Alright.

Hey. Yeah. Thank you very much for having me on. So my kind of background, has sort of been in various forms of activism. I I was originally from a sort of a more of an anarchist kind of background. And sort of through the kind of things I was doing on the ground in sort of, like, community organizing and various forms of revolutionary organizing, I was starting to kind of feel some of what you were sort of saying about, like, the tension between how people often talk about the left and what is in inherent and necessary to the left and what I actually experienced and what I thought was, you know, an important part for me. And also, sort of trying to deal with some of the the problems that we were I was experiencing and and a lot of other people have experienced in organizing spaces and just, you know, in in general, like, a wider scale. And it sort of took me down this path of there were actually kind of separate strands to this sort of, this path. Originally, there was just sort of trying to think through systemic kind of analysis on the left and trying to kind of bring this into into a kind of a a dialogue with sort of complex systems of scientific kind of ways of thinking, which to me seemed like they were very similar in very in in many ways in the ways that they approached understanding social systems. And yet, there was very little sort of, like, communication between those two things. And maybe maybe as we as we go on to talk that there might be some sort of overlap there because, obviously, that complex systems things, they kind of blend in with cybernetics and then into sort of text based kind of stuff. There can be some some sort of, like, lines through there. And then sort of separately, I I've always had this kind of, this sort of, like, the spiritual aspects to my life even even in the periods where I was I was self identifying as, like, an an atheist, like, a hardcore rationalist kinda thing. I think I think you would, you were telling me before that you you you've had some sort of experience like that before as well. You've gone through this kind of stage of being, you know, kind of a militant atheist, which I which I was earlier in my life. But I never got rid of this sort of, like, kind of spiritual yearning, this kind of thing that wasn't being properly sort of, like, answered by everything else I was doing. And certainly, like, this sort of, like, the the the sort of, like, the theoretical aspect of sort of, of socialism wasn't touching in a lot on a lot of things. And these were kind of, like, separate strands. And at some point, they just started to to blend together because in a lot of the sort of, you know, the sort of, like, scientific systemic kind of, approaches to understanding reality, those those were often, like, blending in with spiritual kind of, world views. And they have been for, you know, for certainly back in the sixties. Like, people like Frithel Capra are doing a lot of this sort of, like, science and spirituality stuff. And it was, like, bit by bit, these kind of things started to kind of kind of coalesce until I've sort of started seeing them as one project. And now it's just sort of almost about the book's almost it's trying to put forward a kind of a, a worldview approach to radical politics. It's sort of rather than starting with, the systemic kind of analysis of capitalism, rather than actually starting with an overview of sort of, like, well, how are we understanding reality and then how are we placing our critiques within that. And then sort of using that to articulate things like, well, I can also talk about the human body and I can also talk about sort of, like, pain and, you know, suffering and how these sort of things interact with our sort of wider systems. Yeah. So that's kind of that's kind of what how I've come to this point.

Yeah. So, yeah, that's that's exactly it. It's often sort of the the single line is is brought out and used out of context, often to argue in a way which I'm not even sure that Marx would have agreed with. Marx was a critic of of religion, and we can't get away from that. But he was much more empathetic, I think, than a lot of people that that sort of weaponized that, that that quote. He was basically sort of saying that, you know, religion does have a really important role in people's lives, and it he he believed it was used legitimately as as a as a means of sort of reducing people's suffering. He just ultimately thought that it needed to go beyond and that through bringing about, you know, bringing about communism, we would find ourselves in a place where that was no longer necessary, and we could could sort of then move beyond this need for, for religion as a means of of reducing suffering. It's also used I think there's like a there's subtle shades of difference in in how it's being used by, you know, Lenin had another term, another another quote, it's spiritual booze. Both of them sort of imply a kind of, you know, opium was a pain killer, and it was it's not just sort of about, you know, people use this as a as a means of distraction. It's like, it's genuinely it's foregrounded the fact that people are in pain. And so I think if people are using that quote and coming to it without, the the sense of empathy for people, then I think you're missing the kind of the the, what Marx was going for. There are certain ways in which I actually still disagree with with Marx's, understanding of religion, in that I don't think it is quite as reducible to pain. And I don't think I'm not I'm not convinced that bringing about, you know, full communism would actually get rid of the necessity for something like religion, even if it's not actually religion. But religion and spirituality is is much about, not just the contingent suffering of, you know, you're from you know, you're economically dominated or you're racially dominated or what what have you. That can play a part. But also just sort of, more kind of, excess existential problems of being human like death. I mean, religion is, you know, it's quite central for a lot of people in how they, how they grieve. And, you know, as much as, you know, I I like playing with transhumanist ideas sometimes, but even, like, I can't I'm not I'm I I'm not convinced with, like, you know, a transhumanist communism where we fully get rid of death. I mean, this is what this is Fedorov, the Russian cosmist. Some people like playing with those ideas. I'm not convinced right now that we're on the cusp of that. I think there's gonna be a need for something that at at the very least functions, like religion to help people through these things which aren't just, you know, systemic oppressions, but are actually, you know, just just the the the struggle of desire and unfulfilled desire, which goes well beyond, you know, what capitalism withholds from us. You know, it it it permeates our entire lives and our loves and everything. And so that's part I guess, part of what I'm arguing for in the book is that even whether you wanna call it all spirituality or not, there needs to be something that functions in this way, this sort of, broader world view kind of way, which which can sort of speak to our problems outside of the immediately political, and that can engage our bodies and people's bodies in how they live in their everyday lives, as well as, helping us to understand more systemic problems.

