COMMUNISM

PATRICE GREANVILLE—In this segment, Caleb interviews Christopher Helali, a Communist candidate to the US Congress (PCUSA), based in Vermont. Helali’s background is most interesting: he’s a small farmer, and a descendant of Greek communist partisans who fought the Nazis and later the reactionaries supported by the British and the Americans after the war. Despite his open leftwing views, he enjoys a fraternal relationship with working class men and fellow farmers, mny of whom support Trump, and is able to educate them about the issues confronting them all—in itself a major breakthrough considering the cultural circumstances. Don’t miss this highly instructive and inspiring chat. In the recent 2020 election, although the Democrat candidate (Peter Welch) won, as expected, by a huge majority with 67% of the vote, Helali managed a respectable 1%, with 3,432 people casting their ballot for him. This despite the fact he lacked the enormous financial and media resources enjoyed by the Democrat incumbent, and that he had to communicate his message while pushing back against the deep-seated anti-communist hostility and appalling ignorance that defines the US electorate. Obviously his honesty, courage, steadfastness, and cogency played a big role in this outcome.

CALEB MAUPIN—In this episode Caleb discusses the importance of understanding the truths underscored by Dialectical Materialism, among which the fact that everything changes all the time, that NOTHING stays the same, not even from one second to the next, is central.  This means anything is possible, that the past, even the immediate past, does not need to rigidly determine the future. That A ≠ A. The chat also dwells on how people’s “high” events, highly romantic things they participated in—Vietnam war, the Great Depression,  the McCarthy period and the fight against anti-communism—seem to freeze their perception of what is possible, providing them with a single lens to view history.

CASS DEAN—Comes the Revolution, the displaced ruling class immediately starts organizing a counter-coup and lots of unpleasantness ensues, including mistrust between people. But Cuba’s ruling class, and its psycho sadist enforcers, were intertwined with both the leading civil criminals, the Mafia, the leading underground criminals, the CIA, and the politicians, of a large country only 90 miles away that rolled out the welcome mat.

Parenti smashes rightwing and establishment ideologies.

ERIC SCHECHTER—Regulations can’t make a kinder, gentler guillotine. The problem is not good institutions run badly, but bad institutions, founded on bad principles. We can’t end ecocide, poverty, war, and other problems until we replace our society’s real principles — hierarchy, property, and separateness — with a better Foundation: harmony and consensus. It’s a fool’s errand to try to make the lies of freedom and democracy come true, for those “principles” can’t really work.