Hello and welcome to Red Minus, my name is Allison and I am here with my co-host Brett

and today you are joining us for an episode that isn't necessarily when we had planned

ahead of time but that we think is really important for us to dive into.

Our schedule for this month originally had been to actually dive into Julius E. Vola's

work and talk about his influence on fascism and how we can understand that to combat fascism

but due to current events we decided to change direction somewhat in order to address

the situation that is developing in Russia and Ukraine.

Obviously this is a situation that is of the utmost importance for just global politics

today but it's also a situation that the left has been trying to figure out how to

orient itself to and that there's been fairly extensive debate about.

So one of the things that we thought for this month that might be useful would be just

really jumping into the situation and trying to break it down systematically to think

carefully through what's at play here, what it means for the left and maybe just try to provide

some clarity on what is going on and how we can orient towards these developments.

Obviously things are changing very very fast on the ground and that makes things very difficult

but there are some important analytic tools that we have from Marxism that can be applied here

and our hope is to be able to apply that as we discuss this today.

So that means that next month we will be getting back to our schedule for reading texts and

actually diving into that but we did think it was very important to take this detour in the meantime.

So at that side we have a couple of sort of discussion questions that we've prepared for us to

dive into and we've prepared some responses to them that we really want to wrestle with in order

to try to bring some clarity to this. So Brad I'll go ahead and hit head and hand it over to you

...