Yeah. And and I think it's also important to remember the the all all of the the context that he would have been writing in was it's very different to what at least at least in a Western country right now. Well, let's let's say in in The UK from my my my position. It's very different to what Marx is right writing in, where religion did have a much much more sort of hegemonic role. It was much closer to the state. It was it was it was some it was something that, like, to, to have a, like, a a combative sort of sort of way of approaching religion kind of made quite a lot of sense because religion was in many ways being used, in quite sort of, like, you know, oppressive ways, which is not to say that that's gone away. There is still a lot of that. But in terms of the this of the hegemonic role of religion in in The UK at the moment, it's it's entirely different. And it's it's kind of odd to just sort of take Marx's critique and just, like, plunk it down again in a completely different context. Yeah. It's I I almost think that I mean, it's very easy to say, well, Marx would have agreed with me. But I think, like, if you were to talk about having a dialectical sort of approach to social phenomena, that has to take into account the changing context that you're living in. That's that's just sort of seems quite basic. And I think there is more space to talk about, you know, the potentials or, the emancipate pedigree potentials which lie, you know, among the more oppressive ones. But even also in in Marxist time, we also have to remember that he also like, the first like, I think I mentioned in the book, one of the first groups that he was part of was actually a Christian communist group. Like, there there was, it's not like there was only reactionary religious people. There were, you know, there was religious socialists. There were quite a lot of Christian socialists. And so I think it's important if we're if we're kind of, you know, if we're grabbing any of Marxist or analysis of religion, we have to understand the context he was writing and the context that we're thinking in now.

