55. The Anti-Imperialists Come to Town w/ AWAS

Antifascist Dad Podcast Episode 55: The Anti-Imperialists Come to Town w/ the Alliance of Workers and Students Guests: Sabine Fernandez, Talia, and Mahyar Mohaghegh Dolatabadi Matthew Remski: Hello everyone, this is Matthew Remski with episode 55 of Antifascist Dad. The anti-imperialists come to town with the Alliance of Workers and Students. You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name. I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad and the Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast wherever you where. Subscribers get early access to a second weekly episode. And this is that second episode for this week with Sabine, Talia and Mahyar of the Alliance of Workers and Students. They are the host organizers of a symposium called Seeds Beneath the Snow. It's a three day event on anti-imperialism here in Toronto. It's coming up next week and it runs from November 6th to the 8th. Just another reminder that in the show notes you will also find not only the event details, but a link to my book which is called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. So I love Toronto, even though I don't get out that much. There's always cool stuff coming through here. And this conference had caught my eye on Instagram about six weeks ago and so I had it in my calendar to try to make a few of the sessions. I recognized some of the names of the panelists, including Jean Paul Fartra, who's a brilliant micro essayist on Instagram, whose work I really love. And actually I think he and I first DMed each other about hoping to meet up there. And then Sabine, one of the organizers, reached out to me as well to see if I wanted press passes and I said yes, of course. Now the topics are Canadian Class, Society and Imperialism, Multipolarity, Race, Gender, Disability, Reform and Revolution, Ideology and Political Education. And front and center on the event copy is Lenin's line that there can be no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory. And so I looked into the Alliance of Workers and Students website and realized that these guys are fully committed, real life Marxist-Leninists who are doing this real thing in the world. And because I spend too much time online watching unnecessary and inflammatory wars between influencer leftists, some of whom describe themselves as Marxist-Leninists, and some who say they hate Marxist-Leninists, I thought this would be a good opportunity to clear the air, do some fieldwork among folks who are just doing their thing. I mean, seriously, the acrimony has gotten so sour that one major leftist creator I'm not going to name them came out with a whole screed about how Marxist-Leninists are, you know, in a big cult and they don't want you to vote. And this immediately seemed off to me as a researcher of cults, because I know that there's a huge spectrum of Marxist-Leninist lineage and practice and healthy groups and some unhealthy groups. So I mainly wanted to see what chatting with these in real life folks felt like, because my overall impression is that Marxist-Leninists, in today's world of hyper politics and social fragmentation straddle a paradox of both being correct about crucial things, but also marginalized and distrusted within an alienated world. There's a lot of evidence that they are just empirically right when it comes to the necessity of disciplined organization. For instance. And what's apparent even now as these exuberant protests, the manifestation, continue to spread across France and now are popping up in Portugal and Spain and Italy, is that motivating hundreds of thousands of people into the streets to express their agony and sickness of heart over the inequalities and abuses of capitalism is very powerful and yet easily dissipated or redirected or co-opted. Organic, spontaneous revolt against capitalism is always precious. But what's the plan? And that's where Marxist-Leninists tend to emerge from the shadows to say, well, let's study it carefully and make sure we have a concrete strategy. Let's commit to moving together with an actual plan. And yet that instinct for planning and detail and leadership is looked upon with distrust in a culture unfamiliar with collective commitment. Occupy was an incredible moment in recent organizational leftist history. And yet David Graeber's insistence that social revolution would be self organizing and spontaneous and so all politics should be prefigurative, well, that has its limitations. So I was very happy to sit down with Sabine Fernandez, Talia and Mahyar Mohaghegh Dolatabadi to talk about it all on the eve of this symposium. Now, Mahyar is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at York. He studies ideology in Iranian capitalism using Western philosophy and Marxist theory. And Talia is the organizational officer of the Alliance of Workers and Students and she studies engineering at the Master's level. She's dedicated to and then. Sabine Fernandez is a former migrant care worker and also a PhD candidate in Critical Disability Studies at York