, she became a machinist, which is like a very unusual occupation for a woman. Like, it's a, it's a, you know, male dominated, poor blue collar, industrial. You're like taking heavy, you're doing trigonometry to figure out how to cut parts. And I, I failed math in middle school, so I don't know, I don't know what the hell she was doing, you know, but. So I grew up in Rochester, you know, and my mom's working a blue collar job. My father was like a, an auditor for New York State Medicaid. So like sometimes doctors or pharmacists would bill New York Medicaid like a hundred dollars for a single bottle of Tylenol. So he, you know, his job is to like go through the spreadsheets and be like, gee, does a bottle of Tylenol really cost a hundred dollars? And then, you know, he goes and visits and checks it out and you know, he, you know, whatever. That's, you know, it's kind of like, it's almost like accounting, but also investigative. Like you have to like, you know, put two and two together. But it's a very, it's kind of, it was kind of a low paid like civil servants and you know, just. And government employees in general make less than the private sector, you know. And yeah, you know, he wasn't, he definitely wasn't making that much money. And so my mom was like, you know, so she worked at a blue collar job, but she was also sort of ideologically attached to like the industrial workers of the world. Like she had, she was a member for a while. Like they still existed in the 70s, 80s and 90s as a very small group kind of Like a, I don't want to say a reenactment society or a nostalgia, but it's kind of like a nostalgia thing, you know what I mean? It's like the old IWW people, you know, people who like, like the old iww, you know, and they gave her. Everybody who signed up in those days. They gave you like a song book. So solidarity forever with all the musical notes and like, so she was, she's kind of like into. So she kind of. I kind of grew up thinking, having this kind of. I didn't know it at the time, but it was kind of a blue collar perspective. Andy, you had your hand up.
[18:30]
B
No, just to let you know that the IWW in the Bay Area still exists in that same way as both, both hearkening to that tradition, but also trying to rebuild it. So I know a guy who was, I was worked with, who was, who's in the IWW, like in 2019.
[18:49]
C
That's cool. Yeah, they've seemed to, they have, they've seemed to have a revival since like 2010 or something. 20 2005. They tried to start organizing Starbucks and stuff, I think.
[19:00]
A
Yeah, they organized a few Starbucks, I think. I don't know how it ended up. But that, that cultural affinity, it's also, it's a strong cultural affinity which I, which I share in many ways. Like I, I love the old songs
[19:19]
C
and yeah, I mean that, that tradition, that was a very, that was very much a living tradition in my household because of my mom. So like I said, she's like pro ira, you know, I think that's a little, I don't know, in hindsight I'm like, you know, because the IRA did some stuff that's like really bad. I, in my opinion, very bad. But, you know, so. But politics was like very much part of the dinner table routine. You come and you sit home and you watch the news. I would get 100 on tests. They would have current events tests at school, like, you know, what's happening in the news this week? And I would always get 100 because every night at the dinner table we're watching the TV, you know, first local news 30 minutes, then national news, 30 minutes. So then I'm like probably the most informed 12 year old, 10 year old, you know, who, you know, who's watching Peter. Five hours of Peter Jennings every week. Crazy. Like, you know, in hindsight I realized, like, it's a little weird but you know, it gave me, you know, I was, I was already in, in a culture that I didn't. Hey, Eduardo, what's up?
[20:20]
B
But so Eduardo been as more famous still right now at the beginning of just walking through his family back. So you caught us at the right time.
[20:31]
A
Yeah, his name is Ben. His last family name is Fam.
[20:36]
C
Yeah. Oh, okay.
[20:37]
D
Yeah, I saw the email was Fam. That's why.
[20:40]
B
No, when I refer to you, I
[20:42]
A
should say it was the other way.
[20:43]
C
Yeah, you should, but it doesn't, you know, I'm not.
[20:49]
B
So this part will be on there because this is a clarification that needs.
[20:52]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's fine. So that's kind of like. So I was like, I was telling them, basically I kind of grew up as a red diaper baby in a sense. I grew up in a household of radicalism, anti war, progressive, you know, like it was never forced on me. Like they weren't like, you have to believe this or you can't do that. I actually, the only thing that they actually tried to force on me was like, well, they didn't really force it, but they were worried that because I like to play with guns as a five year old boy that I would become some right wing militarist or something. And I was like, when I got old enough to hear the conversation, I was like, man, you guys know what you're talking about, you know, like, there was no danger of that ever happening. I just, you know, as a boy just like want to play with guns. And you know, that has nothing, it has nothing to do with politics. So that was the one thing that they were like worried about, you know, in terms of political this and that. But they never forced their beliefs on me. But it's, you know, it definitely had an impact on just growing up around it kind of normalized. It's not a weird thing to go to a demonstration or a weird thing to have a political argument or to argue about politics at the dinner table. You know, it was like, that's kind of how I grew up. So. But I really wasn't political until, I mean, I wasn't like. And there was all these books on the shelves, books about the iww, books about the ira, books about the Vietnam War, you know, books. And my mom is like a huge nerd reading. You know, she just reads a lot about politics, but a lot of fiction stuff too, like Irish, Irish poetry and this type of thing because she's an Irish nationalist. And I never paid attention to any of that stuff. Like I didn't read any of those books until, until there was this, there was this Case in California, where some. Some Vietnamese video shop owner. This is like, 1998. Yeah, 1998. Some video shop owner in the Vietnamese community, I think in Orange county, which is where the biggest single concentration of Vietnamese refugees who settled here. Like, I don't know what possessed him to do this. And I actually went and looked later recently to find out what happened to this guy. Like, why did he even do this? But there's. It's not clear why he even did it, but he put a huge poster of Ho Chi Minh in his shop, and then that triggered the whole community to basically picket his shop. And there were these angry demonstrations. Everybody was trying to force him to take down the poster. I don't know why he would. I don't know why he put up the poster. It's like. It's like. It seemed like the dumbest thing you could do. If you're running a Vietnamese business and you're a Vietnamese businessman, you're gonna piss off. The. The whole community has basically fled communism. I don't know what it. You know, so anyway, so this was this huge news story for a while of the, you know, involving the Vietnamese community that caught my eye. And then this is the. Since this is 1998, this is like the early Internet, common sections have just been invented, basically. So I start getting into arguments and comment sections about this stuff, and people start bringing up stuff that I don't know about, like the Vietnam War, America did this. The communists did that. And I'm like. I'm like, way out of my death. I'm like, you know, for me, I was just like. I think my original position at the time, I can't even remember now, though, is like, if you don't like the guy's poster, just go to Blockbuster. I didn't see what the. I didn't understand what the big deal was. Like, why would you get so upset about this thing when you can just shop somewhere else and, you know, maybe this guy will go out of business because everybody hates him. Like, what's. Like, what's. I didn't understand what the fuss was about. And then, you know, so my position was just kind of like, you know, who cares? And just shop somewhere else. And. But all these people in these. In these comment sections were arguing with me, bringing up stuff that, like, I had no idea what. You know, what are they talking about? And that's when I started reaching for the books on my mom's shelf, like Marilyn B. Young's. She did a history of the Vietnam War. That really opened my Eyes. I was just like, holy hell. Like, I had no idea. And you know, the Vietnam War is talked about in schools, but, you know, I mean, American history is like the way it's taught. I mean, obviously they're not going to talk about American atrocities. Like, no, no, duh, right. But like, it's superficial too. Like, it's just like. It's like everything is kind of like a little footnote, you know. And then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. And there's no. In schools, there's no like, you know, in middle and high school, there's no like, why did this happen? Why were people mad about the Vietnam War and not the Korean War? Or, you know, it doesn't go beyond like the kind of superficial chronology, you know. So, like, I had been, you know, I knew that Vietnam would happen, but like, I didn't really think about why or who was right or wrong. Was that the right policy and all that? So then I started, you know, so reading about the Vietnam War radicalized me, like, and turned me into a little, a little anti imperialist, quote, unquote. It made me, you know, totally oppose, you know, the both parties because it was, you know, the Democrats were the ones who started the war basically. And you know, Republicans can't, you know, Nixon made it worse obviously. So like politicized me and, you know, it opened me. It made me a radical. But I wasn't at that point a socialist or anything like that. Like, I didn't know anything about socialism, communism, you know, I didn't know anything about that. But I just thought, man, this is terrible, you know, pretty bad. Pretty bad. When you're like setting up torture. They had like they were putting kids in. In tiger and torturing them. And just like. And this was policy. It wasn't like, it wasn't like, it wasn't like, okay, you know, there are cases where it's like somebody, one guy, one bad apple, single bad apple, whatever. But this was like policy over years and years and years, you know, so there was no, there was no. You know, when it's systematic, it's like, you know, it's. It, you know, it makes you ask systematic questions. You know what I'm saying? When something is happening all over the place for years and years and years under Democrat and Republican administrations, you know, you can't just say, oh, just one person made a mistake. You know, the prep. One president was bad. Like, you know, there's something obviously more deeply wrong and structurally screwed up. And then, so that was like 1998. And then, you know, not long after I became a. An anti imperialist. There was the, The NATO bombing of Kosovo. And at the same time that that took place, there was the shoot, this. The Columbine school shooting. And I was in high school at the time at an inner city school. Like the schools, like, majority black, majority black, Hispanic. Like, white kids are like, I don't know, 20% of the student body. Asian kids are like 5% or less. And the next day after the shooting, after the Columbine shooting, which was done by, you know, Nazis basically, you know, wearing trench coats. Trench coat mafia is what they call themselves. You know, the day very. The next day after the shooting, like, they had metal detectors in my school. I was just like, like, the school, like the Rochester schools are like, my school's like the best of the bunch. Like, if you had to rate the high, if there was a hierarchy of how good the school is academically and in terms of, like, infrastructure and all that. My school was like, at the top, and there were a lot of schools that were below us, but, like, we were not doing that great either, you know, in terms of, like, repairs, doors don't work or don't open, there's paint peeling, probably asbestos in the basement. The lunchroom was actually a basement with no windows. You know, it was just crazy that it was like, overnight. Overnight, you know, the schools have money for metal detectors, but not, like, stuff that will help our academic performance. You know, the stuff that a school is supposed to be about. So that, that definitely radicalized me a lot. And, you know, it was crazy because Bill Clinton gave a speech, you know, in response to the Columbine thing, saying we have to teach our kids to use words and not weapons to, like, solve their problems. While. While, you know, there's an air campaign going on in Kosovo. And I'm like, you know, it's too much cognitive dissonance. Makes your brain explode. You know what I'm saying? So I, you know, I, you know, I really. And having read everything about the Vietnam War and stuff beforehand, it made me automatically kind of mistrust what the government was saying, and not by, you know, the official line of what was being said. And I started looking at, like, Z Magazine. You know, I started reading leftists, anti war, anti imperialist, whatever you want to call it, magazines. There was one, okay, there was Z Magazine and there was another one. Oh, Covert Action Quarterly. That's what it was. It was, you know, it was kind of like standard issue, you know, I mean, there's nothing that remarkable about. It's just, you know, I think Covert Action Quarterly is. Might have actually been like a tanky thing, though, unfortunately.
[30:04]
B
Just before you go too far, sure,
[30:06]
C
you say this is like 1999, but what tanky means.
[30:10]
B
Because I don't necessarily know. Go ahead, just say a little bit about. Thank you. Because you.
[30:13]
C
Sure, sure. Yeah.
[30:15]
B
Dad. Your dad was a tanky when he became a communist. So maybe a little about that and then carry on.
[30:21]
C
Sure, yeah. Tanki is just a pejorative for people who support the ussr, prc, China's government, Cuba, Yugoslavia, at one point was so called communists. Yeah. So anybody who supports those regimes, you know, is. You can just call them a tanky. You know, it's like. It's like calling somebody a liberal. You know, I mean, liberal. Liberal has become a slur too, unfortunately.
[30:48]
B
You know, and if I understand it, it's because, you know, they might even support the willingness of those countries to use their tanks to enforce.
[30:55]
C
Yes, yeah. I mean, the specific reason. Yeah, the specific reason the word tanki became a thing is because in 1956, there was an uprising in Hungary in the eastern block. And they actually set up workers councils again, you know, to. As part of the uprising. And then the Russians send in their tanks, their literal tanks, to like smash it. And there were people in the west who were like cheerleading the tanks. And that's how they became known as tankies. So. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know. I feel like tanki is also a better word than Stalinist because there's malice, you know, like tanky encompasses that range of opinion of people who support it even if they're not Maoists. Because there are people who support that stuff even if they're not actually Maoist or Stalinist or astroist or, you know, whatever. So, yeah, so I was reading Z Magazine, Covert Action Quarterly and just read, you know, and I started going to Food Not Bombs, which is like an anarchist vegan. They make vegan food for homeless people, basically. Me and my friend. My friend Ariel Cruz, who's actually in DSA in Rochester. He's active nowadays, I guess, from what I understand. But so me and my, you know, me and my friend, we were getting radicalized and we wanted to do something. We wanted to, you know, we saw all these. All these things that we saw as injustices and wanted to, you know, lend a hand in, you know, working in the opposite direction, I guess you could say. So we started doing Food Not Bombs and getting up at 6 or 7 in the morning. On Sunday, every Sunday to go cook food at a church. The church was actually run by a Catholic Worker. Catholic Worker is like established by a woman named Dorothy Day who like, it came out of the 1930s, as far as I understand. And it's kind of like it's not liberation theology in, you know, know in the sense of like left wing leftist cat Catholicism from Latin America. It's not like that. It's like, it's. But it's kind of this. It's a similar thing where it's like they're very pro poor people and very pro, you know, helping poor people, helping homeless people. Like you could argue that's the original message of Jesus Christ. And you know, or he's going around, he's going around Palestine or Judea, I guess it was called back in the day. And he's healing the blind and he's healing the sick and he's feeding the hungry and he's, you know, that's kind of like what Catholic Worker is all about, you know. And they would, they actually sponsored. They were big and big fans of protesting the School of the Americas, which is where the US government was like training dictators and torturers in Latin America. So like the food not bombs thing put me in touch with Catholic Worker and all this. All the sort of a local progressive community in Rochester, New York. And I actually ran into somebody in the International Socialist Organization who would sometimes show up. I mean, we didn't really talk about, we didn't really, you know, get into it about in political. Like he didn't try to recruit me or anything like that. But I encountered the. I, that's probably my first encounter with the, the ISO was somebody co volunteering there. But I ended up running into a different person. A guy named Brian Irway. You were recruited by a guy named Brian Belknap? I was recruited by a guy named Brian Irway. And basically I ran into this guy in the street. He's selling news Socialist Worker. And he had a huge plaque, he had some huge placards like denouncing what NATO was doing in Yugoslavia or Serbia. And me and him, we just had a conversation and he seemed very sharp. He's very sharp, very enthusiastic. But also like what, what kind of impressed me about, about him and what he seemed to be trying to do was, you know, he was trying to combine the, the impression I got of the ISO was that it was trying to combine some type of radical politics or radical analysis with some type of pragmatic, practical. Do something in the real world. Don't just write denunciations of imperialism in a magazine or online. You know, they were trying to seem like. They were trying to, like, get people organized and do something about it. So that's kind of how. What piqued my interest about the ISO in terms of, you know, I. I went to a meeting, or me and my friend Arielle, we went to a meeting. I think the first ISO meeting we went to was, like, titled Marxism vs. Anarchism, and they had invited a local anarchist to speak, and the guy didn't show up. But in fairness, the guy was like, an alcoholic, so maybe he know. And I, in. In hindsight, I'm like, maybe they invited him because he was an alcoholic and they knew he wasn't going to show up or they knew he wasn't going to be putting the best face forward for anarchism. But that kind of resolved the debate for me. When they didn't show up, I was like, I. I don't care about anarchism. I mean, you know, I kind of just ruled out, you know, they had. They had this. This whole thing where it was going to be, you know, A versus B, and then B doesn't show up. So I was like, well, I guess that's that for B. You know, I'm not really probably. Which was probably an unfair thing because it was an ISO meeting. But, you know, that's how I. That's how we got started. And so let's.
[36:07]
B
Let's go ahead, because I think you're about to move into the ISO phase maybe a little bit.
[36:11]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[36:12]
B
Let's take a pause and. And I want to give Michael and myself a chance to kind of say a few things about some of the. Some of your past and see where they might intersect with us. Just so sure, we'll make some. Because then. Then go into the ISO part. And, Eduardo, you can kind of either bring in a question you might have. I want to say that, number one, it's interesting, because what radicalized me, that ultimately led me to meeting Brian Belknap was the Kosovo war actually, as well. And the Columbine thing had not been in any feature of my radicalization. But you were entirely right. Like, I remember being so outraged when Madeleine Albright was saying, you know, the Serbians need a little bombing. Like, they just need it, you know, and like that to be said at the same time as this language of Columbine. I never put those two and two together because I was much more radicalized by our foreign policy than the internal lies. It Was only later that the internal lies became more meaningful to me. But it's really interesting as you as a high schooler, are confronted immediately with that dissonance. So that was one thing that was interesting, as I heard you talking about. And the School of Americas was a major feature of a woman I work with, Ms. Darlin Tom. She went to prison over that. And she. That was. She ran into all these Catholic priests and people around that. And I. I feel like the School of America's, because it's been renamed the west, something for Western Hemisphere, for peace
[37:43]
C
or something like that. I don't know what it's called, but it.
[37:46]
B
It is a still a very big feature of the U.S. imperial project in Central and South America. And the reason why we can imagine that Delta Rodriguez was like, you know, like, how the US has complete control or large control over the military of countries like Venezuela all throughout is because they've had decades of training these people in the United States and setting them back to do the thing. You were talking about torture as a policy. Like, it's not like, oh, this was just one person going off. It was. Torture as a policy is what was taught in those schools toward. And they. They probably learned it from the Phoenix program in Vietnam, and then they take it into Abu Ghraib. I mean, people have to understand. And I know I brought the Epstein files is not an accident. These people know how to do violence at very deep levels. So those are some things that I thought about as you were talking. And I just want to. I had to spill that out. But, Michael, I don't know if you have any thoughts.
[38:45]
A
I wanted to pick up on the thread of the complete hypocrisy of being told, even just for myself, understanding how the world works. And like, wait, I've been taught never to use violence to resolve my issues. And yet that is actually the main way that the government does things, you know? So for me, it was the Iraq war. And it's funny because you're younger than me, I was not politically aware during any of the Serbia Kosovo war. It really wasn't until the second Iraq invasion that I started to feel like I was putting together the big picture pieces. But I also remember the first Gulf War was like a video game. It was like, yeah, we had just gotten, like, the nes. And then it was like, oh, cool, there's, like, missiles going into the H Vac system of a. Like, we were literally watching on tv, like, their fancy guided missiles. And I remember there were trading cards and there were, like, US Generals and different kinds of like the Patriot missiles on one, you know, it was it
[40:04]
C
that always sell for Merchant, basically. Yeah, I do remember that. Yeah.
[40:08]
A
I was like, yeah, yeah, it was like a sports event, so. But that didn't really translate into like political activity for me until the, the 2003 invasion.
[40:28]
B
And Eduardo, do you have any either comments or maybe we'll just go back to Ben if you.
[40:32]
D
No, I'll go back to BIM because this is where we're getting to ISO. So.
[40:37]
C
Yeah, well, my uncle was a Jehovah's Witness, so that's my connection with Eduardo. That's what.
[40:44]
B
Man, there are so many people. Like my, my brother's wife, she was in Jehovah's Witness. I feel like it's all around us.
[40:51]
A
Like they're organized.
[40:54]
C
They're the real Illuminati. Probably something. I don't know. They're everywhere, everywhere.
[41:00]
A
Leninists
[41:03]
C
with true Freemasons or something. Anyway, so yeah, so I joined. So basically my friend, my friend and I, Ariel, we joined the ISO. But at that time the Rochester branch was basically one guy, Brian Irwe. So like we joined and created a branch of three, you know, and I was 16. And this is like, this is like summer of 1999. Um, we didn't join or I think I. We joined either like before the socialism conference of that year or after. But we didn't go because it was like too short notice to like, you know, spend the money. I mean high school kids, you know, high school kids, plane tickets or booking a hotel. Like, you know, I mean we, we came around the ISO and joined at a point where it was like too late to like go to the. Go to that event. Brian went though, and he's, you know, he was, he's. This is a guy who's like 45 year old, 45 year old white guy who works at the University of Rochester. He's like a lab tech. Like, you know, people who get people have like, you know, testing like, you know, urine samples to see if there's drugs or, you know, it's like routine lab work, blood work, this type of thing. So that's what he was doing in terms of his occupation. And you know, he had a family with kids. So he's like a family man. And I feel like that. I feel like at the time that me and Ariel. Arielle, my friend was like the same age as me, 16 years old. We're both in high school. I feel like that profile at least at the time was kind of unusual for ISO members to Be family to already have kids and be middle aged. Like, I feel like, you know, the vast majority of ISO members were between 20 and 30 or 20 and 35 and not didn't yet have families. You know, so I feel like some of the problems that seem to happen in other branches, I don't think we had those problems in Rochester. Partly because he was a family person and, you know, his sense of identity was already developed and, you know, he had an established life. And. Yeah, anyway, we'll get more into that later. And so, like, so we joined. Me and my friend joined the ISO and then the first activist campaign that we get involved in was there's this guy named John Duvall who was convicted in 1973 of murdering this out of town, out of town white businessman along with this woman named Betty Tyson. They're both black at the time, they were both prostitutes, and they both served 25 years in prison for this crime. And it turned out they were innocent, that the police beat confessions out of both of them. Supposedly she was the main person who did the crime and he was like the helper or the accomplice or something like that. And eventually Betty Tyson's conviction gets overturned because of. They basically falsified a bunch of evidence or withheld a bunch of evidence from her defense attorney and all, you know, so all this stuff comes out and then it raises the question of like, so if she's innocent, right? Like, that raises the question of, like, what about this other guy who supposedly was her right hand man, so to speak? And so eventually his conviction is overturned, but the prosecutor, for whatever reason, decides to retry him on the original 1973 charge. And the reason, and the reason, the legal reason why it wasn't double jeopardy is because when, when you overturn a conviction, it's like it never happened, you know, which. Which is the kind of thing that just drives. Drives me crazy. Like, like. And it's why I could never become a lawyer. Stuff like that. Technicalities would drive me crazy. So they tried to put him on trial again. And so the ISO, the three of us, you know, three kid. Three, Three kids and an adult basically decided to take up this guy's case and like, try to make some noise around it, build some. Build a movement around it, or put some pressure on the attorney, you know, the district attorney not to do anything. Also, I should mention that in 1973, this guy, John Duvall was like, not just. Not just a prostitute, but like on drugs, but also a transvestite, like, not transgender. Like, this is a Whole discussion of how the culture around that has changed, like there was no such thing as transgender in 1973, you know, but like it was, it was pretty clear that like the cops picked on these two people that nobody would stick up for, nobody would cry or care about if they just went to jail and got convicted on false charges, you know what I mean? They just picked on like the weakest, most vulnerable people that nobody gave a. About to just peg this crime on them, you know, regardless of whether they were guilty or not. So, you know, that was like my first activist campaign. And we tried to. We were doing public meetings at black churches. I brought John Duvall to my high school to speak.
[45:57]
D
Wow.
[45:58]
C
And the crowd and the kid, you know, 30 kids stayed after school for like three hours to listen to this guy tell his story. It was crazy. It was like, I really didn't think that many kids were going to be that interested. You know, I didn't think the whole room was going to be packed and people were crying and stuff because he was telling his whole story of being locked up in prison for, you know, for 25 years or something. He didn't commit crime. He didn't commit the. I. Now that I'm telling the story, I remember now why the prosecutor decided to go after him again. It's because during his parole board hearings, he admit, he said he did it and he felt sorry because he was trying to get out on parole. Whereas Betty Tyson was like, I'm innocent. I don't feel remorse because I never did the crime. You know, she just kind of stuck with that the entire 25 years. And he was like, you know, he did. He took the opposite choice and was like, oh yeah, I did it. I'm so sorry. So they were trying to use that as evidence against him to reconvict. Even though there was no physical evidence linking them to the crime, there was no eyewitnesses, like, like there was no. They had nothing on these two random people that they just grabbed. Basically. There was absolutely nothing tying them to the crime at all. But they tried to use, you know, his parole board hearings and stuff against them. So eventually what, what ends up happening with this is that like the activist campaign doesn't go anywhere. And, and in hindsight, I don't know whether that's because it was not smart to put two 16 year old and a 45 year old guy in charge of the thing who don't know what they're doing or, you know, I'm not saying Brian Iray, he, you know, he had joined, he had joined the, the British SWP in like 1978 or 1979 or something like that. And then he came into Rochester in the 80s and he, he recruited Phil Gasper and I think al. He might have recruited Kianga Yamada Taylor too, who later is, you know, now she's like a celebrity kind of on the left. But you know, Brian had been around for a long time. So I, you know, I can't say that like he didn't know what he was doing. But in hindsight I'm like, man, maybe we made a mistake. Maybe there was something I was overlooking as a 16 year old that we didn't do because we, we tried really hard to build some type of grassroots support for him and just, just didn't get anywhere. Like black churches and leaders were not interested for whatever reason, maybe because he was gay. I truly don't know why, but we just got nowhere. Like besides that meeting with the kids in my high school, like we really just did not have success in getting any politicians to support it or we had marches and stuff, but they were very, very small. The meetings in the black churches were very small. Like we just didn't get anywhere. But thankfully in the intervening 25 years, John Duvall's cousin had gone to law school and she was the head of the D.C. lawyer Guild or something like that. So she came into Rochester to like be his lawyer this time instead of having some court appointed bozo. And I skipped school to like be part, to be part of their. I was there for the opening of the trial and you know, with his family and you know, some of the, the activist people, you know, we showed up in court and stuff like that, you know, to show support for him and stuff. So that was like my introduction to actual activism and campaigning and you know, like we didn't succeed. But you know, John Duvall beat the charges. Like, you know, there was, there, they had no evidence, they really had no evidence and you know, they, the only reason he got put away the first time is because he had a court appointed lawyer. And you know, you know, he just got a raw deal basically. So he was, he was acquitted, which was great, but not because of any sort of activist stuff that we were doing. And then the next, the next couple things on the chronology that I have are like the Battle of Seattle, you know, the, the Seattle protests in 1999, that was like a huge, that was a huge like validator for me. You know what I mean? It was like. Oh, because the thing that was distinctive about it Was that you basically had a whole lot of union members getting into fights with cops, which isn't something you we really saw much of in the 90s, you know, and also that like the unions and environmentalists were like on the same page on something that hadn't happened either because there was a lot of typically there was either friction between them or, you know, they were just separate. Like unions have their issue, environments have their issue. They're not trying to like combine forces against a common foe. So that was like the first time that really happened in the streets and they actually managed to shut down and disrupt the meetings. And the cops went crazy and they were tear gassing people and chasing people all over and they were beating up random people in the, in Seattle neighborhoods. Like, like they would chase protesters into residential neighborhoods and then like beat up somebody standing at a bus stop, you know, just because he's there, you know, like, it was crazy. So that was like a. I don't know, it wasn't, it wasn't a whole week of protests, but it was like four to four or five days and the meetings were disrupted and stuff. But that really validated for me as a new, newly minted socialist, that kind of validated the idea that, you know, work. You could see working class people engage in some type of radical action or mass action or, you know what I mean? Like, it felt like, okay, you know, we're not just talking out of our asses here. We're not just reading history books. You know, this is like part of this is relevant to what's actually going on. So let's see. So out of the John Duvall campaign at my school, I, I established basically an ISO front group. You could call it an ISO front group, like called the Social Justice Club. And we would just have meetings, like, I don't think it was once a month, but it was fairly frequently. We would have meetings on a political topic or an activist campaign to just bring students around. Yeah, I was trying to recruit people, but I was trying to get people. Even if somebody didn't want to join the ISO, I was trying to figure out, okay, yeah, okay, you're not a socialist, but can we do something on X issue or can we talk about this or that? And eventually. So eventually, eventually a couple, there were a few other kids in my school who did join the ISO. Like they weren't strong, they weren't like hardcore members. But you know, they joined and they went to protests and they came to some branch meetings and stuff. I mean, it's hard when you're like in high school and it's like you got to beg your parents. Right, right. Like, like, you know, it's a different set of challenges, you know, when you're in high school and, and kids want to go to a meeting and all that type of stuff. And eventually, yeah, I mean there was, there was like five to 10 people who, I would say five to 10 students who were like regular participants in the club's activities. And a lot of times I would go to Brian Irwe's house. He lived like five blocks from the school in the Ninth Ward, which is like a mostly black neighborhood, black working class neighborhood, but he lived there. And so I would go by his house early in the morning and pick up hey market books and newspapers and flyers and you know, on my way to school. Because that was like part of my routine was like doing that or sometimes I would, I would go with him to. We would have paper labor. Labor paper sales at the University of Rochester Medical center. You know, getting up at six or seven in the morning to like sell people newspapers as they're walking into work. And these were basically this guy's co workers, you know. So sometimes they would like be like, oh, you're a socialist. I had no idea, you know, like, like walking by him and, and it was, it was, it was an interesting thing because, you know, you know, it felt like it's like the modern equivalent of that of a factory, you know, because you'd have hundreds of people all streaming into the, you know, this huge medical complex. And we were trying to sell them papers. And I mean, we really never got anywhere. We never got anybody to go to meetings and stuff like that. And at a certain point we decided to give up at University of Rochester, where we were holding the branch meetings. The University of Rochester is actually across, across the river from my school. So all these things are kind of taking place in the same neighborhood or rough geographic proximity. And the University of Rochester, it's kind of like an elite school. Like it's expensive to go there. And like, we just never got more than a handful of students coming to our branch meetings on different topics and stuff. So we were like, after a year, I think we were like, to hell with this, let's try Rochester Institute of Technology. And we had much more success there. We had, we ended up recruiting some people who ended up becoming like ISO cadre, like Kari Peterson Smith, Josh Karpov, I think his name is. He actually was doing the droop off of the Socialist Worker website at a certain point in the 2000s. So at rit, like, we got a lot more interest. And so by the time I left, right. I was. I left Rochester to go to College in 2001, in summer of 2001. So I was a member for basically two years in Rochester. And in that time, I had basically devoured the entire ISO lit table over. You know, every month you could just buy another book and read it. And by the time I left, the whole. I had gotten through everything that was on the lift table. So that's like building the party, you know. Volume one of the Trotsky biography. Actually, I think I finished all the Trotsky and Lenin biographies by the time I left, because I remember. I definitely remember the fourth volume of the Trotsky book, which was the thickest of the four and probably the best. Honestly.
[55:24]
D
Andy read those as well. I remember seeing him at the cafe and he was reading those.
[55:28]
C
Yeah, yeah. Um, I remember. I remember carrying that. The Volume 4 one. I was visiting my girlfriend at her high school at Irondoquoi High School, and I was. I would carry books with me on. On buses and stuff to read because it's like, you know, an hour of time to kill. And I remember carrying that with me. So I def. I almost certainly got through that one. But there was a lot of stuff that I read that was like, you know, the. All the big names of the International Socialist tendency, like Duncan Hallis, John Molyneux.
[55:59]
A
Don't forget Kalinikos.
[56:00]
C
Kalinikos, yeah. I read his revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx. It was a pretty good book. John Reeves. Let's see. At that time, Haymarket books didn't even exist. Yeah, I actually brought. Brought in a little piece of historical memorabilia.
[56:17]
B
I think a lot of our stuff was from what I was called bookmarks at the time. Yep.
[56:22]
C
I don't know if you remember this. This is by Alan Moss.
[56:24]
B
Oh, it's not showing up because of the thing.
[56:27]
C
Damn, that's too bad.
[56:28]
B
I remember reading that. Why. Why you should be a socialist?
[56:30]
C
Why you should be a socialist by Alan Moss. And there's like, a introduction with Howard Zinn. And the. The topic of the introduction is Eugene V. Debs and the idea of socialism. But, yeah, I have some. I have the old members Handbook from, like, the mid to late 90s, which was black. And then I have the handbook that came after that, which is white. I was actually on the white one in a photo. It's a photo of the protesting. Protesting the RNC in 2000 in Philadelphia. So I went to that, and then there was like, the, the inauguration protest against Bush, that was like a pretty big protest. I actually reserved the bus from Rochester in my name as an 18 year old. Just kind of weird. It's like, is this legal? You know, I'm only 18 years old. I can't even. I didn't even learn how to drive at that point. And they were like, yeah, just reserve the bus. And I was carrying I. Through my. In my high school, I was carrying a big like a can with a sign on it saying Bush stole the election. You know, donate money if you. You know, we were calling him the Commander and thief or something like that. Something edgy. Yeah, it was, it was like a whole thing. And so the bus was full though. The bus from Rochester was full and the ISO basically organized it. And by the time I left Rochester we had like 15, I want to say 15 to 20 members, something like that. So we started out with three and by the time we left, you know, 15 or 20, I think that's pretty good. Yeah, not. And some of those people are still active. One of the high school students, David Peel, he's like a union. He works for a union in like Massachusetts. He's like, I don't know exactly what he does for the union, but he's like, he's still active in labor stuff because I sometimes I look people up just out of curiosity. So yeah, I left. I left Rochester in summer of 2001 to go to SUNY Geneseo. And during the summer of 2001 the big thing that was going to happen was there were going to be protests. There were going to be protests against. I forget which three letter organization. I don't remember if it was. It was the imf, World bank meetings.
[58:42]
B
Yeah, they were like in Canada or
[58:43]
C
something like that, or FTAA or something like that in, In Washington. And then 911 happened. Yeah, you know, and that totally. That was basically the end of the global justice movement which had been taking place since in the late 90s. That was basically the end of the global justice movement. There were no, there were internationally. There were protests against, you know, these trade organizations and these multilateral economic forums and all this kind of stuff. But in the US it was over and everything switched to like the war. And I was by myself in Geneseo when 911 happened. I mean, by myself in the sense that like I was the only ISO member on that campus. 911 happens. You know, everything gets derailed. They had the ISO from Rochester or from Chicago, I don't remember, which had given me like a stack of international socialist Reviews that we were supposed to sell in the run up to the demonstration. It was like a very thick issue with like statements, not statements, but articles by all these prominent anti globalization leftists, thinker people. This is at a time when the ISO and had, I think by 2001, they had set up Haymarket Books and they had set up the center for Economic Research and Social Change, and they were developing relationships with like big names like Howard Zinn. I don't think they ever had a relationship with Noam Chomsky. But, you know, that's when the ISO started becoming sort of influential in the so called broader left, liberal, left liberal space. So they had given me a whole stack of ISRs about this anti globalization stuff. And on September 12, I was like, I can't. This, you know, this is completely useless. We have to like, you know, there has to be a complete shift. And the ISO basically shifted to anti war stuff at that point. And. And I was printing up flyers that were sent to me in ISO notes by Sharon Smith that said, like, don't turn tragedy into war. And it had a bunch of. I don't remember what it said because I didn't write it. It was. It came from Chicago. But at the, you know, at that point it was like, it felt like it felt good to be part of a national organization that I wasn't just operating completely by myself. I had some guidance. I was part of something bigger, you know, that. And that was. And they made the newspaper go weekly too. I remember that Socialist Worker at that, up until then had been bi weekly, every two weeks, a new issue. And then they made it go weekly for like four years or something like that. And it helped because it was like every week something was happening, something the Bush administration was doing something else, you know, something else terrible. So that helped a lot. And before I actually went to Geneseo, I actually had a sit down, face to face meeting with Sharon Smith at like a McDonald's after convention or something like that. And she was just asking me kind of like, she was just trying to understand who am I, am I gonna be okay by myself? Like, who is this person? You know, how many books, what books had I read, you know, how much, you know, all this kind of stuff. And, you know, I mean, we had a friendly discussion. Like, you know, there was no, no friction. You know, I thought she was doing fine as a national leader. There was, there was. I don't know if you remember this, Andy, but. Oh, you might not have been there, but there was a. At the, at the one of the East Coast Conferences, Sharon Smith, who was the national organizer of the ISO since 1983. Apparently there was at the time, there was like, this movement on campuses in the late 90s to get their campuses to stop using sweatshop labor for, like, the merch of the campus or of the university. And the ISO was part of that because the ISO was. Had good, good presence on a lot of campuses. And Sharon Smith had said something. She basically said that as a child she had worked not in a sweatshop, but like. Like that she had been part of that economy through working at home. Like, I don't know if you remember this at all, but it made an impression on me. I was like. And I never heard that story ever again. Like, it wasn't something that she broadcasted in, like her, you know, it wasn't like this thing happened to me as a kid. So it made me think that it was legit, you know what I mean? That she was part. That her family was impoverished and part of how they were dealing with that was basically selling stuff at home as part of some, you know, sweatshop supply chain or something like that. You know, I have no idea if that story is true. It seemed as I believe it's true,
[63:18]
B
because, I mean, all I can say is it's. It's been. It wasn't something she, like, you know, put totally on her sleeve, right? That was shared and was part of her past. That was part of her, as I understand it, part of her connection to the working class and the radicalization.
[63:32]
C
So, yeah, yeah, that's my understanding too. Like, and I got the impression that it was real because she was emotional and it wasn't like, broadcast all over the place. Like, you would only hear that story sometimes if you were in a certain context, you know, so, yeah, so. But, you know, that was my. That was kind of my only dealing, direct dealing with the. Sharon Smith as national head of the ISO. When I went to Geneseo, I, you know, I did talk to Ashley Smith, who was the east coast organizer of. Of the ISO. He was, I would say, mostly pretty helpful. And so when I was. So when I was. I started doing anti war stuff by myself, basically. And pretty quickly I launched. I spearheaded an anti war coalition organizing meeting to see how many other people besides me are anti war or thinking about being anti war on the fence about this whole thing. And, you know, we basically had a coalition of like, 20 people, and we met weekly all the way until I left Geneseo in, like, summer of 2002. And, like, the Broader anti war movement kind of collapsed once, once the Taliban fell. Most anti war groups, my understanding is that they basically collapsed or people stopped showing up to meetings for whatever reason. In Geneseo, people kept going to meetings. I think it's because we were bored. You know, it's a rural campus. All you can do out there is drink and go to sorority and frat parties every weekend. Like if you want to do something other than that, there's not a lot out there for you to do. So I feel like maybe we got by because kids were bored. You know, progressive minded kids didn't just want to get drunk all the time on the weekend, so whatever. But we had, you know, I managed to establish an anti war group of. A pretty stable anti war group of about 20 people. And we would do like meetings. We had debates with the College Republicans at one point about the war and U.S. foreign policy. And within that I, I was selling Socialist Worker and trying to recruit people to the ISO or bring people to ISO events and eventually had a little study group of sorts where we would read. I think we read one of Chris Harmon's pamphlets about how the rev. How the Russian Revolution was lost and. But I did face a strategic point, strategic porch, strategic choice at one point in fall of 2001 as to whether should I try to start an ISO branch or should I try to start an anti war coalition and then within that try to build, you know, see who's interested in socialist politics or whatever. So I made. I think I made the right strategic choice. I think it would have been a very foolhardy or fruitless thing to just try to set up an ISO branch first and then, you know, but I know, I know different people probably might have made different choices at different times and their lives are in different contexts or whatever. Yeah. So that was. So then I moved to New York City and started going to Hunter College because I just didn't like Geneseo. Geneseo was like a culture shock for me because I was. I was going from a majority black Hispanic inner city school where like everybody's getting school lunches for free because they make so little money to a school where it's like 90 white, 10 non white, basically, something like that. And everybody's from the suburbs and doing well for themselves and their parents have two cars and yada yada, yada. Like, for me that was, you know, it was a culture shock. My family didn't. My family didn't own any cars. We didn't even have a microwave, you know, like, I didn't Realize, like, I knew when I was growing up, I knew like, like going to an inner city school, like my mom, and my mom was again, she was at a blue collar job as a machinist. And you know, she would tell me that she's, she's basically being underpaid compared to her male counterparts. And she was making, I don't know, $6, $7 an hour for skilled labor in the 90s, which wasn't all, wasn't a whole lot. And you know, we didn't have. We definitely. I knew we weren't rich, you know, but I didn't really think of us as poor. And we used to pay full price for the school lunches and we didn't have a car, you know, so, like, I couldn't. And we were not, you know, we very rarely went to restaurants or movies and stuff like that because, you know, there just wasn't that much money. And I could never figure out how were these other kids making it because they, most of them were on the free lunches and I was paying full price for the lunch. Lunch was like $2 or $1 or something like that. And they were getting it for free, and they were. So they were making significantly less than me. And I was like, how do you people survive? Like, I didn't understand, like, like, you know what I mean? Like, like I felt like, you know, we were making it, we're, you know, treading water, let's put it that way. You know, making ends meet. You know, the bills are always paid on time, but that's it. There's nothing, there's no, I never, we never went. We didn't really go on vacations or. There's nothing like that. No, no real luxury spending. And then there's these other people who are like, I don't know how you make it, you know, I don't know how you make it on, you know, 10,000 a year. I mean, I don't even know. So go and go. So I was going from that environment to like Geneseo where like, you know, people's parents are buying them computer systems just for college. And you know, in the, in, in the two early 2000s, that was, you know, that was like kind of like a luxury, like a full computer system with a subwoofer and this. And you know, like, that was like, you know, you, you had some money, you had some disposable income, so. But I kind of hated it there. And it was like, it was a culture shock for me. So I wanted to go back, come back to New York City, where I kind of always felt like I belonged and go to Hunter College. So I. I managed to do that in fall of. Fall of 2002. And then I started going to the. Probably do.
[69:19]
B
Here is pausing. Have you pause again? Because I think there's a lot of territory you've covered.
[69:24]
C
Yeah.
[69:25]
B
But don't lose where you are at, where you want to carry.
[69:27]
C
Yeah, I won't.
[69:27]
B
I do want to come in on some of those things.
[69:30]
C
Sure.
[69:30]
B
That you've talked about. And then Michael and Eduardo, please feel free to do the same. First off, I actually think there's some. One of the things that you did that I did was just this voracious appetite for reading that that is part of a radical. That is part of what happens to a person when they become radicalized. They just read everything and they always find themselves like, I want another book. I want another book. And one that's a part of any. You hear about that as a period. Something that comes out of any period of a radicalization, like on a. On a broad scale. Like people are reading books like this one. I don't know if it's true or not, but I remember hearing a story that Lenin's state and revolution was like number one or number two in Portugal in 1974, like on the reading list kind of thing. You hear stuff like that. But as I listen and I. And that happened to me and I. As I listened to even what you're describing about this question you had to ask about, like, we're not doing well and these folks are even worse off. Like, that was sort of my background in some ways. Like, our house was always dark and kind of messy. We had a house, but we were definitely poorer than maybe the people around us who weren't doing. Like, they were not even middle class. They were. We lived in a poor working class neighborhood, mostly white people across the street from people who had been mostly black people. And there was tension even there. But I do feel like that kind of growing up in that environment was part of the fire fueled part of the fire for me, wanting to read so much. It's got an anger thing going on in there as well, an injustice thing. You feel like you were lied to when you come around. And then you are just. You become obsessed with finding out what's. How to do do something about that. So I. That's something I hear in your story that resonates to me from. From me. I also want to say something about like selling the paper. Like, that was a tough part at first, like selling the newspaper, like, why? Why do I need to do this? But I will say that the weekly newspaper sales became a big part of the experience of talking to people and just talking to people about politics at work. Doing my three for Me program, like, just trying to like, get people to see if people would be interested at work. And like, that became a big part of like, talking to people about politics and animated that I will say even today, I think a newspaper or some periodical and some physical thing is, in my belief was very central in my political radicalization of going out and just having to meet people and talk to people about politics and getting over your shyness because, like, you just got to go out there and meet people where they're at. The other thing that I think about are those different campaigns you were involved in. And it makes me think that the initial campaigns I was involved in were like, this is an ISO campaign. This is an ISO campaign. And that was. That was essential to just even getting your feet wet on. What does a campaign feel like? What does it mean? What does it mean to like, say, set an agenda for something? Like your manager isn't telling you what the agenda is, your boss isn't telling, so you have to figure out what the agenda is. And that was very meaningful. And I do think that an interesting transition that takes place for me in the ISO is when I went from doing essentially ISO campaigns to when we started to launch our own campaign around Educators for a Democratic Union. Like, me and other comrades were like, we're going to do our own campaign, which was signed off on by the ISO. But I think that once some of the lessons we learned out of our own campaign become a feature of end up moving us out of the ISO in some ways. So those are just some thoughts I wanted to share. And I do remember that isr, that big Global justice isr, it was green, it was big, it had all these people on it. And then it was like you could just light it on fire right after 9, 11, because there were just stacks of these things that were going to go nowhere. And I always struggled with the don't let tragedy become war thing. There was something very tepid about that that I just never quite liked. But nevertheless, we're an anti war position. Like, at least we can say that. So that's something I wanted to share in terms of some of the things you brought up around the ISO and other things. So don't lose your part, but I want to make sure that. Yeah, yeah, so go ahead, Michael.