Mhmm. Yeah. So I guess maybe the the best way to start before going into the specifics of that is to just go and clarify what I even mean by spirituality because, obviously, it's quite a contentious term. It doesn't isn't happening in the office what it is. And, yeah. So I define it fairly fairly specifically in the book, and in a way that is open to, for example, an atheist spirituality. There's no contradiction in in the way that I'm defining spirituality. So, without getting too much into the, like, the sort of, the philosophical weeds of it, I talk in terms of basically the the metaphysics, ethics, and embodiment, which I just basically mean by metaphysics is just an approach to, like, how we see the world beyond our immediate perception. What we what we how sort of understand the world is structured beyond beyond what we can see. Ethics is just how we shape the path of our life, our our actions right now, but our actions as we move, you know, into the future. And embodiment is just, you know, the fact of our bodies, how we act, and also how we feel, like, our external and our internal sort of, yeah, our our being. And so spirituality for me is when these three things are aligned, where you have some sort of understanding of a world beyond you. That is what you orient your life around. And then through that, you act in certain ways. You change your body in certain ways, and you you feel something. You you don't just just sort of rationally understand that there's a world beyond you, but it's in some ways affect you emotionally. And any any anytime when those three things come into alignment, particularly when they become you know, they intensify, that's basically what I'm calling, spirituality. And that actually, you know, that can that can sort of apply in lots and lots of different domains. Obviously, that that can apply in in very, obviously, religious domains. You know, you have an understanding that there is a god that either is beyond the world or suffuses the world, however you wanna see it, and you guide your life based on that understanding of of of there being a god, and you feel love for that god, and you act in ways that you think will please that god or they are in some way, you know, whether you're thinking selfishly in terms of, I wanna go to heaven or however you sort of you you see it. Your your your bodily, you know, your life, your, your routines, your community, even the way you dress and act, everything like that becomes sort of intertwined. But then also, I mean, that's a very religious sort of understanding of it. But you can have that that could also be a very atheist one. You know, a world beyond our perception is not is not inherently sort of supernatural. You can be just thinking in terms of, you know, in a very scientific kind of way, a secular scientific way in terms of, you know, there's a world that is, you know, this massively interrelated system of full of full of unseen potentials, that is undergoing constant change. And I am going to show, you know, I'm orienting my life around this sort of this sort of understanding of the world in terms of its interconnection rather than just me as, you know, an isolated individual with a fixed essence. Understanding myself as dynamic and changing and the world around me as dynamic and changing and feeling awe, you know. One one thing I I I really like when I I uncover, you know, you you find those sort of, like, scientists who really take it very seriously in sense of, like, they're not just rationally approaching the world, but then you you end up, you know, Carl Sagan's pale blue dot. He he was very spiritual because he clearly felt an enormous amount of awe in the world. And Einstein was a Spinoza. You know, he he he saw the interconnection of the of the universe in terms of God, but it's a it's the Gnosis God rather than, you know, sort of a traditional transcendent Christian God. And so, yes, spirituality, can can sort of, like it it goes well beyond the bounds of what we traditionally think of of religion. And yet it can have the same intensity. It can have the same impact on our on our sort of consciousness. And that for me is where this sort of, like, segues into, well, well, why why is this why do we even need to be thinking about this on the left? Because it's about for me, it's about consciousness change. It's about being able to see the world in terms of its its interconnectedness rather than in terms of individual individualism. So in terms of thinking in terms of systems, thinking of the world and seeing the world and feeling the world as being, changeable, being full of these potentials to create an entirely different world. That is you know, that's part of this of the consciousness raising necessary to becoming a revolutionary. You know, it sort of it ties in with a sort of a, you know, Marxist kind of, idea of of dialectical materialism. You know, thinking not just in terms of social kind of systems, and how they're organized, but actually thinking about reality itself and how, you know, things are inherently undergoing change and inherently interrelated. And so, yeah, for me, kind of integrating that into into a world view and a sort of a felt world view is a is a spiritual thing. Even if even if people go through this process and don't necessarily think of it as, you know, they use that term spirituality. For me, the, the two things are they're kind of they're basically the same process in in different contexts.

Yeah. Just like in that kind of that framework I just sort of introduced, like, you know, to, the the building of the new world and the shell of the old, like, this this kind of, like, you know, quite common phrase on the left. There's an understanding, that the the potential for a better world, whatever we wanna call it, communism or what have you, is in some way imminent in in the world as it is. It's not active, but there is this sort of potential that suffuses our our us as humans, but also as as the, the social system as it exists now. And that's an unseen. That that's that's a thing which we're saying is very real and it exists, but we can't see it and it's not active. That is an unseen beyond our immediate perception. That's you know, there's a metaphysical element to that. And if we are becoming you know, identifying ourselves as socialist and, you know, it's that's guiding our behavior throughout our lives or through for a period you know, a long period of our lives, that's that sort of ethical path being shaped by the unseen. And then, you know, we do things. We go on protests. We start organizations. We we ride things. We, we feel a lot. And even just like the the notion of, like, comradeship, and the joy that you can feel in solidarity with people, when those three things combine. I I have had what what feel like spiritual experiences with comrades doing things, you know, on on protests or in in sort of, like, you know, successful events or just certain moments of, like, success or even a failure. It combines in a very in a very similar way. And I think that actually a lot of socialists, even who would completely dismiss terms like spirituality, are nonetheless experiencing exactly what we're talking about.

