Welcome to the Socialist Program. This is John Prysner, a producer of this show.

Today's episode features a recording of our host Brian Becker teaching at the Summer School for Socialism,

a class series hosted by the People's Forum in New York City. The class module in today's

episode is titled,

Change is Possible.

How do systems of power rise and fall?

This class introduces the Marxist method

for understanding how societies change.

Welcome, Brian.

Thank you, Sidie.

And welcome to all of you.

The topic today is about progress, how change happens.

And it's no coincidence, I think, that at this moment, in New York City, and in cities and towns around the country,

there are large protests going on in defense of immigrant families, immigrant workers,

people who have been targeted by the U.S. government, by the Trump administration, by ICE, using the most odious,

fascistic, unconstitutional, illegal methods. And I think the Trump administration felt,

as it has with its other sort of bourgeois opponents where they were flooding the zone,

dismantling organizations, federal government agencies like USAID, for whom we don't have any tears, actually,

because it was an instrument of the CIA to carry out the destabilization

and overthrow of governments around the world, governments that wanted to be independent.

We shed no tears for the destruction of these bourgeois institutions that Trump targeted for his

own reasons.

...