[73:55]
A
I wanted to say, because I read your piece. So you want to join the ISO, which is written, I think, 2012, 2013 or 2013. So thinking about and listening to your story, and I agree with Andy that all that kind of stuff, the conversations, the. The paper sales, all the pre meetings. The pre. Pre meetings. The pre. Pre. Pre. Pre meetings. No, the. The. Like trying to get a campaign off the ground that doesn't necessarily take off all of that. I, like, in hindsight, now feels like sort of essential link to some kind of political training that doesn't exist anymore that is actually very difficult for people to get. And so I. I wonder how you feel about that. Or rather here I'll phrase it this way. How much do you feel like ideological, individual, ideological recruitment played a role in building the Rochester branch? Because you. You just told us a story of how you went from basically, you know, one guy to 15 people that produced some of the stars of the organization at some point. So how much, like, do you see. What do you. How do you view that process now? Do you be.
[75:20]
D
I.
[75:20]
A
Do you view that as, like, it was totally, you know, like a. Like a waste of time or do you feel like there were valuable things about it? How much did individual recruitment play a role in that?
[75:32]
C
Yeah, I mean, that's. Those are some good questions. I mean, I. Looking back on the whole thing, like, I mean, I also feel like I come from a weird dissident, ISO thing perspective because in the sense that, like, I don't feel like I was ever mistreated or had a bad experience. Like, nobody expelled me. Like. Like. Like there were some times where I was in the minority on stuff and, you know, certain things might have been said that were, you know, questionable debate tactics or something like that, but it was never, like, egregious. Like, Ben works for the CIA, you know, something insane, you know, like that. So, like, I don't have. The thing is, I don't. All my critiques of the ISO never came from a place of, like, personal injury or bitterness or anger. Like, mostly it came from, like, disappointment. Like, I wish the ISO could do better. Why aren't you guys doing better? Like, you should know better. A little bit like that. I personally, you know, I think the whole. I mean, the whole thing for me was, like, formative. Like, I learned how to run a meeting, how to print a flyer, how to get people interested, how to stop somebody who doesn't look like they're interested in stopping and talking about politics, you know, because they're going. They're. They're walking from point A to Point B at 30 miles an hour. I got half a second to get them to spill the beans on Bush or whatever it is on, you know, whatever's in the news, Katrina, whatever. Like, so that was like, you know, that was actually. I think it was an important skill for me to develop in terms of, like, just being blunt with people and just getting straight to the point as soon as possible. Not waste any time on, like, have you read Leon Trotsky, you know, like. Or whatever, you know, or fluff, you know, get to the point, like, what do you think about X? You know, and are you willing to do Y and Z about X? You know, And. And trying to gauge people, also trying to gate. Also a lot of it was like, trying to gauge how far can I go with this person? You know, because sometimes I would run into, like, a conservative Republican, right. You know, a Bush voter or something like that, but a conservative Republican. Most of them are not really thrilled at the idea that you could try somebody twice for the same crime, right. That they already went to jail for 25 years for. Like, there was layers of contradictions where it was like, even if you're pro cop, you know, you can't really support, like, what's happening. You know what I'm saying? So, like, sometimes there was, like, you know, became a skill, like, trying to identify, okay, I can't get you to the socialism conference, but I can get you to sign a petition or I can get you to sign. Come to a rally for, you know, John Duvall or something like that, you know, And. And also another thing that was important that it taught me to do is, like, at least for me, it really taught me how to really listen to people and not just fake listen to people.
[78:26]
B
Yep.
[78:26]
C
You know what I mean? Like, because, like, there was. There were definitely people in the ISO who were, like, fake listening, or they would respond, and it would just be like, you're not responding to anything I actually said. You're responding to some, like, weird straw man that you created. And I feel like being on paper sales, like, and just interacting with people who are not in the bubble, not in the ideological bubble, or not in the fishbowl. That's kind of how I. That's an analogy I can get into about how I understood being in the ISO, but, like, people who are just not political, not thinking about this stuff 24 7, you know, your average person. What does your average person think of Bush? What does your average person think of the Iraq war? What is your average person who's not political or only thinks about politics once every four years when they have to vote for somebody, you know, like it was great because it was like it trained you to think outside, maybe not think outside the box, but think outside your own ideological bubble or your own, you know, whatever you, you know, you know what I mean? Like, try to relate to the average person. So I felt like that was really useful. And so I feel like, you know, I mean, if you're looking at it from the scale, if the, if the scale is, you know, was what I was doing contributing to a workers revolution, you know, it's a complete zero. But you know, there's more, you know what I mean? Like that's, I don't think that's the right scale. You know, it's not like a workers revolution broke out and the ISO failed, right? Like lead it or something like that. You know what I'm saying? Like, so I don't feel like that's like the right scale to assess something like that. I feel like the right scale is, you know, in the given period of time that you were operating or the ISO was operating, you know, did they, did we. Or they maximize the opportunities that were handed. And it's a mix, you know, it's a very mixed bag. You know, it depends on all the branches seem to have slightly different cultures and different challenges and different kind of personality interactions. But I feel like for me personally, like all that stuff was really formative, you know, I mean, I haven't been on a paper sale in 20 years or something like that, but if I really wanted to, I could just go. If I joined a campaign and you know, and I had a petition or something, I can just go up to people and just, you know, you learn how to create little short, three word, five word slogans that get people to stop abruptly and start engaging you. You know, this is before social media. Social media, it's teaching people a little bit of the same skills too. Like, you know, for a social media post you've only got five or six words to, you know, get somebody's attention so that they engage. You know what I mean? If you write, if you write a 500 word Twitter post, nobody's going to read it. People are just going to see a wall of text and just scroll down. You know, it's, you know, the paper sale thing was, you know, but I, it's, it's also, but it is different that Andy's right, that, that you know, being in person, in real life, face to face interaction, like nothing will Beat that. You know, nothing beats trying to engage somebody in person. There's, you know, there's way more. There's way more adherence in terms of, like, when you develop relationships with people, they're more likely to show up to your next meeting or your next campaign event if you've met them, shook their hand, developed some sort of emotional back and forth with them than just texting. You know, texting is so people read it and then they just forget about you, you know? So I feel like. I don't know. I don't. I don't really have a fixed answer about. Should that be part of some sort of future organizing? I mean, that's everything online.
[81:56]
B
But I think those questions, we may not even get to this episode. But I do think some of the lessons, if you will, I. That may be something that we. We want to get to. There's so many different things, I think, to cover on that. Eduardo, I want to give you a chance to kind of share your thoughts on what you've heard so far.
[82:14]
D
I mean, you. The only. I'm just inundated right now with images of the past, of just everything they mentioned, from 9, 11 to the war on Iraq to just you. You mentioned a few things. I. I just took me back to those. To those formative years. That's all.
[82:37]
C
Yeah.
[82:38]
D
So I'm. I'm listening. I'm taking a few notes, but also I have a few things. Questions on written work that you've done. But I think, sure, you should finish here, and then we'll get to your. The things that you have written about.
[82:56]
C
Okay, so, like, let's see.
[82:59]
B
So I want to add this part.
[83:01]
C
Oh, God.
[83:02]
B
I don't think it can be underestimated how important it is. What you said about listening and fake listening versus real listening. I hate that I. I am very aggressive when I am talking to people, like, around the COVID stuff, when I was opposed to the coveted measures. And I was. We were doing. I was doing something with my wife at the trade, the farmers markets, and being like this. And I am very good at knowing now as a result of this, of knowing how to, like, say, I'm just gonna. I'm just gonna be out here engaging people. But it also really did teach me. And I. And I was almost virtually fearless about it because I'd had that training of just talking to strangers about politics. But the biggest feature it really gave me is, like, what am I hearing from people? Like, what are they saying? Like, it. Are they willing. Do they. Are they willing to shift or am I just going to have a block here and there's just no way to. And then just, you just got to let it go and be like, have a good day. And certainly to not be an. You know, the only time I was an is when somebody literally was coming and trying to, trying to just mess with me and you just got to push back a little bit. But I really feel like those skills of talking to complete strangers and engaging people about politics, I feel like, and then listening, I feel like those are going to be part of any revolutionary movement. Like everyone is going to have to adopt some version of that. And so in that regard, a contribution was made into my development to be a worker who's able to talk to other workers about politics and engage and listen. So I think I hadn't heard anyone use that verb listen in a while, but I think that one is really central.
[84:50]
A
A quick thing in your piece about. So you want to join the ISO. This is related to the fake listening. You realize that there's this actually in depth worked out positions that the, that the organization had and they, and realizing that in the radicalization phase they had, they had an array of literature essentially to cover all of these questions. That was all party literature. Right. And so I remember having to figure out, because I take, I took a lot to that like, oh really, what you're saying is just like this, I'm going to map this to some historical debate that I have. We've already answered, right? So like part, part of the fake listening that we were trained to do that I feel like the ISO was trained like I was trained to do in the ISO had to do with. Well, we've already worked out all these questions. You're just repeating something that we already knew. And let me, let me just like rush you along and be like, yes, but here's our answer to what you're saying, right? That, that was something that I, that's why, probably why I didn't sell even close to as many papers as Andy, you know, or, or Brian or any of the people who actually knew how to listen. But I also think that, but so, so that whole, that whole structure of like every question is worked out and we actually agree fundamentally on all these questions. That was one of the fundamentally destructive things where people weren't allowed to like actually explore or disagree or, or try and make sense of. And I saw that most sharply around in, in the Obama election where it was like, no, people are hopeful and struggle is going to pick up. I'm like, actually I feel like, they just really, you know, I was like, I get the sense that people are less interested in radical politics now because they kind of think, oh, maybe the system's. You know, but none of that. If I just. That disagreed with the perspectives coming from the center, then none of that was explored. Or, you know, you basically got castigated for disagreeing with the perspective, you know, And I don't know if what I said was coherent, but I just wanted to bring that up because at the same time as being trained to like actually go talk to people, I was also trained to do a fake listening thing by whatever argument they made, compartmentalizing it into a very specific debate that I had already read about and already had an answer to. And that, that was, that was an element that disrupted real connection for me.
[87:40]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think like what you're saying is like a huge, like, you know, I never really thought about what you're saying that the ISO, a lot of times, because of something that happened in 1871, the ISO, a lot of times would think, just think, you know, this is just a repeat of what happened in 1871, you know, like, I think that actually had a huge. It's probably a big reason why they tripped up so badly with Occupy and anarchism in general, you know, because they felt like, well, we've already. Engels already refuted the anarchists in 1892, you know, why are we even talking about anarchism and Occupy? You know what I mean? And it's like, you know, sometimes, sometimes that stuff can be useful, but like, you can't just rinse and recycle answers like that because historical problems, you know, don't exactly recon re. You know, recreate themselves every 50 years, you know what I mean? Like, it's always a different situation, at least a little bit, you know, and they did, they did. They just didn't engage. They didn't really engage at all with like, where Occupy was actually at and how it actually functioned. And you know what I mean? Because it was like, oh, Anakin's had been refuted by angles or whatever. One thing I, I would also say with Andy is I, I share. I mean, I don't know. I actually haven't gotten back into the. What's left archives to look at all the COVID related stuff because I know that's. It seems like that's where you guys. That was the fork in the road, I guess you could say, between you guys. And like, I guess what, what you call the mainstream left so I don't know what any of that, but I do, I definitely identify with like, you know, the whole baptism by fire thing, you know, because like handing out anti war literature on September 12, 2001 by yourself, you know, you're not part of any group. Ain't nobody there. If you get jumped, that's it, you know, it's one versus whoever. You know, I went through that and I went through this thing where, you know, I was the most unpopular person in my dorm or whatever or campus or, you know, because I was, you know, unapologetically against the war. So I went. So, because I went through that, like, I wasn't afraid to like take up extremely unpopular positions on the far left about Syria, Libya, Occupy, you know, like once you've been, once you've been through the fight, once you, you know, you get, you went through baptism by fire. Like in the real world, stuff on the left is just like, like it doesn't matter, you know what I mean? Like, it just doesn't. The barbs that people throw your way just, it doesn't. They don't land because or don't, don't really make a difference. And the other thing I would want, I would want to mentioned, like Matt was saying, like the ISO has all these sort of. And I guess based on my essay, which I haven't read in 20 years or 10 years, that the ISO has all these like in depth positions on all these country specific, historical, specific stuff. When me and my friend Ariel found the ISO and we're talking about joining, like me and him, we made like a pact that if we found out the ISO in any way supported the ussr, we would just be like, bye. That's it. Because like both of us were working class kids and we just had an instinctual sort of knowledge that whatever was happening over there was not pro working class. That if you were a working class person in the ussr, you were getting destroyed, you know what I mean? Like you were getting screwed. You were an exploited class. You had no freedom, you had no, you know, it was terrible. It was just terrible. So like we didn't know anything about degenerated worker state or, you know, we didn't know. We didn't have the theoretical sophistication to really talk about things like state capitalism versus, you know, but we, it became very clear reading, you know, the where we stand thing made it very clear that like the ISO is not pro Cuba, not pro North Korea, not pro Russia, you know, so that on the face of it was good enough for us to Join. And then we were like, but if we find out in the footnotes that, you know, because that's sometimes how it goes where it's like in a lot of Trotsky's groups, it's like critical support for Blank, you know, so it's like you find out later that you actually do support some of this stuff at some level, you know, anyway. But we didn't know about all that as 16 year olds. We just knew that we didn't want to be part of something that was, you know, that was in any way, shape or form even slightly pro Stalinist. So anyway, so by. So in fall of 2002, I moved to New York. The anti war group that I set up or helped establish. I had run the meetings in such a way in a basically a pretty democratic way. Like everybody had access to the mailing list of each other and each other's phone numbers. We were rotating the chair of the meeting and who would give introductions. And so like, I basically ran the things with the idea that, you know, know, if I die or get arrested or go somewhere else, the group will continue just fine without me. I'm just a cog in a machine. I can be replaced. And that's basically what happened. There was another guy I worked with, his name is Jesse Harasta. He was like a pro iww, sort of anarcho, syndicalist, socialist type of guy. He was the first person not in the ISO that I called Comrade. For me, that was like a big break. It was like, because the ISO had this sectarian thing where you would only call other ISO members comrades. But I started calling him Comrade before I left in 2002 because we worked, me and him worked very closely to manage the group just to make sure, you know, who's got the next talk prepared, who's making the flyer, like the basics, the nuts and bolts of running the group and keeping it going. Me and him worked pretty regularly together to make sure it kept going and not just whatever happens happens. You can't have, you can't run a group with just whatever happens happens. You have to have some leadership or some organizational continuity. So anyway, yeah, I moved to New York in fall of 2002, started going to Hunter College, and then I was in the Hunter branch for like the next four years while I was going to school. And anti war stuff, obviously the Iraq invasion was like a huge thing we did. We set up a campus anti war network that was kind of the ISO's front group for the anti war stuff on campuses like at the time, I didn't think of it as a front group, but in hindsight I'm like, okay, you know, if you, you know, it's not like the ISO ever reached out to other groups.
[94:14]
B
Correct.
[94:15]
C
To actually form a genuine united front. Even though in theory that's what we were supposed to be doing on paper, that's what the theory told us to do. In practice, it was always the ISO plus a bunch of unaffiliated people from, you know, so, you know, so. And a lot of times what happened would. What would what. What happened at the Hunter branch of the campus Anti War network was basically, we ended up alienating everybody. All the unaffiliated people that we. That came into the group, it was like seven or 10 other people and three ISO people, including myself, we ended up alienating them so much, even though most of them were anti capitalist, socialist, radical. There was like one guy who was a conservative and like one person who was a liberal and conservative. I mean, like, you know, Republican voter, basically. But there were Republicans against the Iraq war too. But, you know, we alienated all the people who were closest to us politically just by being too aggressive about selling the paper, trying to recruit, announcing ISO events nonstop at the end of every single meeting. You know, it was, you know, we, you know, it was like it was, if it's the same people coming to the meeting for six months straight, they don't need to hear the next is they know the ISO exists. Like it's not a new thing. Like, and we just didn't, you know, because we had the, this organizational imperative to recruit, recruit, recruit, recruit, you know, like it didn't matter how pissed off these other people were at us. And eventually the coalition got destroyed by that and we got, we got kind of kicked out or red baited out or excluded. And then a new coalition formed called Books Not Bombs. But the original coalition was the Hunter Anti War Coalition. And then a different. The, the student government at Hunter College at that time was like a leftist Maoist, Third worldist, people of color group. And they spearheaded a second anti war coalition. After the war started and ours, after ours collapsed. The one that we started collapse, we kind of joined their group, their coalition, which was more of a genuine united front because this, this third world. This group is called Student Liberation Action Movement. And they came out, they were formed out of like protesting budget cuts throughout the 90s under the Giuliani administration. And Pataky. Pataki was like the Republican governor of NEO for like a long time. So they would, they basically ran A student. They ran student government and they would bust people up to Albany to try to protest against cuts and stuff like that. And it was majority all. They basically were. No, there were no white people in that organization. They were basically. I don't want to go so far to say that they were, quote unquote, anti white, but I don't think a white person could actually be a member to give you some idea of like, you know, you know, they were like Pro Mao, pro PFLP, pro, you know, person of color with an AK47 was kind of like their politics, you could put it that way. So the ISO, you know, we struggled a lot because a lot of our members were white. I'm white passing, but I had a third world name. So I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't really know if I registered as white when I was dealing with them. Like, it wasn't clear to me what they thought of me. But we had black. We had a couple black members who would be the person in charge of interfacing with them to avoid the whole stuff, you know, any toxic stuff going back and forth. So, yeah, so it was, it was definitely. It was. And there was a point, there was actually a point in, in the second coalition, anti war coalition, where somebody in the ISO wanted to bring up that somebody in that coalition was a member of a rival socialist group. I think they were in Freedom Road socialist organization. I want to say they were a Maoist or something like that. And I was like, I was like, so basically you're saying like, we should redbait this person. You know, that's essentially what it would have been. And then that shut that down completely. But it was kind of a. I mean, it kind of boggled my mind that somebody would want to use somebody's membership in a rival socialist group as, as fodder in some sort of. And I was like, I don't think that's a good idea. I mean, first, first of all, this is not a, you know, in principle is a bad idea. Like, in principle you shouldn't be doing that. Second of all, as soon as they find out they're, you know, as soon as you make that an issue with that person, then it becomes a. We're also at a socialist organization. Then. Then it's our turn. Like, you know, what kind of precedent are you creating? You know, I mean, I think it was basically just born of frustration that this other person and this other group was more influential in this coalition than the ISO. Was and they were trying to find ways to like undermine that. And you know, there's just, to me there's certain things, there are certain red lines you just can't cross in politics. You know, there's certain things you just can't do. There's certain things that are just off limits. You know, that's certain, that's, you know, that's probably one of them. In terms of the most exciting thing that definitely that happened that I was part of was on the day that the bombing started or the day after the bombing started. This was like March 19th. It started on March 19th. And then the day after everybody was going to walk out and we called it day X and go down to Times Square on an emergency protest of the bombing. Like we actually got into a fight with the cops and we took the street from them. That was cool. That was just like congratulations. That was amazing. That was just. And this is, this is right after, you know, this is still after 9 11, Giuliani's mayor. And after 911 basically all protests had, were confined in these little tiny penned up spaces. And the, the, the, the justification was oh, security, security threats, blah, blah, 911. You don't want to have a huge gathering of people because somebody could just, you know, blow it up or whatever.
[99:52]
A
But it's a free speech zone.
[99:54]
C
Yeah, they call them free. That's right, they call them speech zones. I mean and they were like 20 by 50 or something. They were tiny. So it was a very rainy, cold misery as we were streaming down to Times Square. And you know, the way the cops had set everything up was kind of like they were, it was kind of like they were herding cattle. The people were just kind of marching, marching, marching. And you know, cops were just kind of waving people into the pen and the people were just kind of like cattle. You know, it didn't seem like there was anything you could do about that. And then you know, some, some of the ISO people and the anti war people from Hunter got, did like a huddle, a spontaneous huddle because we realized they didn't. There were not that many cops versus bodies that they were supposed to be policing. So we in, we had a huddle and we came up with an on the spot plan to, you know, try to take the whole street or cause a problem. And what we ended up doing was we unlocked the fences in like five different places at once, all at the same time. And there was only two or three cops so they couldn't close up the gap. And then we had to Encourage people to, you know, cut across. Because what they were doing is like, if there's a two lane road and there's yellow lines in the middle, you know, left and right side of traffic. So one side would be blocked off completely and there would be protesters in that little block. And then the other side was completely clear. There was no cars on that side of the street. You just couldn't protest there. So we just unhooked the fences and then encouraged people to cross over. And people were scared at first. People were like, you know, I don't want to get arrested. Which is fair. No problem. And then once the cops, you know, at first they were like bewildered. They didn't know what to do. And then they called reinforcements and then a bunch of cops came in. And then there was like, we were like kind of like fist fighting with the cops. And they would grab somebody, and then we would try to grab them back as this hyped up crowd. And we would pull people, they would try to grab somebody, we would pull them back, they would try to grab somebody, we pull them back. And then at some point we all locked arms and we were all jumping up and down so they couldn't grab us. And we were like chanting, you know, the people united will never be defeated and all this kind of stuff. You know, it was cool. It was cool. And then eventually they gave up. There was, there was. There was a point at which there were like three or four cops who were using a fence to like, try to push people back into the thing. And they were pro. You know, there were like 10 people on the other side of that, and they were, you know, it was like a tug of war, except they were pushing instead of pulling. And it was like. So that's the kind of like physical confrontation that we were getting into. And some people did get arrested. There was like a handful of people who got arrested and they faced charges. And, you know, they were kind of like, I shouldn't use collateral damage is, you know, a terrible phrase. But they were like the unintended victims of, you know, they just got arrested and we couldn't un. Arrest them. Essentially, like. And it was all kind of chaotic and unplanned and, you know, it's just. It's just something that kind of, you know, that's kind of like the risk when. If you do get into a thing with cops in a physical confrontation.
[102:56]
B
Yep.
[102:56]
C
You know, you risk arrests, you risk random people who are not actually involved in confrontation just getting snatched because the cops want to arrest somebody. They don't want to go, go back to the paddy wagon empty handed. Um, so yeah, that was like the most exciting thing that happened in terms of the ISO. The only thing, that's the only notable kind of story I have to tell there was. There was a anti war conference in Boston for the campus anti war network. And the ISO was, you know, instrumental in putting that. The ISO was constantly setting up united fronts of itself and then having the front group set up like national networks of yada, yada, fill in the blank. So they were trying to do that with the campus anti war network. And there was a debate about points of unity. Like what, what things does everybody agree on? And one of the things, one was a media withdrawal. I can't remember the others. One of them was, that was proposed was like, everybody a point of unity was like opposing like a UN occupation of Iraq or a UN sanctioned occupation of Iraq because the war was not sanctioned by the UN Security Councils, which is what made it illegal under international law. But there was, you know, the ISO members in that, in that formation were pushing very hard for this point of unity about UN occupation. And everybody basically in the meeting spoke up in favor of it. And then there was like a break or a dinner. And then the next day we would go on vote on the resolution. And myself and Kari Peterson Smith, who I knew from Rochester, we were having dinner with 10 people who were not in the ISO and they hadn't spoken in the meeting. And like all 10 of them were like, they were not at all united on the UN occupation thing. Like they had questions. They were, some of them were liberals. I mean, a lot of it was just confusion. Like they didn't, they didn't necessarily understand the issues, but it was like, because they weren't trained ISO cadre who had been used to speaking and arguing and like they weren't confident enough to like voice their objection against people who are confident. So at the, at the debate about the issue the next day in the voting, I was like the only ISO person who voted against keeping that as a point of unity. Because I felt like, yeah, the ISO agrees that this is the point of unity, but like the non ISO people don't. And it doesn't. It doesn't. It's. If we're not actually united on this, why are we making, why are we trying to make it a point of unity? I didn't understand. Like, to me it made no sense. So I voted against it. I was like the only ISO person who voted against that motion. And it failed. It failed by like like one or two votes. And I feel like it was the right thing. And honestly it wouldn't have mattered if it carried or it failed.
[105:35]
A
Right.
[105:36]
C
You know, it didn't, it didn't really matter. Like, it didn't, didn't have any outcome, organizing outcome to that. But it was definitely a thing where I could. During the debate at, when we were voting, the people who are in favor of it got really emotionally attached to, like super emotionally attached. Like, they were upset when it didn't pass, like tears. Like, it was just like. Yeah, it was, it was surprising. I was very surprised at that, that like people would get so. Because, you know, it just, you know, it just didn't seem like, you know, an emotional issue. You know, the United nations, who cares about the United. You know, United nations is not something that usually gins up like a lot of feeling. You know, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like something like, oh, somebody accused somebody of rape or, you know, that's going to be a heated discussion for sure. No question. There's no way to avoid it. But like the un, like, you know,
[106:33]
A
like, I think this is important because you're now squarely, in my experience, which is I was part of the campus Anti War Network branch from San Francisco State.
[106:46]
B
Cool.
[106:47]
A
And looking back on it now, it's interesting to see how I, I appreciate your take. Right. It was completely a front group and, you know, we would sell papers before every like Students Against War meeting, even though it was the same, like 10 people or whatever, you know, and they were just like, what the fuck is wrong with you people? You know, and we're like, you're red baiting us. And, and then, yeah, you know, looking back, it's like actually we were, we were like really just dysfunctional interpersonally because we were trying to just focus on individually recruiting people. And we thought that the political questions. This is related to your last point, which was that we had this idea that like, winning these political arguments was the ultimate, were like the main goals. And so that question around the UN was essentially trying to, you know, get people to see that the UN was also this, you know, sort of reformist and part of sort of the, the world imperialist power. And we shouldn't, we shouldn't sanction, we shouldn't, you know, basically look to the U.N. you know, and so it's amazing now to think about like, how basically overall politically irrelevant that question was and is. And yet the way that we were, the way that it was kind of. And this is probably has to do also with kind of the middle class nature of the leadership. But also I feel like the idealism behind the whole. The way that. That the ISO saw its project which was that like winning these political questions was. Was how you build the right kind of organization as opposed to understanding there will be a process of development with groups of people and that what was more important was getting people to actually genuinely learn lessons together. Honestly learn it lessons together. So your story, you know, I have similar ones, but it's. It's a little bit. It's important for me to revisit this because you're, you're helping me remember how mistrained I was like how dysfunctional my political training in that context was. So thank you for that.
[109:20]
C
Okay. You're welcome.
[109:23]
A
And it's painful too. It's a little bit like, wow.
[109:26]
B
Well, I would say that. I guess the term I would use for is we've been. We've been talking about experiences like I would say selling a paper or I would say the reading Reading. Reading theory are formative and things that I would just say are.
[109:43]
A
Are
[109:46]
B
engaging people. Like when I say selling the paper, I mean engaging people physically around idea. Political ideas and having something in your hand in which to say hey, check this out, you know and come back to me. Let's talk. Like that's really I do think an important part of building a political environment around. Around you and in your community. Now I think we're getting into areas that while I know what we. I know what we did is wrong, I today I don't know it would be the right way. And that is something fam. This has been. This is really something I do want to discuss. I'm not even sure we'll talk about it today but. But in a subsequent episode about like what. What lessons can we. What are lessons to be learned and what are even points of departure for what we did. Because in our anti war work which wasn't campus anti war network but it was community work, the big debate was around Palestine and whether support for Palestine should be one and in the Bay Area there. There were other radical groups that were part of the group that we were trying to build but then we were building it in opposition to the PSL that had done answer, you know, because an answer we felt like we couldn't get into. So there are all sorts of questions to talk about in terms of how one would take up the dealing with answer and then what do you do with your group? But like there we took up aptly A position of, oh no, you know, we don't want to make Palestine a litmus test for da da, da da. So we actually did the. The inverse there. We. We took up the more reformist position in the face of. In the face of what was considered. Well, I would say it's a more radical position, like not just us out of the Middle east, but, you know, calling for the liberation of Palestine. And even. Maybe I don't even know if the question of two state solution was even taken up as a point of unity. So questions. I think there are questions to be taken up about what to do. And I think mistakes can be mode. We made mistakes on both end. At the end of the day, I do agree with Michael that we saw ourselves as a little cog and that this bigger cog would. Then we saw it as some way, these positions as some way expressing our influence and then developing our influence out of taking right positions, which I think I feel like is connected to things like Trotsky's transitional demands.
[112:05]
C
What.
[112:05]
B
What demands? What actually build the movement versus that which I don't adhere to any more as much. So, yeah, I just want to say that those. There's the ISO operated both ways. I don't think they were right. But I. I have to say I still have questions about if I was part of an organization and I was meeting people from other organizations in a coalition and people who are independent. I still don't have quite answers as to how because these things are going to come up again, I don't have answers as to what the right thing to do is yet. You know, like. But that's something I would like to discuss more. So I'll just leave. I'll just say that.
[112:41]
C
Yeah, I mean the whole thing about the interlocking gears, I mean, that's chapter and verse from Trotsky's history of the Russian Revolution. He said the Bolsheviks were the small gear, they mobilized the Soviets and the Soviets mobilized the whole working class. I mean, that's his. That's his. That's literally his analogy in the book. You know, whether you agree or don't agree, that's. That's where it comes from. Yeah, where it comes from. So let's see in two. So that covers up to 2003, 2004. In 2003, 2004. Also, the other stuff I was doing while I was in the ISO was me and this guy named Tom Barton or Thomas Barton. He put out a newsletter back in the Vietnam War days called Vietnam gi, which was like an anti war Newspaper for soldiers. Him and a guy named Jeff Charlotte. Jeff Charlotte was a. A veteran of the Vietnam War. As soon as he got out in like 1970, 1971 or 1968, he started making a newspaper, an anti war newspaper. And their circulation was something like 40,000 at its peak. And three quarters of that was in Vietnam itself towards. With servicemen. Like, like. So it's a huge. There was a whole documentary about it called sir no sir that's part of the whole GI movement against the Vietnam War. So I worked with Barton to create what I. What we tried to have is like the modern version of that. The publication was called Traveling Soldier. I mean, it was just me and Tom Barton basically with a Word document or PDF, printing this thing out and then mailing it to the soldiers we knew or military families we knew and stuff. And some of those guys ended up after they got out or came home from Iraq, they became part of Iraq Veterans against the War. But that was like, that was officially sanctioned by the ISO leadership. Like Ahmed Sharkey gave us the green light. But we, it was all like through not underhanded, but like subterfuge. Like, it wasn't something that you would talk about at a convention and then pass a resolution. Because at that time we were afraid. We really believed that John Ashcroft was going to like, knock at our door at any minute, you know, and arrest every. Because after nine, 11 in the Patriot act, everybody, you know, there was a pair of. A bit of an atmosphere of paranoia on, on the left that the government was going to, you know, start rounding up radicals or whatever any minute now. Didn't really happen, thank God. But like, we were afraid. And so something like that was technically, technically legal, depending on how you do it. Like, basically Department of Defense regulations state that like, you're allowed to have one copy of any publication in your possession. Anything more than one is basically viewed as attempt to distribute, you know, which is actually probably correct. You know, you have a hundred copies of a newspaper, you're probably not reading all 100 copies yourself, obviously. So, you know, there, you know, we were trying to do like, kind of like a little bit like underground work. And we had like a PO Box and all this kind of stuff. And, you know, we didn't get very far. But I felt like something that kind of became a persistent theme for me at ISO events and meetings and anti war stuff too at campus Anti War Network was that, like, there was a lot of talk about soldiers revolting against the Vietnam War. And I had done a lot of reading at that time to try to learn the lessons of the, you know, the movement of the, you know, this. If, if you want to succeed in stopping the Iraq war, it kind of makes sense to like, try to learn what worked with the Vietnam War. How did they stop the war? And you know, there in every ISO talk, there almost always was some section about working class soldiers revolting, you know, yada, yada, yada. But there was basically never any organizational. They never took that to the level of like, okay, so what do we do about that? Like right now with the soldiers in Iraq? And there was a huge, what after the invasion, there was a huge swelling of anti sentiment in the military because they were sent without proper equipment. You know, they were told they would be liberators. You know, there's all this, you know, I don't want to rel. I don't want to revisit all that. But there was a lot of anti war sentiment because not just I, it was anti war, but it was also because of the way the, the Defense Department chose to wage the war that was screwed up and really pissed people off and made them open to anti war ideas. So there was a huge opening there. And I was like, we're. How come nobody's taking advantage of this or trying to do something with it? And so like, you know, I went back to like the 21 points of the common turn. And one of the things, one of the points of entry that you had to do if you wanted to gain admission to the Communist International was you have to agitate among the troops. You have to do something, you know. And I cited that in an internal document that we circulated, me and Tom circulated with Ahmed and all that. And eventually they signed off, like, you know, quietly, unobtrusively. But so that's kind of like, that's something that kind of became a persistent theme, was like I got kind of annoyed or frustrated that a lot of times people were giving speeches and saying, we should do X, we should do Y, we should do Z. And I agree we should do X, Y and Z. So like, how do we take X, Y and Z and like, turn it into an action plan? Like right now or soon, you know, maybe not today, but in the next week or two. Like, and there was basically, that's something that happened a lot with the ISO, in my opinion was like, you know, the labor movement should do X, unions should do Y. You know, they should go on strike. You know, there's constant, like, exhortation of what should happen, but not much follow up in terms of like, okay, I agree with that grand scheme idea. How does that break down into the, you know, my union local or my campus local or, you know, so that was my attempt to try to fill some of that gap. And there was not very much knowledge about that going on, even in my local brand. I didn't, I didn't tell the people on my branch committee about it. The district, the district organizer at the time, Meredith Collodner, she did know about it because she was like listed as someone. If Tom Barton had a, you know, he's an old, he was an older man, he was like 70 something at the time. He's doing this stuff with me. And I was like, you know, learning from him how they did it back in the day. She was like, if something had happened to him, she was like listed as a part of his estate or something like that, that she would get his papers about certain, certain political projects he was involved in. So she knew about it, but, like, nobody else knew about it and it wasn't broadcast. They did do. They actually did create a special supplement of Socialist Worker for Troops that we like used like a four page, you know, the thing in the middle of the newspaper. We did you. They did create that at some point, but that wasn't, it wasn't advertised to the whole organization, that this is what it's really for or whatever. I mean, it wasn't just for us. It was, you know, I don't want to make it sound like that either, but, you know, it was like a supplement just devoted to the soldier issue and quoting soldiers in Iraq, complaining about the war and all that kind of stuff. And then the other thing that happened in 2004 was that there was a whole debate about whether to support, support Ralph Nader's 2004 campaign. And my recollection, and I haven't gone back to look at the documents to see if I'm actually recalling correctly, but Todd Christian, who was the west coast organizer of the ISO, was like, enthusiastically, yes, we should endorse right now and get involved in whatever campaigns. Maybe you guys might know better than me because I, you know, you guys work with him closer than I did. And then the steering committee position was kind of like, like less enthusiastic. It was like, we should probably endorse, but there's some weird stuff going on with Nader in this camp because he was sucking up to like Pat Buchanan, which sucked, which was horrible because Pat Buchanan is like this right wing anti immigrant nativist. And then my position, I was like in the left minor, you know, the ultra left minority, you could say. And I was saying basically, we should endorse the campaign if it meets certain conditions. Two or three things. Nader should have a better position on Iraq and a couple other stuff like don't mess with the Reform Party and the Buchanan and all that. So anyway, that was the only time I ever had an open conflict with the steering committee on an issue. And it was debated at the 2004 socialism. They gave me my 10 minutes or five minutes to talk, and then Todd talked, and then the steering committee talked, and then there was a vote, and I got like three votes. And the steering committee position got. I don't know what. It was hundreds of votes, I guess. I don't know how many people voted. And then Todd's position had definitely more than mine. But I don't remember, you know, all that, but that was the only time I was ever.
[121:36]
D
I didn't even know there was such organization within the ISO.
[121:40]
C
Oh, yeah, like, we didn't call. You know, there was. Factions were not allowed. We didn't really. I didn't really think there was a need for a faction because we were just advancing different. It was a very specific fork in the road. Should we go left, right, or center? You could put it that way. And I was saying we should go left. The steering committee, you could say, was the center. Todd Kirtien, you know, was saying we should immediately take a right turn. You know, I mean, I'm not saying his position was right wing. I'm just making an analogy because, like, usually faction. Usually when you get into factions, usually it's. It's not one issue. It's. Usually there's a whole bunch of issues that we have problems with, and we have a different. You know, there's usually a bunch of other things. So just for this one thing, whether or not to endorse, you know, I'd never really thought about creating a whole faction. I just figured I'd make my case. If I lose the vote, I lose the vote. You know, it's not the end of the world. I. You know, not everybody agrees everything, you know, and then after the vote, that was that. And like, they, you know, I was. My position, I think, was characterized as ultra left. And, you know, probably that was true. So I felt like the only thing I learned about that debate or from that debate that I took away from it was kind of like, it's better to ex. To me, it's better to explain and argue, like, work out all the arguments. And then if somebody's ultra left that should be in the conclusion rather than the leading thing. Because like, as soon as you say somebody's ultra life, pro imperialist, racist, as soon as you put that in the headline, you've just shut down the actual discussion and argument about and sorting out whether or not this is a good idea or a bad idea. Like, I don't think in general, I try to avoid, you know, I might disagree with somebody, but I'm not going to label them a sectarian. You know what I mean? I'm going to try to, I might expose the fact that they're a sectarian through the actual paragraphs that I write. You know, you read it and you're like, okay, this other person is sectarian. Like, but I let the reader draw that. If they want to call them names, let the reader do that. I try to avoid doing it because I feel like it short circuits the process of debate and discussion when people start throwing around epithets like from the jump, you know, So I try to avoid that in my arguments with, you know, like, I might say it's not good to support X dictator, you know, but I'm, I, am I going to call them a Assad apologist or a counter revolutionary? Like, no, I don't, I generally don't want to do that, you know, especially if there's someone on the left, you know, if it's actually Assad, yeah, I will call Assad a counter revolutionary like that. You know what I'm saying? Like, like it's, you know, I just, if I think somebody's misguided or confused or has a wrong position, I'm going to try not to box them in so that they can't retreat. That's something Tom Barton actually taught me when I was working him with on Trial and Soldier was that like you should leave people room to retreat or shift or change their mind and not like pigeonhole them and dump cement on them so they can't lead the pigeonhole. You know, it's not a good idea. And that's partly also why I don't get, I don't get too worked up about like how I label myself or how I label other people or what their specific ideology is. Because people's ideas change or people have a contradictory ideas or someday one day somebody, on Monday somebody wakes up as a liberal, on Tuesday they become a Marxist, on Wednesday they become a Trump voter. Hopefully not like, you know what I'm saying? Like, because people can change their ideas all the time. It doesn't make, to me, it doesn't make A lot of sense to like get really stuck on labels and specific ideologies so rigidly, you know what I mean? Because people's ideas are always in flux and ideological allegiances can fluctuate quite a lot. So yeah, that's the two things I got from that debate. And then at that point, like I basically had to leave the ISO because I had, I graduated college and my first out of college job paid me so low that I had to get a second job. So I was working like seven days a week at a restaurant, between a restaurant and like a white collar office job. So I had to like leave the ISO for like three years from 2007 to, I mean, I didn't rejoin, but, but I thought about rejoining in 2010, 2011, after I got a better job where I didn't have to work so much. So that was when I started thinking about. That's when I kind of, I left the fishbowl. I called the ISO the fishbowl only because like, when you're inside an organization like that, it's like being in a fishbowl in the sense that like, you can see stuff on the outside world. Like, you know, Bush is president, you know, things are happening, but you don't really, your perspective is kind of skewed by being inside the organization, you know what I'm saying? Like, you don't, how you look at things is not how the average person sees things most of the time because they're not trapped in this little bubble of self reinforcing ideological policing or whatever you want to call it, whether it's Trotskyist or Mao, it doesn't matter, doesn't really matter what flavor of ideology. Jehovah's Witness, you know, you know, they have the same, you know, it's the same, it's the same thing. When you're inside the group, the world looks a certain way on the outside and then when you're outside the group, it looks, you see the same stuff, but it's not, it doesn't really look the same and it's not the same dynamics. So that, so my time outside of the ISO, like it just made me realize, it gave me more perspective. Like it made me realize like nobody in the working class cares about the, the how we word our flyers or all the, like, you spend so much stuff, so much time in meetings debating like minutiae of, you know, do we include Palestine and Yemen and Lebanon and you know, like, you know what I'm saying? Like that gets lost in the, the big picture. Scheme of things. When you have a rally, people are only going to remember one or two ideas. Basically. They're not going to remember the 10 point list of demands. And, but like in leftist meetings, you spend a lot of time with the microscope, you know, sussing, working out the specific details of something that in the big picture is probably not going to matter that much. Certainly not going to matter to the average person. So, yeah, so then, so that's, that's basically I stopped being in the ISO, active, I stopped paying dues, stopped going to meetings at the end of 2006 because I just, you know, you cannot work seven days a week and be a member of the ISL. It's just impossible. It's just physically impossible. It's kind of funny though. I got a, I got an email from Joel Geier explaining, you know, I mess, I don't know, I don't know what, I forgot what we were communicating about. But Joe Geier, who was a member of the steering committee and he was in the group that kicked out the people who formed the ISO back in 1977, he kicked them out of the International Socialists. Anyway, he, you know, I told him, look, I can't, I'm not a member right now because I just, you know, I'm working seven days a week, barely making ends meet. And he was like, he sent me a message like, oh, you know, the revolution doesn't wait. There's no breaks for revolution. I was like, I was like, yeah, dude. I didn't respond. But then years later, I found out he's like a, he's like a millionaire. He's like a bond trader on Wall street in the 80s. Like he made a fortune. Yeah, you know, like, you know, he's like a, I was probably arguing with a millionaire, most likely. And then he actually played, he actually played a very negative role that ended up leading to the ISO's dissolution.
[129:10]
D
Tell me his name again.
[129:12]
C
Joel Gy. I'll put him, I'll put his name in the chat.
[129:15]
D
Thank you. I can look him up.
[129:16]
C
He's, he's ancient. He's, he's, he's a living fossil. I mean, I'm getting there too, you know, I'm getting there too.
[129:22]
B
But, you know, one of the themes that's come up for me in this discussing is listening. And I realized that while I was a good listener in the ISO twist to an extent, I did, I probably did a better job listening than my comrades did on a paper sale. But I will tell you one way I didn't listen I went, I currently believe that when you listen to properly listen to somebody who has a different point of view, you have to put your own point of view on that at stake. It's like you have to put your. Those cards have to be on the table. Like it has to be possible for that person to change my mind. If I'm truly offering, saying that that person needs to be prepared to be changed their mind. And if I go and I'm like, no, I'm rigid here, but you're going to, like, you have to, you have to move towards me, I don't really think I can listen. And that's one change that's been made for me. It's like, you know, I've got to be willing to know that I'm putting at risk in engaging this person the fact that yes, I could change their mind towards me, but I have to make it possible for them to move my point of view to them. And if I'm not doing that, then more likely than not I'm not fully listening. And that's a feature of sectarianism and even opportunism that, you know, where, when is that sectarian? Is when is it opportunistic? Or when is it actually like engagement and actual real, you know, trying to be like honest with a person, I think, are some of the questions that I would like to work out with you as we going forward, you know, because I think that's what comes up for me. And just listening to what you're saying as well as just a wonderful trip down memory lane about ISO stuff. Yeah.
