Hello and welcome to Red Menace. My name is Allison. I am here with my co-host Brett and today we have another episode that is not strictly speaking on any specific text.

We decided to push our episode on conquest of bread back to next month because we felt that there was something worse addressing this month, which is unfortunately the trending hashtag that I'm sure all of our listeners have seen of MAGA Communism and all of the kind of discourse that has sprouted out around that.

We decided that this is probably worth taking an episode to talk about. We'll get a little bit into why we think that's the case, but that's what we're going to be talking about today. Brett, I'll hand it over to you and maybe you can give our listeners a sense of why this is something we think is worth intervening in.

Yeah, because I think this is important. I think both Allison and I had an initial impulse to just ignore it. It's so absurd on its face, especially to people who have been in the game for a very long time like Allison and I.

It's like this idea of like, don't even give them steam and momentum. But on the other hand, we both kind of agreed that when a movement arises and it manifests and it's dressing itself in the garb of our tradition of Marxism, while pushing anti-Marxist, anti-communist, chauvinistic reactionary elements, we have a special obligation to speak up.

So if this is just a random right-wing thing or like it popped up in the anarchist community and the other anarchist had to deal with it, you know, that's one thing. We probably would ignore it, but because it's claiming to speak, not only in the name of Marxism, but in the name of Marxism, Leninism, and it's claiming to be the, I mean, in so many ways, the real true interpretation of Marxism and everybody else who disagrees with them is a fraud or an idiot or some combination thereof.

We thought it would be very helpful and it's our obligation to do it and we can clarify core Marxist concepts in the meantime. And I also wanted to say that a lot of a lot of this stuff could be disorienting to newer people, people on the baby left, people that are just looking for political alternatives.

You know, you could see why, especially certain people with huge egos speaking very confidently about shit, they kind of only have to understand in the best case, could still be appealing and convincing to people who are disillusioned with the normal processes of politics are looking for an alternative.

And, you know, if you are somebody that is indoctrinated in the reactionary settler-shovenist, you know, nationalist white supremacist culture of the United States, and you're looking for an alternative, this can be appealing because it combines the sort of revolutionary aesthetic and impulse with elements of ideology that, you know, for certain people conditioned in American society is not hard at all to digest.

And it actually doesn't require you to do the, you know, deeper work, I think, that really principled people who want to learn something like Marxism have to do over time, which is, you know, really analyze yourself, purge yourself of your own liberalism, deepen your understanding of geopolitics, of history, of theory, et cetera.

And this can kind of be a short, because like, oh, this charismatic, very confident person online is, you know, sort of pulling from this eclectic mix of high intellectual sounding theory and making these arguments, it can bold though somebody over and win somebody over.

And so we fell, we have an obligation, because it's pretending to be Marxism to do this, we have an obligation to younger folks coming up who want to not be, you know, swayed in the wrong direction.

And I think it'll give us an opportunity to clarify some core Marxist concepts that, you know, even if you're coming into this episode ready to laugh and dunk on these clowns, you could still walk away with like, oh, that's a good point about Marx, and this is what we actually believe about what works and what doesn't, et cetera.

So for a slew of reasons we felt, you know, against our better judgment, that it's worth diving into and correcting this shit and combating it.

And I've seen some other comrades do the same on some other shows as well, and I've seen that. And I was like, that's the correct thing to do. We must combat it.

And so that's kind of what we're going to do. We're going to kind of explain it. We're going to put, we're going to use their own words to show what they actually believe in.

We're going to show why it's a failure. We're going to show why this is not new. And then we're going to sort of ponder where this came from.

Is this an organic thing? Is this a brain child of two egomaniacs on the coast? Is this a op, you know, or is this a LaRouche in front?

Right? There's a bunch of different options. We're going to run through them at the end and see what we come up with.

But I also wanted to mention as well before we get into it, around the time that this episode comes out, maybe not exactly at the same day or whatever, but around the time.

We're also releasing, I think, a two hour episode on Lyndon LaRouche on RevLeft Radio. And that is just a deep dive specifically into LaRouche, who he was historically, what his movement was.

And once you study and understand Lyndon LaRouche and his little movement, this mega communism, Pat Sock, Mecha, tanky bullshit, really, you really see that this is nothing new.

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