On Communist Strategy: Dual Power, Mutual Aid, Elections

(upbeat music) - All right Tom, today we're discussing tactics and strategy and I've been dying to do this episode for a while for one because it seems to be kind of the question of the hour. When we have comrades that are out on the street recruiting and talking to people, the kinds of questions we get most frequently are often, like what do you guys propose? What's your plan? What is the RCA doing? I think more broadly, there's also, you know, this phenomenon of like internet leftism where a lot of people are becoming radicalized but they're also trying to grapple with the question of what should we be doing, like with our time and with our energy. And so you have different proposals and trends and I think the main ones are, you have mutual aid on the one hand, people saying we need to have like local initiatives and have something concrete or like direct action, which has a certain edge to it. We can, we'll discuss that as well. But then you also have this trend that seems to be peaking of the democratic socialist electoral strategy of like running candidates in the democratic party. That's having a moment now. There's more, I mean, DSA is set to double its presence in Congress and we've been talking about the impact of the rise of democratic socialism on the political landscape. I will say, you know, Trump and the Republicans are also making this about communism. But the fact is communism has more support than Trump does or than the democratic party for that matter and we'll get into the polling on that. So we'll discuss mutual aid, base building, direct action, we'll discuss electoral strategy. But here's the real reason that I'm excited to discuss this is that as we're recording this, there is a revolution unfolding right now. And we often think about, you know, the lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the question of the Soviets, dual power and the way that a revolutionary process will culminate with the intense moments of an insurrection. Like the question of seizing power, our comrades on the ground in Pakistan administered cashmere are facing that scenario as we speak. They're agitating and organizing and pushing with everything they have for the working class to take power in the form of the Awami Action Committee. And so we have the opportunity to discuss what dual power means, the dynamics of a Soviet structure that's fighting to create a new worker state. And what are the logistical problems and challenges that flow from all of that? That's a lot for us to get into. But let's see what we can cover in the time that we have. - Yeah, there's a tremendous amount of radicalization going on in society today. We're seeing sections of the population are moving to the left. The class struggle is intensifying. You see this anti-ice movement? I mean, almost every week it seems that the U.S. state apparatus is killing people and in repressing people. And it does raise very, very important questions. How can the population, how can the working class win? And I think, you know, sometimes politics maybe is actually more complicated than it looks. We can't just win because we have righteous emotion or we have this fervor, you know, righteous anger. We actually have to think about what we're doing. The movement has to contemplate what it's gonna do and what it needs to do in order to win. But I think also the situation in Kashmir, Pakistani held Kashmir is definitely connected with this because I think there's a lot in the movement in the United States can learn from that movement in Kashmir. - Absolutely, it's a question of method. Like we often feel when we're having this strategic debate with other elements on the left, to the extent that there is a debate happening that we're speaking a different language. Like we're trying to get across a certain logic, a certain political logic about how to approach these questions. And so there is a thread that will run through, I think this whole discussion, like there's, there's a method we're trying to get at. Class independence is part of it. But basically, if you have a certain goal, what way of operating gets you on a path to being able to achieve that goal is what we're trying to get at. And Lenin was the master of explaining this and helping people to wrap their heads around it. Despite a real challenge of, like I'll say, Bolshevism doesn't come like naturally to most people. You don't just stumble across this idea of like, what is it gonna take for a relatively small number of people with these ideas, Marxism, to transform themselves into a mass force capable of influencing millions and bringing the working class to power. That's not something that you can just tackle by winging it, you know? And unfortunately, a lot of what we see on the left, it's early days, like there's this radicalization happening, but people are still groping their way forward, trying to figure out what it's going to take. And instead of really sitting down and studying history and, you know, drilling down to the lessons in order to figure out how to proceed, a lot of people are, there's like sort of pragmatism. Like, let's just get our hands dirty and dive right in. And there's a lot of that happening. It's happening, I think, with the rings of the electoral campaigns, it's happening with the mutual aid. It's not that there's like this ideological battle of these thought out world views as such. There is a battle of views, but it's like, a lot of people are basically just going with the flow. And so part of the task of Bolshevism, the task of Marxist is to counter pose a scientific, theoretically worked out program to an otherwise current that's kind of just vague and just kind of going with demotions. That's part of what the comments are struggling with on the ground in Kashmir at this moment. So let's talk about what's happening in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. This is also called Azad Kashmir. I think a lot of people are learning about this part of the world. It's not like, you know, it's 4.5 million people live there. Kashmir is contested between India, which occupies the majority part of it. And Pakistan, and there's a small section that China controls as well. So there's the national question involved here. In many ways, it's like Poland was before World War I. Or like Kurdistan is today, which is split up between four countries, right? - Yeah, geographically, it's fragmented. And so you have the struggle against the people living on the different sides of these divides against different governments. And of course, it expresses itself as a social struggle. And the way that this particular movement that has since developed into a full-blown revolution, the way it started was actually in 2021, you could say, over this struggle to restore subsidies that under IMF pressure, the Pakistani government and the Azad Kashmir government had removed subsidies for wheat. So this is a question of bread. Like, people could not survive. And it's also on the question of electricity. The electricity rates were spiked. So you think about what this means for people's everyday lives. You have to keep your lights on. You have to be able to cook food to survive. And so when they had this really brutal austerity measure, directly under IMF pressure, the comrades on the ground, and we should say we have, the RCI has an important section in Pakistan, including in Azad Kashmir. The comrades sensed that everywhere they went in the marketplace on the streets, people were unhappy, they were talking about this, it was frustration, it was palpable. And they realized it was an opportunity to organize something to do this. So I think to be very clear, the RCI, the comrades of our international initiated what has become a mass movement. They initiated the Awami Action Committees. They sort of innovated a lot of the methods that have since become a growing tradition in this part of the world, where you have these committees that aren't, it's not a political party. It's actually an expression of rejection of all the ruling parties, which are seen as corrupt and instruments of the ruling class correctly. And so it's a lot more like a Soviet. I mean, I don't think it's an exaggeration to describe the Awami Action Committee. Awami, by the way, in Urdu, it just means popular. Like the People's Action Committee. So, and this is something that we've advocated for. I mean, look at, we'll discuss Minneapolis in a moment, but what were we saying the general strike needs in order to give it concrete direction and structure and master to bring in the participation of the masses, action committees in the workplaces? Well, in Pakistan and in this region, the comrades were in a position to actually initiate that. So it began with some local struggles in sort of remote villages around Rualkat. And I remember actually got to visit Pakistan a couple, two and a half years ago. And I met some of these comrades that are not playing a leading role. And they explained how they started out. Some of it was just like initially, just a, they called a demonstration. They had a huge turnout, far surpassing their wildest expectations, and they realized they had tapped into the mood. And so from there, it became like, well, where are we going to go next to escalate this thing? And they started drawing in the support of the local community. And the Awami Action Committee, it's not a communist organization. It's reflective of the population in general. So they had like local mosques joining and other community leaders and the tribal leaders. And now, you know, in the year since, this thing has really escalated into a mass organization. The comrades don't control it. It's kind of grown out of their control, but it's also become almost like a, so almost a spontaneous expression of the will of the people. And they see it as a second authority, you know? And this is so we're going to get into the question of dual power. But just to say like, we're now the snapshot of the moment right now where we're talking about the Awami Action Committee's seizing power and becoming the government, which we'll talk about the specifics of that, all started because of the struggle of our comrades to make sure that this became the expression of all the oppressed of Kashmir, of all the workers, and they've been able to successfully bridge all the