[131:08]
D
What I want to say is I think Bin should finish and then we should. I'd like, I'm writing down some notes. I'd like to revisit those areas with him in a discussion on the second part because I just don't think it's appropriate to jump in and it just seems awkward now to not finish, you know.
[131:34]
B
Yeah.
[131:35]
D
And so therefore we should have part two to further go in depth.
[131:40]
C
Yeah, I can finish the. By the biographical. Yeah, I mean, seems like that should be finished and then all the issues that it raises maybe should be separate.
[131:52]
A
Yeah. There's several very clear themes to me that I think we could organize future discussions around.
[131:59]
D
Yeah. For example, I'd like to know if the three of you decided to join. You know, not right now. That's not. This has to be edited out. But if you three would have wanted to join the, the different groups that were formed right afterwards. You know, there was the, the socialist groups that formed after 2019, once it. The ISO dissolved. But anyhow, let. Let's finish. And I think that that's what I'm doing. For me, it's just trying to. Because there's a lot. So I do some bullet points and then we can revisit those points.
[132:39]
C
All right. I will try to finish the biographical. Biographical stuff because the elements that are in the first part of the story end up shaping a lot of the second part. So basically, from 2007 to 2010, you know, I'm working seven days a week for three years with no. No vacation, no break. Like, actually, I mean, it sounds bad, and it was. It was kind of bad, but it was. I don't know, it doesn't sound as. It wasn't as hard as it might sound, I guess, is what I'm saying, you know, but when you're 20, when you're in your mid-20s, you know, you just have a lot more energy to do stuff like that, you know, at. If you do, if you're at 45 or 55, working seven days a week, you're probably not in. That's not going to go well in the long run. So basically 2010, I get a new job that's paying me significantly more, significantly more. So then I can just quit the second job at the restaurant. And then I start rethinking, like, because I'm still a believer, you know, I'm still a believer in the ISO, basic mission and all that, you know, I start thinking about rejoining, but I didn't rejoin right away. I didn't feel like, I don't know, nothing was really. There was Nothing compelling in 2010 for me going on. That was like, like, like my personal situation got better. But, you know, I wasn't rushing to just join, jump back in either, because, like, it's not like if there had been a war going on or some, you know, hugely electrifying important thing going on, like. Yeah, but like, in 2010, that was like the rise of the Tea Party, you know, it sucked. It was not a fun. And that was. I think that was the year the, The Deepwater Horizon, BP thing, all the oil everywhere, it's just like sucked, you know, honestly, as a leftist, you know,
[134:29]
B
and Obama was president.
[134:31]
C
Yeah, Obama was president. I never, I never liked the guy. Look, I mean, this is getting into personal stuff, but, like, I just thought he was a cornball, to be honest. Like, from the jump, like. Like, I understand Marxist theory, you know, you understand things in a, hopefully even a more deeper way than the average Person who's not paying attention to politics. Like, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about just like on a personal level. Like, he just. I didn't understand what the hype was, like, why he's so. Like, people were like, worshiping this guy and stuff, and I was like, whatever. And then the thing that really irked me about him was when the whole Reverend Wright situation where he. I mean, Reverend Wright got him and Michelle married. You know, like, they were close. They were like, they were tight. And then one day he's just like. Just threw him under the bus, like nothing. You know, I was like. I was like, this guy sucks, man. I don't care. This guy. But, you know, but that doesn't. That's not affecting the political assessment and all that and whatever. But there was nothing happening at the time that was particularly interesting to me that would compel me to rejoin the ISO. And then that actually changed in 2011 with the Arab Spring, you know, that was like, okay, you know, it makes sense to want to join a revolutionary organization or revolutionary leftist organization when there's revolutions sweeping the globe and then ending up on our shores in the forms of. In the form of Occupy Wall Street. And also I think. I think the Wisconsin thing. Yeah, the Wisconsin uprising was in 2010. And there was some people were chanting about Egypt or Tunisia or something at. So there was some overlap. It was starting. The influence of the Arab Spring was starting to be felt in sort of American leftist politics. So, yeah, the Arab Spring breaks out. I'm starting to rethink thinking seriously, rejoining the ISO and the Libya rev. The Libyan revolution. Like, there's revolutions in like a bunch of Arab countries. And the Libyan revolution is like the first one that's kind of controversial on the left. I would say, like, everybody supported the Egyptian revolution. Everybody supported the Tunisian revolution.
[136:31]
D
Yay.
[136:32]
C
Get rid of these pro US dictators. Very easy for leftists who are anti US to just, you know, support that. But then it gets complicated with Libya because this guy's. Gaddafi is like an anti US dictator, you know, and lots of people, lots of leftists, like PSL Party for socialism and liberation, and not just them, but basically oppose the revolution in that country because it's. They're toppling an anti US dictator and therefore that's a win for US imperialism. That's how they see. They see everything is. Everything that happens in the world for them is like, that helps US Imperialism, hurts US imperialism. There's. There's no other factor in their thinking, basically. And so what happens is Gilbert Achkar, who is like a French Trotsky, French, Lebanese Trotsky is, I think he is, you know, very, you know, he's very educated, very sharp. He basically caused a lot of controversy on the left by supporting, supporting the revolution and, and like the intervention by the United, that was sanctioned by the United nations to stop, to militarily stop Gaddafi's tanks from rolling into Benghazi, which is a hotbed of the revolution at that point. And so he stirs up a lot and there's a lot of, you know, so that creates a lot of debate, not everybody agrees on this on the Western left. And my initial position was basically the same as the ISO, which is like revolution, yes, intervention no. You know, to sum it up, basically, PSL's position is revolution, no, intervention no. And, and, but what ends up happening is what actually happens in the real world is the Libyan revolution, the people leading it, and, and the people in the streets too. It's not just a bunch of guys sitting in a, you know, in a hotel suite, a five star hotel suite. It's not just them, but the people in the streets were demanding intervention in the form of. They call, you know, they call. It's not, they don't think of it as imperialism though, because they're asking for it, whereas they didn't want foreign boots on the ground. But basically the Libyan revolutionaries, pretty much all of them are like pro airstrikes on Gaddafi's forces because that's how you stop tanks, is with airstrikes. I mean, there's just no other way around it. And so the ISO position kind of collapses because, you know, if the ISO is saying revolution yes, intervention no, but the revolution itself is saying revolution yes, intervention yes. You know, it's like your position is basically, your position is no longer relevant if you're saying revolution yes, intervention no, and then intervention takes place anyway. You know, you're just, you're just saying things that don't matter. It's you, the way things have developed has just gone beyond your original starting point. Or you lost the argument. You could put it that way too. So I initially went after Gilbert Achgar and I wrote, I actually wrote an essay. The title, the title was something about calling him a cruise missile, Marxist, something like that. You know, I, I think it's, I still think it's good, but I'll get into that in a minute. But like, so. And they published it. Socialist Worker published it. I wasn't a member of the ISO at that point. They published it but then they unpublished it. Within 24 hours, it was gone, and I wasn't notified. So I email Al Maas and I'm like, did the link break? Am I not seeing it on the front page for some reason? And he's like, oh, I don't know. He gave me some, like, hem. Haw. You know, verbal jiu jitsu, dancing around, whatever the. I don't think he gave me a straight answer. Let me just put it that way. I could be wrong, but, like, the answer reads like. Like he's not being straight with me. Like, he could have just said, Gilbert Atgar got upset, and we don't want to upset him. I think that would be the honest answer, honestly, and that's fine. You know, you want to preserve a relationship with an important left intellectual, and you didn't want to, like, attack him personally. You know, it was a personal attack, you know, like, you know, whatever. Like, I might not agree with the decision, but at least that's the honest answer of, like, why it happened. You know what I'm saying? That's all I was hoping for, but I didn't get that. I got some, like, weird Hemha something. Chat GPT. Before it was chat GPT, you generated AI slot before AI, you know, something that says something without saying anything. So that. That irritated the hell out of me.
[141:01]
A
And then our tradition calls it opportunism.
[141:04]
C
Opportunity. Yeah.
[141:05]
A
I mean, yeah, Our tradition calls it, you. You can't be straight. Basically, a power. A person who we're trying to court doesn't like what you said. But I have to somehow make it seem political.
[141:20]
C
Right, right. Some. Some principled thing. Right, Exactly. I mean, it's. You know, I think it would have been fine if he just said, you know, upon further reflection or debate, we felt like it crossed the line into a personal attack, and we don't want to do that. You know, I think that's a fair. I don't think that's opportunism, personally. Like, I can see. I can see the argument in favor of saying that's opportunism. Like, it's.
[141:44]
A
It's like, to me, yeah, dishonesty is the opportunism.
[141:49]
C
Right. The dishonesty is the right. Exactly. I agree with that. So that got me very irritated. And then it made me think, like, okay, if I rejoin the ISO, hypothetically, how would that be addressed if I don't agree with a decision that the editor of the newspaper made?
[142:07]
B
You know?
[142:08]
C
And that's when I started thinking, like, how did the Bolsheviks deal with that. Because surely there must have been cases where somebody published something. You can't unpublish stuff in a newspaper in, you know, 1917, because that didn't exist. But, you know, there must have been disputes about stuff that gets published and doesn't get published and blah, blah. You know, there had to be something, right? So that's what led me down the rabbit hole of digging into, like, how did the Bolsheviks handle situations like this? And that's when I started looking at how did they elect their Central Committee? How did they get their newspaper out there? How were those decisions made? Who controlled what, who controlled finances, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's when I, like, kind of inadvertently stumbled onto the whole slate system not being used by the Bolsheviks and that they. They elected their. Their Central Committee. Well, there's two. There's a couple different things. The Bolsheviks weren't a party. Number one, they weren't a party. They were a faction of a party. And basically the way they did elections was the most. The people who got the most number of votes ended up on the Steering Committee. It wasn't a unified block of a list of 10 names. And you can vote for or against this, and if you don't like these 10 names, you have to come up with your own other 10 names. They didn't do it like that at all. So when I realized that, I was like, oh, shoot. Well, that made me open. That just kind of opened my mind to, like, what else am I not? What else didn't I know that I should probably know, since we're always talking about the Russian Revolution. You know, we never really delved into the nitty gritty of nuts and bolts about how these things. How these things, how. How decisions were made and how organizing actually happened. And so it was in that process where I. I ran into the debate between Lars Lee, Chris Harmon, John Molyneux, and a couple other guys in the Historical materialism. It was like a debate series that they had, and Lars Lee's contribution had, like, a couple paragraphs talking about how Cliff. How Tony Cliff, the British socialist that the ISO used to promote his Lenin books, basically engaged in plagiarism and said a lot of misleading stuff. And, you know, it was all footnoted. It was all documented that this actually happened. And that just blew my mind. I was just like, holy. I didn't know all this. I had no idea that. I just took it for granted that Tony Cliff was basically correct about his view of Lenin. And, you know, I didn't know I had no idea that, you know, I just didn't. There was never. I never read a contrary point of view, basically. Like, I had read other Lenin books, but they had never talked about stuff like Bending the Stick or the specific things that Tony Cliff claimed Lennon did and stuff. Like they were all sort of. None of them contradicted each other, let's put it that way. It was just like, book A is talking about a bunch of issues. Book B, basically the same stuff, but, you know, a different take, but it doesn't actually flatly contradict what's in book A. So what I was reading from Lars Lee, who was reading a lot is. And translating a lot of original Russian language stuff was like, flatly contradicting. So that, you know, that was like, oh, shoot, maybe I should like, investigate and see, see, see, you know, what else is amiss in this? Because he only talked about a couple instances. So. So that's what led me down the sort of Leninism rabbit hole. And then. And then from there, Occupy Wall street starts happening in September of 2011, which is like a couple blocks from the new job that I got. So I start going to the encampment, like, every lunch break. And then sometimes I go, I stop by before work and sometimes after work, and they're there for like two months, which is basically as long as the Paris commune lasted, roughly 60 days. And like, you know, I was. I spent a good, you know, one plus hours there every day, every weekday for that. For that 12 weeks, you know. And so I was seeing with my own eyes how irrelevant the socialist left was to what was happening. And like, you know, when you go to a demonstration and you're actually there and you're part of a movement, and then you read the account of the movement online from a socialist or Marxist, this, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, you cannot, if you can't recognize what you're reading with your own lived experience. Like, that's a huge red flag. The bad kind, you know, that's a huge, awful. Like, it's like, what. Where's the disconnect? Why is it that what I'm reading has almost no relationship to what's actually happening? So that's why I started getting into, you know, so I was rethinking Leninism, rethinking all. Everything I had been taught by the ISO. And then this thing happens where. Where to my mind, the ISO should have been. You know, I could understand. I could understand that like. Like the ISO was, you know, the New York City ISO, which at that time was, you Know, I don't know, probably 75 people.
[147:13]
B
Yeah.
[147:13]
C
Across five branches, something like that. Like when Occupy Wall street was happening, I was think my, if I was the district organizer, you know, if I was the dictator of the local ISO and I could just do whatever I wanted to, I would have been like, just dissolve all the branches until this thing blows over and put every single person into a working group. Because there were about 40 working groups and if you got about 80 people, you can put two people into each working group to do influence the direction of that working group, sell your newspaper, push your argument. And they didn't do anything like that. As far as I can tell. They had a couple people in the labor working group and like the demands working group or something. Like they put probably five or 10 people at most on Occupy related stuff. And mostly what they were doing seems to be was like maintaining the branches, selling the newspaper at NYU Columbia Hunter and using Occupy as kind of like a talking point to show that the perspective that people are revolting is correct and the audience of socialist ideas is huge. And you know, all the perspective stuff, you know, and it was such a huge, I was just such a huge disappointment, you know what I mean? Like, you know, just imagine, you know, a workers council forming and basically the ISO is just selling a newspaper outside the workers council meeting. They're not even in the meeting. You know, that's what it felt like, you know, so, you know, just watching them just. And I would watch them sell papers and, and set up and break down and like they had no permanent presence in the encampment, which I also thought was a little strange because like if you have a district organizer or east coast organizer, you know, that person is paid full time to do ISO stuff. Why didn't one of those people just live at the encampment for and just build relationships and talk and get to know people and there was nothing, they didn't do anything like that whatsoever. You know, they just, it seemed like what they did was just maintain the branches and the routines that they had. And then Occupy was like this little thing that they shifted a couple resources too, you know. And I don't know what it was like in. I don't know what it was like in the Bay Area. I assume it's real relatively similar, but it was shocking to me. That was shocking.
[149:29]
D
It depends where. I was in a working group in SF and there were a lot of assemblies. I just think it took a long time, some of the assemblies. But yeah, it just depended where in the Bay Area one was. I think some of the outside ones, outside of SF were more, um. We're getting things done anyhow. Go ahead.
[149:47]
C
Oh yeah, yeah. The General Assemblies were a nightmare. I didn't, I didn't sit through any of those. I was looking at the working groups. Like the way Occupy kind of worked was like, every group is working autonomously. Nothing important from that group will go to the central ga. Like the GA was just like, you just get nothing done there, you know, Whereas all these little working groups are like going to have a protest and we're going to protest this bank or we're going to set up a garden or we're going to march on somebody's speech or you know what I mean? Like there so much action was happening through the working groups that, you know, I just felt like you could just ignore the General assembly altogether because like, you know, nobody paid attention to it really. So from there, from there, you know, I wrote that piece Occupying the Tasks of Socialists, which I submitted to the Australian links website because I had a feeling they would publish it and that ISO people would read it because if I sent it directly to the ISO, they would just never publish it because it was critical. So I knew, you know, I had a feeling that they would read it and that it would generate, it would, it would go viral among the socialist left. Because, you know, I'm a former ISO member, you know, writing, critiquing some of the stuff the ISO was doing and I felt like it was a fair critique. I didn't say you guys are opportunists, you guys are sectarian, you guys are, you know, I was just like, here's what the ISO said, here's what they left out, here's what they probably should have done instead, you know, blah. I didn't say the ISO got every single thing wrong. Like it wasn't, you know, you, any fair minded person would read that as like a, you know, you could say I was right or wrong, but I wasn't like just on them, you know, which is a lot of what Internet leftism is, is just on other people you don't like or whatever. And so I got, I got in contact with a lot of people because at the end of the article I was like, if you agree that the socialist left as it's currently constituted as a bunch of sects competing with each other, which isn't helpful or useful, and you know, history is basically leaving us in the dust at this point with anarchists leading. Anarchists are leading this thing and socialists are barely catching up you know, email me. And so a lot of different people from a lot of different tendencies. Email me. Like Eric Blanc, he emailed me. I was in contact with people from the Kusama Project. I had people from Socialist Alternative emailing me from the Socialist Party, from dsa, you know, because I was trying to put forward some type of regroupment initiative to like, you know, it was like, it just didn't seem, it just seemed insane that you could have five or ten newspaper selling groups all competing with each other, all of them not relevant at all to Occupy. You know, it seemed like we all sort of agree on a lot of the basic stuff. If we want to influence Occupy's direction, especially to compete with anarchists, we're going to have to like pool our resources at least a little bit and coordinate. And I, I knew, I knew when I made that appeal at the end that like the groups themselves were not going to go for it. Like I already knew. But by putting the call out there, I figured what would happen is the people who are dissatisfied in a particular group, who had a healthy mindset, healthier mindset, like a lot of people would stay in a group because it's the only game in town, you know what I'm saying? And they're not happy with the group, where the group is going, but they're in it because it's like I don't want to just be alone or be by myself, you know what I'm saying? So I figured those people would reach out to me and that's basically what happened. So I was trying to, trying to gin up some multi tenancy cooperation and use that as the basis of starting some type of formation where everybody's at least under the same roof and talking, you know, and coordinating some type of effort. And that's basically how the North Star website that I launched with Louis Proyect got set up. And that was kind of the general purpose was to have conversations in a place that involves the existing left but isn't reducible to the existing left. So like, if you're an independent person who's not in any group, you could submit something, you know, and, and get published. And because like all the party line publications are just so narrow, you know what I mean? Like PSL would never publish a dissenting view from a PSL member. The ISO, you know, the, the range of descent in the ISO was very narrow, you know, like, like super, super narrow. You couldn't challenge, you definitely could not challenge Tony Cliff. You definitely could not. You know, there's a Lot of stuff that's off limits. So the whole point of Northstar was a place where people who are dissidents, like the Renewal Faction of the ISO could get a fair hearing. You know, if somebody. If the steering committee had submitted a document or article saying the rule new faction is bad, because we probably would have printed it. As long as it didn't say stuff like you're a CA agent and just insane stuff like that, you know, we probably would have printed. But they never engaged, you know, they would never engage with stuff like that. So. So the Renewal faction, you know, we cut the North Star would like cover them as a journalistic thing. Like, here's the thing that's happening in the ISO, here's their documents, here's their arguments. Here's what happened at the commit steering committee thing. Here's where at the convention where they got expelled. Some of their. Some of the stuff I was doing got published in their documents because I had discovered that the whole Caterpillar stock sale happened. You know, Nobody in the ISO knew about that. Nobody bothered to check the 501C3 filings. And then the other thing I was doing with. With the North Star was like covering the Arab Spring in a way that I thought the revolutionary left should cover, but wasn't for a bunch of reasons. So there was a big focus on Syria and Libya. We actually had actually had a. I was in contact with a guy from the Tripoli Brigade, which was like a fighting group in Libya. And he was. He was like, right. He was like, denounce it. He would. He would read what PSL said about the revolution, that it's anti black and all this type of stuff. And he's. He would send me photos of like black. They had black units. They had actual whole black units. And they had like a black general who was part of the revolutionary forces. So like, if you're saying the Libyan rebels are all like a racist lynch mob against black people, you know, it gets hard to sustain that argument when you have actual black rebels and there some of them are generals. It's not like they were just cannon fodder. So there was a lot of like independent journalism going on there that I didn't see anybody on the. On the revolutionary left doing. And it kind of got me. It kind of made me very skeptical of the claim of being a revolutionary leftist if every time a revolution breaks out, you find a way to disown it. Did you have facing.
[156:22]
D
Did you face any criticisms? Oh, yeah, some internal disagreements.
[156:28]
C
Oh, in Northstar, huh. There were people There were people who were like, I wish you would just shop about Syria so that you could just have, we could just all get along on this multi tenancy recruitment stuff. You know, I found, you know, there are people who said that and I was like, my attitude towards that was like, well, how are we ever going to have a healthy left that can't tolerate a debate or a differing opinion? Like we have to learn to work together despite, especially on foreign policy where it's like, you know, me and Andy might disagree about a certain foreign policy issue, but like I can, we can yell at each other till we're blue in the face, but we're not going to impact directly what's happening in that country by and large, you know what I'm saying? Unless some group from that country is asking the group that we're part of to pass some resolution or something, like, you know what I'm saying? Like, like, you know, debating about foreign policy, like, or foreign stuff that's happening abroad, like, doesn't really matter that much in the here and now in terms of what we have to organize today, tomorrow and next week for the most part, you know what I'm saying? Like, like I published stuff on the North Star by somebody who quit PSL because they, they were unhappy. PSL was demo undemocratic, but they agreed totally with PSL on Syria and they wrote an article denouncing me. You know, I published it, I cleaned it up. I cleaned up the editorial, you know, the, the spelling and the, you know, all that I edited and you know, I polished that turd as much as I could. And you know, that's part of the, you know, I tried to give it as fair a thing as possible, you know, like I could think they're completely wrong. But you know, there has to be room in a socialist, a healthy socialist organization for, you know, some wide ranging debate. I mean there's got to be, there still have to be red lines, but they should be, generally speaking, pretty large, I think, for the most part. And so that was like the only pressure I would say I faced inside the North Star sort of milieu was people wanted me to stop talking about Syria.
[158:23]
D
Does it still exist?
[158:25]
C
No, no, I had to resign because the person I was living with, you know, it was like a dysfunctional slash abusive living situation and I, I, my hand was forced by stuff that was going on at home. I had to quit. I didn't want to quit, but it was, it was, I remember that it was under duress. Yeah, no, so I had to Write a resignation letter saying I have to attend to personal problems, blah blah blah. So then you know, the people who took over were kind of pro Assad and you know the stuff that the, the quality of the material took a sharp dive downward and it stopped being, you know, as much of an interesting or useful website for any type of leftist rethinking of important questions.
[159:09]
D
Because I was trying to look for it right now.
[159:11]
C
Yeah, it's 90. Yeah, it's too bad.
[159:13]
D
It's unfortunate it wasn't the noise start.info
[159:16]
C
yeah, it's owned by some Chinese spam or I don't know. Yeah, yeah, it's one of those websites that's owned by some other whatever. So yeah, the one funny story I want to tell about Eric Block or two. Two stories I want to tell related to Northstar. Eric Blanc, he was in a group called Socialist Organizer at the time and he, I think he's the son of some important or big wig Trotskyist person in that group.
[159:43]
B
Alan Benjamin, his son is, he's the son of Alan Benjamin who's the leader of Socialist Organizing.
[159:51]
C
Wow, okay, okay, so that's what it is. So anyway, but clearly he's more open minded than his father, I guess. So you know he, he came to New York and we met this is during the North Star era, 2012, 2013. And you know, we had a friend in conversation. He basically kind of, you know, he was definitely reading my Lenin, Leninism arguments and it definitely played a role in some of the stuff he ended up doing later. But he came to New York City to go on the Daily Show. The Daily show invited him and I think her name is Maria Savart. She was the national organizer of DSA for like 15 years or something. She was like their main office person holding the group together for like from 2011 to like 2024, something like that. So they were going to have both of them on the show, you know, so you know, we met, we talked about regroupment, state of the laugh, blah blah. And the last thing I told them before he got in the cab was what the Daily show is trying to do is they're going to try to, they're going to try to get you to in fight with that DSA person. Don't fall for that trap. That's, that's the whole thing that they're trying to, you know, so don't fall for it. And then I see the clip and that's exactly what he did. He fell, he went right for it. He's like, yeah, DSA is a capitalist organization. And, and then, then they get. Then, then the Daily show got dsa, the DSA person to be like, no, we're not a capitalist organization. So it was like, it was just crazy because it was like, dude, the last thing I said to you was avoid this obvious trap. It was an obvious setup that they were doing, you know, to invite a Trotskyist and a DSA person to talk. Because this is during the era when Obama was accused of being a socialist, basically. So the, the thing the Daily show was doing was like, let's hear for some real socialists about what they think about Obama. And they both said Obama's a capitalist. They both said the, both the DSA person and the, and, and Eric Block said, you know, Obama's pro capitalism, he's not a socialist. But then he fell right into the thing and I was just like, you know, it was frustrating because it was like, you know, we had this whole conversation about regroupment and yet he just, he just couldn't help himself, I guess. I don't know. And then he ends up later joining dsa. And now that's his thing is, you know, he's the Leninist DSA guy, kind of, which is a funny thing. This is hilarious. And the same thing with the ISO people who all, not all of them, but a good chunk of them got ended up, you know, being absorbed by DSA despite giving so many speeches about the dangers of the Democratic Party, right? How evil it is and all this. And it's always the graveyard of movements. And you know, I went to so many panels by Lance Alpha and all that know, listening to that sort of stuff. The second story I want to say before we wrap up is there are some groups out there that are called base building groups. I don't know if Andy's heard of those, but they're basically re. They call them. They. They style themselves as revolutionary groups, but they don't ne. They don't generally, as far as I can tell, subscribe to newspaper Leninism, but they do tenant organizing, mutual aid, you know, non electoral politics, you know, street protest, this kind of thing. And one of those groups is Philly. Philly socialists. And the leader. One of the, the leader of that, One of the leaders of that group, Tim Horace, you know, he was one of the people who contacted me out of the article looking for regroupment or talking about it or whatever. And he was like, he said something strange to me that. Or to me it was strange where he was like, he said something like, you know, you only post political stuff on Facebook and you should be posting personal stuff too because, you know, people want to see another part of your life or something like that. And it was like, I thought it was really weird. I was like, I was like, dude, I didn't say this to him, but I was like, it just, it just, it just, it made me realize that like cults of personality on the left are a thing, you know what I mean? That some people get involved in leftist organizing or writing because they like to see their name in a newspaper or on a website or you know, for reasons of ego or they want to build a personal brand and all this type of stuff. And I was just like, I didn't say anything back to him, I just listened. But like, it really irked me and it made me really like turn me off to the idea of being a quote unquote leftist thought leader, you know, Like, I didn't want to like, you know what I mean? Like, and, and you can go through comment sections all over the place and see my name and people denouncing me and all this. And Eduardo asked the question about, I wanted to answer that about the psl. They actually have a book, a whole book denouncing me called the, what's it called? Socialism. Socialism and war. Two opposing trends. And PSL is one trend and I'm the other trend. They're anti imperialists and I'm pro imperialist and my name's in the book and it's about the Libya stuff. But it, but that kind of stuff made me realize like I, you know, I really didn't want to be any type of like leftist thought leader or getting my name everywhere and all that. Like, I wasn't in it. I was only publishing stuff because I felt like certain things needed to be said and nobody was saying them, you know what I'm saying? And, and if everybody, if there's nothing like that out there, then I don't need to be, have my name out there and talking about like, like, like I see a lot of people who used to be in the ISO who are just publishing stuff very regularly non stop commenting on the latest leftist fad of today. And that's. I just can't, I just can't. I don't care. I don't care.
[165:27]
D
There's so many areas here you can cover at some point. Five points in response to Fan Bin.
[165:33]
C
Yeah, right.
[165:33]
D
Conversation with feminine.
[165:35]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's both Bam bin
[165:37]
D
and Paul LeBlanc are wrong.
[165:39]
C
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I was like Man, I don't want to spend the rest of my life doing that. That's a waste of time. So. So when I was forced to quit Northstar, I still kept. I still kept writing and doing my activism just under. Not my name, you know, So I had, you know, a bunch of pseudonyms that I was using to cover the Sanders campaign, Syria. When the ISO dissolved, I created a thing just to handle that, you know, and it kept my name out. Kept my name out of people's mouths pretty successfully. And I got to say what I felt should be said that needed to be said, you know, So I got the best of both worlds in that sense and stayed under the radar, you know, even as the ISO dissolved. Yeah. And I pieced together everything that basically happened with that. Yeah. So that's basically the end of the. I'll cap the discussion there, you know, in terms of my biography, you know, even though I retired, I was still actually working, just not in the same way or in front. Not as, you know, high profile or whatever. Because I just mean, I didn't like. I didn't like that. I didn't like. The experience was not great for me personally. I was like, this is stupid.
[166:51]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think my Brandy just got in and she was like, wait, you're still recording?
[166:57]
C
Yeah, I know, 20 years, man.
[166:59]
D
Right.
[166:59]
B
But here's what I'll say, which is because you covered a lot of territory, and. And I think the stuff around Libya or really the Arab Spring, they're probably. They're probably areas I might disagree on that, or at least say, here's a different point of view. Or even around Occupy, where I have some questions about. And there's. There's things to discuss out of that. I think there are several points like that that could happen, but I. What I hope will come out of this today and then going forward is I don't know the answer about what has to happen for revolution to be a possibility, but I believe that revolutionaries have to talk about that. And so that's kind of where I see this as a starting point for us. What I'm. What got me most. What. What I'm most excited about is to learn your background and to see how much there is in a commonality and to help me go, like, I recognize myself in many of the stories you said about how you're. And so that, I guess for me is like, this is the beginning of potentially building a. A place where we can workshop together some of the discussion points. I don't know the order actually now because there's a lot of things that came up and we could go in any order, but I would say more offline will maybe decide that. But if you're willing to carry on with us around any of these points, and Michael may have a point and Eduardo may have points that he wants to, I would really welcome that because this, what's left didn't start in 2020, it started in 2018. But it's still trying to answer a question of really, ultimately, what is it going to take to actually have working people be part of making a change? Because it looks like the need for it is getting greater and greater, but the distance between what is, what is required of us and the actual stuff on the ground is getting farther and farther. Like, that's scaring me even more and more. And so that's why I'm excited about, about discussing this stuff with you. So that's, I'll just say that as a capstone for this is like, for me it's a, it's an invitation to carry on together in conversations that are going to be meaningful for me, I think, for Michael, for Eduardo, hopefully for you. And then we'll just have to see who else wants to pay attention to it because it's good that it's, you know, fam bin here. So if people have a problem with fan bin, they can put it in the comments section and tell me to my face.
[169:32]
D
Right.
[169:33]
C
But call me imperialist about but I'm
[169:35]
B
glad you came to us as yourself because I, I do think this, I want this discussion to be out in the open because if there are differences, our responsibility is to figure out how to identify them. And I do would say how to go forward with them because we're taught, I think we all believe that that's what we're going to have to be able to do. So we have to be able to do it. And if we can't do it, then we don't really have much guidance to offer others and how to do that, you know, because, because we couldn't do it and maybe they would learn out of our inability. So I'll say that. And maybe if Michael, Eduardo wants to add things and then maybe. Any final words from you, Ben?
[170:16]
D
I, I feel as if this is a former Jehovah's Witness story. It has a lot of similarities. I'm very just intrigued by this journey, this political journey from your, even from younger years. We went way back from when you were an adolescent. So I look forward now as I get a clear sense of who you are to having some of those discussions that as what you tried to create before with no start an open debate and non censored unfiltered discussion so that we can have a share of ideas that I think are important today's age. I look forward to that now understanding who you are and also revisiting areas that I have jot down so that we can go in depth onto some of those areas. I would like to also go back to memory link with my biography but not in the way that not sharing my whole life but just specific areas like organizing such as Occupy right and the anti war movement and what happened post 911 I'm seeing similarities of how we've entered the Middle east before and how we're entering the Middle east again now but at a different angle. So I think that those discussions merit and episode on its own and so I look forward to that. I really do. And so I go I'd like to have this discussion again with you if you can come back.
[171:55]
C
Hope so.
[171:58]
A
Oh yeah. I was just writing I. Thanks a lot for also taking all this time waiting and then taking all this time to lay this out. I I really do find it very useful and very interesting and some specific areas I'd like to explore more. I I have three off the top of my head which is and they're all interrelated. But like what is what is your understanding of the trajectory of Occupy Wall street and the Sanders campaign and that trajectory Turns out Eric Block has revived Kotskyism. He openly rejected Leninism and now he's like actually Kotzky was right. You know. So that discussion about the the. The role of those ideas in the movement the role of you know, the Sanders campaign. The second one is also the role of US covert and soft power in shaping the trajectory of the Arab Spring. There's a lot of sort of hindsight rethinking I've done about both those movements and right now I think we've developed amongst us here thinking and talking an analysis of of that that there's both us covert and soft power that still plays a major role in shaping any bottom up movement. And that's something that's you know I'd love to explore more with you. And then the other aspect that I think we could get into more is what's worth what's worth retaining in Leninism and that Leninism is actually a broad set of. There's. There's multiple Leninisms but meaning what about and it's directly pertaining to like the kind of activist experience we had that was actually very valuable and, and positive and healthy about our work in the ISO and the stuff that wasn't. And what do we know in terms of actually going back and understanding, you know, the, the, the question of revolutionary organization as an evolving, you know, as an evolving body of thought, you know, what are we, what are we taking away from that now? So those are the big, big three. Because I think I have some big, you know, off the, off the, off the bat, I'm like, oh, I have some big meaty disagreements, but that was with 2011, you know, or 2013, bin, you know, so I don't, you know, and don't. You don't have to say the names of your pseudonyms, but I'm, I would love to, you know, you could, you could send us stuff offline for us to, to read, because I am interested in that, all of that too. So.
[174:52]
C
Okay. Yeah, we'll see. I guess we'll see. I'm definitely interested to come back. That's. It would be great, great to come back and explore in depth some of the issues. I mean, 25 years of biography is like, you know, it's a lot, it's a lot to cover and then to tell actual, you know, this just some of the key events and highlights and all that. I mean, my, I feel like my ISO experience was not. Was in many ways similar, but in a lot of important ways different in that, like, because we were in Rochester, we didn't have much contact with the rest of the organization most of the year. So like, we just kind of experimented and did things on our own and independently figured out what works, what doesn't work. Whereas in the New York district, it was much more. More rigid, more, more like, this is the way things are done, things are done a certain way. And me personally, like, I never, when I, after I came here, I never really felt like I fit in here. I was only on a branch committee briefly and it didn't work out so well because, like, basically one thing I would do is like, I just wouldn't say anything in meetings unless I had something, something somebody else hadn't already said. I felt like if I'm just going to repeat what other people just say, why am I going to say, like, just wasting time, like, I'm trying to, I'm trying to get something done, vote, get out of the meeting, go home and be productive. And they didn't like that. And they also didn't like that. A lot of times I just skipped the perspective discussion when I set up an introduction to like a certain decision or whatever. Like, because it was just like, I just felt like a lot of the perspective thing was like a waste of time. Like let's say you're pessimistic and I'm optimistic about how many papers we're going to sell. Let's just go out and sell the papers and see who's right.
[176:34]
A
Right.
[176:35]
C
Why does it have to be a 30 minute argument about latest perspective? Like, I didn't, I never understood like the obsession with, you know, it's different when something big happened. Like Katrina. Yeah, you gotta, you know, before paper sale Katrina just happens, you know, this is a huge thing. We need to talk about it. Okay. But like every week, every meeting, you don't need 30 minutes of perspective. Like, so I. There was a culture clash that kind of made me not fit in with the rest of the district. And the fact that I was in Geneseo by myself after 9 11, going through that whole baptism of fire thing, like, made me way more into like, I was used to just acting on my own and doing my own thing and not having to run everything by a branch, a convener or branch organizer, a branch committee or, you know what I mean? Like, I was pretty autonomous on my own in a lot of ways. So then when I Occupy Wall street, had all these working groups working autonomously, I was like, okay, I know how this works. You know, I can just jump in and make flyers for this working group and talk to this other. You know, it was like, it was more of a natural fit for me. And I think, whereas most people, most people in the New York ISO, you know, that wasn't true. And I also. Another thing is that like getting trained in high school and going into college with two years or three years of experience already just like a huge advantage, you know what I mean? Most ISO members who joined, they joined the ISO was like their first group, you know what I mean? And so first experiences tend to be formative, you know, for positive and negative, unfortunately, you know, and we, the ISO generally did not recruit experienced activists, experience, trade union people, people who knew how to run a meeting. And that always kind of, kind of bothered me because it was like, if we want to be a vanguard organization, right, wouldn't you want to be recruiting the people who have the most experience actually leading class struggle as it is right now, such as it is? You know, it's not a big deal, not a big scale. But you shouldn't you be recruiting a lot of shop stewards or people who already know how to do stuff. Or they're the. Maybe they're not the president of the union, but maybe they're like the leading person in the local or whatever, or the most active shop steward at a certain job site. Like it was almost always college students with no experience. And when you have people with no experience, they don't have any frame of reference to like push back and say no. That idea, that thing about Lenin is bs, you know, you just take it for granted that the ISO is the experts on Russia because they have all these books about Russia. So you just read everything uncritically, you know, not knowing that there might be another point of view or, you know, that's not said or. And also like foundational assumptions. There's a lot of foundational assumptions and sort of ISO doctrine that actually probably need to be pulled up and reinterrogated. As far as, you know, Eric Blanc, I mean, yeah, you know, whatever. What, he loves Kotsky or whatever. I mean, you know, I've gone back. I've gone back and read Bernstein and I think Bernstein actually has. There's a lot about the Bernstein debate that I think Bernstein was right about and that the. Was never addressed in the people who. By the people who attacked him. And you know, I'm not saying everything he said, Rose.
[179:48]
A
Right.
[179:48]
C
Or whatever, but like a lot of the responses didn't address the substance of what he was saying. And now I feel like now I kind of, now in hindsight I kind of feel like reading only one side of debates is just generally a bad idea. You know, just like if you only read the ISO steering committee documents about the Renewal faction, but you never actually read the Renewal Faction documents. Like you would have a completely screwed
[180:09]
D
up
[180:11]
C
thing about what you know about. You know, you would have no idea what the heck their problem is or what their issues are. So I try to read both sides of every debate or every other point of view, and not without. With an unprejudiced eye. I try not to take, you know, let me at least read the documents before I like, make up my mind. And the last thing I'll say about the security culture story, like, I never ran into this thing where people are accusing people of being government agents. But I heard about it through the renewal thing. And the FBI actually released the ISO's FBI file. It's online, you can find it. And like, there's stuff in there about Ahmed Sharkey, like driving a fancy car and being rich. And it's all based on one person's report to the FBI. You know, it's like a nums. It's like, you know how the Epstein files. It's like, there's a lot of stuff in there that's just a report from a random person who knows if it's actually true. You know, it's an investigative lead. As an investigator, you're supposed to follow up and, like, corroborate, like, did this actually happen? Who is this person? But there's stuff like that in the FBI file. And, like, the only things that are in the ISO's FBI file is like, ahmed is a weirdo, basically. Ahmed Shockey is a weirdo, or he's doing something, he's dangerous. He's a dangerous communist. And it's written by some person who's worried about their kid joining a cult. That's basically what it is. And then the other stuff is like, the ISO in Texas in 2005 was threatening. There was some talk at some meeting about militant direct action. Like, it made it sound like there were. There was talk about violence, like some form of violence, violent protest potentially taking place in 2005 at the Austin branch, or they were going to participate in a protest where the protest organizers were, like, considering. I don't know what type of violence. I don't know. You know, I don't know exactly. But that's what got on the FDI's radar, was like, this protest could be violent. And then the ISO was, like, in the mix of the protest organizers, and that's it. That's all that's in the ISO FBI file. So it's like. It's very funny because, you know, if the group is so revolutionary and dangerous to the state, you know, you think there'd be more stuff in the.
[182:21]
D
There.
[182:22]
C
Big disappointment, you know what I mean? To have only basically two entries in, like, 40 years. So I'll just leave the c. I'll just leave the. The capstone on that. And I would definitely be interested in coming back to, you know, have a round table about some of these other topics. It would be great if. I don't know if there's other ISO people you could reach out to, or I don't know if Eric would be bothered to come on and chat, but, yeah, whatever. Somebody who supports his point of view.
[182:49]
B
Yeah, I. I would say that we've mostly just responded to people who, like, you, reach out to us, and then we're like, okay, let's. Let's do this. And I would say that whoever would reach out to us and say, hey, this is something I'd like to Discuss, then I'd be down for that. I think when. When me and Eduardo first started what's Left? I think the only people I said we wouldn't invite would be people who are running for office or something like that. Isn't that Eduardo? Didn't we have that discussion? If I remember right, I was like, even if there were activist leftists who were running for election, I was like, I don't. I don't want. I really don't believe. Can actually say what they believe, because what's the point of having that discussion if I already know that certain things are walled off? You know? So that would be the only. That probably was the only restriction that I put because I. I had felt like the left had become so. Such a place where people can't really speak openly about what they believe. Um, and so I just was trying to re.
[183:46]
C
We were.
[183:47]
A
Both.
[183:47]
B
Me and Eduardo were trying to reop. Read that, reopen that.
[183:51]
D
We wanted to have honest conversations.
[183:53]
B
Yeah.
[183:53]
C
I don't even have my politician of any ideological stripe. It's impossible.
[183:59]
B
Yeah. So I. That those are the only folks that I was like, I just don't think they're gonna be able to do it. I think they'll feel like they would. They'll kind of, for reasons, have to lie. And then I was like, why? I didn't want to be involved. I mean, want to be. Try to figure out what was true and what was false. I would. I would like to believe what they were saying was what they believed, whether I agreed with it or not. And then that's all. Then we can go from there. And I think some folks. Well, I guess because, you know, Gaza is being destroyed and Iran is now on the target list for the United States and Israel, and World War 3, in my opinion, is. Is really moving a pace. And I think there are some folks who'd be like, well, what about. Like, how are you going to leave those things out? And I will say that the things you're bringing up as they relate to me, figuring out how to no longer be a spectator to political events, but be part of trying to make a change. These are the discussions that I think are more meaningful than necessarily figuring out exactly What. What the U.S. is, what's behind what's going on with the U.S. i'm not saying those things aren't important. I. I will say that I do believe trying to figure out what we're going to do about it, for me, is a more important discussion right now than all the different things that are being thrown at us and that that are real events. So for people who have been listening to our show and who are wondering if this is the road we're going down, this is the road I would like to go down, which is what you're offering to us, Ben, is an opportunity to figure out where have we been? So that maybe going forward with the people I'm going to be doing stuff with, if I find them, how will I go forward with them? That I do think is a more important thing to figure out or more important discussion for me than then all these giant world events, which are giant, but they're, they're much bigger than I can handle in terms of what I have around me to, to make them to say, oh, here's what I'm doing about it. So I just want to say that
[186:08]
C
sounds good. I sounds like we all agree more or less on the same page.
[186:13]
B
Yeah. And Michael's gotta go, so thank you for Thanks a time. Can you, can you take us out here?
[186:21]
C
Yes.
[186:21]
D
All right, let's conclude. Thank you very much, Bin, for that lively biographical political journey of yours.
[186:33]
C
Welcome.
[186:33]
D
I look forward to getting to points, particular points. All right, well, that does it for this week's episode. What's Left is a weekly political podcast slash channel challenging the mainstream left. We post information information about our topics and our guests on the episode on the episode notes wherever you found this episode or on our blog@WhatsApp podcast.com you can find past episodes to this podcast slash channel there and connect with us. I remind folks if you like anything you have heard here, please subscribe rate to view, turn on your notifications to any of our platforms on a Spotify itunes podcast Bitchute, others in YouTube, Rumble or Telegram. You can find any of these on our blog and any of those links in the episode notes wherever you found this episode. If you would like to give us feedback about something you've heard or suggest something for us to cover, contact us to our blog. I'm Ed with co host Michael Hoffman and Andy Libson. Thank you Bin Fam, for joining us and check us out next time. Thank you all for listening. Ciao.
[187:29]
C
Bye Bye.