University. They're also a founding member of the Alliance of Workers and Students. They investigate the ruling ideas of solidarity in liberal democracies. They focus on the social relations between care workers and care recipients in the Settler, Canadian and First World contexts. And they use Marxism-Leninism in their research and practice. So here's our conversation it's me and the organizers of the Seeds Beneath the Snow symposium coming up November 6th to the 8th here in Toronto. The details will all be in the show notes and we're just sitting down and chatting about what anti-imperialism is all about and how they came to it in their political journeys. Sabine, Talia, Mahyar, welcome to Antifascist Dad. It's great that you are able to take the time. Talia: Hi, thank you for having us. Matthew Remski: Yeah, yeah. Don't speak all at once. So this is the first time I have interviewed members of any Marxist-Leninist party. And I want to spend a good amount of time on what that means and how you orient yourself to things like electoral politics within capitalism. But maybe a non theory nerd way of getting into that is by asking about this conference that you are organizing in Toronto for this November 6th to the 8th. This is how I found out about you. It's called Seeds Beneath the Snow and the focus is on anti-imperialism in many global contexts. It's about how imperialism intersects with race and gender and disability and how we think about reform versus revolution and the relationship between education and action. So my first question is, and any of you can sort of take a stab at this, why now, like, it's election season, shouldn't we be talking about, you know, Brad Bradford losing and AI data centers in our neighborhoods and watching the horse races of the US midterms? Like, why should regular working people care about China and Palestine right now? Talia: I think election season makes us a especially a useful time to have this conversation because as you said yourself, the electoral horse races, right, Canadian politics often resembles like a spectator sport, following candidates and that electoral horse race and then we disengage between those elections. It's like, okay, a lot of people don't even interact with any type of political ideas or bodies in between those times, right? So right now, when elections are bringing people into political discussions, this is when we should open up these discussions to force understanding onto them of what are the forces that are shaping these choices in our lives and the politics around us. Because we have to understand capitalism in Canada to be able to understand it, really. We have to understand imperialism because we're talking about housing, water, potential privatization of our water, of other infrastructures, increasing privatization of our hospitals, and then these disputes in local governments, the bike lanes, right? But what we have to really think about is who owns these things, who owns these infrastructures, who controls investments, who is deciding what will be built, where it will be built, what materials it will be built with. And how do we address the causes of these problems? Not just the problem, but the actual cause. So when it comes to like Brad Bradford and even like AI data centers, these are like immediate examples of larger questions about like ownership, development, political power. And from this we can see that the struggles like at home in Canada and abroad are connected. They might not be the same problems, but they belong to the same system that is organizing production for private profit rather than human need. Matthew Remski: You know Talia, I think this, this issue of like whether or not people are engaged outside of electoral system is, or season is really important because I know that, you know, even among the socialist candidates that lost last night in Toronto, so Diana Yoon and Jennie Worden, I'm thinking of specifically they work non stop in various social services and housing especially they work with tenant unions for example. And so I almost, I feel a little bit ambivalent that they lost because I know that they're going to continue to do good work outside of the actual horse race. And then the thing about the data centers is that if you try to figure out who is even opening the one up here in Scarborough, close to where I live, there is no information. You don't know who owns the stuff. I drove up past the security gate one day to actually ask can I get an interview with whoever is the manager there? And they said, you know, we don't really know who that is, but if you Google the company you can find somebody in the States. And I'm like, oh yeah, that's right, because capital has no borders and that's why anti-imperialism. So I just wanted to throw that out there. Speaking to the larger vision that you're talking about, can one of you give me the, and the listeners a one minute definition of Marxism-Leninism today? And why is it not an anachronism in your view? Mahyar Mohaghegh Dolatabadi: I would say that to keep it really simple, I would say