local divisions. So I think this is fascinating because it's not every day that you have this kind of struggle. or that the comments of our international have the opportunity to engage in this kind of work. - It's a class organization. The class is defined by what are the demands, right? The demands are for cheaper flower, cheaper electricity. Flower is necessary to make bread, and that's what most of the people, that's their main staple in order to survive, right? So it's a class. Now, yes, it does include all kinds of people, including even layers of the petty bourgeois, the layers of the peasantry are involved. But it's clearly a class movement. Obviously, the super wealthy and the elite, they don't care. They can afford the price of electricity. They can afford to eat whatever they want. But the vast majority needs these price subsidies. They need these price controls. Otherwise, they will not survive, right? And it has in the vacuum, this AC has become that expression of that vast majority of the population. You know, when there's a vacuum in politics, that has to find some sort of expression. In this case, because of the role the RCI comrades played, putting forward this idea of setting up these popular action committees descended up taking this form. - And they've been able to, you know, basically bridge the differences among the divisions in the local population across ethnicity. There's different national minorities, they speak different languages. The division between men and women, you know, religious divisions. They've been able to make a political case that basically draws out the class lines. And so everyone can now acknowledge that the joint Awami Action Committee has become the expression of all of that discontent. Just to explain also the structure of it, there are, I believe, 10 districts in Azad Kashmir, like the regional governmental division of that territory. And each of the districts has awami action committees that are now, nowadays, they're kind of springing up. I mean, in rural remote villages, you'll have like, which is a peasant composition, people forming new Awami Action Committees, they have no link to our party or to anybody. It's just kind of happening spontaneously. And so it's really spreading, but they'll send delegates centrally into bodies that then represent the area. And on Azad Kashmir level, they have three delegates basically from each of the districts. So that's the joint Awami Action Committee. I mean, in a way, they've kind of, they've reproduced a Soviet structure in the sense that you have this centralization, but it's a federative body that represents the masses. And so the masses see the Awami Action Committees as the place to turn when they have any kind of disputes or issues, they have a problem with the local infrastructure or some legal agreement hasn't been respected. They're not turning to the local government to solve their problems. They're turning to the Awami Action Committee. And so it's reached this point where you have this classic dual power. This is a term that's thrown around a lot, like on the left, by people that don't really understand at a deep level what dual power means. But if you think about it, you're talking about two political authority, two sovereign authorities. You have the state. You have the state power that is normally unchallenged and unquestioned. But at a time when a revolution is developing onto a very high level, you'll have this second authority. And this is a classic example of that. The prime minister of Azad Kashmir Faisal Retor has made a speech recently saying, basically acknowledging the dual power, saying we can't have two authorities competing for power. And our comrades from the platform addressing these massive sit-ins of 100,000 people have been saying the prime minister is right. We can't have two authorities. We need only one, the worker's power. (crowd cheering) And so you have this thing, dual power by its own nature is a temporary thing. It's very unstable. You can't have it lasting indefinitely. One is going to try to crush the other. And so that's really the life or death battle that's being imposed on the comrades as we speak. But before, I mean, there's a lot to look at right now what's happening on the ground. But just to say, in the recent years, the way this thing is escalated, you actually had, Azad Kashmir has been teetering on the edge of a revolutionary situation for a long time for years now. And in 2024, for instance, they had another series of long marches that actually went onto the regional capital of Azad Kashmir is Muzafrabad. And that's a city with 750,000 around. They had a peak of a mass demonstration and a sit in there. As part of a Azad Kashmir-wide general strike which had basically complete participation from the entire population of half a million in the capital. So that's, you know, that's too serious. - That's like half a million people in Boston. That's a similar city, like similar size of Boston. - You can imagine half a million on the streets of Boston. If you had two thirds of the population in New York City, you'd be looking at 5.6 million people. I mean, just to give you a sense of life. And so this is part of also a general strike that has basically, in those moments, the working class does have power in its hands. Right now, in Azad Kashmir, the workers have basically shut down all the highways. They have checkpoints where they controlling, who comes in and out. I mean, they're basically controlling the border. And you have the security forces in a desperate, bloody brutal struggle trying to crush this thing. What happened in 2024 and 2025, peaking in the September of 2025, is that the government risking losing everything made some major concessions, and they accepted the demands of the Awami Action Committee. They basically, after a period of negotiations, they sat down and you have a three-party agreement between the Pakistani government, the Azad Kashmir government, and the Awami Action Committee, which saw themselves as petitioners with the demands of the population. And so they had a legal binding agreement that came out of that, which was they were going to drop, they were basically going to restore those subsidies. What does that mean? The IMF, which was demanding these things, was not happy about that agreement, was pressuring these governments. And so the government is now walking it back. They've agreed to that. They were supposed to be implemented within 90 days. They didn't implement any of the actual policies that they had promised to. And now, in the last months, they have outlawed the Awami Action Committee. They've branded them as terrorists, and they've basically made a decision. The ruling class of Pakistan has made the decision instead of negotiating or having this back and forth to just go in and crush it and drown the movement in blood. We've already seen the beginnings of that. They've been shooting peaceful, unarmed demonstrators. They've been shooting people inside of hospitals that were attending to the injured from other protests. They've shot up a funeral where around 100 people were killed. You can just imagine the impact of these atrocities on the consciousness of the masses. So it's bringing things to a key moment where our comrades are saying the state is either going to unleash a full-on bloodbath or we have to take power. - That's the question of power is basically on the table right in front of the comrades. - Notice when a friend of US imperialism does all this repression, no coverage in the news media. - All right. - They don't get raised coverage. - Right now, I'm sure if Iran was doing this, we would hear, they were doing like 3% of this. We would hear about it constantly. But one thing, this movement shows in practice in what we always say as Marxists. And that is the only class that can unify people. It's the working class. The working class is the only class that can unify people across gender lines, across religious lines, across national lines, across racial lines, across all the, and you see it in practice. And in fact, not only does the working class is it able to unite the class, but it's even able to win over other layers of the population, like layers of the petty bourgeois, the peasantry and all that. That shows you, that's the solution to all these civil wars and strife that we see all around the world. It's ultimately when the working class puts itself forward as a force, right? In through these action committees, it shows you the possibilities. We say it theoretically, but this is not theory. This is in practice. You can see this and how this is unfolding. The key moment right now, it's becoming a question of, do they actually seize the power? And this is what the comrades are energetically agitating for. You can see some of their speeches. It's like watching a televised, I mean, you're looking at an Instagram feed, but you're actually watching the same kind of interactions and content from those revolutionary speeches in front of the revolutionary masses, who are literally chanting, we will bring the revolution. ♪ Now, through the world ♪ ♪ It's all the same, it's all the same ♪ And it's like you're watching Bolshevism. You're watching 21st century Bolshevism unfold in front of our eyes. It's really, the inspiration, it gives me chills, literally. I mean, you feel the emotion of this life or death struggle to try and take power. Right now, the front lines of what is basically an open class war, what's developing as an open class war, are centered around Rualacot. Now, this is the third largest city in Azad Kashmir, but it's actually has a reputation for being the political capital of Kashmir. It's like the protest movements capital. And so, when they were having this long march that began in early June to try and basically make their way from every region of Azad Kashmir to the capital to Masafrafat, because they were being repressed. in these different areas. And because they were waiting for people to arrive from different regions, they declared a sit-in in a village, Dreek, or Direct, outside of Rwala-Khadis. I think like a 20-minute drive just south east of Rwala-Khadis city. So that's where it's become kind of the center of the resistance. Meanwhile, the state basically invaded Rwala-Khadis city. The state forces that have also come from outside of Uzakashmir, Pakistani security