Summary10 min read

What's Left? Podcast — "The Return of Pham Binh"

Date: March 14, 2026
Hosts: Andy Libson, Eduardo Abarca, Michael Hoffman
Guest: Pham Binh

Episode Overview

This episode marks the return of Pham Binh to What's Left?, diving deep into his political and activist journey, especially his evolution within the U.S. left. The episode explores the formative experiences that shaped Pham's politics—from family influences and early antiwar radicalization, through deep involvement with the International Socialist Organization (ISO), to his later critical perspectives and writings on political strategy, organization, and debate within the Left. The conversation stands out for its candid reflection on the strengths and dysfunctions of Leftist organizing, the importance (and complication) of real listening, and the persistent question of how to build revolutionary movement today.

Tone: Honest, reflective, sometimes humorous, critical but respectful
Structure: The episode follows a loose chronology of Pham Binh’s biography, interlaced with reflections and exchanges from the hosts.

Introduction & Guest Background

[00:10–04:26]
- Andy introduces Pham Binh (formerly of the ISO, published in a variety of Left forums), expressing enthusiasm for his independent thought. Michael Hoffman shares initial impressions, highlighting Pham’s influential critiques—particularly of Tony Cliff’s interpretation of Leninism and the concept of “stick-bending."
- Michael raises the key organizational question: “How can you actually build something that will have enough power to disrupt the very enormous power of US imperialism backed by world finance capital? Like, how do we do that?” ([06:41] Michael)

Early Life and Political Radicalization

Family History and Ethnic Roots

[07:49–18:29]
- Pham describes his mixed Irish-Vietnamese background. His father, a southern Vietnamese draft-dodger, gets radicalized in the U.S. antiwar movement and joins the Workers World Party—a reversal of the usual refugee trajectory.
- “He fled anti-communism in a sense. And then he comes to America and becomes a communist. You know, it’s such a weird... a very unusual, trajectory or whatever.” ([12:33] Pham)
- Pham describes growing up in a “red diaper” environment:
  - Early exposure to protests, debates on the IRA, talks about Vietnam at the dinner table.
  - His mother, a machinist and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) member, infused the household with a blue-collar, left-tradition.

Coming of Age into Politics

[18:48–34:00]
- The pivotal moment: a 1998 controversy in the Vietnamese community in Orange County over a Ho Chi Minh poster pushes Pham to contest, research, and read left histories.
- Reading Marilyn B. Young’s history of the Vietnam war radicalizes him — makes him an anti-imperialist.
- Deploys the contradiction of American schools’ version of history, especially regarding Vietnam, and reflects on atrocities as policy vs. exception.
- Columbia shooting and the Kosovo War trigger sharp perceptions of hypocrisy:
  “Bill Clinton gave a speech, you know, in response to the Columbine thing, saying we have to teach our kids to use words and not weapons to... solve their problems. While... there’s an air campaign going on in Kosovo. And I’m like, you know, it’s too much cognitive dissonance.” ([28:17] Pham)

Beginning Activism & ISO Involvement

Initial Organizing and Recruitment

[34:00–41:02]
- Gets involved with Food Not Bombs (Catholic Worker connections); first ISO encounter is through a local activist.
- Officially joins the ISO at 16 (Rochester branch), together with his friend Ariel. The branch at the time: three people.

Early Campaigns

[41:02–55:58]
- Details the John Duvall campaign: rallying against wrongful conviction, facing challenges mobilizing local (especially Black) community support—exposing the intersection of race, sexuality, and organizing obstacles.
- “It was pretty clear... the cops picked on these two people that nobody would stick up for, nobody would cry or care about if they just went to jail...” ([44:09] Pham)
- Reflects on failure: “...maybe we made a mistake. Maybe there was something I was overlooking as a 16-year-old...”
- Branch grows from three to ~15-20 by the time Pham leaves for college. Notes differences in composition and ethos between Rochester (older, stable) and other branches.

College Years, Expanding Activism & Antiwar Organizing

[55:23–69:19]
- Devours the “entire ISO lit table”—from Building the Party to Trotsky’s biography; attends national conferences and protests.
- Post-9/11: shifts anti-globalization activism to antiwar organizing. Organizes a coalition at Geneseo, recognizing the need for broad, democratic structures vs. tight cadre groups.
- Strategic organizing lesson:
  “I faced a strategic choice... should I try to start an ISO branch or should I try to start an antiwar coalition and then, within that, try to build... see who’s interested in socialist politics... I think I made the right strategic choice.” ([63:31] Pham)

Organizational Insights, Reflections, and Critiques

Skills, Training, and Paper Sales

[69:19–81:55]
- Pham and hosts agree that ISO’s methods—paper sales, street campaigning—were a unique, formative sort of political training, teaching direct engagement, attention-getting succinctness, and listening (“not just fake listen... but really listen to people”).
- “It really taught me how to, really listen to people and not just fake listen to people.” ([78:26] Pham)

The Problem of Fake Listening and Pre-Determined Answers

[84:49–87:40]
- Michael and Pham discuss the ISO’s culture of “already worked out” positions (“Because of something that happened in 1871, the ISO, a lot of times would think, just... this is just a repeat of what happened in 1871...").
- Pham: “You can’t just rinse and recycle answers like that because historical problems... don’t exactly... recreate themselves... it’s always a different situation.”

Frustrations with Internal Culture & Decision Making

“For me, all my critiques of the ISO never came from a place of personal injury... mostly it came from disappointment. Like, I wish the ISO could do better. Why aren’t you guys doing better? Like, you should know better.” ([75:31] Pham)
Disagrees with the ISO’s focus on minute details and litmus-test-style debate; notes that most organizing, especially with “average people,” requires prioritizing the big, actionable picture.

Leadership Experiences: The New York Years & ISO Limitations

[94:14–112:13]
- Details the Campus Antiwar Network (CAN) at Hunter College, emphasizing that most front groups were in practice ISO-dominated rather than authentic united fronts.
- Chronicles the dysfunction from relentless recruitment and red-baiting rivals, which alienated potential allies and ultimately destroyed coalitions.
- Describes an instance of direct action: fighting police in Times Square during anti-Iraq War protests; underscoring the risks (arrests, collateral consequences) inherent in confrontational protest.
- Raises lasting questions about coalition-building, how much a group should “assert” its politics, and the perils of turning necessary tactical debates into rigid dogma.

Departure from ISO, Independent Political Thought & Critique

Burnout, Class Realities, and Reassessment

[121:35–132:39]
- Describes leaving ISO due to needing to work two jobs just to make ends meet, and the absurdity of “the revolution doesn’t wait” messages coming from ISO leadership insulated by elite backgrounds.
- Time outside the ISO clarifies how inward-focused much of the group’s culture was:
  “It made me realize like nobody in the working class cares about how we word our flyers... in leftist meetings, you spend a lot of time with the microscope, working out the specific details of something that in the big picture is probably not going to matter that much.”

The Arab Spring, Occupy, and Rethinking Leninism

[134:30–149:47]
- The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street spark a crisis: ISO’s political formulas-–e.g., “revolution yes, intervention no” on Libya–-fall apart on contact with real events, with revolutionaries in Libya demanding intervention.
- Pham is critical of ISO’s lack of deep engagement with Occupy, their failure to abandon routine and embed fully in the movement.
- “If I was the dictator of the local ISO... I would have... dissolved all the branches until this thing blows over and put every single person into a working group... They didn’t do anything like that. They... maintained the branches and the routines that they had.”

Beyond Sectarianism: North Star, Regroupment, and the Limits of the Left

[149:47–165:27]
- North Star Project: a space for multi-tendency, open debate, especially on contentious issues like Syria and Libya.
- “There has to be room in a healthy socialist organization for some wide-ranging debate... major problems on the Left arise when debate is choked off.”
- North Star attracts (disgruntled) members from across socialist groups, but never gains wide organizational buy-in.
- Critiqued for not silencing internal disputes (“I found... people wanted me to stop talking about Syria so that we could just all get along on this recruitment stuff”).

On the "Thought Leader" Trap and Political Branding

Refuses the cult-of-personality approach so common among leftists online:
“I was only publishing stuff because I felt like certain things needed to be said, and nobody was saying them... I didn’t want to be any type of... leftist thought leader or getting my name everywhere.”

Themes & Notable Quotes

On Listening and Political Culture

“It really taught me how to, really listen to people and not just fake listen to people.” ([78:26] Pham)
Andy: “I currently believe that when you listen—properly listen—to somebody who has a different point of view, you have to put your own point of view on that at stake... If I’m truly offering, saying that that person needs to be prepared to be changed their mind.” ([129:22])

On Sectarianism, Rigid Dogma, and Real World Movements

“It became very clear reading... the [ISO's] where we stand thing... that the ISO is not pro Cuba, not pro North Korea, not pro Russia, you know... But if we found out in the footnotes...” ([87:40])
Michael: “The way that it was kind of... the ISO saw its project... was that winning these political arguments was the ultimate... the main goal... Politically, [that] made us dysfunctionally unable to relate to people.” ([106:46])

On the Failure to Transform During Historic Moments

“Just imagine... a workers’ council forming and basically the ISO is just selling a newspaper outside the workers council meeting. They’re not even in the meeting. That’s what it felt like.” ([147:12] Pham)

Organizing Lessons & Reflections

Approaches shaped by practical engagement, not just theory.
The significance of “real” (vs. “fake”) listening and the humility to genuinely engage people who might shift one's view.
The dangers of pre-set ideology: how organizations can become fishbowls with stilted, circular logic unable to adapt to new, dynamic realities.
The need for honest debate and making space for disagreement—“leave people room to retreat or shift or change their mind and not pigeonhole them and dump cement on them.”
The dysfunction of Left groups’ inward focus, particularly the prioritization of recruitment or dogmatic purity over actual movement-building, tactical flexibility, or mass engagement.

Closing & Looking Ahead

[166:50–end]
- The hosts express gratitude for Pham’s candor and detail, outlining plans for follow-up episodes around themes raised here:
  - Occupy & the Sanders campaign’s trajectory
  - US covert and soft power and the Arab Spring
  - What, if anything, is worth retaining from Leninism?
  - Lessons for organization-building and coalition dynamics on the US left
- Andy: “What I hope will come out of this today... is I don’t know the answer about what has to happen for revolution to be a possibility, but I believe that revolutionaries have to talk about that. And so that’s kind of where I see this as a starting point...” ([166:59])
Pham: “I would definitely be interested in coming back to have a roundtable about some of these other topics.” ([182:21])

Notable Moments by Timestamp

[12:33] Pham’s father’s journey: refugee from draft- and anti-communism, radicalized into communism in U.S. antiwar movement
[28:17] Clinton’s Columbine comments vs. Kosovo war: cognitive dissonance as radicalization
[44:09] Campaigning on wrongful conviction—early lessons in intersectional oppression and mobilizing challenges
[78:26] Importance of authentic listening, and the risks of paper-thin connection
[94:14] Dangers of front groups, recruitment focus breaking coalitions
[147:12] ISO’s missed moment during Occupy: “...just selling a newspaper outside the workers council meeting.”
[149:47] North Star regroupment: attempts at open debate amid deep Left divisions
[166:59] Setting the stage for further deep, open discussions among the U.S. Left

Further Discussion Topics (for Next Episodes)

Occupy Wall Street and the lessons for socialist/revolutionary strategy
The role (and reality) of U.S. foreign policy and soft power in uprisings abroad
The fate of the ISO, “Leninism,” and the problem of perpetual sects and rebranding
Rethinking how the Left might authentically build mass power and cross-organizational alliances

Summary prepared for listeners new or familiar, providing a roadmap of the episode’s narrative and essential insights from Pham Binh’s return to What's Left?