our version of Marxism-Leninism is really three things and they're very abstract and they have to do with organizing. First and foremost, as Leninists we are, we adhere to a theory of basically imperialism as the primary contradiction. The, the way that the world is organized today is through imperialist forces extracting resources, not merely in the old like Spanish, like we just go and steal people's stuff, but more through banking systems, institutions like for example the IMF, World Bank, but also through capital ventures going like going abroad and taking over countries and maintaining, I would say power over their economy. So the primary contradiction is imperialism. But how do you fight imperialism? Right? You can't just say we're waiting for people to just spontaneously rise up. You need to be as strong, organized and centralized. So we also believe that the only way to fight imperialism is to develop a democratically centralized organization that can actually fight, not merely wait for people to just rise up, but to build the infrastructure for whenever they do rise up, to fight the fight to its final moment, final victory. And I would say the way that we do that, the way we fight imperialism, like, we can't pick up weapons in Canada, that's a ridiculous thing to ask. It would be to develop a type of intensification of the class struggle at home. So there are issues in Toronto, real issues, like not just tenant issues, not just with housing, not just with cost of living, but really a class struggle. You can see, for example, as the plants are closing down, what's happening with the workers. What's happening with the fact that all of our old school unionized workplaces are now transformed into gig economies where there's no benefits or anything for workers. Those sites of struggle, those sites of class struggle are intensifying. And by intensifying and organizing those struggles into a unified class front, we are actually fighting imperialism at home. Because this is. This is where it really matters. But I would say about anachronism or the obsolete nature of Lenin and Marxism-Leninism, it would be about something along the lines of thinking about science, right? We think about Newtonian classical mechanics as something that still can explain most of life's phenomena. It is for its own sake. It's still viable. But Newtonian mechanics has evolved, right? And so has Leninism. So, for example, we have Fidel Castro, Sankara, I know Mao Zedong. They all call themselves Marxist-Leninists. And they said, we are applying Marxism-Leninism to the conditions of China in, I don't know, 1920s to 1960s or today, actually still a Marxist-Leninist state. We are applying Marxism-Leninism to the Canadian context of 2026. So, of course, things have changed. We have evolved, we have developed new concepts to deal with the issues here at home. And it would be very different than Russia in 1917. But Marxism-Leninism is a type of science that has evolved, that has incorporated new concepts. Just like I would say liberalism, conservatism. It's not the same liberalism of Locke, right? Marxism-Leninism today is different than the Marxism-Leninism of Lenin's own time. And he would be very upset if he said, we apply the same Leninism today as his time. So I would say it's a type of developed theory, a science of Revolution for the conditions of Canadian society as it was for Mao in China, as it was for Castro in Cuba, as it was for Sankara in Burkina Faso and so on and so forth. So I don't think it's old school. I would say it is a type of applying a good, proper and effective method to the conditions here at home. Matthew Remski: Do you feel vulnerable around the word science? Because as you know, as you know, all of Karl Popper is designed around like, oh, Marxism is not falsifiable, right? Like it's a series of speculations about the future, about how economies evolve and so on. And I'm wondering if that is a sore point. I mean, I tend to steer away from the term science because it's very easy for people in the new atheist movement or the rationalists or the skeptics to attack it because you're not creating experiments and so on. Of course, there are social experiments. So I tend to use cultural terms more than scientific terms. So how do you feel about that? Mahyar Mohaghegh Dolatabadi: I would say, like, for example, if you look at Popper, the Popper has been criticized by his own students. Like, for example, Matthew Remski: I'm not propping him up. I'm not propping up Popper. Mahyar Mohaghegh Dolatabadi: No, no, no, no, no. I would say there's something to be said about the distinctions between the forms of science, right? Like there's something called political science. Political science has to deal, like, all the way, going back, not just Plato and Aristotle, but really Machiavelli. There is a type of politics that are applied universally the way that science, whether you're communist or fascist, there are politics that you need to do. For example, Olivia Chow, how are they going to win elections? They have to apply a certain type of politics