forces, paramilitary goons from different regions. They have come in, they've carried out these massacres that we've mentioned, but they've also basically occupied the city. So what you have is the state is holding Rwala-Khadis city. People have been expelled from their homes and they're not being allowed back in. And meanwhile, you have what's developing as you could call like a revolutionary siege of the city because from that one sit-in in Dreek, you now have six different sit-ins that have essentially surrounded Rwala-Khadis city from every direction. They've taken the bus terminal, there's a number of villages all around the area where if you put together the population of the sit-ins, like the people that are participating constantly for over a month now, it's between 100 and 150,000. Now the population of Rwala-Khadis city itself is less than 60,000. So the class balance of forces right now to be able to go in to Storm Rwala-Khad and to take control of that city, it's really a question of whether the leadership is willing to do it, whether they're willing to go all the way and it's not a light-hearted, it's not a light-minded decision to make, it's a question of life or death obviously. The essence of the situation is this, right? There was an agreement signed, the Pakistani government, the Kashmir government, and the imperialists through the IMF are basically ripped up this agreement, right? And now they're viciously attacking and basically using violence against the population. The population has a right to defend itself. The population has a right to implement that agreement, right? And the question is, like you said, is what are they going to do? What can the AAC do to solve this problem? The vast majority of the population is on the side of the AAC, the vast majority of the population is, it's not just on the side, they are the AAC. The population is the AAC. The question is, is they can push back and they can appeal to the workers throughout Pakistan and throughout India and throughout that whole region because I guarantee you, look at the statistics how poor people are in that region. They also depend on bread. They also depend on, they need that electricity and look at the prices of flour, the prices of electricity throughout that region. This is an issue that the AAC can use to not only win their victory in Kashmir, but use it to spread throughout that whole region. Right. If they were to, if they were to basically come to power in Ruwalaqat, that would be kind of a launching point to then march on, was offer a bud. And at that point, the practical role and the immediate task of the AAC would be to declare itself the new government. In effect, you'd be forming a new workers state in that region. And not only as an administrative measure, but as a social program, they would have to explain in that moment, why are we taking power? Why are the workers and the masses and the peasant masses of AAC Kashmir coming to power and forming a new government? Because this is the way to have bread, because this is the way to feed our families, because this is the way to defend our homes from these paramilitary goons that have taken them from us. And so it is a question of immediate practical self-defense. But yeah, by having a new worker state that would then announce the measures it's prepared to take, the nationalization of the industries, of the land, of the infrastructure, the power grid itself, like the generation of power depends on a system of dams. They would have to take control of those dams. And then implement, as you said, the terms of this legal agreement that the Pakistani government has already accepted. Now they've reneged on that. So if you can, you know, basically the Pakistani government and the ruling class has signaled that the period of negotiations is over. You're not going to negotiate with the party that already agreed to the terms last time and then to completely disregard them and use the media to attack them and use these measures to, to, you know, to slander the leadership. A number, I think 600 activists of the AAC have already been arrested. I don't know what the death toll is in terms of those that have been killed. The Pakistani government has put a bounty on the head of the leaders for I think a million rupees each, which is something like $35,000. And they haven't lifted these measures. Tomorrow, we're recording this on July 14th. Tomorrow on the 15th is the deadline that the AAC has set as an ultimatum for the government to accept the demands. Or they're going to continue the long march with an understanding that this is basically the do-or-die moment. Now, our comrades are, you know, again, the speeches that they've been giving, not just from the platform, which are incredible examples of the most passionate, effective revolutionary agitation. But they've also been working tirelessly throughout Pakistan to drum up solidarity and to spread the news of this and to organize workers in different industries, the railway workers, agitating, holding meetings. They're having an active outreach campaign saying the working class of the entire region and of the subcontinent can come to the defense, the Kashmiri struggle is our struggle. And this is the story of the whole class war that's happening in the subcontinent. And they're explaining why these demands are the same as the program that's needed by the entire working class. The railway workers could stop the railroads and paralyze transportation and prevent the state from sending more troops in to go and repress Kashmir. The electricity workers could shut down the light to the government buildings. But above all the revolutionary appeal that could come from a newly formed revolutionary government in, as I Kashmir, you can imagine the electric impact that that would have on the workers in Pakistan, in India, throughout the entire subcontinent, saying we are taking power because we need it to defeat our children. You have the same issues. They've just raised the price of fuel in the rest of Pakistan. It's going up fast. The straight-of-form moves are closed again. So, fuel prices are going up in the U.S. as high as they've been in a month. Well, in this part of the world, they're going up even higher. So, there's this desperation right now. And so, this is the struggle of the hour, but what you really need is a mass force much larger than the brave and tireless efforts of the comrades that we have on the ground. We have a force, but we don't have the size, the numbers, it would actually be needed to carry this out. There have been also very big general strikes in India. We've seen that against that reactionary Modi government and everything. The potential here, though, is real because a revolutionary government is not just an idea. It's an actual, if it was established, it would be a material fact. And that would have a certain force, and that would gain a certain echo, particularly in that region, which is very desperate. By the way, people want to talk about, oh, capitalism, it works. Yeah. If you think capitalism works, go live in the Indian subcontinent. Look at the misery, the vast majority, I mean, this is over a billion people in the subcontinent. Look at the kind of conditions that the vast majority of these people live under. That's the nightmare of capitalism. And that's why we're going to be following this closely. And we got to hope that the AAC leaders take the advice of the comrades and move this forward. Yeah. The Pakistan has a working class of 250 million. We have comrades, I think in every region of Pakistan that are doing this work, trying to organize this solidarity, but it's for the whole international in every country, especially the Dom, the imperialist country, especially the country like the US, to come to the solidarity of these comets, to learn from what they're doing, to spread the news of it, and to really absorb the lessons of what this means because going back to the question of strategy, the whole the whole question of strategy is, what is your goal? Like what is your ultimate goal? And what is the road from where you are to achieving that goal? What does that road look like? Right? If you're doing correct tactics, that means you're moving forward towards a certain in a certain direction. And you have to have a way of judging whether you're moving forward towards the goal or not. In a sense, this life and death struggle happening in a Zad Kashmir is kind of like, it helps us see further down the road, like the ultimate glimpse. When you're talking about dual power, a Soviet struggle for a worker's state, like the most advanced moments of like a new October, what kind of force do you need in place? What kind of preparation do you need to have already carried out by that time so that you can take advantage of the situation and bring the, you know, help the working class to take that final step that everybody is dying to take. And that's, that's the question of like, what kind of force are you building? The comments right now are saying what we need, what is needed throughout Pakistan is like a machine that can explain the lessons of this everywhere in every workplace and every sector and industry and on the campuses to the students. And when there's a defeat of any kind, then the lessons of that defeat also have to be processed collectively. And you need to help the workers like learn from what this means in a way that they can draw conclusions regroup and then prepare for another instead of becoming confused, disoriented, demoralized. If you don't have a network that can communicate and we're talking about a revolutionary press, but also a network of revolutionary agitators and people that can explain what's happening. The same thing is needed in the United States, like when you had the George Floyd movement and you had like the rise of neighborhood committees or you have in Minneapolis, you know, once again, in January, the struggle against ICE, the rise of these workplace organizing the signal chats that were linking the actions of all of these different areas of the population. Where was the force in the rest of the country that was explaining and transmitting those lessons and those incredible inspiring scenes to workplaces everywhere else. It was missing, you know? So in a sense, Bolshevism, that's an important ingredient of it, is like you need the sort of