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Transcript198 lines

[00:00]
A
Foreign.
[00:11]
B
Welcome to what's Left, a weekly political discussion challenging the mainstream left. My name is Andy Libson and I'm joined by Michael Hoffman. And Eduardo is not here right now, but he will be here in, like, 10 minutes. You can find us online@whatsleftpodcast.com Please subscribe, rate, review, turn on notifications, share your favorite episode and jot down our information wherever you found this episode. Also, if you're interested in a T shirt, we can make you one if you're interested. And you'll see a sample of that down below. But you'll see today, we have a third person on the screen right now. His name is Pham Bin Fam. Bin lives in New York City and is a former member of the International Socialist Organization. His writings on history, revolution and social strategy have been published by Occupied Wall Street Journal, Occupied Wall Street Journal, Counterpunch, znet, and other publications. Welcome, Pham.
[01:06]
C
Hey, guys. Happy to be here. Happy to be here.
[01:10]
B
Very good. And let me just say that I've known Fam for a long time. I knew. I. Did we ever meet each other in the ISO, like, at a district, national something or another?
[01:22]
C
I think. I mean, I have emails. I have some emails exchanged with you going back to 2006.
[01:29]
B
Okay.
[01:30]
C
Because there was, I guess there was some argument at the time about whether the Taliban counts as a national liberation movement. I don't remember what the heck we were talking about. Well, the. I did. I did see you and Brian Belknap at probably at a convention, probably in 2000 or 2001. But, like, we didn't, like, shake hands or anything. But I remember you guys gave interventions. I basically was pretty impressed with, you know, you guys, both of you came off as being very serious revolutionaries. You guys had, like, sharp questions and formulations. And I thought it was, you know, cut through a lot of the BS that sort of happened at the speech, making that happen at those type of events. And I remember. I remember Brian wearing something orange and black.
[02:17]
B
That's his deal.
[02:18]
C
Something that was orange and black. And I was like, that's a cool shirt. Like, it wasn't until I saw the podcast that you guys did together where he's dressed up in orange and black. Where I was like, oh, that's like his thing.
[02:28]
B
That is his thing.
[02:29]
C
I didn't know he was an artist. I didn't know. Or like a musician. Like, yeah, I had no idea. Like, yeah, yeah.
[02:35]
B
And someday, I believe there's a guy who's working on a documentary about him that hopefully will Come out. But we'll, you know that he is. He's an amazing musician, so. But yeah, fam, I would say the same about you. Like, you've always kind of been a person who, like when things you wrote that were for our conventions and things like that, I were like, oh, that. That person, like, is not just pitching a line or just. There was some creativity and some independence of thought that I had seen in that. And then as we started to move our way out of the ISO, I really remember thinking that some of your criticisms, and particularly some of the stuff you've written in response to the ISO's understanding of Leninism and Tony Cliff's understanding of Leninism, I just thought was really brilliant, actually, and really impressive. And so. And then even afterwards, I had thought you were part of the Renewal faction, but you had just written about them and written in things, kind of supported some of their ideas. I probably read some of your stuff then. So when you reached out to me maybe a month ago and said, hey, I see you're still doing what's left, you know, can I be on? And I was like, yes. I mean, it was almost like a long lost. Well, certainly a long lost political friend just coming and saying, hey, can we, can we catch up? So this is very exciting for me because many ways, Eduardo and Michael aren't just going to get to know you. I'm going to get to know you more because I think there's a lot of things to talk about and we're not going to talk about them all in one episode. I think we'll have you on possibly a series of episodes coming forward, but I want to start today just getting to know your background, who you are, and, and then kind of come to bring, bring us forward to today.
[04:27]
C
Okay. Wow. Yeah.
[04:30]
B
Oh, and I, I want to have Michael, because, Michael, you sent us a bunch of things to read. Maybe Michael, if you want to say just your impressions just from that, you know, without getting into the subject, because we can't do that. But I wanted to see if there's anything you can say, impressions you've had of Fam, either from his writings or just maybe you've been familiar with him.
[04:50]
A
Well, I remember when you wrote some things about Tony Cliff and the idea of stick bending and then. And I think I didn't really, because I was. I had drunk the Kool Aid and we did many study groups on Building the Party and there's a three book series and I do think there are some. Like, I do. I'm glad I read that, and I'm glad now I have a critique of it, you know, but your criticism of, you know, like, stick bending as being, you know, just completely intellectually dishonest and then also, like, it would create complete distrust, and this doesn't actually fit with what we understand about the actual Bolsheviks. Was very important, I think, to the folks around me. And I didn't understand because basically I didn't read any of that. I didn't read deeply the newer books around Lenin until after Andy and Brian left the ISO. And then I, shortly after was like, there's nothing. There's not much left, especially in the Bay Area of integrity. Right. So they. With them went all the sort of integrity that I saw in the organization amongst other folks like AJ and anyway, so your. Your arguments clearly, actually at that time were influential to my close political friends. And reading through your other stuff, though, I'm like, I'm very curious to see what your assessment of things like Occupy Wall street and. And the. Because I. Because I think that question of organization is so crucial, like, how. How can you actually build something that will have enough power to disrupt the, you know, the very enormous power of US Imperialism backed by world finance capital? Like, how do we do that? And what does that look like? And how can we use that to understand the fate of things like Occupy Wall street or the Arab Spring or any of the other kind of almost revolutions?
[07:28]
C
Okay, so I guess that's a big question. Yeah, I'm not going to jump into the question, but.
[07:33]
A
So, yeah, maybe just start with, like, what radicalized you?
[07:36]
C
Sure.
[07:36]
A
You know, how did you get started?
[07:38]
B
Or even. I'll even go back further. Just go back as far as you want to. To what would. What do we know about. What's to know about your past to understand where you are today politically?
[07:49]
C
Sure, yeah. I'm gonna start. I'm just gonna try to run sort of chronolog chronologically. You know, the thing is, I joined the ISO at age 16, so this is like 20 years of history. You know, I mean, if you want to do. If you know, like. But it's good to hear. It's also good to hear, though, that, like, that some of the stuff I was publishing actually mattered to people or made a difference, because that was hard to tell at the time that all these sort of Internet polemics were happening. It's just like, is this just a pissing contest? You know what I mean? Like, I was publishing stuff because I felt like. I basically kind of felt misled once I started investigating things on My, on my own and then know, comparing. This is what I was told and then this is what I found out. And then this is what I told. And what I found out either flatly contradict each other or, you know, what I was told is like cherry picked history. So I only got 1% of what actually happened and then I found out the other 99% or, you know, something like that. And then, you know, it changes everything. It changes everything once you have more context, you know. And that's part of why I liked Lars Lee's book Lenin in Context, where he's like, you know, quoting leaflets of people who, you know, you never heard of this guy. He's just some, some guy in, some, in the Urals, you know what I'm saying? But he's repeating some of the, you know, so you see through, through other people's eyes, you know, I don't know, whatever. So I'm glad that you guys had some benefit from that because it was hard to tell. Does this even matter? You know, who's reading this? Who cares? You know, because if nobody cares and if it's not impacting anything in a positive way, like, what's the point of writing? What's the point of doing this? So in terms of my biographical sort of background, I mean, I'm, in a way, I'm a bit of a red diaper baby. Like my mom, my mom is like 5th generation Irish, Irish American. And she's like a big fan of the ira. She's like an Irish nationalist, like Jerry, Jerry. Photos of Jerry Adams in the house and stuff like that. And my father, my father is Vietnamese and he fled to America like most Vietnamese people who are here fled after 1975, after the south lost the war. Communists take over. Everybody who was scared of Communists for one reason or another, you know, hightailed it out of there. And then some people came over in the 80s as economic refugees, as so called boat people. My father came here in 1971, four years before the south fell, like in the middle of the war basically. And he's from a southern, he's from a town in the south and in Southern Vietnam. And so he was. My, my grandfather basically sent him here to be a draft dodger because he didn't want him to be. I mean, the casualty rates of the South Vietnamese army, you know, enormous. You know, I don't know what they are offhand. So, you know, he sends his, his, his, you know, he get, you know, he gets. My father comes here, he's at University of Buffalo. It's the first time he ever sees snow. You know, his first job here in America is shoveling snow. And he gets caught up in the anti war movement here in America, you know, because it's, you got to think, it's a weird thing, like you're fleeing this country, you're fleeing your own country, trying to evade a draft. You come to America and then all these people are talking about Vietnam all the time, you know what I mean? Like, like, how could you not go to a demonstration or be cur. At least curious? Like, what is. You know, they're all talking about my country. You know, they're all against American foreign policy, all this kind of stuff. So. And what he told me basically was that like, he didn't know because he grew up in the south under the South's government, which was a police dictatorship. He didn't know about Dien Bien Phuket, which is where the communists inflicted a huge military defeat on France. And then that led to the partitioning in the country and all this other stuff. They didn't teach that in the schools at all because it made the communists look good. It made them look, you know, nationalist, you know, something to be proud of. You know, it's really, I think it's actually the first. It's one of the few cases where developing arm, developing world or third world countries, army militarily defeats, you know, an imperialist power. That's almost never been the case. So they didn't teach that in the school. But he learned about it here in America from basically leftists. And so he gets involved in the anti war movement. My mom was also involved in the, the protest movement against the war in Vietnam. And my dad ends up becoming a tanky or a, you know, supporter of the Workers World Party actually, because so he gets radicalized. So he's like fleeing anti communism. Most Vietnamese people are fleeing communism. He fled anti communism in a sense. And then he comes to America and becomes a communist. You know, it's such a weird, it's a very strange thing. And it put him, it actually put him at odds with like most of the Vietnamese community here and parts of my own family where like the other his brothers and sisters, they're not like, they're not ideologically like right wing, you know, because usually when you say somebody's an anti communist, usually that means they're virulently anti socialist, anti liberal, you know, aggressively pro Trump. You know what I mean? That's usually what somebody means when they say so and so is anti communist. Usually it's a whole. And with them it's more like, you know, they just hate the government that exists there because it's corrupt. And just, you know, especially in the 80s was really. It was. They were doing a lot of stuff they shouldn't have been doing, let's put it that way. After the war ended, so my family is, you know, his brothers and sisters and my, My grandfather were like, they're not pro government. But my father was pro government, you know, because he got mixed up in. He was a. He was part of a capital. Das. Capital reading group in Buffalo at the University of Buffalo. Like. Yeah, very strange. Yeah, I think it's very strange or very unusual, you know, trajectory or whatever. So that's kind of like my. That ends up playing a role in how I get radicalized. I mean, first of all, I have a Vietnamese name, right? And it's done the Vietnamese way. So the family name is first and then the personal name is second. So if Andy was Vietnamese, he would be Libs. And Andy, all the names, it's the same thing in Korea and China that the family name comes first and then the personal name comes last. And the reason that's kind of important is because, you know, all my. All my kindergarten teachers and first grade teachers, everybody, all my teachers, I had to explain to them the name thing. Why is my name. Why is my brother's name the same family name at first? So, like, I got. I kind of got stamped with the Vietnamese identity, even though I'm only half Vietnamese, you know, because I have the name and I had to constantly explain it to people. Like, it gave me. It made me more. It made like if my name was just John Smith. Like, I don't know if. I don't know if the subsequent path of radicalism would be the same, you know, because as I was saying, I was like a red diaper baby. So like in the 80s, my parents brought me to like, peace in El Salvador, rallies, like rallying against the Contras, rallying again, you know, in favor of the Sandinistas, all this kind of stuff. I mean, I was too young to understand what the hell is going on. But, you know, going to protest was like part of my growing up culture. When my parents split up in 1991 and my mom took me and my brother to Rochester, you know, we had gone to protest against the Gulf War in 1990 here in New York City. They were pretty big, you know. And again, I didn't know what the hell's going on, but seemed cool, you know, so. And My mom was very, My mom was also very.
[15:42]
B
Oh, one second family, 1991. How old are you then?
[15:46]
C
Eight years old. Okay, eight years old. So. But the protest I think were in 1990, because the Gulf War is like January of 1991, I want to say. And the protests were. Definitely wasn't winter because it was, you know, there was no snow on the ground for sure. So that was like fall of 1990. And yeah, I didn't, I mean, I didn't understand any of the issues. I didn't know what was going on. But know, I got exposed to this kind of stuff early. And my mom was also very into Vietnam Veterans against the War. She was, even though she's like ideologically or politically like a liberal, like she's all about. And she at the time, in the 90s, after she split up from my father, she became a machinist, which is like a very unusual occupation for a woman. Like, it's a, it's a, you know, male dominated, poor blue collar, industrial. You're like taking heavy, you're doing trigonometry to figure out how to cut parts. And I, I failed math in middle school, so I don't know, I don't know what the hell she was doing, you know, but. So I grew up in Rochester, you know, and my mom's working a blue collar job. My father was like a, an auditor for New York State Medicaid. So like sometimes doctors or pharmacists would bill New York Medicaid like a hundred dollars for a single bottle of Tylenol. So he, you know, his job is to like go through the spreadsheets and be like, gee, does a bottle of Tylenol really cost a hundred dollars? And then, you know, he goes and visits and checks it out and you know, he, you know, whatever. That's, you know, it's kind of like, it's almost like accounting, but also investigative. Like you have to like, you know, put two and two together. But it's a very, it's kind of, it was kind of a low paid like civil servants and you know, just. And government employees in general make less than the private sector, you know. And yeah, you know, he wasn't, he definitely wasn't making that much money. And so my mom was like, you know, so she worked at a blue collar job, but she was also sort of ideologically attached to like the industrial workers of the world. Like she had, she was a member for a while. Like they still existed in the 70s, 80s and 90s as a very small group kind of Like a, I don't want to say a reenactment society or a nostalgia, but it's kind of like a nostalgia thing, you know what I mean? It's like the old IWW people, you know, people who like, like the old iww, you know, and they gave her. Everybody who signed up in those days. They gave you like a song book. So solidarity forever with all the musical notes and like, so she was, she's kind of like into. So she kind of. I kind of grew up thinking, having this kind of. I didn't know it at the time, but it was kind of a blue collar perspective. Andy, you had your hand up.
[18:30]
B
No, just to let you know that the IWW in the Bay Area still exists in that same way as both, both hearkening to that tradition, but also trying to rebuild it. So I know a guy who was, I was worked with, who was, who's in the IWW, like in 2019.
[18:49]
C
That's cool. Yeah, they've seemed to, they have, they've seemed to have a revival since like 2010 or something. 20 2005. They tried to start organizing Starbucks and stuff, I think.
[19:00]
A
Yeah, they organized a few Starbucks, I think. I don't know how it ended up. But that, that cultural affinity, it's also, it's a strong cultural affinity which I, which I share in many ways. Like I, I love the old songs
[19:19]
C
and yeah, I mean that, that tradition, that was a very, that was very much a living tradition in my household because of my mom. So like I said, she's like pro ira, you know, I think that's a little, I don't know, in hindsight I'm like, you know, because the IRA did some stuff that's like really bad. I, in my opinion, very bad. But, you know, so. But politics was like very much part of the dinner table routine. You come and you sit home and you watch the news. I would get 100 on tests. They would have current events tests at school, like, you know, what's happening in the news this week? And I would always get 100 because every night at the dinner table we're watching the TV, you know, first local news 30 minutes, then national news, 30 minutes. So then I'm like probably the most informed 12 year old, 10 year old, you know, who, you know, who's watching Peter. Five hours of Peter Jennings every week. Crazy. Like, you know, in hindsight I realized, like, it's a little weird but you know, it gave me, you know, I was, I was already in, in a culture that I didn't. Hey, Eduardo, what's up?
[20:20]
B
But so Eduardo been as more famous still right now at the beginning of just walking through his family back. So you caught us at the right time.
[20:31]
A
Yeah, his name is Ben. His last family name is Fam.
[20:36]
C
Yeah. Oh, okay.
[20:37]
D
Yeah, I saw the email was Fam. That's why.
[20:40]
B
No, when I refer to you, I
[20:42]
A
should say it was the other way.
[20:43]
C
Yeah, you should, but it doesn't, you know, I'm not.
[20:49]
B
So this part will be on there because this is a clarification that needs.
[20:52]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's fine. So that's kind of like. So I was like, I was telling them, basically I kind of grew up as a red diaper baby in a sense. I grew up in a household of radicalism, anti war, progressive, you know, like it was never forced on me. Like they weren't like, you have to believe this or you can't do that. I actually, the only thing that they actually tried to force on me was like, well, they didn't really force it, but they were worried that because I like to play with guns as a five year old boy that I would become some right wing militarist or something. And I was like, when I got old enough to hear the conversation, I was like, man, you guys know what you're talking about, you know, like, there was no danger of that ever happening. I just, you know, as a boy just like want to play with guns. And you know, that has nothing, it has nothing to do with politics. So that was the one thing that they were like worried about, you know, in terms of political this and that. But they never forced their beliefs on me. But it's, you know, it definitely had an impact on just growing up around it kind of normalized. It's not a weird thing to go to a demonstration or a weird thing to have a political argument or to argue about politics at the dinner table. You know, it was like, that's kind of how I grew up. So. But I really wasn't political until, I mean, I wasn't like. And there was all these books on the shelves, books about the iww, books about the ira, books about the Vietnam War, you know, books. And my mom is like a huge nerd reading. You know, she just reads a lot about politics, but a lot of fiction stuff too, like Irish, Irish poetry and this type of thing because she's an Irish nationalist. And I never paid attention to any of that stuff. Like I didn't read any of those books until, until there was this, there was this Case in California, where some. Some Vietnamese video shop owner. This is like, 1998. Yeah, 1998. Some video shop owner in the Vietnamese community, I think in Orange county, which is where the biggest single concentration of Vietnamese refugees who settled here. Like, I don't know what possessed him to do this. And I actually went and looked later recently to find out what happened to this guy. Like, why did he even do this? But there's. It's not clear why he even did it, but he put a huge poster of Ho Chi Minh in his shop, and then that triggered the whole community to basically picket his shop. And there were these angry demonstrations. Everybody was trying to force him to take down the poster. I don't know why he would. I don't know why he put up the poster. It's like. It's like. It seemed like the dumbest thing you could do. If you're running a Vietnamese business and you're a Vietnamese businessman, you're gonna piss off. The. The whole community has basically fled communism. I don't know what it. You know, so anyway, so this was this huge news story for a while of the, you know, involving the Vietnamese community that caught my eye. And then this is the. Since this is 1998, this is like the early Internet, common sections have just been invented, basically. So I start getting into arguments and comment sections about this stuff, and people start bringing up stuff that I don't know about, like the Vietnam War, America did this. The communists did that. And I'm like. I'm like, way out of my death. I'm like, you know, for me, I was just like. I think my original position at the time, I can't even remember now, though, is like, if you don't like the guy's poster, just go to Blockbuster. I didn't see what the. I didn't understand what the big deal was. Like, why would you get so upset about this thing when you can just shop somewhere else and, you know, maybe this guy will go out of business because everybody hates him. Like, what's. Like, what's. I didn't understand what the fuss was about. And then, you know, so my position was just kind of like, you know, who cares? And just shop somewhere else. And. But all these people in these. In these comment sections were arguing with me, bringing up stuff that, like, I had no idea what. You know, what are they talking about? And that's when I started reaching for the books on my mom's shelf, like Marilyn B. Young's. She did a history of the Vietnam War. That really opened my Eyes. I was just like, holy hell. Like, I had no idea. And you know, the Vietnam War is talked about in schools, but, you know, I mean, American history is like the way it's taught. I mean, obviously they're not going to talk about American atrocities. Like, no, no, duh, right. But like, it's superficial too. Like, it's just like. It's like everything is kind of like a little footnote, you know. And then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. And there's no. In schools, there's no like, you know, in middle and high school, there's no like, why did this happen? Why were people mad about the Vietnam War and not the Korean War? Or, you know, it doesn't go beyond like the kind of superficial chronology, you know. So, like, I had been, you know, I knew that Vietnam would happen, but like, I didn't really think about why or who was right or wrong. Was that the right policy and all that? So then I started, you know, so reading about the Vietnam War radicalized me, like, and turned me into a little, a little anti imperialist, quote, unquote. It made me, you know, totally oppose, you know, the both parties because it was, you know, the Democrats were the ones who started the war basically. And you know, Republicans can't, you know, Nixon made it worse obviously. So like politicized me and, you know, it opened me. It made me a radical. But I wasn't at that point a socialist or anything like that. Like, I didn't know anything about socialism, communism, you know, I didn't know anything about that. But I just thought, man, this is terrible, you know, pretty bad. Pretty bad. When you're like setting up torture. They had like they were putting kids in. In tiger and torturing them. And just like. And this was policy. It wasn't like, it wasn't like, it wasn't like, okay, you know, there are cases where it's like somebody, one guy, one bad apple, single bad apple, whatever. But this was like policy over years and years and years, you know, so there was no, there was no. You know, when it's systematic, it's like, you know, it's. It, you know, it makes you ask systematic questions. You know what I'm saying? When something is happening all over the place for years and years and years under Democrat and Republican administrations, you know, you can't just say, oh, just one person made a mistake. You know, the prep. One president was bad. Like, you know, there's something obviously more deeply wrong and structurally screwed up. And then, so that was like 1998. And then, you know, not long after I became a. An anti imperialist. There was the, The NATO bombing of Kosovo. And at the same time that that took place, there was the shoot, this. The Columbine school shooting. And I was in high school at the time at an inner city school. Like the schools, like, majority black, majority black, Hispanic. Like, white kids are like, I don't know, 20% of the student body. Asian kids are like 5% or less. And the next day after the shooting, after the Columbine shooting, which was done by, you know, Nazis basically, you know, wearing trench coats. Trench coat mafia is what they call themselves. You know, the day very. The next day after the shooting, like, they had metal detectors in my school. I was just like, like, the school, like the Rochester schools are like, my school's like the best of the bunch. Like, if you had to rate the high, if there was a hierarchy of how good the school is academically and in terms of, like, infrastructure and all that. My school was like, at the top, and there were a lot of schools that were below us, but, like, we were not doing that great either, you know, in terms of, like, repairs, doors don't work or don't open, there's paint peeling, probably asbestos in the basement. The lunchroom was actually a basement with no windows. You know, it was just crazy that it was like, overnight. Overnight, you know, the schools have money for metal detectors, but not, like, stuff that will help our academic performance. You know, the stuff that a school is supposed to be about. So that, that definitely radicalized me a lot. And, you know, it was crazy because Bill Clinton gave a speech, you know, in response to the Columbine thing, saying we have to teach our kids to use words and not weapons to, like, solve their problems. While. While, you know, there's an air campaign going on in Kosovo. And I'm like, you know, it's too much cognitive dissonance. Makes your brain explode. You know what I'm saying? So I, you know, I, you know, I really. And having read everything about the Vietnam War and stuff beforehand, it made me automatically kind of mistrust what the government was saying, and not by, you know, the official line of what was being said. And I started looking at, like, Z Magazine. You know, I started reading leftists, anti war, anti imperialist, whatever you want to call it, magazines. There was one, okay, there was Z Magazine and there was another one. Oh, Covert Action Quarterly. That's what it was. It was, you know, it was kind of like standard issue, you know, I mean, there's nothing that remarkable about. It's just, you know, I think Covert Action Quarterly is. Might have actually been like a tanky thing, though, unfortunately.
[30:04]
B
Just before you go too far, sure,
[30:06]
C
you say this is like 1999, but what tanky means.
[30:10]
B
Because I don't necessarily know. Go ahead, just say a little bit about. Thank you. Because you.
[30:13]
C
Sure, sure. Yeah.
[30:15]
B
Dad. Your dad was a tanky when he became a communist. So maybe a little about that and then carry on.
[30:21]
C
Sure, yeah. Tanki is just a pejorative for people who support the ussr, prc, China's government, Cuba, Yugoslavia, at one point was so called communists. Yeah. So anybody who supports those regimes, you know, is. You can just call them a tanky. You know, it's like. It's like calling somebody a liberal. You know, I mean, liberal. Liberal has become a slur too, unfortunately.
[30:48]
B
You know, and if I understand it, it's because, you know, they might even support the willingness of those countries to use their tanks to enforce.
[30:55]
C
Yes, yeah. I mean, the specific reason. Yeah, the specific reason the word tanki became a thing is because in 1956, there was an uprising in Hungary in the eastern block. And they actually set up workers councils again, you know, to. As part of the uprising. And then the Russians send in their tanks, their literal tanks, to like smash it. And there were people in the west who were like cheerleading the tanks. And that's how they became known as tankies. So. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know. I feel like tanki is also a better word than Stalinist because there's malice, you know, like tanky encompasses that range of opinion of people who support it even if they're not Maoists. Because there are people who support that stuff even if they're not actually Maoist or Stalinist or astroist or, you know, whatever. So, yeah, so I was reading Z Magazine, Covert Action Quarterly and just read, you know, and I started going to Food Not Bombs, which is like an anarchist vegan. They make vegan food for homeless people, basically. Me and my friend. My friend Ariel Cruz, who's actually in DSA in Rochester. He's active nowadays, I guess, from what I understand. But so me and my, you know, me and my friend, we were getting radicalized and we wanted to do something. We wanted to, you know, we saw all these. All these things that we saw as injustices and wanted to, you know, lend a hand in, you know, working in the opposite direction, I guess you could say. So we started doing Food Not Bombs and getting up at 6 or 7 in the morning. On Sunday, every Sunday to go cook food at a church. The church was actually run by a Catholic Worker. Catholic Worker is like established by a woman named Dorothy Day who like, it came out of the 1930s, as far as I understand. And it's kind of like it's not liberation theology in, you know, know in the sense of like left wing leftist cat Catholicism from Latin America. It's not like that. It's like, it's. But it's kind of this. It's a similar thing where it's like they're very pro poor people and very pro, you know, helping poor people, helping homeless people. Like you could argue that's the original message of Jesus Christ. And you know, or he's going around, he's going around Palestine or Judea, I guess it was called back in the day. And he's healing the blind and he's healing the sick and he's feeding the hungry and he's, you know, that's kind of like what Catholic Worker is all about, you know. And they would, they actually sponsored. They were big and big fans of protesting the School of the Americas, which is where the US government was like training dictators and torturers in Latin America. So like the food not bombs thing put me in touch with Catholic Worker and all this. All the sort of a local progressive community in Rochester, New York. And I actually ran into somebody in the International Socialist Organization who would sometimes show up. I mean, we didn't really talk about, we didn't really, you know, get into it about in political. Like he didn't try to recruit me or anything like that. But I encountered the. I, that's probably my first encounter with the, the ISO was somebody co volunteering there. But I ended up running into a different person. A guy named Brian Irway. You were recruited by a guy named Brian Belknap? I was recruited by a guy named Brian Irway. And basically I ran into this guy in the street. He's selling news Socialist Worker. And he had a huge plaque, he had some huge placards like denouncing what NATO was doing in Yugoslavia or Serbia. And me and him, we just had a conversation and he seemed very sharp. He's very sharp, very enthusiastic. But also like what, what kind of impressed me about, about him and what he seemed to be trying to do was, you know, he was trying to combine the, the impression I got of the ISO was that it was trying to combine some type of radical politics or radical analysis with some type of pragmatic, practical. Do something in the real world. Don't just write denunciations of imperialism in a magazine or online. You know, they were trying to seem like. They were trying to, like, get people organized and do something about it. So that's kind of how. What piqued my interest about the ISO in terms of, you know, I. I went to a meeting, or me and my friend Arielle, we went to a meeting. I think the first ISO meeting we went to was, like, titled Marxism vs. Anarchism, and they had invited a local anarchist to speak, and the guy didn't show up. But in fairness, the guy was like, an alcoholic, so maybe he know. And I, in. In hindsight, I'm like, maybe they invited him because he was an alcoholic and they knew he wasn't going to show up or they knew he wasn't going to be putting the best face forward for anarchism. But that kind of resolved the debate for me. When they didn't show up, I was like, I. I don't care about anarchism. I mean, you know, I kind of just ruled out, you know, they had. They had this. This whole thing where it was going to be, you know, A versus B, and then B doesn't show up. So I was like, well, I guess that's that for B. You know, I'm not really probably. Which was probably an unfair thing because it was an ISO meeting. But, you know, that's how I. That's how we got started. And so let's.
[36:07]
B
Let's go ahead, because I think you're about to move into the ISO phase maybe a little bit.
[36:11]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[36:12]
B
Let's take a pause and. And I want to give Michael and myself a chance to kind of say a few things about some of the. Some of your past and see where they might intersect with us. Just so sure, we'll make some. Because then. Then go into the ISO part. And, Eduardo, you can kind of either bring in a question you might have. I want to say that, number one, it's interesting, because what radicalized me, that ultimately led me to meeting Brian Belknap was the Kosovo war actually, as well. And the Columbine thing had not been in any feature of my radicalization. But you were entirely right. Like, I remember being so outraged when Madeleine Albright was saying, you know, the Serbians need a little bombing. Like, they just need it, you know, and like that to be said at the same time as this language of Columbine. I never put those two and two together because I was much more radicalized by our foreign policy than the internal lies. It Was only later that the internal lies became more meaningful to me. But it's really interesting as you as a high schooler, are confronted immediately with that dissonance. So that was one thing that was interesting, as I heard you talking about. And the School of Americas was a major feature of a woman I work with, Ms. Darlin Tom. She went to prison over that. And she. That was. She ran into all these Catholic priests and people around that. And I. I feel like the School of America's, because it's been renamed the west, something for Western Hemisphere, for peace
[37:43]
C
or something like that. I don't know what it's called, but it.
[37:46]
B
It is a still a very big feature of the U.S. imperial project in Central and South America. And the reason why we can imagine that Delta Rodriguez was like, you know, like, how the US has complete control or large control over the military of countries like Venezuela all throughout is because they've had decades of training these people in the United States and setting them back to do the thing. You were talking about torture as a policy. Like, it's not like, oh, this was just one person going off. It was. Torture as a policy is what was taught in those schools toward. And they. They probably learned it from the Phoenix program in Vietnam, and then they take it into Abu Ghraib. I mean, people have to understand. And I know I brought the Epstein files is not an accident. These people know how to do violence at very deep levels. So those are some things that I thought about as you were talking. And I just want to. I had to spill that out. But, Michael, I don't know if you have any thoughts.
[38:45]
A
I wanted to pick up on the thread of the complete hypocrisy of being told, even just for myself, understanding how the world works. And like, wait, I've been taught never to use violence to resolve my issues. And yet that is actually the main way that the government does things, you know? So for me, it was the Iraq war. And it's funny because you're younger than me, I was not politically aware during any of the Serbia Kosovo war. It really wasn't until the second Iraq invasion that I started to feel like I was putting together the big picture pieces. But I also remember the first Gulf War was like a video game. It was like, yeah, we had just gotten, like, the nes. And then it was like, oh, cool, there's, like, missiles going into the H Vac system of a. Like, we were literally watching on tv, like, their fancy guided missiles. And I remember there were trading cards and there were, like, US Generals and different kinds of like the Patriot missiles on one, you know, it was it
[40:04]
C
that always sell for Merchant, basically. Yeah, I do remember that. Yeah.
[40:08]
A
I was like, yeah, yeah, it was like a sports event, so. But that didn't really translate into like political activity for me until the, the 2003 invasion.
[40:28]
B
And Eduardo, do you have any either comments or maybe we'll just go back to Ben if you.
[40:32]
D
No, I'll go back to BIM because this is where we're getting to ISO. So.
[40:37]
C
Yeah, well, my uncle was a Jehovah's Witness, so that's my connection with Eduardo. That's what.
[40:44]
B
Man, there are so many people. Like my, my brother's wife, she was in Jehovah's Witness. I feel like it's all around us.
[40:51]
A
Like they're organized.
[40:54]
C
They're the real Illuminati. Probably something. I don't know. They're everywhere, everywhere.
[41:00]
A
Leninists
[41:03]
C
with true Freemasons or something. Anyway, so yeah, so I joined. So basically my friend, my friend and I, Ariel, we joined the ISO. But at that time the Rochester branch was basically one guy, Brian Irwe. So like we joined and created a branch of three, you know, and I was 16. And this is like, this is like summer of 1999. Um, we didn't join or I think I. We joined either like before the socialism conference of that year or after. But we didn't go because it was like too short notice to like, you know, spend the money. I mean high school kids, you know, high school kids, plane tickets or booking a hotel. Like, you know, I mean we, we came around the ISO and joined at a point where it was like too late to like go to the. Go to that event. Brian went though, and he's, you know, he was, he's. This is a guy who's like 45 year old, 45 year old white guy who works at the University of Rochester. He's like a lab tech. Like, you know, people who get people have like, you know, testing like, you know, urine samples to see if there's drugs or, you know, it's like routine lab work, blood work, this type of thing. So that's what he was doing in terms of his occupation. And you know, he had a family with kids. So he's like a family man. And I feel like that. I feel like at the time that me and Ariel. Arielle, my friend was like the same age as me, 16 years old. We're both in high school. I feel like that profile at least at the time was kind of unusual for ISO members to Be family to already have kids and be middle aged. Like, I feel like, you know, the vast majority of ISO members were between 20 and 30 or 20 and 35 and not didn't yet have families. You know, so I feel like some of the problems that seem to happen in other branches, I don't think we had those problems in Rochester. Partly because he was a family person and, you know, his sense of identity was already developed and, you know, he had an established life. And. Yeah, anyway, we'll get more into that later. And so, like, so we joined. Me and my friend joined the ISO and then the first activist campaign that we get involved in was there's this guy named John Duvall who was convicted in 1973 of murdering this out of town, out of town white businessman along with this woman named Betty Tyson. They're both black at the time, they were both prostitutes, and they both served 25 years in prison for this crime. And it turned out they were innocent, that the police beat confessions out of both of them. Supposedly she was the main person who did the crime and he was like the helper or the accomplice or something like that. And eventually Betty Tyson's conviction gets overturned because of. They basically falsified a bunch of evidence or withheld a bunch of evidence from her defense attorney and all, you know, so all this stuff comes out and then it raises the question of like, so if she's innocent, right? Like, that raises the question of, like, what about this other guy who supposedly was her right hand man, so to speak? And so eventually his conviction is overturned, but the prosecutor, for whatever reason, decides to retry him on the original 1973 charge. And the reason, and the reason, the legal reason why it wasn't double jeopardy is because when, when you overturn a conviction, it's like it never happened, you know, which. Which is the kind of thing that just drives. Drives me crazy. Like, like. And it's why I could never become a lawyer. Stuff like that. Technicalities would drive me crazy. So they tried to put him on trial again. And so the ISO, the three of us, you know, three kid. Three, Three kids and an adult basically decided to take up this guy's case and like, try to make some noise around it, build some. Build a movement around it, or put some pressure on the attorney, you know, the district attorney not to do anything. Also, I should mention that in 1973, this guy, John Duvall was like, not just. Not just a prostitute, but like on drugs, but also a transvestite, like, not transgender. Like, this is a Whole discussion of how the culture around that has changed, like there was no such thing as transgender in 1973, you know, but like it was, it was pretty clear that like the cops picked on these two people that nobody would stick up for, nobody would cry or care about if they just went to jail and got convicted on false charges, you know what I mean? They just picked on like the weakest, most vulnerable people that nobody gave a. About to just peg this crime on them, you know, regardless of whether they were guilty or not. So, you know, that was like my first activist campaign. And we tried to. We were doing public meetings at black churches. I brought John Duvall to my high school to speak.
[45:57]
D
Wow.
[45:58]
C