which come with objective parameters, what we mean by science. So I just want to not make it very academic. I mean something along the lines of we are not idealistic. So something like, if you want to win against imperialism, you have to be very serious. As my comrade Talia was pointing out, getting rid of, for example, the technological apparatus, of AI, of engineering, of missiles, let's say we have a revolution in Canada. What are you going to do when the Americans come and invade us? There needs to be a very strategic, honest, objective, scientific approach to the entire thing. Again, I always go back to Machiavelli. There will always be events. There will always be spontaneous uprising of people. There will be floods, and fortune will always come to ruin everything you built. But you need to build dams, dikes, whatever measures that you can apply so that when fortune comes when the events of the world, the natural world, really meets you head on, if we have a revolution in Canada, the United States and the imperialist forces will attack us. Do you have the infrastructure, do you have the scientifically built up infrastructure to be able to fight it? And do you have the organizational structure? For example, you want to fight the police and abolish the police. Okay, do you have the force to be able to even carry out such a task, to be able to organize society where police become unnecessary? Those are things that I would say make this a science. Whereas I also don't think we are scientific or scientific or in the sense of, like, thinking society can be run as though people are machines. Like, Right, Yeah. There's this sentiment of extreme positivism. So we often, at least in the Marxist-Leninist tradition after the 1960s, we step away from this type of thinking. People are, in a sense, infinite, and we can't really just pin them down like they are machines. But of course, I would say that when we think about science, it's about how do we objectively win? How do we actually carry out the task of the revolution in a way that will not lead to idealistic dreams of, okay, people will just magically be moral and they will rise up and see that everything is bad. No, tomorrow, after the revolution, things are gonna get worse. Matthew Remski: You know what's so funny is that that seems to be the refuge of the liberal anyway, is that they'll say we're actually the rational ones because we hope in a good future. Right, Mahyar Mohaghegh Dolatabadi: we hope. We are terrified of what's coming in the future. Our attempt is to make sure that what's coming is not fascism. Matthew Remski: You are an Iranian communist, and I'm wondering how you grew up that way. If there are many more of you in the world than most people realize. And then what your sources of, like, mentorship and inspiration have been as you found yourself towards where you are now. Talia: Yes. Mahyar Mohaghegh Dolatabadi: I actually wanted to tell you an anecdote because it is quite funny. Last year I went to Iran right around the time of the war. When war broke out, I didn't have a passport. So it's really great to go to Iran with an expired passport. It's really safe. I recommend it. Yeah. Especially a dual citizen. Matthew Remski: What did they do at the border? Mahyar Mohaghegh Dolatabadi: No, Iran is Alice in Wonderland to some point. Everything can be done just in a clanky way. But what's. And I had to go to a passport office every other day. And because it was war, so things were closed. There was no Internet. There was no electricity sometimes, right? I went and I met one of my old friends and they're like, okay, there's a protest for Gaza come. And of course I randomly go to Iran without a passport and go to protest. And it was a very small crowd because there are the, I would say the, the state marches and the basically the IRGC rallies which are massive, like millions of people. Sorry. As you can see, the cat is also joined us for this conversation. But what was interesting is that if we were around like maybe two dozen, like very, very small crowd in front of the, the UN building in Tehran. And you have to imagine this crowd, I mean it is a leftist crowd. So it was queer people, people with hijab, people who are conservative, people who are extremely against Islamic Republic. Like die hard protesters who would have been getting shot like maybe a few months earlier, right. And universally they all like, it was almost like natural. It was a drinking water from like how could we even talk about social development as my comrades have been alluding to, without having the type of material development? Like, yes, Tehran is much more well off than the other cities. You'll see no one is wearing hijab, right? The conservative nature of people just washes away when people have their own lives and they generally don't care about these things. Whereas if like for example, my mother is from, or God rest her soul is from Tabriz, it's much more conservative, much more traditional city, right? So people, it's not like the police are coming around saying you need to wear the