Afleveringen
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Economist Rob Larson joins Breht to discuss his book Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do With Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More. Together they explore the billionaire class not merely as a collection of rich individuals, but as a ruling class whose ownership of corporations, finance, media, housing, technology, and political access gives them extraordinary power over society. They discuss the staggering scale of wealth inequality, the grotesque lifestyles of the ultra-rich, the myths used to justify their rule, and the psychological and social damage that extreme inequality inflicts on everyone; rich and non-rich alike. They also examine how concentrated wealth makes genuine democracy impossible, why capitalism is structurally incapable of solving the major crises of the 21st century, and why taxing the rich is not enough. Finally, Rob makes the case for socialist expropriation: taking the productive wealth of the ruling class out of private hands and reorganizing society around democracy, human need, ecological sanity, and collective flourishing -- before advancing his positive vision of human civilization after capitalism.
Check out our other two episodes with Rob HERE
Outro Music: "Rich People" by Carsie Blanton
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In this episode, Breht goes on The Left Page podcast as a guest to explore the role that science fiction plays as part of the cultural superstructure of empire: a genre born in the shadow of British and American imperial power, shaped by colonial assumptions, and increasingly haunted by attempts to critique the very structures it once blindly reproduced. From early invasion fiction and dreams of space conquest to modern works like Dune, Blade Runner, The Expanse, and The Three-Body Problem, Leon, Frank and Breht examine how sci-fi imagines the future through the unresolved contradictions of the present: capitalism, colonialism, racial hierarchy, technological domination, corporate sovereignty, and imperial war. Along the way, they discuss the role of Rome in the Western political imaginary, especially for reactionaries and fascists; extend Mark Fisher's concept of capitalist realism into colonial and imperialist realism; and ask why science fiction can so easily imagine interstellar travel, artificial life, alien civilizations, and cosmic catastrophe, yet so often struggles to imagine a future beyond empire and capital.
Check out The Left Page podcast HERE
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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In this episode, Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante join forces for a deep philosophical conversation on Marxism, consciousness, and the mind-body problem. Using China Miéville's essay on consciousness and materialism as a starting point, they explore why the nature of subjective experience remains such a profound challenge for crude or reductionist forms of materialism -- and why this question matters for Marxists.
Alyson begins by carefully summarizing Miéville's original essay and its challenge to conventional Marxist materialism. From there, Breht lays out several major positions in the philosophy of mind, including dualism, physicalism, idealism, panpsychism, neutral monism, emergentism, eliminativism, and epiphenomenalism. Together, they then work through two responses to Miéville's essay, clarifying the arguments, tensions, and stakes of the debate.
In the second half, Breht argues for a different approach: a dialectical monism informed by dependent origination. Rather than reducing consciousness to matter, escaping into idealism, or treating mind and matter as separate substances, this view understands reality as a single, dynamic, relational process in which consciousness, embodiment, nature, society, and practice arise interdependently.
The conversation closes by bringing Buddhist philosophy and phenomenology into dialogue with Marxism, exploring emptiness, experience, nonduality, and the limits of conceptual thought. What emerges is not a rejection of materialism, but a call to deepen it -- beyond reductionism, beyond dualism, and toward a more dialectical understanding of consciousness & reality.
Find Fluss and Frim's response (Their Materialism and Ours) to Mieville HEREFind Pineda's response (Naturalized Dialectics) to Mieville HERE
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In this episode, Breht sits down with Mohamed Khougali, author of Politically Unconscious: The Psychic Aftermath of the Sudanese Revolution (Iskra Books) for a sweeping and deeply illuminating conversation on Sudanese history, revolution, counterrevolution, and the current catastrophe unfolding in Sudan. Together, they discuss the 2018–19 Sudanese Revolution, how it erupted, what forces animated it, his direct participation in it, how it was contained, and what its aftermath reveals about the dynamics of counter-revolution and co-optation. Mohamed also walks us through the history of the revolutionary left in Sudan, from the period after independence through the rise and repression of the Sudanese Communist Party, and the weakened but still significant state of the Left today. Along the way, we touch on the civil war, Darfur, the RSF, the unfathomable human suffering and staggering acts of brutality taking place in Sudan, and why revolutionaries everywhere need a much deeper understanding of this country, its people, and its unfinished struggle for liberation.