And the crowd and the kid, you know, 30 kids stayed after school for like three hours to listen to this guy tell his story. It was crazy. It was like, I really didn't think that many kids were going to be that interested. You know, I didn't think the whole room was going to be packed and people were crying and stuff because he was telling his whole story of being locked up in prison for, you know, for 25 years or something. He didn't commit crime. He didn't commit the. I. Now that I'm telling the story, I remember now why the prosecutor decided to go after him again. It's because during his parole board hearings, he admit, he said he did it and he felt sorry because he was trying to get out on parole. Whereas Betty Tyson was like, I'm innocent. I don't feel remorse because I never did the crime. You know, she just kind of stuck with that the entire 25 years. And he was like, you know, he did. He took the opposite choice and was like, oh yeah, I did it. I'm so sorry. So they were trying to use that as evidence against him to reconvict. Even though there was no physical evidence linking them to the crime, there was no eyewitnesses, like, like there was no. They had nothing on these two random people that they just grabbed. Basically. There was absolutely nothing tying them to the crime at all. But they tried to use, you know, his parole board hearings and stuff against them. So eventually what, what ends up happening with this is that like the activist campaign doesn't go anywhere. And, and in hindsight, I don't know whether that's because it was not smart to put two 16 year old and a 45 year old guy in charge of the thing who don't know what they're doing or, you know, I'm not saying Brian Iray, he, you know, he had joined, he had joined the, the British SWP in like 1978 or 1979 or something like that. And then he came into Rochester in the 80s and he, he recruited Phil Gasper and I think al. He might have recruited Kianga Yamada Taylor too, who later is, you know, now she's like a celebrity kind of on the left. But you know, Brian had been around for a long time. So I, you know, I can't say that like he didn't know what he was doing. But in hindsight I'm like, man, maybe we made a mistake. Maybe there was something I was overlooking as a 16 year old that we didn't do because we, we tried really hard to build some type of grassroots support for him and just, just didn't get anywhere. Like black churches and leaders were not interested for whatever reason, maybe because he was gay. I truly don't know why, but we just got nowhere. Like besides that meeting with the kids in my high school, like we really just did not have success in getting any politicians to support it or we had marches and stuff, but they were very, very small. The meetings in the black churches were very small. Like we just didn't get anywhere. But thankfully in the intervening 25 years, John Duvall's cousin had gone to law school and she was the head of the D.C. lawyer Guild or something like that. So she came into Rochester to like be his lawyer this time instead of having some court appointed bozo. And I skipped school to like be part, to be part of their. I was there for the opening of the trial and you know, with his family and you know, some of the, the activist people, you know, we showed up in court and stuff like that, you know, to show support for him and stuff. So that was like my introduction to actual activism and campaigning and you know, like we didn't succeed. But you know, John Duvall beat the charges. Like, you know, there was, there, they had no evidence, they really had no evidence and you know, they, the only reason he got put away the first time is because he had a court appointed lawyer. And you know, you know, he just got a raw deal basically. So he was, he was acquitted, which was great, but not because of any sort of activist stuff that we were doing. And then the next, the next couple things on the chronology that I have are like the Battle of Seattle, you know, the, the Seattle protests in 1999, that was like a huge, that was a huge like validator for me. You know what I mean? It was like. Oh, because the thing that was distinctive about it Was that you basically had a whole lot of union members getting into fights with cops, which isn't something you we really saw much of in the 90s, you know, and also that like the unions and environmentalists were like on the same page on something that hadn't happened either because there was a lot of typically there was either friction between them or, you know, they were just separate. Like unions have their issue, environments have their issue. They're not trying to like combine forces against a common foe. So that was like the first time that really happened in the streets and they actually managed to shut down and disrupt the meetings. And the cops went crazy and they were tear gassing people and chasing people all over and they were beating up random people in the, in Seattle neighborhoods. Like, like they would chase protesters into residential neighborhoods and then like beat up somebody standing at a bus stop, you know, just because he's there, you know, like, it was crazy. So that was like a. I don't know, it wasn't, it wasn't a whole week of protests, but it was like four to four or five days and the meetings were disrupted and stuff. But that really validated for me as a new, newly minted socialist, that kind of validated the idea that, you know, work. You could see working class people engage in some type of radical action or mass action or, you know what I mean? Like, it felt like, okay, you know, we're not just talking out of our asses here. We're not just reading history books. You know, this is like part of this is relevant to what's actually going on. So let's see. So out of the John Duvall campaign at my school, I, I established basically an ISO front group. You could call it an ISO front group, like called the Social Justice Club. And we would just have meetings, like, I don't think it was once a month, but it was fairly frequently. We would have meetings on a political topic or an activist campaign to just bring students around. Yeah, I was trying to recruit people, but I was trying to get people. Even if somebody didn't want to join the ISO, I was trying to figure out, okay, yeah, okay, you're not a socialist, but can we do something on X issue or can we talk about this or that? And eventually. So eventually, eventually a couple, there were a few other kids in my school who did join the ISO. Like they weren't strong, they weren't like hardcore members. But you know, they joined and they went to protests and they came to some branch meetings and stuff. I mean, it's hard when you're like in high school and it's like you got to beg your parents. Right, right. Like, like, you know, it's a different set of challenges, you know, when you're in high school and, and kids want to go to a meeting and all that type of stuff. And eventually, yeah, I mean there was, there was like five to 10 people who, I would say five to 10 students who were like regular participants in the club's activities. And a lot of times I would go to Brian Irwe's house. He lived like five blocks from the school in the Ninth Ward, which is like a mostly black neighborhood, black working class neighborhood, but he lived there. And so I would go by his house early in the morning and pick up hey market books and newspapers and flyers and you know, on my way to school. Because that was like part of my routine was like doing that or sometimes I would, I would go with him to. We would have paper labor. Labor paper sales at the University of Rochester Medical center. You know, getting up at six or seven in the morning to like sell people newspapers as they're walking into work. And these were basically this guy's co workers, you know. So sometimes they would like be like, oh, you're a socialist. I had no idea, you know, like, like walking by him and, and it was, it was, it was an interesting thing because, you know, you know, it felt like it's like the modern equivalent of that of a factory, you know, because you'd have hundreds of people all streaming into the, you know, this huge medical complex. And we were trying to sell them papers. And I mean, we really never got anywhere. We never got anybody to go to meetings and stuff like that. And at a certain point we decided to give up at University of Rochester, where we were holding the branch meetings. The University of Rochester is actually across, across the river from my school. So all these things are kind of taking place in the same neighborhood or rough geographic proximity. And the University of Rochester, it's kind of like an elite school. Like it's expensive to go there. And like, we just never got more than a handful of students coming to our branch meetings on different topics and stuff. So we were like, after a year, I think we were like, to hell with this, let's try Rochester Institute of Technology. And we had much more success there. We had, we ended up recruiting some people who ended up becoming like ISO cadre, like Kari Peterson Smith, Josh Karpov, I think his name is. He actually was doing the droop off of the Socialist Worker website at a certain point in the 2000s. So at rit, like, we got a lot more interest. And so by the time I left, right. I was. I left Rochester to go to College in 2001, in summer of 2001. So I was a member for basically two years in Rochester. And in that time, I had basically devoured the entire ISO lit table over. You know, every month you could just buy another book and read it. And by the time I left, the whole. I had gotten through everything that was on the lift table. So that's like building the party, you know. Volume one of the Trotsky biography. Actually, I think I finished all the Trotsky and Lenin biographies by the time I left, because I remember. I definitely remember the fourth volume of the Trotsky book, which was the thickest of the four and probably the best. Honestly.
[55:24]
D
Andy read those as well. I remember seeing him at the cafe and he was reading those.
[55:28]
C
Yeah, yeah. Um, I remember. I remember carrying that. The Volume 4 one. I was visiting my girlfriend at her high school at Irondoquoi High School, and I was. I would carry books with me on. On buses and stuff to read because it's like, you know, an hour of time to kill. And I remember carrying that with me. So I def. I almost certainly got through that one. But there was a lot of stuff that I read that was like, you know, the. All the big names of the International Socialist tendency, like Duncan Hallis, John Molyneux.
[55:59]
A
Don't forget Kalinikos.
[56:00]
C
Kalinikos, yeah. I read his revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx. It was a pretty good book. John Reeves. Let's see. At that time, Haymarket books didn't even exist. Yeah, I actually brought. Brought in a little piece of historical memorabilia.
[56:17]
B
I think a lot of our stuff was from what I was called bookmarks at the time. Yep.
[56:22]
C
I don't know if you remember this. This is by Alan Moss.
[56:24]
B
Oh, it's not showing up because of the thing.
[56:27]
C
Damn, that's too bad.
[56:28]
B
I remember reading that. Why. Why you should be a socialist?
[56:30]
C
Why you should be a socialist by Alan Moss. And there's like, a introduction with Howard Zinn. And the. The topic of the introduction is Eugene V. Debs and the idea of socialism. But, yeah, I have some. I have the old members Handbook from, like, the mid to late 90s, which was black. And then I have the handbook that came after that, which is white. I was actually on the white one in a photo. It's a photo of the protesting. Protesting the RNC in 2000 in Philadelphia. So I went to that, and then there was like, the, the inauguration protest against Bush, that was like a pretty big protest. I actually reserved the bus from Rochester in my name as an 18 year old. Just kind of weird. It's like, is this legal? You know, I'm only 18 years old. I can't even. I didn't even learn how to drive at that point. And they were like, yeah, just reserve the bus. And I was carrying I. Through my. In my high school, I was carrying a big like a can with a sign on it saying Bush stole the election. You know, donate money if you. You know, we were calling him the Commander and thief or something like that. Something edgy. Yeah, it was, it was like a whole thing. And so the bus was full though. The bus from Rochester was full and the ISO basically organized it. And by the time I left Rochester we had like 15, I want to say 15 to 20 members, something like that. So we started out with three and by the time we left, you know, 15 or 20, I think that's pretty good. Yeah, not. And some of those people are still active. One of the high school students, David Peel, he's like a union. He works for a union in like Massachusetts. He's like, I don't know exactly what he does for the union, but he's like, he's still active in labor stuff because I sometimes I look people up just out of curiosity. So yeah, I left. I left Rochester in summer of 2001 to go to SUNY Geneseo. And during the summer of 2001 the big thing that was going to happen was there were going to be protests. There were going to be protests against. I forget which three letter organization. I don't remember if it was. It was the imf, World bank meetings.
[58:42]
B
Yeah, they were like in Canada or
[58:43]
C
something like that, or FTAA or something like that in, In Washington. And then 911 happened. Yeah, you know, and that totally. That was basically the end of the global justice movement which had been taking place since in the late 90s. That was basically the end of the global justice movement. There were no, there were internationally. There were protests against, you know, these trade organizations and these multilateral economic forums and all this kind of stuff. But in the US it was over and everything switched to like the war. And I was by myself in Geneseo when 911 happened. I mean, by myself in the sense that like I was the only ISO member on that campus. 911 happens. You know, everything gets derailed. They had the ISO from Rochester or from Chicago, I don't remember, which had given me like a stack of international socialist Reviews that we were supposed to sell in the run up to the demonstration. It was like a very thick issue with like statements, not statements, but articles by all these prominent anti globalization leftists, thinker people. This is at a time when the ISO and had, I think by 2001, they had set up Haymarket Books and they had set up the center for Economic Research and Social Change, and they were developing relationships with like big names like Howard Zinn. I don't think they ever had a relationship with Noam Chomsky. But, you know, that's when the ISO started becoming sort of influential in the so called broader left, liberal, left liberal space. So they had given me a whole stack of ISRs about this anti globalization stuff. And on September 12, I was like, I can't. This, you know, this is completely useless. We have to like, you know, there has to be a complete shift. And the ISO basically shifted to anti war stuff at that point. And. And I was printing up flyers that were sent to me in ISO notes by Sharon Smith that said, like, don't turn tragedy into war. And it had a bunch of. I don't remember what it said because I didn't write it. It was. It came from Chicago. But at the, you know, at that point it was like, it felt like it felt good to be part of a national organization that I wasn't just operating completely by myself. I had some guidance. I was part of something bigger, you know, that. And that was. And they made the newspaper go weekly too. I remember that Socialist Worker at that, up until then had been bi weekly, every two weeks, a new issue. And then they made it go weekly for like four years or something like that. And it helped because it was like every week something was happening, something the Bush administration was doing something else, you know, something else terrible. So that helped a lot. And before I actually went to Geneseo, I actually had a sit down, face to face meeting with Sharon Smith at like a McDonald's after convention or something like that. And she was just asking me kind of like, she was just trying to understand who am I, am I gonna be okay by myself? Like, who is this person? You know, how many books, what books had I read, you know, how much, you know, all this kind of stuff. And, you know, I mean, we had a friendly discussion. Like, you know, there was no, no friction. You know, I thought she was doing fine as a national leader. There was, there was. I don't know if you remember this, Andy, but. Oh, you might not have been there, but there was a. At the, at the one of the East Coast Conferences, Sharon Smith, who was the national organizer of the ISO since 1983. Apparently there was at the time, there was like, this movement on campuses in the late 90s to get their campuses to stop using sweatshop labor for, like, the merch of the campus or of the university. And the ISO was part of that because the ISO was. Had good, good presence on a lot of campuses. And Sharon Smith had said something. She basically said that as a child she had worked not in a sweatshop, but like. Like that she had been part of that economy through working at home. Like, I don't know if you remember this at all, but it made an impression on me. I was like. And I never heard that story ever again. Like, it wasn't something that she broadcasted in, like her, you know, it wasn't like this thing happened to me as a kid. So it made me think that it was legit, you know what I mean? That she was part. That her family was impoverished and part of how they were dealing with that was basically selling stuff at home as part of some, you know, sweatshop supply chain or something like that. You know, I have no idea if that story is true. It seemed as I believe it's true,
[63:18]
B
because, I mean, all I can say is it's. It's been. It wasn't something she, like, you know, put totally on her sleeve, right? That was shared and was part of her past. That was part of her, as I understand it, part of her connection to the working class and the radicalization.
[63:32]
C
So, yeah, yeah, that's my understanding too. Like, and I got the impression that it was real because she was emotional and it wasn't like, broadcast all over the place. Like, you would only hear that story sometimes if you were in a certain context, you know, so, yeah, so. But, you know, that was my. That was kind of my only dealing, direct dealing with the. Sharon Smith as national head of the ISO. When I went to Geneseo, I, you know, I did talk to Ashley Smith, who was the east coast organizer of. Of the ISO. He was, I would say, mostly pretty helpful. And so when I was. So when I was. I started doing anti war stuff by myself, basically. And pretty quickly I launched. I spearheaded an anti war coalition organizing meeting to see how many other people besides me are anti war or thinking about being anti war on the fence about this whole thing. And, you know, we basically had a coalition of like, 20 people, and we met weekly all the way until I left Geneseo in, like, summer of 2002. And, like, the Broader anti war movement kind of collapsed once, once the Taliban fell. Most anti war groups, my understanding is that they basically collapsed or people stopped showing up to meetings for whatever reason. In Geneseo, people kept going to meetings. I think it's because we were bored. You know, it's a rural campus. All you can do out there is drink and go to sorority and frat parties every weekend. Like if you want to do something other than that, there's not a lot out there for you to do. So I feel like maybe we got by because kids were bored. You know, progressive minded kids didn't just want to get drunk all the time on the weekend, so whatever. But we had, you know, I managed to establish an anti war group of. A pretty stable anti war group of about 20 people. And we would do like meetings. We had debates with the College Republicans at one point about the war and U.S. foreign policy. And within that I, I was selling Socialist Worker and trying to recruit people to the ISO or bring people to ISO events and eventually had a little study group of sorts where we would read. I think we read one of Chris Harmon's pamphlets about how the rev. How the Russian Revolution was lost and. But I did face a strategic point, strategic porch, strategic choice at one point in fall of 2001 as to whether should I try to start an ISO branch or should I try to start an anti war coalition and then within that try to build, you know, see who's interested in socialist politics or whatever. So I made. I think I made the right strategic choice. I think it would have been a very foolhardy or fruitless thing to just try to set up an ISO branch first and then, you know, but I know, I know different people probably might have made different choices at different times and their lives are in different contexts or whatever. Yeah. So that was. So then I moved to New York City and started going to Hunter College because I just didn't like Geneseo. Geneseo was like a culture shock for me because I was. I was going from a majority black Hispanic inner city school where like everybody's getting school lunches for free because they make so little money to a school where it's like 90 white, 10 non white, basically, something like that. And everybody's from the suburbs and doing well for themselves and their parents have two cars and yada yada, yada. Like, for me that was, you know, it was a culture shock. My family didn't. My family didn't own any cars. We didn't even have a microwave, you know, like, I didn't Realize, like, I knew when I was growing up, I knew like, like going to an inner city school, like my mom, and my mom was again, she was at a blue collar job as a machinist. And you know, she would tell me that she's, she's basically being underpaid compared to her male counterparts. And she was making, I don't know, $6, $7 an hour for skilled labor in the 90s, which wasn't all, wasn't a whole lot. And you know, we didn't have. We definitely. I knew we weren't rich, you know, but I didn't really think of us as poor. And we used to pay full price for the school lunches and we didn't have a car, you know, so, like, I couldn't. And we were not, you know, we very rarely went to restaurants or movies and stuff like that because, you know, there just wasn't that much money. And I could never figure out how were these other kids making it because they, most of them were on the free lunches and I was paying full price for the lunch. Lunch was like $2 or $1 or something like that. And they were getting it for free, and they were. So they were making significantly less than me. And I was like, how do you people survive? Like, I didn't understand, like, like, you know what I mean? Like, like I felt like, you know, we were making it, we're, you know, treading water, let's put it that way. You know, making ends meet. You know, the bills are always paid on time, but that's it. There's nothing, there's no, I never, we never went. We didn't really go on vacations or. There's nothing like that. No, no real luxury spending. And then there's these other people who are like, I don't know how you make it, you know, I don't know how you make it on, you know, 10,000 a year. I mean, I don't even know. So go and go. So I was going from that environment to like Geneseo where like, you know, people's parents are buying them computer systems just for college. And you know, in the, in, in the two early 2000s, that was, you know, that was like kind of like a luxury, like a full computer system with a subwoofer and this. And you know, like, that was like, you know, you, you had some money, you had some disposable income, so. But I kind of hated it there. And it was like, it was a culture shock for me. So I wanted to go back, come back to New York City, where I kind of always felt like I belonged and go to Hunter College. So I. I managed to do that in fall of. Fall of 2002. And then I started going to the. Probably do.
[69:19]
B
Here is pausing. Have you pause again? Because I think there's a lot of territory you've covered.
[69:24]
C
Yeah.
[69:25]
B
But don't lose where you are at, where you want to carry.
[69:27]
C
Yeah, I won't.
[69:27]
B
I do want to come in on some of those things.
[69:30]
C
Sure.
[69:30]
B
That you've talked about. And then Michael and Eduardo, please feel free to do the same. First off, I actually think there's some. One of the things that you did that I did was just this voracious appetite for reading that that is part of a radical. That is part of what happens to a person when they become radicalized. They just read everything and they always find themselves like, I want another book. I want another book. And one that's a part of any. You hear about that as a period. Something that comes out of any period of a radicalization, like on a. On a broad scale. Like people are reading books like this one. I don't know if it's true or not, but I remember hearing a story that Lenin's state and revolution was like number one or number two in Portugal in 1974, like on the reading list kind of thing. You hear stuff like that. But as I listen and I. And that happened to me and I. As I listened to even what you're describing about this question you had to ask about, like, we're not doing well and these folks are even worse off. Like, that was sort of my background in some ways. Like, our house was always dark and kind of messy. We had a house, but we were definitely poorer than maybe the people around us who weren't doing. Like, they were not even middle class. They were. We lived in a poor working class neighborhood, mostly white people across the street from people who had been mostly black people. And there was tension even there. But I do feel like that kind of growing up in that environment was part of the fire fueled part of the fire for me, wanting to read so much. It's got an anger thing going on in there as well, an injustice thing. You feel like you were lied to when you come around. And then you are just. You become obsessed with finding out what's. How to do do something about that. So I. That's something I hear in your story that resonates to me from. From me. I also want to say something about like selling the paper. Like, that was a tough part at first, like selling the newspaper, like, why? Why do I need to do this? But I will say that the weekly newspaper sales became a big part of the experience of talking to people and just talking to people about politics at work. Doing my three for Me program, like, just trying to like, get people to see if people would be interested at work. And like, that became a big part of like, talking to people about politics and animated that I will say even today, I think a newspaper or some periodical and some physical thing is, in my belief was very central in my political radicalization of going out and just having to meet people and talk to people about politics and getting over your shyness because, like, you just got to go out there and meet people where they're at. The other thing that I think about are those different campaigns you were involved in. And it makes me think that the initial campaigns I was involved in were like, this is an ISO campaign. This is an ISO campaign. And that was. That was essential to just even getting your feet wet on. What does a campaign feel like? What does it mean? What does it mean to like, say, set an agenda for something? Like your manager isn't telling you what the agenda is, your boss isn't telling, so you have to figure out what the agenda is. And that was very meaningful. And I do think that an interesting transition that takes place for me in the ISO is when I went from doing essentially ISO campaigns to when we started to launch our own campaign around Educators for a Democratic Union. Like, me and other comrades were like, we're going to do our own campaign, which was signed off on by the ISO. But I think that once some of the lessons we learned out of our own campaign become a feature of end up moving us out of the ISO in some ways. So those are just some thoughts I wanted to share. And I do remember that isr, that big Global justice isr, it was green, it was big, it had all these people on it. And then it was like you could just light it on fire right after 9, 11, because there were just stacks of these things that were going to go nowhere. And I always struggled with the don't let tragedy become war thing. There was something very tepid about that that I just never quite liked. But nevertheless, we're an anti war position. Like, at least we can say that. So that's something I wanted to share in terms of some of the things you brought up around the ISO and other things. So don't lose your part, but I want to make sure that. Yeah, yeah, so go ahead, Michael.
[73:55]
A
I wanted to say, because I read your piece. So you want to join the ISO, which is written, I think, 2012, 2013 or 2013. So thinking about and listening to your story, and I agree with Andy that all that kind of stuff, the conversations, the. The paper sales, all the pre meetings. The pre. Pre meetings. The pre. Pre. Pre. Pre meetings. No, the. The. Like trying to get a campaign off the ground that doesn't necessarily take off all of that. I, like, in hindsight, now feels like sort of essential link to some kind of political training that doesn't exist anymore that is actually very difficult for people to get. And so I. I wonder how you feel about that. Or rather here I'll phrase it this way. How much do you feel like ideological, individual, ideological recruitment played a role in building the Rochester branch? Because you. You just told us a story of how you went from basically, you know, one guy to 15 people that produced some of the stars of the organization at some point. So how much, like, do you see. What do you. How do you view that process now? Do you be.
[75:20]
D
I.
[75:20]
A
Do you view that as, like, it was totally, you know, like a. Like a waste of time or do you feel like there were valuable things about it? How much did individual recruitment play a role in that?
[75:32]
C
Yeah, I mean, that's. Those are some good questions. I mean, I. Looking back on the whole thing, like, I mean, I also feel like I come from a weird dissident, ISO thing perspective because in the sense that, like, I don't feel like I was ever mistreated or had a bad experience. Like, nobody expelled me. Like. Like. Like there were some times where I was in the minority on stuff and, you know, certain things might have been said that were, you know, questionable debate tactics or something like that, but it was never, like, egregious. Like, Ben works for the CIA, you know, something insane, you know, like that. So, like, I don't have. The thing is, I don't. All my critiques of the ISO never came from a place of, like, personal injury or bitterness or anger. Like, mostly it came from, like, disappointment. Like, I wish the ISO could do better. Why aren't you guys doing better? Like, you should know better. A little bit like that. I personally, you know, I think the whole. I mean, the whole thing for me was, like, formative. Like, I learned how to run a meeting, how to print a flyer, how to get people interested, how to stop somebody who doesn't look like they're interested in stopping and talking about politics, you know, because they're going. They're. They're walking from point A to Point B at 30 miles an hour. I got half a second to get them to spill the beans on Bush or whatever it is on, you know, whatever's in the news, Katrina, whatever. Like, so that was like, you know, that was actually. I think it was an important skill for me to develop in terms of, like, just being blunt with people and just getting straight to the point as soon as possible. Not waste any time on, like, have you read Leon Trotsky, you know, like. Or whatever, you know, or fluff, you know, get to the point, like, what do you think about X? You know, and are you willing to do Y and Z about X? You know, And. And trying to gauge people, also trying to gate. Also a lot of it was like, trying to gauge how far can I go with this person? You know, because sometimes I would run into, like, a conservative Republican, right. You know, a Bush voter or something like that, but a conservative Republican. Most of them are not really thrilled at the idea that you could try somebody twice for the same crime, right. That they already went to jail for 25 years for. Like, there was layers of contradictions where it was like, even if you're pro cop, you know, you can't really support, like, what's happening. You know what I'm saying? So, like, sometimes there was, like, you know, became a skill, like, trying to identify, okay, I can't get you to the socialism conference, but I can get you to sign a petition or I can get you to sign. Come to a rally for, you know, John Duvall or something like that, you know, And. And also another thing that was important that it taught me to do is, like, at least for me, it really taught me how to really listen to people and not just fake listen to people.
[78:26]
B
Yep.
[78:26]
C
You know what I mean? Like, because, like, there was. There were definitely people in the ISO who were, like, fake listening, or they would respond, and it would just be like, you're not responding to anything I actually said. You're responding to some, like, weird straw man that you created. And I feel like being on paper sales, like, and just interacting with people who are not in the bubble, not in the ideological bubble, or not in the fishbowl. That's kind of how I. That's an analogy I can get into about how I understood being in the ISO, but, like, people who are just not political, not thinking about this stuff 24 7, you know, your average person. What does your average person think of Bush? What does your average person think of the Iraq war? What is your average person who's not political or only thinks about politics once every four years when they have to vote for somebody, you know, like it was great because it was like it trained you to think outside, maybe not think outside the box, but think outside your own ideological bubble or your own, you know, whatever you, you know, you know what I mean? Like, try to relate to the average person. So I felt like that was really useful. And so I feel like, you know, I mean, if you're looking at it from the scale, if the, if the scale is, you know, was what I was doing contributing to a workers revolution, you know, it's a complete zero. But you know, there's more, you know what I mean? Like that's, I don't think that's the right scale. You know, it's not like a workers revolution broke out and the ISO failed, right? Like lead it or something like that. You know what I'm saying? Like, so I don't feel like that's like the right scale to assess something like that. I feel like the right scale is, you know, in the given period of time that you were operating or the ISO was operating, you know, did they, did we. Or they maximize the opportunities that were handed. And it's a mix, you know, it's a very mixed bag. You know, it depends on all the branches seem to have slightly different cultures and different challenges and different kind of personality interactions. But I feel like for me personally, like all that stuff was really formative, you know, I mean, I haven't been on a paper sale in 20 years or something like that, but if I really wanted to, I could just go. If I joined a campaign and you know, and I had a petition or something, I can just go up to people and just, you know, you learn how to create little short, three word, five word slogans that get people to stop abruptly and start engaging you. You know, this is before social media. Social media, it's teaching people a little bit of the same skills too. Like, you know, for a social media post you've only got five or six words to, you know, get somebody's attention so that they engage. You know what I mean? If you write, if you write a 500 word Twitter post, nobody's going to read it. People are just going to see a wall of text and just scroll down. You know, it's, you know, the paper sale thing was, you know, but I, it's, it's also, but it is different that Andy's right, that, that you know, being in person, in real life, face to face interaction, like nothing will Beat that. You know, nothing beats trying to engage somebody in person. There's, you know, there's way more. There's way more adherence in terms of, like, when you develop relationships with people, they're more likely to show up to your next meeting or your next campaign event if you've met them, shook their hand, developed some sort of emotional back and forth with them than just texting. You know, texting is so people read it and then they just forget about you, you know? So I feel like. I don't know. I don't. I don't really have a fixed answer about. Should that be part of some sort of future organizing? I mean, that's everything online.
[81:56]
B
But I think those questions, we may not even get to this episode. But I do think some of the lessons, if you will, I. That may be something that we. We want to get to. There's so many different things, I think, to cover on that. Eduardo, I want to give you a chance to kind of share your thoughts on what you've heard so far.
[82:14]
D
I mean, you. The only. I'm just inundated right now with images of the past, of just everything they mentioned, from 9, 11 to the war on Iraq to just you. You mentioned a few things. I. I just took me back to those. To those formative years. That's all.
[82:37]
C
Yeah.
[82:38]
D
So I'm. I'm listening. I'm taking a few notes, but also I have a few things. Questions on written work that you've done. But I think, sure, you should finish here, and then we'll get to your. The things that you have written about.
[82:56]
C
Okay, so, like, let's see.
[82:59]
B
So I want to add this part.
[83:01]
C
Oh, God.
[83:02]
B
I don't think it can be underestimated how important it is. What you said about listening and fake listening versus real listening. I hate that I. I am very aggressive when I am talking to people, like, around the COVID stuff, when I was opposed to the coveted measures. And I was. We were doing. I was doing something with my wife at the trade, the farmers markets, and being like this. And I am very good at knowing now as a result of this, of knowing how to, like, say, I'm just gonna. I'm just gonna be out here engaging people. But it also really did teach me. And I. And I was almost virtually fearless about it because I'd had that training of just talking to strangers about politics. But the biggest feature it really gave me is, like, what am I hearing from people? Like, what are they saying? Like, it. Are they willing. Do they. Are they willing to shift or am I just going to have a block here and there's just no way to. And then just, you just got to let it go and be like, have a good day. And certainly to not be an. You know, the only time I was an is when somebody literally was coming and trying to, trying to just mess with me and you just got to push back a little bit. But I really feel like those skills of talking to complete strangers and engaging people about politics, I feel like, and then listening, I feel like those are going to be part of any revolutionary movement. Like everyone is going to have to adopt some version of that. And so in that regard, a contribution was made into my development to be a worker who's able to talk to other workers about politics and engage and listen. So I think I hadn't heard anyone use that verb listen in a while, but I think that one is really central.
[84:50]
A
A quick thing in your piece about. So you want to join the ISO. This is related to the fake listening. You realize that there's this actually in depth worked out positions that the, that the organization had and they, and realizing that in the radicalization phase they had, they had an array of literature essentially to cover all of these questions. That was all party literature. Right. And so I remember having to figure out, because I take, I took a lot to that like, oh really, what you're saying is just like this, I'm going to map this to some historical debate that I have. We've already answered, right? So like part, part of the fake listening that we were trained to do that I feel like the ISO was trained like I was trained to do in the ISO had to do with. Well, we've already worked out all these questions. You're just repeating something that we already knew. And let me, let me just like rush you along and be like, yes, but here's our answer to what you're saying, right? That, that was something that I, that's why, probably why I didn't sell even close to as many papers as Andy, you know, or, or Brian or any of the people who actually knew how to listen. But I also think that, but so, so that whole, that whole structure of like every question is worked out and we actually agree fundamentally on all these questions. That was one of the fundamentally destructive things where people weren't allowed to like actually explore or disagree or, or try and make sense of. And I saw that most sharply around in, in the Obama election where it was like, no, people are hopeful and struggle is going to pick up. I'm like, actually I feel like, they just really, you know, I was like, I get the sense that people are less interested in radical politics now because they kind of think, oh, maybe the system's. You know, but none of that. If I just. That disagreed with the perspectives coming from the center, then none of that was explored. Or, you know, you basically got castigated for disagreeing with the perspective, you know, And I don't know if what I said was coherent, but I just wanted to bring that up because at the same time as being trained to like actually go talk to people, I was also trained to do a fake listening thing by whatever argument they made, compartmentalizing it into a very specific debate that I had already read about and already had an answer to. And that, that was, that was an element that disrupted real connection for me.
[87:40]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think like what you're saying is like a huge, like, you know, I never really thought about what you're saying that the ISO, a lot of times, because of something that happened in 1871, the ISO, a lot of times would think, just think, you know, this is just a repeat of what happened in 1871, you know, like, I think that actually had a huge. It's probably a big reason why they tripped up so badly with Occupy and anarchism in general, you know, because they felt like, well, we've already. Engels already refuted the anarchists in 1892, you know, why are we even talking about anarchism and Occupy? You know what I mean? And it's like, you know, sometimes, sometimes that stuff can be useful, but like, you can't just rinse and recycle answers like that because historical problems, you know, don't exactly recon re. You know, recreate themselves every 50 years, you know what I mean? Like, it's always a different situation, at least a little bit, you know, and they did, they did. They just didn't engage. They didn't really engage at all with like, where Occupy was actually at and how it actually functioned. And you know what I mean? Because it was like, oh, Anakin's had been refuted by angles or whatever. One thing I, I would also say with Andy is I, I share. I mean, I don't know. I actually haven't gotten back into the. What's left archives to look at all the COVID related stuff because I know that's. It seems like that's where you guys. That was the fork in the road, I guess you could say, between you guys. And like, I guess what, what you call the mainstream left so I don't know what any of that, but I do, I definitely identify with like, you know, the whole baptism by fire thing, you know, because like handing out anti war literature on September 12, 2001 by yourself, you know, you're not part of any group. Ain't nobody there. If you get jumped, that's it, you know, it's one versus whoever. You know, I went through that and I went through this thing where, you know, I was the most unpopular person in my dorm or whatever or campus or, you know, because I was, you know, unapologetically against the war. So I went. So, because I went through that, like, I wasn't afraid to like take up extremely unpopular positions on the far left about Syria, Libya, Occupy, you know, like once you've been, once you've been through the fight, once you, you know, you get, you went through baptism by fire. Like in the real world, stuff on the left is just like, like it doesn't matter, you know what I mean? Like, it just doesn't. The barbs that people throw your way just, it doesn't. They don't land because or don't, don't really make a difference. And the other thing I would want, I would want to mentioned, like Matt was saying, like the ISO has all these sort of. And I guess based on my essay, which I haven't read in 20 years or 10 years, that the ISO has all these like in depth positions on all these country specific, historical, specific stuff. When me and my friend Ariel found the ISO and we're talking about joining, like me and him, we made like a pact that if we found out the ISO in any way supported the ussr, we would just be like, bye. That's it. Because like both of us were working class kids and we just had an instinctual sort of knowledge that whatever was happening over there was not pro working class. That if you were a working class person in the ussr, you were getting destroyed, you know what I mean? Like you were getting screwed. You were an exploited class. You had no freedom, you had no, you know, it was terrible. It was just terrible. So like we didn't know anything about degenerated worker state or, you know, we didn't know. We didn't have the theoretical sophistication to really talk about things like state capitalism versus, you know, but we, it became very clear reading, you know, the where we stand thing made it very clear that like the ISO is not pro Cuba, not pro North Korea, not pro Russia, you know, so that on the face of it was good enough for us to Join. And then we were like, but if we find out in the footnotes that, you know, because that's sometimes how it goes where it's like in a lot of Trotsky's groups, it's like critical support for Blank, you know, so it's like you find out later that you actually do support some of this stuff at some level, you know, anyway. But we didn't know about all that as 16 year olds. We just knew that we didn't want to be part of something that was, you know, that was in any way, shape or form even slightly pro Stalinist. So anyway, so by. So in fall of 2002, I moved to New York. The anti war group that I set up or helped establish. I had run the meetings in such a way in a basically a pretty democratic way. Like everybody had access to the mailing list of each other and each other's phone numbers. We were rotating the chair of the meeting and who would give introductions. And so like, I basically ran the things with the idea that, you know, know, if I die or get arrested or go somewhere else, the group will continue just fine without me. I'm just a cog in a machine. I can be replaced. And that's basically what happened. There was another guy I worked with, his name is Jesse Harasta. He was like a pro iww, sort of anarcho, syndicalist, socialist type of guy. He was the first person not in the ISO that I called Comrade. For me, that was like a big break. It was like, because the ISO had this sectarian thing where you would only call other ISO members comrades. But I started calling him Comrade before I left in 2002 because we worked, me and him worked very closely to manage the group just to make sure, you know, who's got the next talk prepared, who's making the flyer, like the basics, the nuts and bolts of running the group and keeping it going. Me and him worked pretty regularly together to make sure it kept going and not just whatever happens happens. You can't have, you can't run a group with just whatever happens happens. You have to have some leadership or some organizational continuity. So anyway, yeah, I moved to New York in fall of 2002, started going to Hunter College, and then I was in the Hunter branch for like the next four years while I was going to school. And anti war stuff, obviously the Iraq invasion was like a huge thing we did. We set up a campus anti war network that was kind of the ISO's front group for the anti war stuff on campuses like at the time, I didn't think of it as a front group, but in hindsight I'm like, okay, you know, if you, you know, it's not like the ISO ever reached out to other groups.
[94:14]
B
Correct.
[94:15]
C
