Hello, you are listening to Red Menace. This is a podcast where normally we go into a specific work of theory and talk about how that applies to our current situation and how us as Marxist and organizers can use that.

Or alternatively, we occasionally go into current events and dive into how we can think about the chaotic situation that we are in in the world today through the lens of Marxism.

And today we're doing something that's kind of in between those two things.

We are going to be kind of trying to make an introductory approach to Marxism for people who might need something that's not so thoroughly grounded in one book, but more sort of a broader overview of what Marxism is and why it matters for us today.

So that's really what we're going to be focusing on. It sort of breaks the mold of the two formats we've used in the past.

But if you are interested in what we're doing, you can find us on Twitter at the Red Menace and then you can also find us on Patreon as well, where we have bonus episodes that you can listen to that's really get into sort of details about some of our thought processes behind our episodes, supplementary materials and also Q&A questions that we go over with patrons to kind of provide more depth for what we're talking about.

So if any of that interests you, we are online and you can find that information.

But today we are going to kind of try to make a case to you that Marxism is something that you should be considering and understanding and then trying to provide the tools to understand that.

I think pretty much everyone regardless that their political orientation is aware that we're living in extremely chaotic times right now.

We are at a point where there are mainstream conversations about civil collapse in the United States and these are thoughts that are not just happening on sort of the radical fringes, but are being talked about by academics, being talked about by politicians, being talked about by mainstream publications.

And it's kind of in that situation that I, you know, and I think Brett as well hope to suggest that Marxism has something to offer for us in this sort of time.

And hopefully we can get into what that is a little bit.

Yeah. And just to talk about this episode, you know, we pitched this sort of an introduction to Marxism for people who, you know, are moving left were especially younger or newer people to the left.

And they're trying to sort of, you know, find their bearings and get grounded in left theory.

But there's so much disinformation and just bad poor understandings of Marxism out there that it can be really hard.

And then if you go on social media, you know, you're more likely to run into some obscure sectarian debate than you are some principled outlying of the basic principles of Marxism.

And so this can be very confusing. So we want to offer this up to help people come into Marxism and learn some of the basics of Marxism at the same time.

We're also sort of summarizing things we've covered in a lot of the theory texts that we've covered so far on this show.

And as we were going through it, we realized that it's very hard to make it super 101. Like, you know, the very basic terms we'd have to start talking about like, you know, what is liberalism versus socialism.

And, you know, we're going to touch on that a little bit, but it's almost a little bit more advanced than a complete and total intro.

But hopefully it's still introductory enough. And importantly, I think a broad overview of Marxism that I think this can be used as a tool to help those younger and newer folks come in.

A tool for people to summarize what we've talked about on this show already. And hopefully a resource that people can use in their organizations and cadres just to help catch people up or to remind people of what Marxism is et cetera.

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