Welcome to another episode of Confronting Capitalism.

I'm Melissa Nashak and I'm here, as always, with Vivek Chipper, a professor of sociology at NYU and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy.

How's it going, V?

It's going well, Melissa.

Nice to see you, even though we are at opposite ends of the world.

Yeah, though, this is the first time we've recorded internationally.

Do you want to tell the listeners where you are?

I am in Delhi, where I come every summer for a series of schools that we have set up here for about 15 years or so.

Schools on Marxist theory, which I've been doing twice a year for about 15 years. Wow. So this is the summer version of the school.

That's so cool. Man. How did you guys start doing that? This is just something that I and some

colleagues and friends who were on the left in India started around 2012, I think it was.

And it's a school for trade unionists, journalists, political people, students, people in various.

India has many, many, many left-wing parties.

So also people from those parties.

About 50 people at a time come for a four-day-long school.

Wow. That's awesome.

It's hard to think of a direct equivalent in the U.S., especially when you talk about, you know,

just the nature of the people who are coming and everything. Yeah, no, there isn't one. In fact,

there aren't very many in the world we found out. So there should be, but they're just, I mean,

since Marxism itself is dying, there just aren't that many. All right. Well, we'll bookmark that for another episode. But today, I wanted to talk about something that's been in the air,

which is the U.S. conflict with Iran. And it's not clear right now whether this is going

to escalate into a full-blown military conflict or if it's going to be more of a one-off

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