hijab, it's people looking at you. Matthew Remski: People do that. People do that themselves. Yeah. Mahyar Mohaghegh Dolatabadi: And so when I went to the protest, what's really funny about it, and we had all these very motley crew of individuals, all of them anti-imperialists, but various different politics. The police came and told us, you need to go home. The police in Iran were flying the flag of Palestine, told us, you need to pick up and get out of here. And we're like, what is going on? This is Iran. Why are you telling us this? And another police on a bike came and said, okay, this guy doesn't like you. Come next week, I'm here, you can protest. So I just want you to think about Iran is like that. It is not like this. The whole state is. Everyone is on the same page. There is one thing, everyone's on the same page. And it's, we are a society basically that began in 1906 with a revolutionary movement in the constitutional revolution that wanted to throw off the shackles of imperialism, right? We understood imperialism very clearly. Being an empire for so many centuries ago, we know what it is and what happens to the people who are under an imperialist yoke, especially of capitalist imperialism, which is kind of domineering. For almost a century we had to carry this task out. And every time we tried to overthrow the capitalist imperialist forces, there would be a return to reaction for like whether it was under the Reza Shah or his son. Of course, during the coup of 1953 against Mohammad Mossadegh and an oil nationalization movement, there was always this attempt to overthrow imperialist forces and always this reaction against it. And the Islamic Republic, with all of its limitations, failures, all of its terrible aspects, is the legacy of that. It is basically we are the project, it is our heritage. Even those like myself. I come from a communist family. My father was a political prisoner, my mother. God, again, we never talked about these things at home because we understand it's very terrifying, the prison, whatever happens in prison, the torture, the ruthlessness. But at the end of the day, when I went to speak to people, when I was interviewing other political prisoners, they would immediately tell me, yes, the revolution is ours. We will defend Iran, even the Islamic Republic, till we die. These are people who were tortured in prison. And they said this revolution wasn't about one or two individual, one or two groups. It was all of us. It was really the rising up of a people who wanted to have an independent state free from imperialism. And even if we have to incorporate capitalism and all the other aspects of the Western world, it is for the sake of developing the power to push it all back. And if we're going to develop, if we're going to have our own revolution, whatever is going to come after the Islamic Republic, if something comes, it is ours. It shouldn't be at the behest of the Mossad, it shouldn't be at the behest of puppets like their shahists. And it shouldn't be at the behest of the Western forces. It should be for us and by us. So everyone, whether they were pro Islamic Republic or against Islamic Republic, they were dead set against the imperialist forces and they were very much adamant about maintaining the legacy of the 1979 revolution. Matthew Remski: Mahyar, that's such an amazing story. I think it gives us a really good picture of your long, strange trip. I think the anecdote is perfect as well for personalizing how a politics develops. Now, Sabine, you also have a lived experience behind you as a migrant care worker. And I'm wondering was that what inexorably drove you towards Marxism-Leninism? Sabine Fernandez: Yes. Ish. I'm actually just working on wrapping up a final draft of my dissertation. So I'm in the trenches right now. And this is kind of what I like. I grapple with a little bit in the introduction. And I think what's so interesting is that on the one hand, it did develop the early seeds of class consciousness. At the very least, an understanding of my individual experience of oppression. So being on a temporary closed work permit in rural Nova Scotia, in a group home setting, seeing the race dynamics and also experiencing racism, where you have all these racialized migrant care workers taking care of white folks, the management is all white. We were situated right next door to the Wagmatcook Reserve, the Mi'kmaq reserve. And then also seeing the dynamics between how those folks were treated versus the more material privileges that the white people in the village experience. Even though on the whole, I would call the entire village somewhat economically depressed. Right. Like most of the folks, the only jobs are, like, to go out west, and then maybe you have healthcare and folks work in the school system. So I think there was definitely a lot of learning through lived experience. But one of the things I realized having that intimate experience was not enough to develop the class consciousness. Right. Because I still had really reactionary ideas. Like, I understood, okay, I think I'm