Well, I mean, there are other, you know, there are examples kind of pop up here and there. The the one that I the person that I I like going back to, not that the movement as a whole could necessarily be categorized as socialist, but as an individual in his positions, Martin Luther King is actually Particularly as he's often, like, appropriate as a as a secular liberal. Like, the way that when I grew up and I was seeing Martin Luther King on, like, TV ad like, TV adverts for mobile phone contracts or whatever. It's like absolutely the nonsense way that, he like, his image has sort of been used. I didn't really understand that he was like a Christian socialist, like, very explicitly, who has made that card very clear. He's just sort of like, you know, he's just sort of like been absorbed into the kind of, you know, liberal ideology. But yeah. And the way that he combined his sort of how he understood the world as a Christian and as a socialist. There there weren't two separate kind of parts of him that were battling. He saw them as the same sort of thing. He saw, again, in this sort of, like, this sort of semi metaphysical kind of way, thinking in terms of, you know, my struggle is intertwined with your struggle because we are part of this this one sort of fabric of reality. And his, you know, his sort of, like, the way that he, approached organizing his his rhetoric was highly influenced by sort of, like, biblical rhetoric, and yet it was sort of, it was used to attack, racialized capitalism. And I think that's the one of the reasons why I like to to to go back to that one is because, like, of how powerful it was and how much potential there is in that sort of in that sort of way of approaching, activism. And it's sort of odd that that that hasn't really been emulated so much. That you seem like little moments of it every now and again, more so like, you know, in the in The US, but you'd expect it to actually be much bigger than it is. There aren't many examples of this kind of very explicit melding of, you know, the spiritual and the socialist. And it it just I to me, it shows how much power there is in it because of just how much Martin Luther King has sort of, like, echoed, you know, since then and how, I think the the left over the last sort of ten years has has kind of collectively realized that we're sleeping on, like, what let's say, left white leftists. I'm sure black leftists have been perfectly well aware in all the the intervening time. But white leftist, I think I was sort of like, oh, actually, yeah. We he's not a secular liberal. We've we've all been sleeping on this guy. And, and yeah. So, like, you'll find lots of these these little moments, but a lot of it is is often like flashes that kind of come and go. And, you know, there there's there's quite a strong wave in in, like, South America of of leftist movements in often, like, strongly sort of Catholic countries where the two were kind of not quite closely intertwined. A lot of that is has to take into account, of course, of what I'm not necessarily arguing for is, hey, let's just create a religious socialist movement regardless of the context. It's like, well, no. It's actually engaged with what the context is in our in our in our, you know, wherever we're coming from. And, you know, in The UK, that's gonna be different to say in The US, where the the where the the amount sort of, like, the active religious sort of practice is much is much lower in The UK. Although there is actually, one of the things I think I briefly mentioned in the book is this distinction between, we believing but not belonging. You know, there's been an institutional collapse of religion in many many countries in the West. But actually, when you ask people, when you talk to people, they actually often still have religious beliefs. They just don't really have any interest in being part of of a church. Or maybe it's not even interest. Maybe it's just they've become so atomized that, you know, things have just fallen apart for one reason or another. But, you know, that's kind of an answer to some people that might be like, well, what surely now when religion is, like, falling apart, why is that the time to be caring about religion on the left? Or it's well, actually, if you meet people where they're at, they are actually much more spiritual than you you probably give them, credit for. It's just it's not it doesn't have the same kind of institutional expression that it maybe did have, you know, a hundred years ago or so.