Politically Unconscious: The Psychic Aftermath of the Sudanese Revolution is Mohamed Khougali's reflection on what it means to organize and think after a revolution has been usurped. Written as both a participant in Sudan's 2018-19 uprising and a working psychotherapist, Khougali weaves together a history of the Sudanese Left, an account of the current war and the racialized financialization that informed the various factions, alongside the development of a new clinical modality he calls "praxis psychotherapy." Refusing the reductive binaries of international media coverage and the moral puritanism he sees paralyzing contemporary leftist thought, Khougali argues that Sudan cannot be understood apart from a longer "irrational revolution" linking Khartoum to Darfur, and Sudan to Palestine, through the same circuits of imperial accumulation and waste. At once political history and clinical experiment, Politically Unconscious is a work with lessons for comrades involved in the struggle; in Sudan, and far beyond.
Check Out Mohamed's podcast Black Radicals HERE Follow Black Radicals on Instagram HEREOutro music: Lunch Break by spinitch
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In this episode, Breht is joined by organizer, educator, and Marxist feminist scholar Comrade Gabi for a discussion on patriarchy, misogyny, and power within contemporary socialist and organizing spaces. Together they explore the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy, the contributions of Marxist feminism, the persistence of sexist attitudes and behaviors among those committed to liberation, the politics of the sex trade, and the challenges of building healthy cultures of accountability. Grounded in both theory and lived organizing experience, this conversation examines what it would take to cultivate a genuinely anti-patriarchal socialist movement capable of embodying the liberatory values it seeks to bring into the world.
Check out more of Gabi's work here: https://medium.com/@comrade_gabi
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Breht and Alyson spend over three hours answering your questions on a wide range of topics!
Subscribe to Rev Left Radio on YouTube to be notified about future livestreams like this one HERE
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In this installment of our All Too Human interview series, Breht and Dave welcome Dr. John Ukadike, a physician and emergency medicine specialist, into the Shoeless Shed to have a fascinating conversation about his experiences as an ER doctor, his treatment of many patients who struggle with addiction in various forms, his personal relationship with religion and death, his understanding of and approach to general health, the challenges of informing family members that a loved one has passed away, his critiques of the for-profit American healthcare system, and so much more!
Check out John's articles on a wide range of topics here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=john+ukadikeFollow John on IG HERE
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Outro music: Millionth Time - Spinitch
https://spinitch.bandcamp.com/album/run-for-the-arts-spinstrumentals
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Breht is joined by A.J.A. Woods, author of The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West. In this conversation, they explore the genealogy of the "Cultural Marxism" myth, the reactionary forces that shaped it, and the way it continues to animate right-wing attacks on liberation movements, critical thought, and social progress. Moving from the upheavals of the long 1960s through Lyndon LaRouche, the New Right, the Tea Party, and today's panics over "wokeness," CRT, and gender, Woods shows how "Cultural Marxism" functions less as a coherent theory than as a flexible ideological weapon: one that explains away popular struggles for equality and emancipation as elite manipulation, cultural subversion, and civilizational decay. The result is a rich historical and political analysis of one of the contemporary right's most influential myths, and of the broader culture-war terrain on which reaction, neoliberalism, and authoritarianism increasingly converge.
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Breht listens, reacts, and elaborates on a lecture by the late professor Michael Sugrue on the religious philosophy of the famous German Christian Mystic and Theologian, Meister Eckhart. In the process Breht touches on a dizzying array of spiritual, existential and religious themes. This is a classic Rev Left "Spiritual" episode that doubles as a sort of weird Dharm Talk... capped off with a 15 minute guided meditation.
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Myriam Charabaty, a Lebanese political analyst and journalist, joins Breht for a wide-ranging discussion on Lebanon, the struggle against imperialism and Zionism, the nature of solidarity and resistance, and the rapidly shifting political landscape of West Asia. Drawing from both personal experience and political analysis, Myriam helps unpack the history, forces, and contradictions shaping the country while challenging many of the assumptions commonly found in Western media and political discourse.
The conversation ranges from questions of sovereignty, faith, and national liberation to the human realities of war, occupation, and collective struggle. Along the way, Breht and Myriam explore the relationship between Christianity, Islam, and anti-imperialism, the criminal pager terrorist attack by Israel, what meaningful solidarity from those of us in the imperial core looks like, the role of Hezbollah in Lebanese society, the religious diversity within Lebanon, and the challenges facing those committed to self-determination and liberation in an era of deepening global crisis.