social, political, organizational infrastructure that can transmit lessons help people process what's happening, the events in the news, but also like the conclusions from the movement and the experience that it's going through at the moment. Exactly, you know what's funny? Nobody's denying that there's a big difference between the standard of living in a country like the United States and the standard living of the average worker in the Indian subcontinent. However, there is something in common. It's about high price of food, high price of gas, high price of electric, and it's exactly on those issues that we could unite people in the United States to fight for solutions on that. And that ultimately, that goes along with the fight that, you know, what Trump is doing on the immigration 'cause we know his whole strategy on that is to divide the working class. Let's put the working class. And if the working class is divided, it's weaker. If the working class is united, like we're seeing in Kashmir, look at the potential power that it has. Yeah, and you're right that the atrocities of the state have that whip of counter revolution has acted like a force that has just injected the mass movement with determination to move forward happening in Kashmir. It'll, we also saw a glimpse of that in January, 2026. I mean, I remember the moment where I saw the moment where Alex Prety was killed, which was right after the general strike. So you just had this, I mean, almost ecstatic moment of like watching this processions of this historic mobilization of the masses in Minneapolis. And then the very next day, they kill another one. The way it makes your blood boil. You can just see if you're looking at like the footage that's being spread coast to coast, just imagine what it was like on the ground where the barricades go up. Suddenly you have not just vigils, but tear gas battles with the local police and checkpoints being set up. I mean, a very similar situation to, I don't know, maybe not an all out insurrectionary situation, but it's basically a social explosion that has these kinds of implications. And so the point is this will happen again. It'll happen on a bigger scale. It's inevitable. At a certain, it's a question of timing. When does it happen again? When do you have another movement like Minneapolis that spreads coast to coast the way it did in 2020? And then at that point, it's like, what do you have in place ready to go? I remember for many years this debate we've had with like, what I sometimes call the soft left, right? The DSA, people that have basically had sort of a much more passive approach to revolutionary politics and tactics. Well, it's not really revolutionary politics or tactics. It's they've said to us, you can't have a strategy that just hinges on some kind of mass uprising. Like there's gonna be some kind of epic social explosion and the people pour into the streets. This was something that I remember people saying like in the 2010s, 2016, 2018. And we said, we do, we do have a tactic that's based on like the role of the masses. Like that for us is the agent of change. We do live in a period where this kind of thing happens. And since then, of course, you've had, I mean, in 2019, it was like a quarter of the countries on earth had mass uprisings. I mean, it was all over the world. In 2020, we saw it in the US. In 2026, it's happening now. I mean, you can see we live in a revolutionary epoch and that's no longer such a controversial point. So the question of what does that mean for our tactics and strategy, for the way we spend our time and energy, what do we, what are we trying to build? What kind of general staff of a mass movement, you know? How do you prepare that? How do you arrive at that? That's basically what does determine our, it's Bolshevism in the modern era. We have a three-pronged strategy. You know, we have an ideological battle against the capitalist class. That's why we emphasize the question of theory and why we answer all the arguments and the misinformation put out by the bourgeois. We have, we believe in a battle in the political sense as well. And if we were larger, we ourselves would be running candidates in the elections. We would use the elections to raise our ideas and use it to help to organize people. And we believe that in a struggle that encompasses at the workplaces and in the streets, right? So there's no, we're not seeding any territory, you know, against the class enemy. We have to fight the class enemy everywhere because they are everywhere. But the question is, what do you do in those arenas? What do you say in those arenas? And I think the part of the problem that we've been discussing about the question of the GSA since they got so much larger is that they make all sorts of concessions ideologically and theoretically concessions on the electoral arena and concessions otherwise as well. And that is not going to allow the movement. If we go the path that they're going, it's not going to allow the movement to achieve what we want, which is achieve victory, right? But by the way, we had put out a number of years ago, we put out a slogan, socialism in our lifetime. My understanding is the GSA now also has a t-shirt that's socialism in our lifetime. But if you want to achieve socialism in our lifetime, it's not just the question of an emotional thing or doing what feels good. You actually have to look at it scientifically. How do we get from where we are to there? - Yeah, well, I think the dominant electoral strategy that we're seeing in DSA and the self-described democratic socialist candidates is really quite a narrow, pragmatic one that's basically playing by the rules of the game. It's conventional electoral politics in a bourgeois sense and that's really our critique of it. Sometimes the debate has seemed to focus around the question of the ballot line because especially when you had the first wave of DSA electoral victories with like AOC and you got to squat in and Sanders had all that momentum. And to be sure, that was a way that the term socialism got placed on the table and it kind of ushered in this new period. But the question of running candidates on the democratic party ballot line for them, they were saying it's not a big deal. We're just using that apparatus of the party. We're just using their ballot line so that we can get socialist elected and then we're going to build our influence and we're going to build capacity. We're going to have more people and those kinds of arguments are now, I think, even stronger. I mean, they're making those arguments even more insistently now after the recent string of electoral victories. And this is precisely that point where it feels like sometimes we're at cross purposes or like speaking different languages, like it's a question of what are you after? What's the goal, right? And as you say, like if the goal is achieving socialism by that we mean like the step of establishing a workers state that would plan the economy that would confiscate the banks and monopolies, right? If you have the Fortune 500 companies and you can start to plan that, now you have basically what? Two thirds of the US GDP is in the hands of a planned economy that would have abundant resources to radically transform people's standard of living in a very short space of time. And so that would be the basis for the beginning of a transition to socialism. If you ever want to arrive at that, then it's clear that what kind of struggle is it going to take before you can be at the doorstep of that kind of scenario? It's not going to be running regular, like progressive campaigns that are going after sort of tax the rich initiatives. It has to be a strategy that involves the masses. Like it has to be the way you pursue your electoral strategy has to be an extension of the class struggle, of the rest of the class struggle, including mass mobilizations on the streets. The people that are in Congress would have to see themselves as kind of the wing within those halls of power of a mass revolutionary movement on the outside. And they wouldn't be horse trading with the other members trying to get agreements with the governor and trying to negotiate, give a little here in order to get, they would be in there to be like a burn it down, thorn in the side of everybody else in that chamber and saying, we are against all of you, all of you, and expose. You all, you know, basically addressing all of the bourgeois parties. All of you are instruments of the Epstein class, giving these kinds of revolutionary speeches, but also becoming, yeah, a Tribune for the masses connecting up with the, you know, mass strike battles on the outside, mobilizing mass support, you know, for these kinds of class conflicts. Yeah, see, see the, one of the mistakes that the DSA leadership, the dominant people in DSA make is they basically think of politics the way they were taught by the ruling class. So therefore they reflect this capitalist individuality. So the question of like when they run candidates, it's not the DSA that's running candidates, it's individuals who choose to run. And then they get some support, some other support. And by the way, DSA is not even unanimous on that, right? And I think like Chavalli had the support of Zoran, Mayor Zoran Mannami. And it, but the, but I don't think AOC supported Chavalli, at least before she got it, like it maybe she supports her now that she won the nomination. But, but it, but it's like everything is individual. What we're talking about when we say the working class needs its own party, we're talking about a collective party, right? And that anyone who runs as a candidate the working class party, it's not about them choosing to run. It's about the party choosing to run and who the party chooses to run in that seat. You know, people, people get angry. The DSA members get angry. They say, we have no control over our elected. Of course you don't have control because they aced to bourgeois individuality and the whole bourgeois conception of politics they're not starting from a class perspective, that the party is a collective, a product of the working class, and therefore it acts collectively. And anyone who gets elected is there to serve the, the party, which is democratically determined by its members, by its working class members. It's supposed, and it's supposed to follow the program of the party. It's not about what they