To actually form a genuine united front. Even though in theory that's what we were supposed to be doing on paper, that's what the theory told us to do. In practice, it was always the ISO plus a bunch of unaffiliated people from, you know, so, you know, so. And a lot of times what happened would. What would what. What happened at the Hunter branch of the campus Anti War network was basically, we ended up alienating everybody. All the unaffiliated people that we. That came into the group, it was like seven or 10 other people and three ISO people, including myself, we ended up alienating them so much, even though most of them were anti capitalist, socialist, radical. There was like one guy who was a conservative and like one person who was a liberal and conservative. I mean, like, you know, Republican voter, basically. But there were Republicans against the Iraq war too. But, you know, we alienated all the people who were closest to us politically just by being too aggressive about selling the paper, trying to recruit, announcing ISO events nonstop at the end of every single meeting. You know, it was, you know, we, you know, it was like it was, if it's the same people coming to the meeting for six months straight, they don't need to hear the next is they know the ISO exists. Like it's not a new thing. Like, and we just didn't, you know, because we had the, this organizational imperative to recruit, recruit, recruit, recruit, you know, like it didn't matter how pissed off these other people were at us. And eventually the coalition got destroyed by that and we got, we got kind of kicked out or red baited out or excluded. And then a new coalition formed called Books Not Bombs. But the original coalition was the Hunter Anti War Coalition. And then a different. The, the student government at Hunter College at that time was like a leftist Maoist, Third worldist, people of color group. And they spearheaded a second anti war coalition. After the war started and ours, after ours collapsed. The one that we started collapse, we kind of joined their group, their coalition, which was more of a genuine united front because this, this third world. This group is called Student Liberation Action Movement. And they came out, they were formed out of like protesting budget cuts throughout the 90s under the Giuliani administration. And Pataky. Pataki was like the Republican governor of NEO for like a long time. So they would, they basically ran A student. They ran student government and they would bust people up to Albany to try to protest against cuts and stuff like that. And it was majority all. They basically were. No, there were no white people in that organization. They were basically. I don't want to go so far to say that they were, quote unquote, anti white, but I don't think a white person could actually be a member to give you some idea of like, you know, you know, they were like Pro Mao, pro PFLP, pro, you know, person of color with an AK47 was kind of like their politics, you could put it that way. So the ISO, you know, we struggled a lot because a lot of our members were white. I'm white passing, but I had a third world name. So I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't really know if I registered as white when I was dealing with them. Like, it wasn't clear to me what they thought of me. But we had black. We had a couple black members who would be the person in charge of interfacing with them to avoid the whole stuff, you know, any toxic stuff going back and forth. So, yeah, so it was, it was definitely. It was. And there was a point, there was actually a point in, in the second coalition, anti war coalition, where somebody in the ISO wanted to bring up that somebody in that coalition was a member of a rival socialist group. I think they were in Freedom Road socialist organization. I want to say they were a Maoist or something like that. And I was like, I was like, so basically you're saying like, we should redbait this person. You know, that's essentially what it would have been. And then that shut that down completely. But it was kind of a. I mean, it kind of boggled my mind that somebody would want to use somebody's membership in a rival socialist group as, as fodder in some sort of. And I was like, I don't think that's a good idea. I mean, first, first of all, this is not a, you know, in principle is a bad idea. Like, in principle you shouldn't be doing that. Second of all, as soon as they find out they're, you know, as soon as you make that an issue with that person, then it becomes a. We're also at a socialist organization. Then. Then it's our turn. Like, you know, what kind of precedent are you creating? You know, I mean, I think it was basically just born of frustration that this other person and this other group was more influential in this coalition than the ISO. Was and they were trying to find ways to like undermine that. And you know, there's just, to me there's certain things, there are certain red lines you just can't cross in politics. You know, there's certain things you just can't do. There's certain things that are just off limits. You know, that's certain, that's, you know, that's probably one of them. In terms of the most exciting thing that definitely that happened that I was part of was on the day that the bombing started or the day after the bombing started. This was like March 19th. It started on March 19th. And then the day after everybody was going to walk out and we called it day X and go down to Times Square on an emergency protest of the bombing. Like we actually got into a fight with the cops and we took the street from them. That was cool. That was just like congratulations. That was amazing. That was just. And this is, this is right after, you know, this is still after 9 11, Giuliani's mayor. And after 911 basically all protests had, were confined in these little tiny penned up spaces. And the, the, the, the justification was oh, security, security threats, blah, blah, 911. You don't want to have a huge gathering of people because somebody could just, you know, blow it up or whatever.
[99:52]
A
But it's a free speech zone.
[99:54]
C
Yeah, they call them free. That's right, they call them speech zones. I mean and they were like 20 by 50 or something. They were tiny. So it was a very rainy, cold misery as we were streaming down to Times Square. And you know, the way the cops had set everything up was kind of like they were, it was kind of like they were herding cattle. The people were just kind of marching, marching, marching. And you know, cops were just kind of waving people into the pen and the people were just kind of like cattle. You know, it didn't seem like there was anything you could do about that. And then you know, some, some of the ISO people and the anti war people from Hunter got, did like a huddle, a spontaneous huddle because we realized they didn't. There were not that many cops versus bodies that they were supposed to be policing. So we in, we had a huddle and we came up with an on the spot plan to, you know, try to take the whole street or cause a problem. And what we ended up doing was we unlocked the fences in like five different places at once, all at the same time. And there was only two or three cops so they couldn't close up the gap. And then we had to Encourage people to, you know, cut across. Because what they were doing is like, if there's a two lane road and there's yellow lines in the middle, you know, left and right side of traffic. So one side would be blocked off completely and there would be protesters in that little block. And then the other side was completely clear. There was no cars on that side of the street. You just couldn't protest there. So we just unhooked the fences and then encouraged people to cross over. And people were scared at first. People were like, you know, I don't want to get arrested. Which is fair. No problem. And then once the cops, you know, at first they were like bewildered. They didn't know what to do. And then they called reinforcements and then a bunch of cops came in. And then there was like, we were like kind of like fist fighting with the cops. And they would grab somebody, and then we would try to grab them back as this hyped up crowd. And we would pull people, they would try to grab somebody, we would pull them back, they would try to grab somebody, we pull them back. And then at some point we all locked arms and we were all jumping up and down so they couldn't grab us. And we were like chanting, you know, the people united will never be defeated and all this kind of stuff. You know, it was cool. It was cool. And then eventually they gave up. There was, there was. There was a point at which there were like three or four cops who were using a fence to like, try to push people back into the thing. And they were pro. You know, there were like 10 people on the other side of that, and they were, you know, it was like a tug of war, except they were pushing instead of pulling. And it was like. So that's the kind of like physical confrontation that we were getting into. And some people did get arrested. There was like a handful of people who got arrested and they faced charges. And, you know, they were kind of like, I shouldn't use collateral damage is, you know, a terrible phrase. But they were like the unintended victims of, you know, they just got arrested and we couldn't un. Arrest them. Essentially, like. And it was all kind of chaotic and unplanned and, you know, it's just. It's just something that kind of, you know, that's kind of like the risk when. If you do get into a thing with cops in a physical confrontation.
[102:56]
B
Yep.
[102:56]
C
You know, you risk arrests, you risk random people who are not actually involved in confrontation just getting snatched because the cops want to arrest somebody. They don't want to go, go back to the paddy wagon empty handed. Um, so yeah, that was like the most exciting thing that happened in terms of the ISO. The only thing, that's the only notable kind of story I have to tell there was. There was a anti war conference in Boston for the campus anti war network. And the ISO was, you know, instrumental in putting that. The ISO was constantly setting up united fronts of itself and then having the front group set up like national networks of yada, yada, fill in the blank. So they were trying to do that with the campus anti war network. And there was a debate about points of unity. Like what, what things does everybody agree on? And one of the things, one was a media withdrawal. I can't remember the others. One of them was, that was proposed was like, everybody a point of unity was like opposing like a UN occupation of Iraq or a UN sanctioned occupation of Iraq because the war was not sanctioned by the UN Security Councils, which is what made it illegal under international law. But there was, you know, the ISO members in that, in that formation were pushing very hard for this point of unity about UN occupation. And everybody basically in the meeting spoke up in favor of it. And then there was like a break or a dinner. And then the next day we would go on vote on the resolution. And myself and Kari Peterson Smith, who I knew from Rochester, we were having dinner with 10 people who were not in the ISO and they hadn't spoken in the meeting. And like all 10 of them were like, they were not at all united on the UN occupation thing. Like they had questions. They were, some of them were liberals. I mean, a lot of it was just confusion. Like they didn't, they didn't necessarily understand the issues, but it was like, because they weren't trained ISO cadre who had been used to speaking and arguing and like they weren't confident enough to like voice their objection against people who are confident. So at the, at the debate about the issue the next day in the voting, I was like the only ISO person who voted against keeping that as a point of unity. Because I felt like, yeah, the ISO agrees that this is the point of unity, but like the non ISO people don't. And it doesn't. It doesn't. It's. If we're not actually united on this, why are we making, why are we trying to make it a point of unity? I didn't understand. Like, to me it made no sense. So I voted against it. I was like the only ISO person who voted against that motion. And it failed. It failed by like like one or two votes. And I feel like it was the right thing. And honestly it wouldn't have mattered if it carried or it failed.
[105:35]
A
Right.
[105:36]
C
You know, it didn't, it didn't really matter. Like, it didn't, didn't have any outcome, organizing outcome to that. But it was definitely a thing where I could. During the debate at, when we were voting, the people who are in favor of it got really emotionally attached to, like super emotionally attached. Like, they were upset when it didn't pass, like tears. Like, it was just like. Yeah, it was, it was surprising. I was very surprised at that, that like people would get so. Because, you know, it just, you know, it just didn't seem like, you know, an emotional issue. You know, the United nations, who cares about the United. You know, United nations is not something that usually gins up like a lot of feeling. You know, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like something like, oh, somebody accused somebody of rape or, you know, that's going to be a heated discussion for sure. No question. There's no way to avoid it. But like the un, like, you know,
[106:33]
A
like, I think this is important because you're now squarely, in my experience, which is I was part of the campus Anti War Network branch from San Francisco State.
[106:46]
B
Cool.
[106:47]
A
And looking back on it now, it's interesting to see how I, I appreciate your take. Right. It was completely a front group and, you know, we would sell papers before every like Students Against War meeting, even though it was the same, like 10 people or whatever, you know, and they were just like, what the fuck is wrong with you people? You know, and we're like, you're red baiting us. And, and then, yeah, you know, looking back, it's like actually we were, we were like really just dysfunctional interpersonally because we were trying to just focus on individually recruiting people. And we thought that the political questions. This is related to your last point, which was that we had this idea that like, winning these political arguments was the ultimate, were like the main goals. And so that question around the UN was essentially trying to, you know, get people to see that the UN was also this, you know, sort of reformist and part of sort of the, the world imperialist power. And we shouldn't, we shouldn't sanction, we shouldn't, you know, basically look to the U.N. you know, and so it's amazing now to think about like, how basically overall politically irrelevant that question was and is. And yet the way that we were, the way that it was kind of. And this is probably has to do also with kind of the middle class nature of the leadership. But also I feel like the idealism behind the whole. The way that. That the ISO saw its project which was that like winning these political questions was. Was how you build the right kind of organization as opposed to understanding there will be a process of development with groups of people and that what was more important was getting people to actually genuinely learn lessons together. Honestly learn it lessons together. So your story, you know, I have similar ones, but it's. It's a little bit. It's important for me to revisit this because you're, you're helping me remember how mistrained I was like how dysfunctional my political training in that context was. So thank you for that.
[109:20]
C
Okay. You're welcome.
[109:23]
A
And it's painful too. It's a little bit like, wow.
[109:26]
B
Well, I would say that. I guess the term I would use for is we've been. We've been talking about experiences like I would say selling a paper or I would say the reading Reading. Reading theory are formative and things that I would just say are.
[109:43]
A
Are
[109:46]
B
engaging people. Like when I say selling the paper, I mean engaging people physically around idea. Political ideas and having something in your hand in which to say hey, check this out, you know and come back to me. Let's talk. Like that's really I do think an important part of building a political environment around. Around you and in your community. Now I think we're getting into areas that while I know what we. I know what we did is wrong, I today I don't know it would be the right way. And that is something fam. This has been. This is really something I do want to discuss. I'm not even sure we'll talk about it today but. But in a subsequent episode about like what. What lessons can we. What are lessons to be learned and what are even points of departure for what we did. Because in our anti war work which wasn't campus anti war network but it was community work, the big debate was around Palestine and whether support for Palestine should be one and in the Bay Area there. There were other radical groups that were part of the group that we were trying to build but then we were building it in opposition to the PSL that had done answer, you know, because an answer we felt like we couldn't get into. So there are all sorts of questions to talk about in terms of how one would take up the dealing with answer and then what do you do with your group? But like there we took up aptly A position of, oh no, you know, we don't want to make Palestine a litmus test for da da, da da. So we actually did the. The inverse there. We. We took up the more reformist position in the face of. In the face of what was considered. Well, I would say it's a more radical position, like not just us out of the Middle east, but, you know, calling for the liberation of Palestine. And even. Maybe I don't even know if the question of two state solution was even taken up as a point of unity. So questions. I think there are questions to be taken up about what to do. And I think mistakes can be mode. We made mistakes on both end. At the end of the day, I do agree with Michael that we saw ourselves as a little cog and that this bigger cog would. Then we saw it as some way, these positions as some way expressing our influence and then developing our influence out of taking right positions, which I think I feel like is connected to things like Trotsky's transitional demands.
[112:05]
C
What.
[112:05]
B
What demands? What actually build the movement versus that which I don't adhere to any more as much. So, yeah, I just want to say that those. There's the ISO operated both ways. I don't think they were right. But I. I have to say I still have questions about if I was part of an organization and I was meeting people from other organizations in a coalition and people who are independent. I still don't have quite answers as to how because these things are going to come up again, I don't have answers as to what the right thing to do is yet. You know, like. But that's something I would like to discuss more. So I'll just leave. I'll just say that.
[112:41]
C
Yeah, I mean the whole thing about the interlocking gears, I mean, that's chapter and verse from Trotsky's history of the Russian Revolution. He said the Bolsheviks were the small gear, they mobilized the Soviets and the Soviets mobilized the whole working class. I mean, that's his. That's his. That's literally his analogy in the book. You know, whether you agree or don't agree, that's. That's where it comes from. Yeah, where it comes from. So let's see in two. So that covers up to 2003, 2004. In 2003, 2004. Also, the other stuff I was doing while I was in the ISO was me and this guy named Tom Barton or Thomas Barton. He put out a newsletter back in the Vietnam War days called Vietnam gi, which was like an anti war Newspaper for soldiers. Him and a guy named Jeff Charlotte. Jeff Charlotte was a. A veteran of the Vietnam War. As soon as he got out in like 1970, 1971 or 1968, he started making a newspaper, an anti war newspaper. And their circulation was something like 40,000 at its peak. And three quarters of that was in Vietnam itself towards. With servicemen. Like, like. So it's a huge. There was a whole documentary about it called sir no sir that's part of the whole GI movement against the Vietnam War. So I worked with Barton to create what I. What we tried to have is like the modern version of that. The publication was called Traveling Soldier. I mean, it was just me and Tom Barton basically with a Word document or PDF, printing this thing out and then mailing it to the soldiers we knew or military families we knew and stuff. And some of those guys ended up after they got out or came home from Iraq, they became part of Iraq Veterans against the War. But that was like, that was officially sanctioned by the ISO leadership. Like Ahmed Sharkey gave us the green light. But we, it was all like through not underhanded, but like subterfuge. Like, it wasn't something that you would talk about at a convention and then pass a resolution. Because at that time we were afraid. We really believed that John Ashcroft was going to like, knock at our door at any minute, you know, and arrest every. Because after nine, 11 in the Patriot act, everybody, you know, there was a pair of. A bit of an atmosphere of paranoia on, on the left that the government was going to, you know, start rounding up radicals or whatever any minute now. Didn't really happen, thank God. But like, we were afraid. And so something like that was technically, technically legal, depending on how you do it. Like, basically Department of Defense regulations state that like, you're allowed to have one copy of any publication in your possession. Anything more than one is basically viewed as attempt to distribute, you know, which is actually probably correct. You know, you have a hundred copies of a newspaper, you're probably not reading all 100 copies yourself, obviously. So, you know, there, you know, we were trying to do like, kind of like a little bit like underground work. And we had like a PO Box and all this kind of stuff. And, you know, we didn't get very far. But I felt like something that kind of became a persistent theme for me at ISO events and meetings and anti war stuff too at campus Anti War Network was that, like, there was a lot of talk about soldiers revolting against the Vietnam War. And I had done a lot of reading at that time to try to learn the lessons of the, you know, the movement of the, you know, this. If, if you want to succeed in stopping the Iraq war, it kind of makes sense to like, try to learn what worked with the Vietnam War. How did they stop the war? And you know, there in every ISO talk, there almost always was some section about working class soldiers revolting, you know, yada, yada, yada. But there was basically never any organizational. They never took that to the level of like, okay, so what do we do about that? Like right now with the soldiers in Iraq? And there was a huge, what after the invasion, there was a huge swelling of anti sentiment in the military because they were sent without proper equipment. You know, they were told they would be liberators. You know, there's all this, you know, I don't want to rel. I don't want to revisit all that. But there was a lot of anti war sentiment because not just I, it was anti war, but it was also because of the way the, the Defense Department chose to wage the war that was screwed up and really pissed people off and made them open to anti war ideas. So there was a huge opening there. And I was like, we're. How come nobody's taking advantage of this or trying to do something with it? And so like, you know, I went back to like the 21 points of the common turn. And one of the things, one of the points of entry that you had to do if you wanted to gain admission to the Communist International was you have to agitate among the troops. You have to do something, you know. And I cited that in an internal document that we circulated, me and Tom circulated with Ahmed and all that. And eventually they signed off, like, you know, quietly, unobtrusively. But so that's kind of like, that's something that kind of became a persistent theme, was like I got kind of annoyed or frustrated that a lot of times people were giving speeches and saying, we should do X, we should do Y, we should do Z. And I agree we should do X, Y and Z. So like, how do we take X, Y and Z and like, turn it into an action plan? Like right now or soon, you know, maybe not today, but in the next week or two. Like, and there was basically, that's something that happened a lot with the ISO, in my opinion was like, you know, the labor movement should do X, unions should do Y. You know, they should go on strike. You know, there's constant, like, exhortation of what should happen, but not much follow up in terms of like, okay, I agree with that grand scheme idea. How does that break down into the, you know, my union local or my campus local or, you know, so that was my attempt to try to fill some of that gap. And there was not very much knowledge about that going on, even in my local brand. I didn't, I didn't tell the people on my branch committee about it. The district, the district organizer at the time, Meredith Collodner, she did know about it because she was like listed as someone. If Tom Barton had a, you know, he's an old, he was an older man, he was like 70 something at the time. He's doing this stuff with me. And I was like, you know, learning from him how they did it back in the day. She was like, if something had happened to him, she was like listed as a part of his estate or something like that, that she would get his papers about certain, certain political projects he was involved in. So she knew about it, but, like, nobody else knew about it and it wasn't broadcast. They did do. They actually did create a special supplement of Socialist Worker for Troops that we like used like a four page, you know, the thing in the middle of the newspaper. We did you. They did create that at some point, but that wasn't, it wasn't advertised to the whole organization, that this is what it's really for or whatever. I mean, it wasn't just for us. It was, you know, I don't want to make it sound like that either, but, you know, it was like a supplement just devoted to the soldier issue and quoting soldiers in Iraq, complaining about the war and all that kind of stuff. And then the other thing that happened in 2004 was that there was a whole debate about whether to support, support Ralph Nader's 2004 campaign. And my recollection, and I haven't gone back to look at the documents to see if I'm actually recalling correctly, but Todd Christian, who was the west coast organizer of the ISO, was like, enthusiastically, yes, we should endorse right now and get involved in whatever campaigns. Maybe you guys might know better than me because I, you know, you guys work with him closer than I did. And then the steering committee position was kind of like, like less enthusiastic. It was like, we should probably endorse, but there's some weird stuff going on with Nader in this camp because he was sucking up to like Pat Buchanan, which sucked, which was horrible because Pat Buchanan is like this right wing anti immigrant nativist. And then my position, I was like in the left minor, you know, the ultra left minority, you could say. And I was saying basically, we should endorse the campaign if it meets certain conditions. Two or three things. Nader should have a better position on Iraq and a couple other stuff like don't mess with the Reform Party and the Buchanan and all that. So anyway, that was the only time I ever had an open conflict with the steering committee on an issue. And it was debated at the 2004 socialism. They gave me my 10 minutes or five minutes to talk, and then Todd talked, and then the steering committee talked, and then there was a vote, and I got like three votes. And the steering committee position got. I don't know what. It was hundreds of votes, I guess. I don't know how many people voted. And then Todd's position had definitely more than mine. But I don't remember, you know, all that, but that was the only time I was ever.
[121:36]
D
I didn't even know there was such organization within the ISO.
[121:40]
C
Oh, yeah, like, we didn't call. You know, there was. Factions were not allowed. We didn't really. I didn't really think there was a need for a faction because we were just advancing different. It was a very specific fork in the road. Should we go left, right, or center? You could put it that way. And I was saying we should go left. The steering committee, you could say, was the center. Todd Kirtien, you know, was saying we should immediately take a right turn. You know, I mean, I'm not saying his position was right wing. I'm just making an analogy because, like, usually faction. Usually when you get into factions, usually it's. It's not one issue. It's. Usually there's a whole bunch of issues that we have problems with, and we have a different. You know, there's usually a bunch of other things. So just for this one thing, whether or not to endorse, you know, I'd never really thought about creating a whole faction. I just figured I'd make my case. If I lose the vote, I lose the vote. You know, it's not the end of the world. I. You know, not everybody agrees everything, you know, and then after the vote, that was that. And like, they, you know, I was. My position, I think, was characterized as ultra left. And, you know, probably that was true. So I felt like the only thing I learned about that debate or from that debate that I took away from it was kind of like, it's better to ex. To me, it's better to explain and argue, like, work out all the arguments. And then if somebody's ultra left that should be in the conclusion rather than the leading thing. Because like, as soon as you say somebody's ultra life, pro imperialist, racist, as soon as you put that in the headline, you've just shut down the actual discussion and argument about and sorting out whether or not this is a good idea or a bad idea. Like, I don't think in general, I try to avoid, you know, I might disagree with somebody, but I'm not going to label them a sectarian. You know what I mean? I'm going to try to, I might expose the fact that they're a sectarian through the actual paragraphs that I write. You know, you read it and you're like, okay, this other person is sectarian. Like, but I let the reader draw that. If they want to call them names, let the reader do that. I try to avoid doing it because I feel like it short circuits the process of debate and discussion when people start throwing around epithets like from the jump, you know, So I try to avoid that in my arguments with, you know, like, I might say it's not good to support X dictator, you know, but I'm, I, am I going to call them a Assad apologist or a counter revolutionary? Like, no, I don't, I generally don't want to do that, you know, especially if there's someone on the left, you know, if it's actually Assad, yeah, I will call Assad a counter revolutionary like that. You know what I'm saying? Like, like it's, you know, I just, if I think somebody's misguided or confused or has a wrong position, I'm going to try not to box them in so that they can't retreat. That's something Tom Barton actually taught me when I was working him with on Trial and Soldier was that like you should leave people room to retreat or shift or change their mind and not like pigeonhole them and dump cement on them so they can't lead the pigeonhole. You know, it's not a good idea. And that's partly also why I don't get, I don't get too worked up about like how I label myself or how I label other people or what their specific ideology is. Because people's ideas change or people have a contradictory ideas or someday one day somebody, on Monday somebody wakes up as a liberal, on Tuesday they become a Marxist, on Wednesday they become a Trump voter. Hopefully not like, you know what I'm saying? Like, because people can change their ideas all the time. It doesn't make, to me, it doesn't make A lot of sense to like get really stuck on labels and specific ideologies so rigidly, you know what I mean? Because people's ideas are always in flux and ideological allegiances can fluctuate quite a lot. So yeah, that's the two things I got from that debate. And then at that point, like I basically had to leave the ISO because I had, I graduated college and my first out of college job paid me so low that I had to get a second job. So I was working like seven days a week at a restaurant, between a restaurant and like a white collar office job. So I had to like leave the ISO for like three years from 2007 to, I mean, I didn't rejoin, but, but I thought about rejoining in 2010, 2011, after I got a better job where I didn't have to work so much. So that was when I started thinking about. That's when I kind of, I left the fishbowl. I called the ISO the fishbowl only because like, when you're inside an organization like that, it's like being in a fishbowl in the sense that like, you can see stuff on the outside world. Like, you know, Bush is president, you know, things are happening, but you don't really, your perspective is kind of skewed by being inside the organization, you know what I'm saying? Like, you don't, how you look at things is not how the average person sees things most of the time because they're not trapped in this little bubble of self reinforcing ideological policing or whatever you want to call it, whether it's Trotskyist or Mao, it doesn't matter, doesn't really matter what flavor of ideology. Jehovah's Witness, you know, you know, they have the same, you know, it's the same, it's the same thing. When you're inside the group, the world looks a certain way on the outside and then when you're outside the group, it looks, you see the same stuff, but it's not, it doesn't really look the same and it's not the same dynamics. So that, so my time outside of the ISO, like it just made me realize, it gave me more perspective. Like it made me realize like nobody in the working class cares about the, the how we word our flyers or all the, like, you spend so much stuff, so much time in meetings debating like minutiae of, you know, do we include Palestine and Yemen and Lebanon and you know, like, you know what I'm saying? Like that gets lost in the, the big picture. Scheme of things. When you have a rally, people are only going to remember one or two ideas. Basically. They're not going to remember the 10 point list of demands. And, but like in leftist meetings, you spend a lot of time with the microscope, you know, sussing, working out the specific details of something that in the big picture is probably not going to matter that much. Certainly not going to matter to the average person. So, yeah, so then, so that's, that's basically I stopped being in the ISO, active, I stopped paying dues, stopped going to meetings at the end of 2006 because I just, you know, you cannot work seven days a week and be a member of the ISL. It's just impossible. It's just physically impossible. It's kind of funny though. I got a, I got an email from Joel Geier explaining, you know, I mess, I don't know, I don't know what, I forgot what we were communicating about. But Joe Geier, who was a member of the steering committee and he was in the group that kicked out the people who formed the ISO back in 1977, he kicked them out of the International Socialists. Anyway, he, you know, I told him, look, I can't, I'm not a member right now because I just, you know, I'm working seven days a week, barely making ends meet. And he was like, he sent me a message like, oh, you know, the revolution doesn't wait. There's no breaks for revolution. I was like, I was like, yeah, dude. I didn't respond. But then years later, I found out he's like a, he's like a millionaire. He's like a bond trader on Wall street in the 80s. Like he made a fortune. Yeah, you know, like, you know, he's like a, I was probably arguing with a millionaire, most likely. And then he actually played, he actually played a very negative role that ended up leading to the ISO's dissolution.
[129:10]
D
Tell me his name again.
[129:12]
C
Joel Gy. I'll put him, I'll put his name in the chat.
[129:15]
D
Thank you. I can look him up.
[129:16]
C
He's, he's ancient. He's, he's, he's a living fossil. I mean, I'm getting there too, you know, I'm getting there too.
[129:22]
B
But, you know, one of the themes that's come up for me in this discussing is listening. And I realized that while I was a good listener in the ISO twist to an extent, I did, I probably did a better job listening than my comrades did on a paper sale. But I will tell you one way I didn't listen I went, I currently believe that when you listen to properly listen to somebody who has a different point of view, you have to put your own point of view on that at stake. It's like you have to put your. Those cards have to be on the table. Like it has to be possible for that person to change my mind. If I'm truly offering, saying that that person needs to be prepared to be changed their mind. And if I go and I'm like, no, I'm rigid here, but you're going to, like, you have to, you have to move towards me, I don't really think I can listen. And that's one change that's been made for me. It's like, you know, I've got to be willing to know that I'm putting at risk in engaging this person the fact that yes, I could change their mind towards me, but I have to make it possible for them to move my point of view to them. And if I'm not doing that, then more likely than not I'm not fully listening. And that's a feature of sectarianism and even opportunism that, you know, where, when is that sectarian? Is when is it opportunistic? Or when is it actually like engagement and actual real, you know, trying to be like honest with a person, I think, are some of the questions that I would like to work out with you as we going forward, you know, because I think that's what comes up for me. And just listening to what you're saying as well as just a wonderful trip down memory lane about ISO stuff. Yeah.
[131:08]
D
What I want to say is I think Bin should finish and then we should. I'd like, I'm writing down some notes. I'd like to revisit those areas with him in a discussion on the second part because I just don't think it's appropriate to jump in and it just seems awkward now to not finish, you know.
[131:34]
B
Yeah.
[131:35]
D
And so therefore we should have part two to further go in depth.
[131:40]
C
Yeah, I can finish the. By the biographical. Yeah, I mean, seems like that should be finished and then all the issues that it raises maybe should be separate.
[131:52]
A
Yeah. There's several very clear themes to me that I think we could organize future discussions around.
[131:59]
D
Yeah. For example, I'd like to know if the three of you decided to join. You know, not right now. That's not. This has to be edited out. But if you three would have wanted to join the, the different groups that were formed right afterwards. You know, there was the, the socialist groups that formed after 2019, once it. The ISO dissolved. But anyhow, let. Let's finish. And I think that that's what I'm doing. For me, it's just trying to. Because there's a lot. So I do some bullet points and then we can revisit those points.
[132:39]
C
All right. I will try to finish the biographical. Biographical stuff because the elements that are in the first part of the story end up shaping a lot of the second part. So basically, from 2007 to 2010, you know, I'm working seven days a week for three years with no. No vacation, no break. Like, actually, I mean, it sounds bad, and it was. It was kind of bad, but it was. I don't know, it doesn't sound as. It wasn't as hard as it might sound, I guess, is what I'm saying, you know, but when you're 20, when you're in your mid-20s, you know, you just have a lot more energy to do stuff like that, you know, at. If you do, if you're at 45 or 55, working seven days a week, you're probably not in. That's not going to go well in the long run. So basically 2010, I get a new job that's paying me significantly more, significantly more. So then I can just quit the second job at the restaurant. And then I start rethinking, like, because I'm still a believer, you know, I'm still a believer in the ISO, basic mission and all that, you know, I start thinking about rejoining, but I didn't rejoin right away. I didn't feel like, I don't know, nothing was really. There was Nothing compelling in 2010 for me going on. That was like, like, like my personal situation got better. But, you know, I wasn't rushing to just join, jump back in either, because, like, it's not like if there had been a war going on or some, you know, hugely electrifying important thing going on, like. Yeah, but like, in 2010, that was like the rise of the Tea Party, you know, it sucked. It was not a fun. And that was. I think that was the year the, The Deepwater Horizon, BP thing, all the oil everywhere, it's just like sucked, you know, honestly, as a leftist, you know,
[134:29]
B
and Obama was president.
[134:31]
C
Yeah, Obama was president. I never, I never liked the guy. Look, I mean, this is getting into personal stuff, but, like, I just thought he was a cornball, to be honest. Like, from the jump, like. Like, I understand Marxist theory, you know, you understand things in a, hopefully even a more deeper way than the average Person who's not paying attention to politics. Like, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about just like on a personal level. Like, he just. I didn't understand what the hype was, like, why he's so. Like, people were like, worshiping this guy and stuff, and I was like, whatever. And then the thing that really irked me about him was when the whole Reverend Wright situation where he. I mean, Reverend Wright got him and Michelle married. You know, like, they were close. They were like, they were tight. And then one day he's just like. Just threw him under the bus, like nothing. You know, I was like. I was like, this guy sucks, man. I don't care. This guy. But, you know, but that doesn't. That's not affecting the political assessment and all that and whatever. But there was nothing happening at the time that was particularly interesting to me that would compel me to rejoin the ISO. And then that actually changed in 2011 with the Arab Spring, you know, that was like, okay, you know, it makes sense to want to join a revolutionary organization or revolutionary leftist organization when there's revolutions sweeping the globe and then ending up on our shores in the forms of. In the form of Occupy Wall Street. And also I think. I think the Wisconsin thing. Yeah, the Wisconsin uprising was in 2010. And there was some people were chanting about Egypt or Tunisia or something at. So there was some overlap. It was starting. The influence of the Arab Spring was starting to be felt in sort of American leftist politics. So, yeah, the Arab Spring breaks out. I'm starting to rethink thinking seriously, rejoining the ISO and the Libya rev. The Libyan revolution. Like, there's revolutions in like a bunch of Arab countries. And the Libyan revolution is like the first one that's kind of controversial on the left. I would say, like, everybody supported the Egyptian revolution. Everybody supported the Tunisian revolution.
[136:31]
D
Yay.
[136:32]
C
Get rid of these pro US dictators. Very easy for leftists who are anti US to just, you know, support that. But then it gets complicated with Libya because this guy's. Gaddafi is like an anti US dictator, you know, and lots of people, lots of leftists, like PSL Party for socialism and liberation, and not just them, but basically oppose the revolution in that country because it's. They're toppling an anti US dictator and therefore that's a win for US imperialism. That's how they see. They see everything is. Everything that happens in the world for them is like, that helps US Imperialism, hurts US imperialism. There's. There's no other factor in their thinking, basically. And so what happens is Gilbert Achkar, who is like a French Trotsky, French, Lebanese Trotsky is, I think he is, you know, very, you know, he's very educated, very sharp. He basically caused a lot of controversy on the left by supporting, supporting the revolution and, and like the intervention by the United, that was sanctioned by the United nations to stop, to militarily stop Gaddafi's tanks from rolling into Benghazi, which is a hotbed of the revolution at that point. And so he stirs up a lot and there's a lot of, you know, so that creates a lot of debate, not everybody agrees on this on the Western left. And my initial position was basically the same as the ISO, which is like revolution, yes, intervention no. You know, to sum it up, basically, PSL's position is revolution, no, intervention no. And, and, but what ends up happening is what actually happens in the real world is the Libyan revolution, the people leading it, and, and the people in the streets too. It's not just a bunch of guys sitting in a, you know, in a hotel suite, a five star hotel suite. It's not just them, but the people in the streets were demanding intervention in the form of. They call, you know, they call. It's not, they don't think of it as imperialism though, because they're asking for it, whereas they didn't want foreign boots on the ground. But basically the Libyan revolutionaries, pretty much all of them are like pro airstrikes on Gaddafi's forces because that's how you stop tanks, is with airstrikes. I mean, there's just no other way around it. And so the ISO position kind of collapses because, you know, if the ISO is saying revolution yes, intervention no, but the revolution itself is saying revolution yes, intervention yes. You know, it's like your position is basically, your position is no longer relevant if you're saying revolution yes, intervention no, and then intervention takes place anyway. You know, you're just, you're just saying things that don't matter. It's you, the way things have developed has just gone beyond your original starting point. Or you lost the argument. You could put it that way too. So I initially went after Gilbert Achgar and I wrote, I actually wrote an essay. The title, the title was something about calling him a cruise missile, Marxist, something like that. You know, I, I think it's, I still think it's good, but I'll get into that in a minute. But like, so. And they published it. Socialist Worker published it. I wasn't a member of the ISO at that point. They published it but then they unpublished it. Within 24 hours, it was gone, and I wasn't notified. So I email Al Maas and I'm like, did the link break? Am I not seeing it on the front page for some reason? And he's like, oh, I don't know. He gave me some, like, hem. Haw. You know, verbal jiu jitsu, dancing around, whatever the. I don't think he gave me a straight answer. Let me just put it that way. I could be wrong, but, like, the answer reads like. Like he's not being straight with me. Like, he could have just said, Gilbert Atgar got upset, and we don't want to upset him. I think that would be the honest answer, honestly, and that's fine. You know, you want to preserve a relationship with an important left intellectual, and you didn't want to, like, attack him personally. You know, it was a personal attack, you know, like, you know, whatever. Like, I might not agree with the decision, but at least that's the honest answer of, like, why it happened. You know what I'm saying? That's all I was hoping for, but I didn't get that. I got some, like, weird Hemha something. Chat GPT. Before it was chat GPT, you generated AI slot before AI, you know, something that says something without saying anything. So that. That irritated the hell out of me.
[141:01]
A
And then our tradition calls it opportunism.
[141:04]
C
Opportunity. Yeah.
[141:05]
A