Yeah. So rather than sort of like seeing them as just separate domains and then they're sort of like, you know, trying to interact with one another. I I I nest all three within a sort of like a wider metaphysics. You know, I was saying that that that metaphysical aspect is is is one of the the the parts of of of how we're approaching spirituality. So it's sort of about identifying where between those three domains there are these kind of, like, metaphysical sort of reflections in one another. And it and you can't just, like, take any and all science, any and all, you know, spirituality, any and all even having any and all leftism. But for me, there is a thread that runs through, certain parts of these domains where, for example, when we're talking like I've mentioned a few times about interconnection process. So things being constantly under change, there'd be, you know, things being having potentials beyond what they actually are at any moment. You can find that in a lot of, like, like I say, in dialectal materialism and a lot of sort of leftist and particularly Marxist thought. But then complex system science is all about, okay, well, we're going against the sort of the reductionist tendencies of science over the last sort of couple of hundred years, which have all been about going down and down and down into the smallest parts and understanding the world as basically being fundamentally nothing but the smallest parts. Instead, like, these sort of, like, systemic approaches to science, which allows, as I say, complex system science and cybernetics, I see them as basically part of the same sort of, you know discursively, they're different, but they are coming from the same sort of place. That's much more about looking, you know, to the higher and higher, you know, to the to the wider, to the the up to the holes rather than just the parts and understanding how, yeah, the parts report, but the holes are something in themselves that can't be reduced to those parts. And so you have the same kind of you can find similar sort of metaphysical kind of ideas in terms of the world is more you know, we need to think about interconnections. We need to think about emergence of large things out well, wider things out of, you know, the the underlying parts. And thinking in terms of, you know, the patterns of organization in a system create potentials to to develop in other directions. And then then in sort of in various sort of, like, religious ontologies, you can also find, you know, again, it's you're not gonna find it in in all kinds of in all kinds of religious thought. But, you know, we've mentioned Spinoza. And, you know, there's quite a lot of Spinoza in the book because, you know, we're talking about a god which is imminent in the world and which is which orients our minds towards thinking about how everything is is sort of together, rather than being split into, you know, an infinite multiplicity of things which don't communicate. You know, a purely sort of individualistic sort of ontology is it's, it's more about interconnection. And and then there are other sort of, you know, we can go I I I begin with Spinoza, but then I sort of use that to try and find moments in different sort of, different religious ontologies and different sort of, like, philosophies outside of the Western canon. So in a lot of, like, Indian philosophy, various sort of, like, Buddhist philosophies, Particularly, you know, you have this idea of the the fundamental interconnectedness of all being, in in various sort of like, like, Islamic mysticism, like Suf Sufism. You have, again, these sort of like the notion of an imminent God, the interconnectedness of things, the process, the, you know, the endless sort of flowering of, you know, of reality, you know, as it sort of churns forward through time. You can find it all moments where these sort of all these things sort of, they align. But it requires us, first of all, to to, you know, step back and see start thinking in those more metaphysical terms, which is something that a lot of people on the left are still resistant to because because of certain, certain ways that particularly Engels talked about these sort of things. I think people actually misinterpret. They they, you know, Martin Engels would sort of say be against metaphysics, you know. We have to we're we're we're doing dialectics without doing metaphysics. And that's, you know, that's true with a certain definition of metaphysics. Their definition is is this sort of, like, Pomegranate and sort of the world is made of only a fixed essences. And they're like saying, well, we're rejecting that now. We're thinking in terms of fundamental change and the relationality of all things. They're saying that's not metaphysics. I'm just saying, well, no. That's that's still metaphysics. But you're talking now about sort of a process exactly. It's a process metaphysics rather than a sort of an essentialist kind of, you know. So if if anyone's going, well, I well, we can't do metaphysics. Well, that's that's the answer to that. Like, I don't, I don't think it's actually possible to really have any kind of coherent ontology. Even even if you're just talking about social systems, I don't think it's even possible to do that without some kind of unspoken metaphysical assumptions, but maybe that's maybe that's like a a whole other conversation. Yeah.

Yes. So he's, he is now, like, he's now being credited as being sort of a forerunner of cybernetics and sort of sys systems theory in general because he had his own his own system that he called tectology. But it anticipated a lot of the things that sort of, you know, twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred years later, people have sort of been coming up with these ideas. In some in some ways, independently, some of it might have had some sort of, like, influence that this, you know, difficult to sort of trace. But one way or another, he was he was doing this kind of, like, this sort of abstract kind of understanding of systems. So not just saying, you know and and he was drawing on Marx. He was very much a Marxist. And he was, like, you know, taking Marx's, understanding of systems, his critique of systems. But but, obviously, Marx was was specifically critiquing the capitalist system. What what Danov, was doing was stepping back and saying, well, what's this what what can we tell then about systems in general, and how can that help us organize? Because he was interested in not just the critique of of, you know, of capitalism of prior systems, but of saying, how do we organize now? How is this gonna hit change how we interact, and how do we organize society? The way that he sort of saw it was, you know, the workers, if we're going to, you know, create a socialist society, it's gonna have to, to some extent, break out of, the particular ways that knowledge is specialized under capitalism. Well, you know, knowledge is typically held by an elite and then, you know, the workers are just doing sort of, like, you know, grunt work. They they they're sort of cut off intellectually in their, you know, their sort of intellectual manual labor division. And he was like, well, okay. If we wanna break out of that, then people have to have sort of a wider understanding of how systems work because we're gonna have to be able to coordinate between all these different, you know, different aspects of society. Because society isn't a just a system. It's it's made up of all these different modules, completely different different industries, different parts of the state, different communities. And so some understanding of of how systems in general work is going to be a necessary aspect of actually organizing a socialist society. And so he was thinking very much in this kind of, you know, this more ontological sense, in terms of, how that alters people's consciousness and how that alters how people actually act into the world and, you know, how that therefore is how we're going to build the world into the future. Now he wasn't, he wasn't thinking in terms of it spiritually. There were other people around him. Luna Charsky was sort of, like, taking some of the same sort of ideas, and he had a much more sort of, like, spiritual approach to things. But Bob Bob Danov, was more he was just more interested in the in the system science. But I draw on him in the book both historically to kind of connect what I'm talking about, system science complexity theory and say, oh, hey. You know, people have in the past had these very same very similar ideas, and they were connecting it directly into their sort of socialist practice. But also yeah. Just just to sort of show how that, how that actually connects directly into, like, class consciousness raising and just consciousness raising in general. That it's not just about this sort of cold rational, oh, we need to understand systems. It's also, oh, no. It's actually it changes you bodily and it, and it becomes, you know, the the ground out of which you can create this sort of, you know, this future society.