individually think about this or that, right? They, they have their right to think it's a, they can argue their point inside the party, try to convince the party, but the majority of the party guides where the party needs to go. And exactly the whole idea of a working class representation, if we got a, got real workers in Congress or state legislature, they would form at first an opposition to the capitalist government, putting forward the idea of what a workers government could do. Now, by the way, you know, there, there's some people who write to us and they'll say, like, well, are you just saying that until we have the revolution, until we have socialist, we're not going to get anything. And until then the workers will, we'll just have to wait, you know, like, like that kind of thing. No, we're not, we're not saying that at all. If, if what, if our ideas were implemented, what would happen is a growing workers opposition, you know what that would do, that would put pressure on the capitalist class. So like, for example, in the Congress, we'd say, we're not voting for Mike Johnson. We're not voting for Hakeem Jeffries. We're not voting for any bourgeois speaker, right? You, you, you capitalist, you make your deal on who's going to be speaker as long as you're in the majority. What we're doing is we're going to build eventually a majority and we're elect our own speaker. It's going to be a worker speaker. Now, what will happen is the capitalist class will be forced to make concessions as they see the workers party grow because they know if they get it, get it wrong, if they do something wrong, people are angry at the incumbent government, where are they going to vote? They're going to vote for the workers because the workers become an opposition. That's our strategy. See, the, the DSA makes a big mistake by aligning themselves with the Democrats. They profit on that when the Republicans are in power because then the Republicans become very unpopular. Okay. Fine. Right now, the DSA is on a rise just like when Trump was in, in his first term. Here's the question, what happens when the Democrats win the presidency and win the House and the Senate and the Democrats? Then the DSA being part of that coalition with that wing of the ruling class, that wing of the ruling cuts will not be so popular. People will turn on them and that's exactly what happened with Biden, right? That's exactly what happened because yeah, think everyone says things are horrible today. It is horrible and Trump is horrible, but Trump is horrible because he's leading American capitalism and American capitalism is in crisis. Were things better when Biden was there and he was running American capitalism? See, the, the, it's a systemic problem. It's not a question of individuals. Yeah. And that's why you need to have if the, the candidates that are running are indistinguishable from the Democratic Party, which is basically the main issue that we're explaining. It's like the, the, the question of class independence isn't a narrow matter of the ballot line. It's not just about breaking with the Democratic Party. It's about breaking with bourgeois politics in general, but what does that mean? It means breaking with an entire world outlook, breaking with the bourgeois approach to electoral politics means you're playing by the rules of a certain game. And if you're playing where, you know, to win that game means you get elected. Like, that's the, the finish line. Then you're going to campaign in a certain way. You're going to raise funds in a certain way. You're going to constrain your message in a certain, you're going to appeal for votes in a certain way. If you, all you're trying to do is just get someone into a seat, which is, that's playing by the rules of the game. That's conventional bourgeois politics, but you're not trying to do revolutionary agitation or bring kind of a message that will expose the institutions or actually channel the real class anger that's in the streets. Then you're not going to be distinguished from the Democratic Party. And of course, you'll be tarnished by association when, correctly, the mass of the working class says, what are the Democrats doing for us? It's the party of Wall Street. And so they're saying, well, we're a wing. We're, we're an independent wing. We're moving towards, for a long time, they had this dirty break strategy. It was like, well, we know we need an independent party. We hate the Democrats too. We're holding our nose. We're running on this ballot line. But someday we're, we're building capacity so that we can break. The truth is they're not taking any steps towards becoming an independent force. You know, there, there's nothing that's actually distinguishing. Once they get elected, they just disappear into Congress. What, you know, you have this big campaign moment. And there's all these posters and all these door knocking and DSA mobilizes all these, you know, energetic young people and people that have the best of intentions willing to go and do all this hard work. I think they knocked about three million doors for Zoran. I mean, he's the mayor. So he doesn't just disappear into Albany or into Washington, DC. But for the most part, these Congress people, they're just running congressional campaigns like any other sort of progressive Democrat, they just disappear. And then at the, at what point do the workers feel like, well, we have our representative on the inside who's making revolutionary speeches and, you know, helping to tear down the system and expose it? No, that doesn't happen. In fact, AOC herself in 2022, when the real world workers were going to go on strike, and it was going to be a huge event that was going to polarize the country along class lines, put the strengths of the working class front and center. I mean, these, these workers have been squeezed for decades. They were finally going to take this and the Biden administration came in and made the strike illegal. And AOC said nothing about it voted. She voted with Biden to make it illegal. The whole thing was, was that that's the other thing is you'll see, sometimes these people, if they don't need their vote, then they allow them to do a showcase vote. It's like to leave voted correctly on that because they didn't need her vote. Probably if they needed her vote, they would have pressured her and she would have voted accordingly, according to the way AOC did, you know? Yeah. But it's, it's like this happens all the time. This is just pure bourgeois politics, pure, pure capital hill theatrics. Yeah. And so the question of class independence is about having, if you, if you understand the political conflict of our time as a struggle between two classes, then of course you wouldn't associate with the enemy class. Our historic goal is to sweep away that enemy class and all its institutions, its parties and its world view. And so the first step you have to take is to break in order to have some kind of an independent force that can, you know, raise a banner and say we are not like the rest of them and we're here to fight against them, to expose them, to use every injustice. I mean, every, every single person that's killed by ice and it's happening more frequently. We, we were just looked earlier this week, somebody was killed in Maine in a small town. They've heard Maine, yeah. Yeah. I mean, a town of what 5,000 people or something like that. Yeah, it's, it's not a very large town. Yeah. Someone was killed in Houston, I think, the week before, wrongly, because I mean, it's just, you're seeing these atrocities. Oh, by the way, you have the guy in Maine. I think Mullin said that he wasn't even the person they were trying to serve the war on time. Yeah. No, it made a mistake. Yeah. But, but what is that base? What we're talking about is the state is, is, is basically killing people, right? You know, you're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. Your day in court, these people are getting capital punishment before they're even arrested. They're not even arrested, right? They're killed before they're arrested. Yeah. So if we had a revolutionaries that were part of a class independent wing within Congress, let's say they get elected. We have us even a small minority, even just one. What would they be doing? Having a press conference, calling for a mass demonstration, like mobilize the labor movement, mobilize the working class and say we have to fight this. And then when the state comes and starts arresting the participants in this movement, like they're doing in Minneapolis, the Minneapolis 15 or, you know, attack throwing the book at these activists in Prairieland, like there's basically a crackdown on your democratic rights. Where's the mass movement to defend them? You know, to defend their rights to free these political prisoners. There's nobody talking about this in Congress. And so that's the whole thing is like all of these struggles, every struggle in society would have its expression in Congress, but it would be a class struggle expression, you know, and it wouldn't be just otherwise those people, they're just indistinguishable from the rest of the Democrats. Yeah. You know, I mean, like the thinking members of DSA, they, they should really think about this and, and really maybe make, make a balance sheet, right? Because the party right now recently, where the DSA is real, is claiming that they have 120,000 members and they're saying they've got the biggest socialist organization that's ever existed in the United States. Okay. Now, if you have that force, here's a question. What are you doing with those numbers? What are you accomplishing? Because, you know, they make a big emphasis that the DSA is a big tend to organization. It's multi-tenancy. They have all these different tendencies. What I would suggest, this stop worrying about being multi-tenancy inside your organization. And if you really want to build like a multi-tenancy force, build this strong United front because this would be, because if you have 120,000 members, if you really have that kind of force, you have, you know, like you said, you're going to have double the congressman. There's a lot of money there. Those congressmen could take some of their salaries. Why don't they accept the average wage of a worker and donate the rest of their salary to the movement? Because then DSA could initiate a United Front Organization, which