Follow Myriam and her work:
X:
https://x.com/miriam00961
Substack:
https://substack.com/@myriamch
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/liberationchronicles?igsh=c2NnenNscG5uZ3Zn----------------------------------------------------
Check out our NEW REV LEFT MERCH with Goods For The People HERE
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In this episode, Breht is joined by writer, intellectual, and poet Too Black to discuss his essay "Nonviolence is Violence, Too (Part 2)—We're All in the Gunk." Together, they critically examine the liberal mythology of "nonviolence" as a pure moral alternative to violence, arguing instead that all movements operate within conditions already structured by state, colonial, racial, and imperial violence.
Drawing from the Black freedom struggle, Ghana's independence movement, Kwame Nkrumah, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, Gandhi, Indian independence, riots, armed resistance, and the "positive radical flank," Too Black shows how so-called nonviolent movements have often depended on the threat, presence, displacement, or redirection of violence in order to win concessions.
Rather than offering a simplistic celebration of violence, this conversation asks us to think more honestly about power, confrontation, sacrifice, propaganda, state repression, and the real historical conditions under which oppressed people struggle to breathe beneath the boot. At its core, this is a discussion about what movements actually do, how victories are actually won, and why peace is not the absence of conflict, but something that must be fought for.
Listen to our previous discussion on Part 1 of Too Black's essay here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/nonviolence-is-violence-too-somebodys-gotta-die
Subscribe to Black Myths Podcast
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Historian David Yaghoubian joins Rev Left Radio to discuss the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, the genocide in Gaza, the assault on Lebanon, and the broader imperial-Zionist project to dominate West Asia. Drawing from his 2014 monograph Ethnicity, Identity, and the Development of Nationalism in Iran, Yaghoubian explains why Washington and Tel Aviv have repeatedly misunderstood Iranian society, underestimated Iranian national cohesion, and fantasized that sanctions, bombing, covert operations, or minority pressure could fracture the country from within.
Together, Breht and David explore Iran's history of resisting foreign domination, the reactionary nature of the Iranian diaspora in the United States, the ethno-religious complexity of Iranian society, Iranian national cohesion, the strategic significance of the Strait of Hormuz, the relationship between Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, and the ideological inversion through which the U.S. and Israel present themselves as defenders of "stability" while unleashing coups, sanctions, assassinations, occupations, and genocide across the region. They also discuss how anti-imperialists should defend Iran against U.S.-Zionist aggression without flattening Iranian society or denying its internal contradictions.
This is a conversation about nationalism, sovereignty, resistance, and the failure of empire to understand the peoples it seeks to dominate.
Dr. David N. Yaghoubian is Professor of Modern West Asian and Islamic History at California State University-San Bernardino and author of "Ethnicity, Identity, and the Development of Nationalism in Iran" (Syracuse, 2014) and co-editor of "Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East" (3rd edition forthcoming).-----------------------------------------
Check out a great new resource for revolutionary education, Unlearning Capitalism: https://unlearn.capital/
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In this episode, Breht sits down with filmmakers and journalists Abby Martin and Matthew Belen from BreakThrough News to discuss their new documentary Cuba After Castro — an unprecedented and historic film featuring the first major interview Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has ever given to American journalists.
At a moment when Cuba faces intensifying economic warfare, sanctions, destabilization efforts, and renewed aggression from the Trump administration, the film offers a rare look inside contemporary Cuban society beyond the lies, distortions, and Cold War mythology of U.S. corporate media. Together, they explore the realities of post-Castro Cuba, the enduring legacy of the Cuban Revolution, the devastating day-to-day effects of the U.S. blockade, the 2021 protests and media disinformation campaigns surrounding them, and the broader struggle for sovereignty against the most powerful empire on Earth.
They also discuss why mainstream outlets refused to platform the film, what Abby and Matt observed while speaking with ordinary Cubans on the ground, and what Cuba's extraordinary endurance under more than six decades of siege can teach the international left today.
Cuba After Castro is more than a documentary about Cuba — it is a meditation on imperialism, resistance, dignity, and the ongoing fight to build a world beyond capitalist domination.
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In this episode, Breht speaks with scholar Angie Bittar about the life, thought, and enduring relevance of Carl Jung. Together they explore Jung's understanding of the unconscious, archetypes, the shadow, individuation, dreams, symbols, myth, and the modern search for meaning.
After introducing Jung on his own terms, Breht and Angie place Jung in conversation with Marxism, historical materialism, and revolutionary politics. They discuss alienation, spiritual hunger, reactionary projection, fascist myth, scapegoating, bourgeois individualism, and the ways unconscious forces shape ideology and political life. They also ask what radicals can usefully take from Jung, what they should remain cautious about, and how the left might confront its own shadow without reducing politics to therapy.