Well, the question I'm at Yeah. It is a big question. Yeah. I guess it's if it had to be boiled down, like, to sim simplify as much as possible, I think it's it's about the the education of, this sort of this sort of complexity way of seeing the world articulated, you know, I said with with a, with a sort of anti capitalist and socialist sort of analysis. But, like, fundamentally, it's it's partly it's like this sort of embodying, the world view of of sort of, change and interconnection and collective being. The idea that, you know, we are not just purely individuals, we are collective. You know, there there are collectives which emerge out of our interactions. One of one of the sort of, like, the the jumping off points for me is, you know, I I I refer to Mark Fisher a couple of times in the book, and he was he was very focused. Well, he in, in Capital's realism, he talks about this sort of Thatcherite idea that there is no such thing as society. That's one thing. And there is no alternative. And these not just as sort of statements of some sort of political intent, but they are actually expressions of a worldview that it was the project of the right to spread and to to to make sort of common sense. The idea that you are fundamentally no nothing more than an individual or at most your your family, and that there is no real being beyond that. And also that, you know, what is happening is just it's just the march of history and this is, there is no other there are no imminent potentials in the world. Don't bother trying to even see them or fail them. You've just got to kind of ride on this train. And, obviously, you know, a political project is more than just an ontology. It's it's all these kind of things that actually get done, but underlying it is the spread of this world view. It's one of the ways that that that project has been stabilized. And part of the the the goal is to to combat that, to raise consciousness of the fact that there is an alternative. There are many alternatives that we are we live in a world which is which is full of potentials for for the world going into different directions. And you are more than just an individual or a family. You do have collective being, and you can come together with people and create things that are much bigger than you. You can create organizations. You could be part of communities. You can you can enact social change through your role in a wider body that you is not just reducible to you. That for me is a really important part of of an overall sort of class consciousness raising, and sort of embedding that in our in how we educate, both on a sort of a community informal level, but also, you know, if we if we're if we're talking about how would you imagine in a utopian sense, you know, in embedding this in wider institutions, embedding this in our in our, you know, in our schools and our universities, and this sort of way of understanding all systems or all scales. And just to give a sort of, like, another sort of contrast, you know, that it's I think it is important to just be to distinguish, like, neoliberal from fascist. I know a lot often people just sort of match the two together, but I do think they are quite distinct phenomena. But, like, the fascist, sort of worldview honestly, fascism is is again, it's more than a worldview. It's more than just a way of thinking. It is, you know, it's a collective political project. But underlying it is, like, like, fascism kind of, appropriates and manipulates a tendency tendencies in human thought to to have very strong bonding with, an imagined in group and then to create everyone else as an out group. Everyone in the out group is then reduced. They're simplified. They become nothing more than a caricature. They become like an essence, and then you violently repel. You you you you remove them from the social body. That to me is sort of like the the cognitive kind of core of fascist thought. And that is actually the that's the complete that's the polar opposite of this kind of, like, dynamic dialectical worldview. It's understanding this human being not as this massively complex, conflictual, you know, body or system. It's seeing them as a simple character. They, you know, they can be characterized in this very, cartoonish kind of way that you can have just a yes or a no, position to, and then you can just destroy them. That's that's like the polar opposite to this what I'm sort of arguing for this. Yeah. There's basically, like, dialectical like an embodiment of dialectical thought. Now that in itself like, the dialectical thought in itself may not be enough. Like, it very much does need to be articulated with an explicitly sort of anti capitalist, and pro socialist sort of analysis. But I think those things, you know, they you it's quite simple to to to tie those things. I mean, the work on that has already been done hundreds of years ago. Like, historical materialism and dialectical materialism, they're, you know, they're they they come from the same sort of seed. So that's why it's important to whilst I'm arguing for, you know, a more metaphysical way of of of sort of approaching, you know, these got this kind of this kind of thing, it's important we don't stay only in the metaphysical. Because if you stay only in the metaphysical, there's not necessarily anything that's going to take us out of our our current position. You know, we knew there needs to be clear politics. There needs to be an articulation of political action with all these these sort of ideas. But I guess that's sort of how I understand Red Enlightenment is the the spreading and the making hegemonic of this more sort of dynamic complex world view and, sort of, you know, articulated with a an anti capitalist analysis.