experiencing racism. I think I'm experiencing exploitation, what have you. And that there are still really individualistic and reactionary ways to understand that experience. And it wasn't until I got permanent residency and did not have to live and work in the same place and could pursue things like an education, and I was privileged enough to be given a spot in the Critical Disability Studies program as a master's student without an undergraduate degree, because York University does that for some people. And then having the time and space for the first time in my life to actually access theory and have the room to analyze and process what I had experienced, and then being very, very privileged to not just be exposed to liberal theory, because there was a lot of that. Matthew Remski: Most of it was right. Sabine Fernandez: Most of it was 99% of it was so extremely identical theories to help me understand, okay, this was this experience I had, and I was so lucky that my. My supervisor, Dr. Rachel Gorman, introduced me to some texts, one of which was Mao's On Contradiction. And that really just rewired my brain in a somewhat painful way and led me to then do more. A lot of independent study where I read more Marx and Lenin and more materialist accounts of disability and care work. But all this to say, I think the experience of being a migrant care worker for those almost five years was definitely grounding. And also, I don't think I would have had the class consciousness or the analysis necessary if I hadn't had the privilege that so many of my coworkers and peers and comrades who were migrant care workers or continue to be, because it's really hard to transition into permanent residency. And I had a lot of intersecting privileges that gave me the human capital points to qualify for an express entry invitation and then be given a spot in graduate education and so forth. I think without those opportunities to literally have the room and the time and the exposure to read and digest revolutionary theory, I don't know that I would have arrived at this politics. Even though, fun story. I grew up in West Bengal under the CPI(M), so the Communist Party. And since then I lived through the fall of the party and then it being taken over by the Trinamool Congress. And now they, they have the BJP in power. But I grew up in a communist state, but in a very anti communist household. So it was also like, anyway, lots Matthew Remski: of like, well, I wanted to ask you about that because it sounded to me like you were being a little bit hard on yourself when you said so I'm working in care work as a migrant and my, you know, visa status is precarious and I'm very reliant. And I kind of know that I'm experiencing racism, but I have some reactionary responses to it and I'm wondering what those are. Like, what's an example of that? Did you just sort of personalized things or you blamed your supervisors instead of looking at the structure, like, what was it? Sabine Fernandez: Oh, absolutely, right. So there's like, oh, I have like a history of lots of reactionary takes, which I think is a good thing because it shows us that we can all grow. And that class consciousness is a really empowering thing, right? And I wish more people had access to the opportunities I did to develop it, but I think so. Some examples would be like, when I, when I first came to group homework in Canada, I'd done similar work in India. I was like, oh my gosh, like, Canada is so good. Like, it even like, gives you decent wages for like, dirty work, right? When you compare like the lives of care workers back home to here, I was like, this is so great. Like, and I, you know, I'm one of those folks, like every freaking migrant care worker that sends remittances back home, right? And I'm like, see this country, like, it pays you decent wages. So you can not only afford to live yourself, but you can send that money back home. Matthew Remski: So you're reinforcing actually like, global north south inequality just by that sort of like, oh, hey, look, I'm in the promised land. Sabine Fernandez: Yeah, absolutely right. Matthew Remski: Oh, shit. Sabine Fernandez: And then you're like, okay, but maybe it's kind of unfair, like, why am I being paid less than the less qualified white workers, for example? That was a whole thing. Or, you know, like, is this. Then you start to notice, like, there's a lot of exploitation. We worked on a 24/7 basis. We were employment standards exempt. There's all kinds of things. That is also legal exploitation of residential care workers that I'm sure every care worker listening is well aware of. Migrant or someone with status. And then you're like, okay, this is kind of unfair. Okay, this is an unfair part of the system that needs to be reformed. Or do you know what I mean? Until you develop a bigger understanding of, like, why did I come to this country to work as a care worker in the first place? Like, what material conditions inform, you know, people crossing oceans, leaving their loved ones independence behind. Matthew Remski: What you're stuck with