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In this episode, Breht and Alyson sit down with Arlene Eisen to discuss her new memoir, In the Worldwide Family of Militant Women. Eisen reflects on her political formation across the upheavals of the 1960s through the early 1980s, her encounters with Black liberation and anti-imperialist struggle, and the forgotten history of militant women who built relationships of solidarity across borders. Together they explore internationalism, revolutionary commitment, movement fragmentation, and what younger generations can still learn from an era when women fought empire not from the margins, but from the heart of the struggle. The result is a rich conversation about memory, political development, and the urgent need to build durable anti-imperialist movements in our own time.
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In this episode, Breht speaks with Mohanad Alsayed about his memoir Scars and Medals (Iskra Books), a powerful and deeply human account of growing up Palestinian under occupation, carrying exile across continents, and trying to make sense of memory, loss, family, and resistance. Through the story of his grandmother Jamila, his missing uncle Ghazi, and his own journey from Palestine to the United States, Alsayed offers an intimate portrait of how dispossession enters not only history and politics, but childhood, identity, and the inner life.
The conversation explores occupation as a lived and psychological reality, the tension between assimilation and memory, the many meanings of resistance, and the current situation across West Asia - including how Palestinians view Iran. At once personal and collective, Scars and Medals opens onto the wider Palestinian experience with honesty, dignity, and emotional force.Buy or get a FREE pdf of Scars and Medals here: https://www.iskrabooks.org/books/p/scars-and-medals
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In this episode, Breht sits down with Suzin Green, author of The Goddess Remedy, to explore the psychological, spiritual, and civilizational roots of modern disconnection. Moving beyond conventional political understandings of patriarchy, Green presents it as a deeper structure of domination that shapes not only institutions, but consciousness itself -- fueling alienation, compulsive striving, inner fragmentation, and a profound loss of connection to self, others and the living world.
Together, they unpack Green's concepts of "dismemberment," the "inner patriarch," and the tension between "being" and "doing," while probing the experiential realities beneath the book's symbolic language. The conversation explores how ego, social conditioning, and modern systems of competition shape subjectivity; whether inner healing can meaningfully intersect with broader social transformation; and what it might mean to reclaim wholeness in an age defined by burnout, anxiety, and disconnection.
Drawing connections between mysticism, psychology, and political life, this dialogue examines the possibility that genuine transformation may require not only structural change, but a radical reorientation of consciousness itself. For listeners interested in spirituality, liberation, psychology, and the crisis of modern life, this is a rich exploration of what it means to heal both self and society.
Outro Song: Semolina Pudding by Spinitch
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In this episode, Breht sits down with Ashwin Shantha to discuss the argument that China's green development is not only an environmental achievement, but also a profoundly political one. Drawing on Ashwin's essay "China's Green Development is Both Anti-Imperialist and Socialist," the conversation explores how China became the global leader in solar, wind, and electric vehicles through long-term planning, industrial policy, state capacity, and the disciplining of capital to broader social goals.
Together, they examine the relationship between green development, national sovereignty, and anti-imperialism, asking why China has been able to carry out a large-scale green industrial transition while Western capitalist states have largely failed. The discussion also takes up the deeper theoretical question at the heart of the essay: whether China's model is best understood not as "state capitalism," but as a socialist market economy in which capital is subordinated to national development, ecological sustainability, and public need.
Read more essays at Journal of International Solidarity HERE
Follow Ashwin's International Solidarity on IG HERE
Check out Breht's appearance on International Solidarity podcast HERE
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In this episode, Breht speaks with professor of history Dr. Afshin Matin-Asgari to discuss his book Axis of Empire: A History of Iran–US Relations, about the long arc of Iranian–American relations from the nineteenth century to the present. Matin-Asgari argues that U.S. policy toward Iran has been structured by enduring "imperial priorities," a framework that reframes familiar episodes such as the 1953 coup, the consolidation of the Shah (Pahlavi) client state, the revolutionary rupture of 1978–79, the hostage crisis, and the sanctions-and-war paradigm of the twenty-first century . Together, they discuss how state power, oil, militarization, the Israel lobby, imperialist aggression, American arrogance, and transnational political movements shaped this relationship. Finally, they analyze the current war in Iran through the lens of the history discussed.
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