wants to defend the rights of workers and democratic rights that they should be, look at all these people are being sat and basically killed by the state, right? Without their day in court, right? Without even being a right, right? That's a violation, even of the bourgeois constitution, right? The bourgeois bill of right. So why aren't they starting a United Front campaign on that, say, you don't have to be a socialist, you don't have to be a communist, but everybody agrees that workers' rights have to be defended. People's rights have to, these democratic rights, and this is a violation. And we're going to have a mass struggle on that, right? We're going to fight against these These killings, we're going to fight it today. defend the people in Minneapolis that are being charged with this, these are into charge it. And we'll fight to defend the people in Texas. There should have been a campaign for those people before the trial. But you know, they, they, this could be done. I, I would, I would say if you're a serious member of DSA, you should be looking at that and saying what, what's going on here? Why, why, why is there no leadership on this? Another thing they could take an initiative on is, look, there's this imperialist work going on. US imperialism against Venezuela, against the Iran, you know, well, why isn't the DSA initiating, initiating a united front on that question? They said, look, you don't have to be a socialist. All you have to do is be against these imperialist wars and against the US imperialist aggression. Unite, they could, they could form such a thing and they had, and they'd have all these congressmen to help out, right? It's, it's a serious weakness. You know, I, if, if I would give some advice, I would say spend less time telling us that you're the biggest socialist organization and actually try to show something for it. The, the, when the communist party in the 1920s had only eight, nine, 10,000 members, they were doing a lot more of these kinds of things, initiating these kinds of united fronts than you see with DSA, which is claiming to be so much larger. Yeah. And it's not that the mood for it doesn't exist. If anything, communism is more popular now than it was in the early 20th century. I think, and socialism, I mean, forget about it, the vast majority of young people favor socialism outright to capitalism. These, the new polls from Kato that we've been discussing a lot, they're historic. I mean, we've become kind of accustomed to these kinds of polls. I say, oh, how many million young people are in favor of socialism? Come, like, let's not get blase about the, the, the implications of this. There was one, if you break it down by the actual number of people that are in, in Gen Z and the millennial generation and, basically, all the different age segments, the number of people who have a favorable view of communism across all age groups is closing in on 60 million people in the United States. I mean, talk about the potential that you have. Those, those are people that are not afraid of communism. Not only that, if you have a favorable view of the hammer and sickle, what does that tell you? It means they're looking for the most radical rejection of the system of the status quo of both parties. They're not, the red scare has no impact on these people. And so they, you know, if anything, like the democratic socialists that are basically treating politics like they're still living in the red scare era, like we can't go too far, we can't scare people. They're missing out on an epic historic opportunity that's in front of them. And I think that's the main thing for us to understand is like, if you're going to harness and tap into this real class anger that exists in this desire to take action, which is just being frustrated. It's not finding an expression. It's not finding a lead. The moment that lead we're given say like a successful strike, you know, strikes used to be a class battle like they shut down production. Of course, the ruling class uses its control of the laws to make that illegal. So you, they say it's illegal to have an effective method to shut down production. All you can do is have a symbolic informational picket line that goes in a little circle across the street, let the scabs come in and out. That's this is the way that strikes happen. When's the last time you had a real class battle? But, you know, those class battles are serious things. If you're going to start playing by the rules of the class war, you better have a whole backup plan that's ready to go for all the consequences that flow from that. It's the same thing in Kashmir. The comments are saying the AAC just to jump back to that. The AAC, you know, the leadership isn't controlled by communists. We are one element in the leadership we're pushing forward for our program. But why isn't the leadership going on the advance? Why didn't they storm Rwalacott a month ago when they had the opportunity? Because what would they do next? That's, this is the point that the comments are making. Like, if you're going to take one step on this road of escalation and you're going to face, because of the consequences of that step, by escalating, by moving forward, by advancing, you're going to face a new threat. You better have a plan for what comes after that. But if you don't, then every step you take forward is going to appear to be like, you're stepping over a cliff. Like, you're going into the abyss. Why would you possibly, you know, go up against that kind of threat? The same thing that there's something general here about like, class struggle politics requires people that have a class war mentality that understand like, that's not a wall. That's not a cliff. That's, there's a, there's a way to break through this obstacle. There's a way to escalate the movement. And so like, whether it's a strike battle or like, you know, you have this housing crisis. The number of people that wanted, hoped Zoran was going to freeze the rent and lower the cost of, you know, living, which is incredible in the city. Instead of negotiating for like a rent freeze that keeps the current rent levels at their unaffordable rate and keeps them from going up even faster, what if you actually organized, I think six out of 10 tenants renters in the city voted for Zoran. What if you organized a mass tenants union and then rested on that kind of organizational structure to then have real leverage to be able to carry out a mass struggle against the evictions, but also, you know, to control the rent levels. And this is the kind of thing that the Communist Party did with much smaller forces. I think in the 30s during the Great Depression, when people were being thrown out on the streets, I mean, they took direct action. If you will, that's, that's an example of like, class struggle methods where they were reversing the evictions. I mean, they were, they were having confrontations, but, but you have to have, and then they had what the international labor defense to come to the aid of political prisoners. I mean, we're reaching a point where you need to have, you need to think these things through. And if you're going to have a real struggle when there's a mass mood for it, then we need to make sure that we can come to the defense of the future political prisoners. We're already piling up the political prisoners in this country as we've seen Minneapolis 15 and others. By the way, if you, if you had a strategy of having these kinds of united front initiatives, how would that, that wouldn't that work hand in glove with your electoral strategy, right? If you had, but it has to be a consistent, militant class approach, you know, because yeah, then in the, in the, in the, in the early depression, the Communist Party would get massive people. They'd march on the welfare office and say, we demand, you know, money and food for the, for these people, we demand that the electric pay the electric bill or turn the electricity on. They, they would do that. They'd have, they'd mobilize in that way. Yeah. And the, and the Communist Party was able to successfully organize tenant associate even, even in, even as recently in the 1980s, they had a lot of influence in New York, among the tenant associations and everything. Yeah. And the principle of a united front is also class independence. March separately strike together, right? You could have different working class organizations, which have their own programs, but they're going to unite on this particular point. But it means you're not uniting with the bourgeoisie. It's not, not a popular front. You would never have an electoral alliance with the democrats or with anything like that. That's the first line of demarcation that needs to be made in order for the classical to take a step forward. I think finally, let's tackle this question of mutual aid because this is another really common thing that we're hearing. And it seems to be sort of, I think people perceive it as an alternative to the electoral opportunism. People who are really put off by, you know, this, the democratic socialist running on the democratic party ballot line and all this, they, and, and there's also a certain impatience, a thirst for taking action and the sense of urgency. Like, we need to do something. And sometimes that feeling is expressed as like, we need to do something, whatever it is, you know, but like, because people have these burning needs, if we're not going out there and directly addressing them, if we're not giving people something material, something concrete, if we're not serving their needs, then what are we even doing? It's this sort of kind of impatience for like, show me the results. In that sense, it's, it's reflective of the American pragmatic mentality, which is like, which is impatient with a long-term strategy or something that appears abstract or something that requires a lot of preparatory groundwork before you can reach a new, a more advanced level. For these reasons, it's something that comes up a lot. But I mean, mutual aid, I think, why do you think it's becoming more popular? Yeah, I mean, I think it's also, it's becoming more popular because there is a need, right? We're not denying that there is a need, right? And there's a vacuum. And people don't know where to go. I mean, it's not, it's not like, for example, the potential power of the labor movement is not being used, but