I mean, yeah, Our tradition calls it, you. You can't be straight. Basically, a power. A person who we're trying to court doesn't like what you said. But I have to somehow make it seem political.
[141:20]
C
Right, right. Some. Some principled thing. Right, Exactly. I mean, it's. You know, I think it would have been fine if he just said, you know, upon further reflection or debate, we felt like it crossed the line into a personal attack, and we don't want to do that. You know, I think that's a fair. I don't think that's opportunism, personally. Like, I can see. I can see the argument in favor of saying that's opportunism. Like, it's.
[141:44]
A
It's like, to me, yeah, dishonesty is the opportunism.
[141:49]
C
Right. The dishonesty is the right. Exactly. I agree with that. So that got me very irritated. And then it made me think, like, okay, if I rejoin the ISO, hypothetically, how would that be addressed if I don't agree with a decision that the editor of the newspaper made?
[142:07]
B
You know?
[142:08]
C
And that's when I started thinking, like, how did the Bolsheviks deal with that. Because surely there must have been cases where somebody published something. You can't unpublish stuff in a newspaper in, you know, 1917, because that didn't exist. But, you know, there must have been disputes about stuff that gets published and doesn't get published and blah, blah. You know, there had to be something, right? So that's what led me down the rabbit hole of digging into, like, how did the Bolsheviks handle situations like this? And that's when I started looking at how did they elect their Central Committee? How did they get their newspaper out there? How were those decisions made? Who controlled what, who controlled finances, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's when I, like, kind of inadvertently stumbled onto the whole slate system not being used by the Bolsheviks and that they. They elected their. Their Central Committee. Well, there's two. There's a couple different things. The Bolsheviks weren't a party. Number one, they weren't a party. They were a faction of a party. And basically the way they did elections was the most. The people who got the most number of votes ended up on the Steering Committee. It wasn't a unified block of a list of 10 names. And you can vote for or against this, and if you don't like these 10 names, you have to come up with your own other 10 names. They didn't do it like that at all. So when I realized that, I was like, oh, shoot. Well, that made me open. That just kind of opened my mind to, like, what else am I not? What else didn't I know that I should probably know, since we're always talking about the Russian Revolution. You know, we never really delved into the nitty gritty of nuts and bolts about how these things. How these things, how. How decisions were made and how organizing actually happened. And so it was in that process where I. I ran into the debate between Lars Lee, Chris Harmon, John Molyneux, and a couple other guys in the Historical materialism. It was like a debate series that they had, and Lars Lee's contribution had, like, a couple paragraphs talking about how Cliff. How Tony Cliff, the British socialist that the ISO used to promote his Lenin books, basically engaged in plagiarism and said a lot of misleading stuff. And, you know, it was all footnoted. It was all documented that this actually happened. And that just blew my mind. I was just like, holy. I didn't know all this. I had no idea that. I just took it for granted that Tony Cliff was basically correct about his view of Lenin. And, you know, I didn't know I had no idea that, you know, I just didn't. There was never. I never read a contrary point of view, basically. Like, I had read other Lenin books, but they had never talked about stuff like Bending the Stick or the specific things that Tony Cliff claimed Lennon did and stuff. Like they were all sort of. None of them contradicted each other, let's put it that way. It was just like, book A is talking about a bunch of issues. Book B, basically the same stuff, but, you know, a different take, but it doesn't actually flatly contradict what's in book A. So what I was reading from Lars Lee, who was reading a lot is. And translating a lot of original Russian language stuff was like, flatly contradicting. So that, you know, that was like, oh, shoot, maybe I should like, investigate and see, see, see, you know, what else is amiss in this? Because he only talked about a couple instances. So. So that's what led me down the sort of Leninism rabbit hole. And then. And then from there, Occupy Wall street starts happening in September of 2011, which is like a couple blocks from the new job that I got. So I start going to the encampment, like, every lunch break. And then sometimes I go, I stop by before work and sometimes after work, and they're there for like two months, which is basically as long as the Paris commune lasted, roughly 60 days. And like, you know, I was. I spent a good, you know, one plus hours there every day, every weekday for that. For that 12 weeks, you know. And so I was seeing with my own eyes how irrelevant the socialist left was to what was happening. And like, you know, when you go to a demonstration and you're actually there and you're part of a movement, and then you read the account of the movement online from a socialist or Marxist, this, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, you cannot, if you can't recognize what you're reading with your own lived experience. Like, that's a huge red flag. The bad kind, you know, that's a huge, awful. Like, it's like, what. Where's the disconnect? Why is it that what I'm reading has almost no relationship to what's actually happening? So that's why I started getting into, you know, so I was rethinking Leninism, rethinking all. Everything I had been taught by the ISO. And then this thing happens where. Where to my mind, the ISO should have been. You know, I could understand. I could understand that like. Like the ISO was, you know, the New York City ISO, which at that time was, you Know, I don't know, probably 75 people.
[147:13]
B
Yeah.
[147:13]
C
Across five branches, something like that. Like when Occupy Wall street was happening, I was think my, if I was the district organizer, you know, if I was the dictator of the local ISO and I could just do whatever I wanted to, I would have been like, just dissolve all the branches until this thing blows over and put every single person into a working group. Because there were about 40 working groups and if you got about 80 people, you can put two people into each working group to do influence the direction of that working group, sell your newspaper, push your argument. And they didn't do anything like that. As far as I can tell. They had a couple people in the labor working group and like the demands working group or something. Like they put probably five or 10 people at most on Occupy related stuff. And mostly what they were doing seems to be was like maintaining the branches, selling the newspaper at NYU Columbia Hunter and using Occupy as kind of like a talking point to show that the perspective that people are revolting is correct and the audience of socialist ideas is huge. And you know, all the perspective stuff, you know, and it was such a huge, I was just such a huge disappointment, you know what I mean? Like, you know, just imagine, you know, a workers council forming and basically the ISO is just selling a newspaper outside the workers council meeting. They're not even in the meeting. You know, that's what it felt like, you know, so, you know, just watching them just. And I would watch them sell papers and, and set up and break down and like they had no permanent presence in the encampment, which I also thought was a little strange because like if you have a district organizer or east coast organizer, you know, that person is paid full time to do ISO stuff. Why didn't one of those people just live at the encampment for and just build relationships and talk and get to know people and there was nothing, they didn't do anything like that whatsoever. You know, they just, it seemed like what they did was just maintain the branches and the routines that they had. And then Occupy was like this little thing that they shifted a couple resources too, you know. And I don't know what it was like in. I don't know what it was like in the Bay Area. I assume it's real relatively similar, but it was shocking to me. That was shocking.
[149:29]
D
It depends where. I was in a working group in SF and there were a lot of assemblies. I just think it took a long time, some of the assemblies. But yeah, it just depended where in the Bay Area one was. I think some of the outside ones, outside of SF were more, um. We're getting things done anyhow. Go ahead.
[149:47]
C
Oh yeah, yeah. The General Assemblies were a nightmare. I didn't, I didn't sit through any of those. I was looking at the working groups. Like the way Occupy kind of worked was like, every group is working autonomously. Nothing important from that group will go to the central ga. Like the GA was just like, you just get nothing done there, you know, Whereas all these little working groups are like going to have a protest and we're going to protest this bank or we're going to set up a garden or we're going to march on somebody's speech or you know what I mean? Like there so much action was happening through the working groups that, you know, I just felt like you could just ignore the General assembly altogether because like, you know, nobody paid attention to it really. So from there, from there, you know, I wrote that piece Occupying the Tasks of Socialists, which I submitted to the Australian links website because I had a feeling they would publish it and that ISO people would read it because if I sent it directly to the ISO, they would just never publish it because it was critical. So I knew, you know, I had a feeling that they would read it and that it would generate, it would, it would go viral among the socialist left. Because, you know, I'm a former ISO member, you know, writing, critiquing some of the stuff the ISO was doing and I felt like it was a fair critique. I didn't say you guys are opportunists, you guys are sectarian, you guys are, you know, I was just like, here's what the ISO said, here's what they left out, here's what they probably should have done instead, you know, blah. I didn't say the ISO got every single thing wrong. Like it wasn't, you know, you, any fair minded person would read that as like a, you know, you could say I was right or wrong, but I wasn't like just on them, you know, which is a lot of what Internet leftism is, is just on other people you don't like or whatever. And so I got, I got in contact with a lot of people because at the end of the article I was like, if you agree that the socialist left as it's currently constituted as a bunch of sects competing with each other, which isn't helpful or useful, and you know, history is basically leaving us in the dust at this point with anarchists leading. Anarchists are leading this thing and socialists are barely catching up you know, email me. And so a lot of different people from a lot of different tendencies. Email me. Like Eric Blanc, he emailed me. I was in contact with people from the Kusama Project. I had people from Socialist Alternative emailing me from the Socialist Party, from dsa, you know, because I was trying to put forward some type of regroupment initiative to like, you know, it was like, it just didn't seem, it just seemed insane that you could have five or ten newspaper selling groups all competing with each other, all of them not relevant at all to Occupy. You know, it seemed like we all sort of agree on a lot of the basic stuff. If we want to influence Occupy's direction, especially to compete with anarchists, we're going to have to like pool our resources at least a little bit and coordinate. And I, I knew, I knew when I made that appeal at the end that like the groups themselves were not going to go for it. Like I already knew. But by putting the call out there, I figured what would happen is the people who are dissatisfied in a particular group, who had a healthy mindset, healthier mindset, like a lot of people would stay in a group because it's the only game in town, you know what I'm saying? And they're not happy with the group, where the group is going, but they're in it because it's like I don't want to just be alone or be by myself, you know what I'm saying? So I figured those people would reach out to me and that's basically what happened. So I was trying to, trying to gin up some multi tenancy cooperation and use that as the basis of starting some type of formation where everybody's at least under the same roof and talking, you know, and coordinating some type of effort. And that's basically how the North Star website that I launched with Louis Proyect got set up. And that was kind of the general purpose was to have conversations in a place that involves the existing left but isn't reducible to the existing left. So like, if you're an independent person who's not in any group, you could submit something, you know, and, and get published. And because like all the party line publications are just so narrow, you know what I mean? Like PSL would never publish a dissenting view from a PSL member. The ISO, you know, the, the range of descent in the ISO was very narrow, you know, like, like super, super narrow. You couldn't challenge, you definitely could not challenge Tony Cliff. You definitely could not. You know, there's a Lot of stuff that's off limits. So the whole point of Northstar was a place where people who are dissidents, like the Renewal Faction of the ISO could get a fair hearing. You know, if somebody. If the steering committee had submitted a document or article saying the rule new faction is bad, because we probably would have printed it. As long as it didn't say stuff like you're a CA agent and just insane stuff like that, you know, we probably would have printed. But they never engaged, you know, they would never engage with stuff like that. So. So the Renewal faction, you know, we cut the North Star would like cover them as a journalistic thing. Like, here's the thing that's happening in the ISO, here's their documents, here's their arguments. Here's what happened at the commit steering committee thing. Here's where at the convention where they got expelled. Some of their. Some of the stuff I was doing got published in their documents because I had discovered that the whole Caterpillar stock sale happened. You know, Nobody in the ISO knew about that. Nobody bothered to check the 501C3 filings. And then the other thing I was doing with. With the North Star was like covering the Arab Spring in a way that I thought the revolutionary left should cover, but wasn't for a bunch of reasons. So there was a big focus on Syria and Libya. We actually had actually had a. I was in contact with a guy from the Tripoli Brigade, which was like a fighting group in Libya. And he was. He was like, right. He was like, denounce it. He would. He would read what PSL said about the revolution, that it's anti black and all this type of stuff. And he's. He would send me photos of like black. They had black units. They had actual whole black units. And they had like a black general who was part of the revolutionary forces. So like, if you're saying the Libyan rebels are all like a racist lynch mob against black people, you know, it gets hard to sustain that argument when you have actual black rebels and there some of them are generals. It's not like they were just cannon fodder. So there was a lot of like independent journalism going on there that I didn't see anybody on the. On the revolutionary left doing. And it kind of got me. It kind of made me very skeptical of the claim of being a revolutionary leftist if every time a revolution breaks out, you find a way to disown it. Did you have facing.
[156:22]
D
Did you face any criticisms? Oh, yeah, some internal disagreements.
[156:28]
C
Oh, in Northstar, huh. There were people There were people who were like, I wish you would just shop about Syria so that you could just have, we could just all get along on this multi tenancy recruitment stuff. You know, I found, you know, there are people who said that and I was like, my attitude towards that was like, well, how are we ever going to have a healthy left that can't tolerate a debate or a differing opinion? Like we have to learn to work together despite, especially on foreign policy where it's like, you know, me and Andy might disagree about a certain foreign policy issue, but like I can, we can yell at each other till we're blue in the face, but we're not going to impact directly what's happening in that country by and large, you know what I'm saying? Unless some group from that country is asking the group that we're part of to pass some resolution or something, like, you know what I'm saying? Like, like, you know, debating about foreign policy, like, or foreign stuff that's happening abroad, like, doesn't really matter that much in the here and now in terms of what we have to organize today, tomorrow and next week for the most part, you know what I'm saying? Like, like I published stuff on the North Star by somebody who quit PSL because they, they were unhappy. PSL was demo undemocratic, but they agreed totally with PSL on Syria and they wrote an article denouncing me. You know, I published it, I cleaned it up. I cleaned up the editorial, you know, the, the spelling and the, you know, all that I edited and you know, I polished that turd as much as I could. And you know, that's part of the, you know, I tried to give it as fair a thing as possible, you know, like I could think they're completely wrong. But you know, there has to be room in a socialist, a healthy socialist organization for, you know, some wide ranging debate. I mean there's got to be, there still have to be red lines, but they should be, generally speaking, pretty large, I think, for the most part. And so that was like the only pressure I would say I faced inside the North Star sort of milieu was people wanted me to stop talking about Syria.
[158:23]
D
Does it still exist?
[158:25]
C
No, no, I had to resign because the person I was living with, you know, it was like a dysfunctional slash abusive living situation and I, I, my hand was forced by stuff that was going on at home. I had to quit. I didn't want to quit, but it was, it was, I remember that it was under duress. Yeah, no, so I had to Write a resignation letter saying I have to attend to personal problems, blah blah blah. So then you know, the people who took over were kind of pro Assad and you know the stuff that the, the quality of the material took a sharp dive downward and it stopped being, you know, as much of an interesting or useful website for any type of leftist rethinking of important questions.
[159:09]
D
Because I was trying to look for it right now.
[159:11]
C
Yeah, it's 90. Yeah, it's too bad.
[159:13]
D
It's unfortunate it wasn't the noise start.info
[159:16]
C
yeah, it's owned by some Chinese spam or I don't know. Yeah, yeah, it's one of those websites that's owned by some other whatever. So yeah, the one funny story I want to tell about Eric Block or two. Two stories I want to tell related to Northstar. Eric Blanc, he was in a group called Socialist Organizer at the time and he, I think he's the son of some important or big wig Trotskyist person in that group.
[159:43]
B
Alan Benjamin, his son is, he's the son of Alan Benjamin who's the leader of Socialist Organizing.
[159:51]
C
Wow, okay, okay, so that's what it is. So anyway, but clearly he's more open minded than his father, I guess. So you know he, he came to New York and we met this is during the North Star era, 2012, 2013. And you know, we had a friend in conversation. He basically kind of, you know, he was definitely reading my Lenin, Leninism arguments and it definitely played a role in some of the stuff he ended up doing later. But he came to New York City to go on the Daily Show. The Daily show invited him and I think her name is Maria Savart. She was the national organizer of DSA for like 15 years or something. She was like their main office person holding the group together for like from 2011 to like 2024, something like that. So they were going to have both of them on the show, you know, so you know, we met, we talked about regroupment, state of the laugh, blah blah. And the last thing I told them before he got in the cab was what the Daily show is trying to do is they're going to try to, they're going to try to get you to in fight with that DSA person. Don't fall for that trap. That's, that's the whole thing that they're trying to, you know, so don't fall for it. And then I see the clip and that's exactly what he did. He fell, he went right for it. He's like, yeah, DSA is a capitalist organization. And, and then, then they get. Then, then the Daily show got dsa, the DSA person to be like, no, we're not a capitalist organization. So it was like, it was just crazy because it was like, dude, the last thing I said to you was avoid this obvious trap. It was an obvious setup that they were doing, you know, to invite a Trotskyist and a DSA person to talk. Because this is during the era when Obama was accused of being a socialist, basically. So the, the thing the Daily show was doing was like, let's hear for some real socialists about what they think about Obama. And they both said Obama's a capitalist. They both said the, both the DSA person and the, and, and Eric Block said, you know, Obama's pro capitalism, he's not a socialist. But then he fell right into the thing and I was just like, you know, it was frustrating because it was like, you know, we had this whole conversation about regroupment and yet he just, he just couldn't help himself, I guess. I don't know. And then he ends up later joining dsa. And now that's his thing is, you know, he's the Leninist DSA guy, kind of, which is a funny thing. This is hilarious. And the same thing with the ISO people who all, not all of them, but a good chunk of them got ended up, you know, being absorbed by DSA despite giving so many speeches about the dangers of the Democratic Party, right? How evil it is and all this. And it's always the graveyard of movements. And you know, I went to so many panels by Lance Alpha and all that know, listening to that sort of stuff. The second story I want to say before we wrap up is there are some groups out there that are called base building groups. I don't know if Andy's heard of those, but they're basically re. They call them. They. They style themselves as revolutionary groups, but they don't ne. They don't generally, as far as I can tell, subscribe to newspaper Leninism, but they do tenant organizing, mutual aid, you know, non electoral politics, you know, street protest, this kind of thing. And one of those groups is Philly. Philly socialists. And the leader. One of the, the leader of that, One of the leaders of that group, Tim Horace, you know, he was one of the people who contacted me out of the article looking for regroupment or talking about it or whatever. And he was like, he said something strange to me that. Or to me it was strange where he was like, he said something like, you know, you only post political stuff on Facebook and you should be posting personal stuff too because, you know, people want to see another part of your life or something like that. And it was like, I thought it was really weird. I was like, I was like, dude, I didn't say this to him, but I was like, it just, it just, it just, it made me realize that like cults of personality on the left are a thing, you know what I mean? That some people get involved in leftist organizing or writing because they like to see their name in a newspaper or on a website or you know, for reasons of ego or they want to build a personal brand and all this type of stuff. And I was just like, I didn't say anything back to him, I just listened. But like, it really irked me and it made me really like turn me off to the idea of being a quote unquote leftist thought leader, you know, Like, I didn't want to like, you know what I mean? Like, and, and you can go through comment sections all over the place and see my name and people denouncing me and all this. And Eduardo asked the question about, I wanted to answer that about the psl. They actually have a book, a whole book denouncing me called the, what's it called? Socialism. Socialism and war. Two opposing trends. And PSL is one trend and I'm the other trend. They're anti imperialists and I'm pro imperialist and my name's in the book and it's about the Libya stuff. But it, but that kind of stuff made me realize like I, you know, I really didn't want to be any type of like leftist thought leader or getting my name everywhere and all that. Like, I wasn't in it. I was only publishing stuff because I felt like certain things needed to be said and nobody was saying them, you know what I'm saying? And, and if everybody, if there's nothing like that out there, then I don't need to be, have my name out there and talking about like, like, like I see a lot of people who used to be in the ISO who are just publishing stuff very regularly non stop commenting on the latest leftist fad of today. And that's. I just can't, I just can't. I don't care. I don't care.
[165:27]
D
There's so many areas here you can cover at some point. Five points in response to Fan Bin.
[165:33]
C
Yeah, right.
[165:33]
D
Conversation with feminine.
[165:35]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's both Bam bin
[165:37]
D
and Paul LeBlanc are wrong.
[165:39]
C
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I was like Man, I don't want to spend the rest of my life doing that. That's a waste of time. So. So when I was forced to quit Northstar, I still kept. I still kept writing and doing my activism just under. Not my name, you know, So I had, you know, a bunch of pseudonyms that I was using to cover the Sanders campaign, Syria. When the ISO dissolved, I created a thing just to handle that, you know, and it kept my name out. Kept my name out of people's mouths pretty successfully. And I got to say what I felt should be said that needed to be said, you know, So I got the best of both worlds in that sense and stayed under the radar, you know, even as the ISO dissolved. Yeah. And I pieced together everything that basically happened with that. Yeah. So that's basically the end of the. I'll cap the discussion there, you know, in terms of my biography, you know, even though I retired, I was still actually working, just not in the same way or in front. Not as, you know, high profile or whatever. Because I just mean, I didn't like. I didn't like that. I didn't like. The experience was not great for me personally. I was like, this is stupid.
[166:51]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think my Brandy just got in and she was like, wait, you're still recording?
[166:57]
C
Yeah, I know, 20 years, man.
[166:59]
D
Right.
[166:59]
B
But here's what I'll say, which is because you covered a lot of territory, and. And I think the stuff around Libya or really the Arab Spring, they're probably. They're probably areas I might disagree on that, or at least say, here's a different point of view. Or even around Occupy, where I have some questions about. And there's. There's things to discuss out of that. I think there are several points like that that could happen, but I. What I hope will come out of this today and then going forward is I don't know the answer about what has to happen for revolution to be a possibility, but I believe that revolutionaries have to talk about that. And so that's kind of where I see this as a starting point for us. What I'm. What got me most. What. What I'm most excited about is to learn your background and to see how much there is in a commonality and to help me go, like, I recognize myself in many of the stories you said about how you're. And so that, I guess for me is like, this is the beginning of potentially building a. A place where we can workshop together some of the discussion points. I don't know the order actually now because there's a lot of things that came up and we could go in any order, but I would say more offline will maybe decide that. But if you're willing to carry on with us around any of these points, and Michael may have a point and Eduardo may have points that he wants to, I would really welcome that because this, what's left didn't start in 2020, it started in 2018. But it's still trying to answer a question of really, ultimately, what is it going to take to actually have working people be part of making a change? Because it looks like the need for it is getting greater and greater, but the distance between what is, what is required of us and the actual stuff on the ground is getting farther and farther. Like, that's scaring me even more and more. And so that's why I'm excited about, about discussing this stuff with you. So that's, I'll just say that as a capstone for this is like, for me it's a, it's an invitation to carry on together in conversations that are going to be meaningful for me, I think, for Michael, for Eduardo, hopefully for you. And then we'll just have to see who else wants to pay attention to it because it's good that it's, you know, fam bin here. So if people have a problem with fan bin, they can put it in the comments section and tell me to my face.
[169:32]
D
Right.
[169:33]
C
But call me imperialist about but I'm
[169:35]
B
glad you came to us as yourself because I, I do think this, I want this discussion to be out in the open because if there are differences, our responsibility is to figure out how to identify them. And I do would say how to go forward with them because we're taught, I think we all believe that that's what we're going to have to be able to do. So we have to be able to do it. And if we can't do it, then we don't really have much guidance to offer others and how to do that, you know, because, because we couldn't do it and maybe they would learn out of our inability. So I'll say that. And maybe if Michael, Eduardo wants to add things and then maybe. Any final words from you, Ben?
[170:16]
D
I, I feel as if this is a former Jehovah's Witness story. It has a lot of similarities. I'm very just intrigued by this journey, this political journey from your, even from younger years. We went way back from when you were an adolescent. So I look forward now as I get a clear sense of who you are to having some of those discussions that as what you tried to create before with no start an open debate and non censored unfiltered discussion so that we can have a share of ideas that I think are important today's age. I look forward to that now understanding who you are and also revisiting areas that I have jot down so that we can go in depth onto some of those areas. I would like to also go back to memory link with my biography but not in the way that not sharing my whole life but just specific areas like organizing such as Occupy right and the anti war movement and what happened post 911 I'm seeing similarities of how we've entered the Middle east before and how we're entering the Middle east again now but at a different angle. So I think that those discussions merit and episode on its own and so I look forward to that. I really do. And so I go I'd like to have this discussion again with you if you can come back.
[171:55]
C
Hope so.
[171:58]
A
Oh yeah. I was just writing I. Thanks a lot for also taking all this time waiting and then taking all this time to lay this out. I I really do find it very useful and very interesting and some specific areas I'd like to explore more. I I have three off the top of my head which is and they're all interrelated. But like what is what is your understanding of the trajectory of Occupy Wall street and the Sanders campaign and that trajectory Turns out Eric Block has revived Kotskyism. He openly rejected Leninism and now he's like actually Kotzky was right. You know. So that discussion about the the. The role of those ideas in the movement the role of you know, the Sanders campaign. The second one is also the role of US covert and soft power in shaping the trajectory of the Arab Spring. There's a lot of sort of hindsight rethinking I've done about both those movements and right now I think we've developed amongst us here thinking and talking an analysis of of that that there's both us covert and soft power that still plays a major role in shaping any bottom up movement. And that's something that's you know I'd love to explore more with you. And then the other aspect that I think we could get into more is what's worth what's worth retaining in Leninism and that Leninism is actually a broad set of. There's. There's multiple Leninisms but meaning what about and it's directly pertaining to like the kind of activist experience we had that was actually very valuable and, and positive and healthy about our work in the ISO and the stuff that wasn't. And what do we know in terms of actually going back and understanding, you know, the, the, the question of revolutionary organization as an evolving, you know, as an evolving body of thought, you know, what are we, what are we taking away from that now? So those are the big, big three. Because I think I have some big, you know, off the, off the, off the bat, I'm like, oh, I have some big meaty disagreements, but that was with 2011, you know, or 2013, bin, you know, so I don't, you know, and don't. You don't have to say the names of your pseudonyms, but I'm, I would love to, you know, you could, you could send us stuff offline for us to, to read, because I am interested in that, all of that too. So.
[174:52]
C
Okay. Yeah, we'll see. I guess we'll see. I'm definitely interested to come back. That's. It would be great, great to come back and explore in depth some of the issues. I mean, 25 years of biography is like, you know, it's a lot, it's a lot to cover and then to tell actual, you know, this just some of the key events and highlights and all that. I mean, my, I feel like my ISO experience was not. Was in many ways similar, but in a lot of important ways different in that, like, because we were in Rochester, we didn't have much contact with the rest of the organization most of the year. So like, we just kind of experimented and did things on our own and independently figured out what works, what doesn't work. Whereas in the New York district, it was much more. More rigid, more, more like, this is the way things are done, things are done a certain way. And me personally, like, I never, when I, after I came here, I never really felt like I fit in here. I was only on a branch committee briefly and it didn't work out so well because, like, basically one thing I would do is like, I just wouldn't say anything in meetings unless I had something, something somebody else hadn't already said. I felt like if I'm just going to repeat what other people just say, why am I going to say, like, just wasting time, like, I'm trying to, I'm trying to get something done, vote, get out of the meeting, go home and be productive. And they didn't like that. And they also didn't like that. A lot of times I just skipped the perspective discussion when I set up an introduction to like a certain decision or whatever. Like, because it was just like, I just felt like a lot of the perspective thing was like a waste of time. Like let's say you're pessimistic and I'm optimistic about how many papers we're going to sell. Let's just go out and sell the papers and see who's right.
[176:34]
A
Right.
[176:35]
C
Why does it have to be a 30 minute argument about latest perspective? Like, I didn't, I never understood like the obsession with, you know, it's different when something big happened. Like Katrina. Yeah, you gotta, you know, before paper sale Katrina just happens, you know, this is a huge thing. We need to talk about it. Okay. But like every week, every meeting, you don't need 30 minutes of perspective. Like, so I. There was a culture clash that kind of made me not fit in with the rest of the district. And the fact that I was in Geneseo by myself after 9 11, going through that whole baptism of fire thing, like, made me way more into like, I was used to just acting on my own and doing my own thing and not having to run everything by a branch, a convener or branch organizer, a branch committee or, you know what I mean? Like, I was pretty autonomous on my own in a lot of ways. So then when I Occupy Wall street, had all these working groups working autonomously, I was like, okay, I know how this works. You know, I can just jump in and make flyers for this working group and talk to this other. You know, it was like, it was more of a natural fit for me. And I think, whereas most people, most people in the New York ISO, you know, that wasn't true. And I also. Another thing is that like getting trained in high school and going into college with two years or three years of experience already just like a huge advantage, you know what I mean? Most ISO members who joined, they joined the ISO was like their first group, you know what I mean? And so first experiences tend to be formative, you know, for positive and negative, unfortunately, you know, and we, the ISO generally did not recruit experienced activists, experience, trade union people, people who knew how to run a meeting. And that always kind of, kind of bothered me because it was like, if we want to be a vanguard organization, right, wouldn't you want to be recruiting the people who have the most experience actually leading class struggle as it is right now, such as it is? You know, it's not a big deal, not a big scale. But you shouldn't you be recruiting a lot of shop stewards or people who already know how to do stuff. Or they're the. Maybe they're not the president of the union, but maybe they're like the leading person in the local or whatever, or the most active shop steward at a certain job site. Like it was almost always college students with no experience. And when you have people with no experience, they don't have any frame of reference to like push back and say no. That idea, that thing about Lenin is bs, you know, you just take it for granted that the ISO is the experts on Russia because they have all these books about Russia. So you just read everything uncritically, you know, not knowing that there might be another point of view or, you know, that's not said or. And also like foundational assumptions. There's a lot of foundational assumptions and sort of ISO doctrine that actually probably need to be pulled up and reinterrogated. As far as, you know, Eric Blanc, I mean, yeah, you know, whatever. What, he loves Kotsky or whatever. I mean, you know, I've gone back. I've gone back and read Bernstein and I think Bernstein actually has. There's a lot about the Bernstein debate that I think Bernstein was right about and that the. Was never addressed in the people who. By the people who attacked him. And you know, I'm not saying everything he said, Rose.
[179:48]
A
Right.
[179:48]
C
Or whatever, but like a lot of the responses didn't address the substance of what he was saying. And now I feel like now I kind of, now in hindsight I kind of feel like reading only one side of debates is just generally a bad idea. You know, just like if you only read the ISO steering committee documents about the Renewal faction, but you never actually read the Renewal Faction documents. Like you would have a completely screwed
[180:09]
D
up
[180:11]
C
thing about what you know about. You know, you would have no idea what the heck their problem is or what their issues are. So I try to read both sides of every debate or every other point of view, and not without. With an unprejudiced eye. I try not to take, you know, let me at least read the documents before I like, make up my mind. And the last thing I'll say about the security culture story, like, I never ran into this thing where people are accusing people of being government agents. But I heard about it through the renewal thing. And the FBI actually released the ISO's FBI file. It's online, you can find it. And like, there's stuff in there about Ahmed Sharkey, like driving a fancy car and being rich. And it's all based on one person's report to the FBI. You know, it's like a nums. It's like, you know how the Epstein files. It's like, there's a lot of stuff in there that's just a report from a random person who knows if it's actually true. You know, it's an investigative lead. As an investigator, you're supposed to follow up and, like, corroborate, like, did this actually happen? Who is this person? But there's stuff like that in the FBI file. And, like, the only things that are in the ISO's FBI file is like, ahmed is a weirdo, basically. Ahmed Shockey is a weirdo, or he's doing something, he's dangerous. He's a dangerous communist. And it's written by some person who's worried about their kid joining a cult. That's basically what it is. And then the other stuff is like, the ISO in Texas in 2005 was threatening. There was some talk at some meeting about militant direct action. Like, it made it sound like there were. There was talk about violence, like some form of violence, violent protest potentially taking place in 2005 at the Austin branch, or they were going to participate in a protest where the protest organizers were, like, considering. I don't know what type of violence. I don't know. You know, I don't know exactly. But that's what got on the FDI's radar, was like, this protest could be violent. And then the ISO was, like, in the mix of the protest organizers, and that's it. That's all that's in the ISO FBI file. So it's like. It's very funny because, you know, if the group is so revolutionary and dangerous to the state, you know, you think there'd be more stuff in the.
[182:21]
D
There.
[182:22]
C
Big disappointment, you know what I mean? To have only basically two entries in, like, 40 years. So I'll just leave the c. I'll just leave the. The capstone on that. And I would definitely be interested in coming back to, you know, have a round table about some of these other topics. It would be great if. I don't know if there's other ISO people you could reach out to, or I don't know if Eric would be bothered to come on and chat, but, yeah, whatever. Somebody who supports his point of view.
[182:49]
B
Yeah, I. I would say that we've mostly just responded to people who, like, you, reach out to us, and then we're like, okay, let's. Let's do this. And I would say that whoever would reach out to us and say, hey, this is something I'd like to Discuss, then I'd be down for that. I think when. When me and Eduardo first started what's Left? I think the only people I said we wouldn't invite would be people who are running for office or something like that. Isn't that Eduardo? Didn't we have that discussion? If I remember right, I was like, even if there were activist leftists who were running for election, I was like, I don't. I don't want. I really don't believe. Can actually say what they believe, because what's the point of having that discussion if I already know that certain things are walled off? You know? So that would be the only. That probably was the only restriction that I put because I. I had felt like the left had become so. Such a place where people can't really speak openly about what they believe. Um, and so I just was trying to re.
[183:46]
C
We were.
[183:47]
A
Both.
[183:47]
B
Me and Eduardo were trying to reop. Read that, reopen that.
[183:51]
D
We wanted to have honest conversations.
[183:53]
B
Yeah.
[183:53]
C
I don't even have my politician of any ideological stripe. It's impossible.
[183:59]
B
Yeah. So I. That those are the only folks that I was like, I just don't think they're gonna be able to do it. I think they'll feel like they would. They'll kind of, for reasons, have to lie. And then I was like, why? I didn't want to be involved. I mean, want to be. Try to figure out what was true and what was false. I would. I would like to believe what they were saying was what they believed, whether I agreed with it or not. And then that's all. Then we can go from there. And I think some folks. Well, I guess because, you know, Gaza is being destroyed and Iran is now on the target list for the United States and Israel, and World War 3, in my opinion, is. Is really moving a pace. And I think there are some folks who'd be like, well, what about. Like, how are you going to leave those things out? And I will say that the things you're bringing up as they relate to me, figuring out how to no longer be a spectator to political events, but be part of trying to make a change. These are the discussions that I think are more meaningful than necessarily figuring out exactly What. What the U.S. is, what's behind what's going on with the U.S. i'm not saying those things aren't important. I. I will say that I do believe trying to figure out what we're going to do about it, for me, is a more important discussion right now than all the different things that are being thrown at us and that that are real events. So for people who have been listening to our show and who are wondering if this is the road we're going down, this is the road I would like to go down, which is what you're offering to us, Ben, is an opportunity to figure out where have we been? So that maybe going forward with the people I'm going to be doing stuff with, if I find them, how will I go forward with them? That I do think is a more important thing to figure out or more important discussion for me than then all these giant world events, which are giant, but they're, they're much bigger than I can handle in terms of what I have around me to, to make them to say, oh, here's what I'm doing about it. So I just want to say that
[186:08]
C
sounds good. I sounds like we all agree more or less on the same page.
[186:13]
B
Yeah. And Michael's gotta go, so thank you for Thanks a time. Can you, can you take us out here?
[186:21]
C
Yes.
[186:21]
D
All right, let's conclude. Thank you very much, Bin, for that lively biographical political journey of yours.
[186:33]
C
Welcome.
[186:33]
D
I look forward to getting to points, particular points. All right, well, that does it for this week's episode. What's Left is a weekly political podcast slash channel challenging the mainstream left. We post information information about our topics and our guests on the episode on the episode notes wherever you found this episode or on our blog@WhatsApp podcast.com you can find past episodes to this podcast slash channel there and connect with us. I remind folks if you like anything you have heard here, please subscribe rate to view, turn on your notifications to any of our platforms on a Spotify itunes podcast Bitchute, others in YouTube, Rumble or Telegram. You can find any of these on our blog and any of those links in the episode notes wherever you found this episode. If you would like to give us feedback about something you've heard or suggest something for us to cover, contact us to our blog. I'm Ed with co host Michael Hoffman and Andy Libson. Thank you Bin Fam, for joining us and check us out next time. Thank you all for listening. Ciao.
[187:29]
C
Bye Bye.