Yeah. One one one aspect that there was actually, you know, it seemed to have been a much bigger part of socialist culture in the past. And maybe this speaks to, like, how we're often so so often distributed today, like, over social media. But, singing, singing of in socialist choirs or just singing in demonstrations. Yeah. Chance, obviously, you know, we do we still do chants, but, like, I think making a part of an everyday sort of socialist culture is like a huge thing. Like, that's a highly accessible thing. It's not it it won't in most people evoke sort of, spirituality necessarily. And so, you know, the people who are sort of like, you know, you know, they're they're not gonna be put off by just by singing. And I I just think people just we just don't need to do it as much anymore, and I really think that's a huge loss. But there are lots of, you know, different things, ways you can do it. I've experimented with more more obviously sort of spiritual practices like we've done, like, had a radical mindfulness group where we we would come together and we it was like, yeah, a sitting meditation. But then we would instead of introducing it with vague a a lot of sort of, like, secular mindfulness is just sort of like they've taken Buddhist ontology and, like, stripped it of most of the interesting stuff. But instead, basically, talking about dialectical materialism, talking about the interconnection of things and process and and designing meditations to get people to feel and to embody, you know, the constancy of change and, you know, the relation of their body to the world and and all these kind of things like this. You can experiment with different ways. Some of them will be more seem more secular, and some might seem more like you've sort of taken it out of a religious context. But I think experimentation is the only way to find out what works. Like, any any any place where you can have some kind of bodily practice, that you can then get people to try and understand through that ontology. Like, try try to see it in terms of how you're relating to one another and how things are changing and what, like, powers are you expressing or that are later. Once you get people to try and use those and attach that to a bodily practice, then then you've got a practice, then then you've got a con a potential consciousness raising tool.

in? Yes. Absolutely. I think I think there are, like, there are multiple ways to approach I think, for one thing, if you if you're thinking in terms of spiritual practices and groups and what have you and cultures, communities that aren't explicitly leftist, I think it's important as leftists, if we're so inclined, to to get involved in those communities. Maybe not to be too belligerent about it, but to, nonetheless, to try and guide that, you know, you you in into a a a different direction. Try to be there to push back against any more reactionary tendencies, to encourage people towards more socialist thought. I think that's really important to engage with. But then I think it's also important to create spaces where we're like, yeah, we are all socialist, and we're doing this for a very specific class consciousness raising kind of way. And not in just class, but, you know, of all kind of forms of oppression and domination. We're we're doing it as this sort of, like, you know, guardra or what have you. I think both of those are quite quite important things. If you've got the energy to do both or if you only got the energy to do one or the other, I think over the over the you know, all the people that might be interested in doing this, I think both of those have their value, because, you know, the the the stuff that we build independently, I think, is is not, at this point in time, going to to touch the wider sort of, like, new spiritual communities. It might be able to have conversations with them, draw people in. And I think it's important to create those those organizations, like, to have some sort of institutional basis. But, yeah, also taking part in in the wider community is just I think that's an important part of that sort of dialectic.

Yeah. Thank thanks for having me. It's, been a really fun conversation. The book, you can get it from Repeater Books on their website. And me, if you wanna keep up with me, I I'm on Twitter, but I don't post anything very interesting. I'm on Live Glug. I'm also on Instagram, which I spend most of my time. Yeah. Those are the main places. And, yeah. The the the book you can get on, the Repeater website.

Thank you so much for having me.