organized people in a way to meet people's demands today for higher wages, for better working conditions for universal health care. They're not doing that, right? And the political side, you see some expression towards the GSA, the growth in the GSA, shows people want something more radical, but also it stays within a certain confines. So there's a vacuum that exists there. So people say, hey, we have to do something and we have to do something now. But the question that we have to ask is, is that the correct thing? Are we doing something that really solves the problem right now and moving us forward in the direction that we want to? That's the key question. That's the key question of every avenue of strategy that you want to assess, you should be like, okay, we're going to have to expend effort and energy on this immediate goal. But once we attain that goal, does that mean we've moved now towards the bigger goal? In that sense, are we taking one step and putting one foot in front of the other or not? Because if you're expanding energy, whether it's to get a candidate elected to office or to launch a mutual aid initiative, like setting up a food bank or organizing local neighborhood initiatives where you're pooling resources that are donated by other working class people to try and meet some kind of immediate need, once you've achieved that, which is often so much work that it burns people out, especially if someone engages in this over time, oftentimes it's like very committed small groups of activists that are, you know, with the best of intentions trying to do something helpful for the working class that's right in front of them, but in what way does that help prepare for like a class independent expression of the class region society or to give the working class confidence in its own power to change society, the rule of thumb for our tactics, like the rule of thumb of class independent strategy and tactics is, are we doing something that is helping to build the confidence of the working class, the unity to raise its consciousness, to raise its horizons, to help the working class see itself as the agent of change. That's the bottom line with, you know, and again, whether it's the electoral strategy that's saying vote for me and all solve the problem, get me into office and then all take care of the rent prices, or is it saying, you know, you need to have a mass struggle, the working class has the power to solve this. If we struggle collectively, we have the strengths to paralyze industry, to make demands, to organize in a way that forces the ruling class to make these concessions, but only if we use the mass methods of class struggle, like the workers have the strength to do this. Yeah, let's take a look. There's growing hunger because of the high price of food, right? Everyone agrees, right? Because of the, you look at how the price of food has been going up, right? But what are they saying? They're expanding soup kitchens, they're expanding, um, pant, food pantries, whatever they're expanding that. And what are all those places reporting? Is that, is that filling the gap? No, what they're saying is, oh my god, the lines are getting longer and longer and longer. So this is not really solving anything, right? And, uh, people have to, and people aren't learning the, you know, the basic facts here and that, look, there's plenty of food. Yeah. The problem is it's controlled by private property, right? Because if, if the, if we wanted to, we can definitely take the food and distribute it in such a way that everyone's eating and one has plenty of food. But that's not what's being challenged. So if we're going to engage in a fight, I agree, you have to eat today. So we're, we're not against people fighting to get food today. But you have to connect that fight for food today with what the bigger problem is so that people see as part of that fight, what the real issue is, the real, there is not hunger in this world because we cannot produce enough food. That's not true. We produce plenty of food and we could even produce more. That is not the problem. There's, there's not a problem like we don't know how to grow food. No, that's not a problem. The problem is private ownership of the means of production and the market system and how it distributes. It's also a problem is that real wages, you know, wages are according to inflate. That's not keeping up, right? That's, that's your problem. So, so you have less money to be able to spend on food because your rent is up, a bigger portion of your money goes to rent or goes to the pay for the gas to go to and from work because the gas is going up, therefore I have less money for food. That's what's causing the problem. So how do you know, you have to look at what the real problem is and then organize to fight that. Revolutionaries have a task of raising the political level of the working class, like giving explanations that again raise their horizons for their understanding of like the potential strengths that we have as a class through those methods. And I think if you look at a lot of the mutual aid activists that defend that tactic, they're saying, well, by doing these initiatives, we're actually exposing the inability of the system to provide those things. But I think I don't think that giving somebody like sandwich or handing out water bottles or you know, any number of these local neighborhood initiatives are actually the way to transmit those explanations. Like workers aren't just going to listen to you if you give them something that feeds their belt. That's kind of a primitive way of understanding how to sink roots and what how consciousness changes. I mean, young people are becoming radicalized not by socialist on street corners that are giving them food. They're becoming radicalized by their experience of life under declining capitalism. And what they're actually needing is a force that can explain what are the tactics and strategy that we can use to harness this movement and realize its potential and move forward. You know, working class people, they have this instinctive rejection of the billionaires and of their institutions, of the Epstein class, of both parties. What's needed is a force that can point the way forward. And that's the way that you win leadership. That's the way that you build political authority as a force that can give explanations is if you can, you know, convincingly help workers to understand what are the fundamental conflicts in society. And raising their potential, raising their horizons also means bringing them to the conclusion that, you know, we have the productive forces at our disposal for a completely different standard of living for a planned economy on the basis of abundance that would be mind-boggling to people that have lived for generations under class society. That potential is right at our fingertips. It's a question of harnessing that potential, planning the economy. That's the step that should be taken. And I mean, the socialist movement today is doing very little to talk about that kind of, to talk about the need for socialism. I mean, concrete terms. I mean, today's sewer socialism is like, oh, we just, the people just want the government to work to fix the potholes and this kind of thing. That's not the radicalization that I'm seeing. I see millions of people that want to end capitalism and want to have serious discussions and explanations for how we can do that. And I mean, that's kind of the need that's missing right now. Our message should be to engage with the working class, so that the working class sees that its own liberation is a byproduct of its own activity. It's not about going somewhere, it's someone's going to give you something. That's not socialism. Socialism is the working class, engage collectively to fight to change things. By the way, just to take a historical point, and a historical example, you know, in Minneapolis, 1934, there was an effort to organize the unorganized into the Teamsters Union, people who worked in warehouses and who loaded the trucks unloaded the trucks. It wasn't just the truck drivers. It was a whole bunch of people. And they organized that. And they said, in order to fight this battle, we need to be organized collectively. What did they do? They gathered together and organized people and they got a headquarters, a proper headquarters and at that headquarters, they got people who were going to be cooking food for the people on strike, right? And they got people who actually were going to take care of people's injuries because they knew like the police were going to attack them and hurt people. So they had to come, you know, it was kind of like a makeshift hospital in the certain say they had all this collective activity. Mutual aid when it's connected to a direct struggle like that can be a very positive thing. It can be a thing that really teaches the working class what is possible, right? Imagine like if if the unions were going to have a real strike and they really shut down production, imagine if they had these kinds of headquarters all around. And not only that, by bringing people together, people start to see how much power they have. There's nothing like, you know, if you're alone, you don't feel powerful. But when you see a whole bunch of people together, we're all fighting for the same thing. That makes you feel powerful. And by the way, it also gives a scare to the ruling class because they get nervous when they see the working class come together. And that that's the kind of activity. You know, it's like like mutual aid can be posed in an abstract way. We believe it should be posed in a direct way, a concrete way. And in a certain concrete situation, it can be something that can really facilitate the struggle of the working class. And in other situations, it's almost starts to look like charity. And we know that charity has never solved anything under capitalism. You know, the church has been around for you know, longer than capitalism. And they've been doing all kinds of charity for people. I'm not denying that these people need the charity. But has that solved anything? Has that made society better? In fact, you know, you had times when capitalism was in a boom, but you had less charities. And then you have capitalism and a decline. You need more charity. But the charity under both situations never meets the full need. That's the solution is not capitalism plus charity. In my view, the solution is socialism. We don't need capitalism. There's no reason for this. There's no reason for hunger. There's no reason why everyone doesn't have a place to live. There's absolutely no reason. There's no technical reason for that to exist. There's a reason it's called private ownership of the means production and a system that functions for profit. There's a really good point you made about 1934 and the way that, I mean, basically, you're talking about a variant of mutual aid, if you like, which we can definitely get behind, because we're talking about methods that emerge in the context of a class struggle. And so if we go back to this rule of thumb of like, our tactics are those which elevate the confidence, consciousness, and unity of the working class. These are perfect examples of the kind of struggle where you are depending on the ingenuity of the workers to solve the problems that emerge from a struggle, but it's the workers who are in the driver's seat of that struggle. They're the ones solving the problem. They're the ones pulling their resources in order not just to help each other get through the week, but in order to collectively survive a struggle and to build it up. I know that there were comrades who went who were in Minneapolis, comrades of the RCA, who were describing how local food banks were being just overwhelmed with donations, which is also a sign of the solidarity. During this massive struggle against the invasion by ICE agents, you had people that were wanting to make sure that people were going to, you know, if they, if you had undocumented workers that couldn't go to work, that they weren't, their families weren't going to go hungry and this kind of thing. At a certain point, they were saying we have enough donations. We don't actually, we can't accept anymore because we don't have no room for them and we have, you know, they were being just overrun. But when there were discussions about the need for a general strike and the need for a general strike headquarters and the need for coordinating the logistics of everything to have a proper Shut down of the city The people that were involved in those were you know could start to think they can make a leap from just trying to help Provide food for people to the thing we could actually make sure that this strike could go on and no working class family would go hungry Like it almost became an extension of like a strike fund see this is the type of thing where workers pool their resources in order to make sure that they can hold out together It's like a war of attrition in the class war version of like against the bosses We're gonna shut it down Whatever hardships come our way. We're gonna work through them together But this is part of the class struggle. It's part of class struggle methods Any kind of mass movement and a revolution. You see that too right now in Kashmir. There's these sit-ins They're being fed by the local community by you know housewives that are feeding their own children And also those children are delivering food to the sit-ins Local hotels and restaurants are feeding the population free of charge You see this like the community comes together, but why because it's a class struggle and they're all trying to support this Revolution against the state in this case and so you know, yeah every every kind of mass struggle every revolutionary movement every class War you see these elements of this type if you want to call that mutual aid then that's that's our mutual aid That's the one that we defend. It's on for in Minneapolis if they had had a PAC popular action committee Is that correct? So if they had established that Imagine how far it could have gone right and and and it could have if it was if it was uh You know even half as organized as the AAC Imagine that and not not only imagine what they could have achieved there But what a banner that what what what what a an example that would have been Brought the United States repeat for other cities that are engaging in the same struggle I think one thing that flows from everything we've discussed so far We've basically we've pointed out some of the shortcomings of different methods that don't help the working class To become a independent force that can fight for power But there's a positive side of this like if it's not that we're just trying to explain what not to do But the alternative to all of these methods is the methods of Bolshevism The methods that our comrades in Pakistan are using right now the methods that we're we're I mean we're talking about leninist Party building and you know, we understand that for every comrade we have in our ranks There are thousands out there who will join in the future for every one comrade we have today Who's studying Marxism there are other people out there who are going through experiences that are pushing them to search for a party like ours For explanations for ideas for theory and more and more people are knocking on our door I mean every day we're getting people joining And they're saying you know, I've been pushed into this direction because of events that are happening I've been looking for ideas and theory and Marxism I've been reading and I'm convinced of what you're doing So this thing has momentum behind it But at the same time it's kind of like we're drinking from a fire hose in the sense of like the potential The number of people were we're encountering who agree with us who are willing to help It's almost like our forces are just overrun by the opportunities like we have this ocean of opportunity in front of that That's what communism is having a moment in this country right now How do we make the most of it and the thing and this was similar to what the Bolsheviks were facing In the birth time of Bolshevism like the beginning of the 20th century when Lenin wrote what is to be done It was a similar political landscape, you know, he has quotes about how Marxism became invogan You know Marxist books were published one after another and Marxist publications were launched and Marxist reading groups are people were searching for ideas And the number of people that were moving into the into activity Was just kind of overwhelming the movement. So what do you need in a situation like that? You need a general staff, you know, you need a cadre organization This is the essence of his answer to the dilemma laid out in what is to be done It's ideological training. You need political education. You need people that can give explanations and help people to learn Marxism like study dialectical materialism study philosophy study history like get a very deep grounding so that you can be in a position to be To deliver an agitational speech in front of a hundred thousand people But that's not just going to come to you in the moment It needs to be something that grows out of a thorough education in how to think like a Marxist How to think like a revolutionary because this stuff once again It's not like people just wake up one morning and become Marxist. You have to work hard to To adopt this worldview in a way that gives you what you need in order to Assess the situation and to guide action in practice a lot of people become politically active because they are angry About what they see what they've experienced what's happened to a loved one That's we understand that with that's true of us as well, right? But here's the thing okay anger can start you on our on a direction of becoming politically active But should we just do something based on our feelings or should we at least try to say if we're going to do something We're going to learn from past experience like because my my gut feeling is I don't think That you would want to solve any problem you face in life just based on the way you felt You'd actually want to see what is successful and what's not successful The whole question of theory you know Trotsky says it's a generalization of past experience of the working class That's why we study theory we want to learn from the past we want to learn what works we want to actually Achieve victory. We don't want to be defeated. We don't want to be end up as martyrs if possible We want to transform society we want to end all these problems So the anger can start you on a trajectory towards political activity But what we would argue with people is to don't just leave it at the question of anger Don't just do what feels good But to actually study the past learn from the past And then direct your activity into something that can actually achieve victory That's a really good point because Marxists are not Atomatons. We're not robots like we it's not That because we have a scientific theory that we don't feel the rage and the passion that the rest of our class feels Our blood boils every time one of these atrocities is committed as well And our comrades right now in Azad Kashmir are putting their lives on the line And I know that we have comrades in the US and in other sections in every section of the international That will put their lives on the line when it comes to a life-and-death struggle like The way we feel about our task in history is born out of the depth of Marxism But it's also because you understand our place in history And that's the thing that only Marxism can provide And I think that it's very clear that in the US right now a period is opening up Where we're facing opportunities that We've never faced before no communists have faced A landscape as favorable as it is in the United States Right now and it's only becoming more so with every so how do we harness this opportunity This is the task of the RCA is to Build ourselves up as Marxists build our units of the party up our cells our branches That's where the nuts and bolts happens and if we build vibrant branches If our branches go out in recruit and multiply and divide This is the progress that's going to bring us to the next stage So that when these events are unfolding in the United States again When we have another social explosion We can intervene and not just talk about what we're going to do someday But actually be able to play that intervening role because very clearly history is inviting us to do it I mean the the conditions the objective conditions of society Are screaming out for some force to step into the vacuum And to fulfill that need I mean we're doing it with all the urgency in the world You