is, maybe I can ask Olivia Chow if she can help me get better wages. Sabine Fernandez: Yeah, yeah. Lots of, like, reformists. Like, maybe like my whole thing. This is really embarrassing, but the first level of this, my level of consciousness and my masters was like, oh, you know, and all this liberal theory reinforced that. Right. Is like, if people just valued disabled people more, then care workers would be valued more. Like, that is a big. And that's kind of a line of thinking and analysis that is taken to all kinds of conclusions in disability studies. Right, Right. So, like, that whole thing was like, oh, the reason we're paid so badly is because it's care work that's devalued. And care work is devalued because disabled people are devalued. So if we just, like, get people to think about disability in more empowering ways, care workers will be paid better and everyone's lives will be transformed, which is, again, just very idealistic, very reformist and something that does not address the base, the material conditions that inform migration in the first place that inform, like, unequal wages. Right? Yeah. And unequal exchange. So I think. I just really wish. My conclusion is that we live in a country that's an advanced capitalist state that everyone could be, you know, could have access to the education they need to, I think, empower them and develop class consciousness. And it's really something that we should fight for. Matthew Remski: Right. Sabine Fernandez: You know, and just to circle back our little labor of love is this symposium that we're trying to make as accessible as possible and as plain language as possible for everyone that doesn't have the material resources or the privileges to be a paying student in the ivory tower, to still access some of these opportunities, to collectively raise our consciousness. Matthew Remski: I mean, I think it's a great circle because the Sabine who comes from West Bengal today and wants better, better care, wages for their work and better contracts and so on, can come to the conference and hear from you that, oh, you know what? Actually there's a superstructure, right? Yes, there's actually something larger than that. Okay, so, Talia, I wanted to turn to you. You're in grad school. You guys are all in grad school, but you're in grad school for engineering. And I had to say that this made me think of Kropotkin's appeal to the young, which he wrote in 1880. I have this bit of it to read. Maybe it resonates with you. And you, young engineer, you who dream of improving the lot of the workers by the application of science to industry. What a sad disappointment. What terrible disillusions await you. You devote the useful energy of your mind to working out the scheme of a railway which, running along the brink of precipices and burrowing into the very heart of mountains of granite, will bind together two countries which nature has separated. But once you work, you see whole regiments of workers decimated by privations and sickness in this dark tunnel. You see others of them returning home, carrying with them maybe a few pence and the troub and the und undoubted seeds of consumption. You see human corpses, the results of a groveling greed, as landmarks along each yard of your road. And when the railroad is finished, you see lastly that it becomes the highway for the artillery of an invading army. So I'm wondering, Talia, did Kropotkin clock it and are you an engineer so that you can do the opposite? Sabine Fernandez: Yeah. Talia: Okay, so I think. I think. I think under capitalism and under imperialism or imperialist rule, this is very well true. And I think I've fallen into some of this thinking of just like, oh, everything's evil, everything's bad. But the truth is that, yeah, the revolution still needs engineers too. And it's not about the technology or the. I guess, like, culmination of, like, human intelligence is not bad in and of itself, but it's about who is using it, who wields that intelligent. Who Again, like back to what we were saying before is like, who is making these decisions to say, build this highway or sorry, railroad through the mountains, right? It's not, not informed necessarily by maybe the actual needs of the people and the world which we live in, but for the capitalist class. And I think it's something I definitely struggled with, especially in my later years in starting my master's and stuff, is that what am I doing? And I think I have this fear for all the children. I call them children, but they're young adults or adults that I will teach is I want them to be able to be critical thinkers. Because like this quote, I am of the belief that unfortunately, in Canada or in the capitalist state and being aggressors of imperialism, regardless, I guess, of what path you choose to work locally in Canada, if you want to work for the military industrial complex, because that is what will finance and feed your family or whatever, or even if you want to work in local infrastructure, one way or another, as a result of being this cog in the imperialist machine, you're going to cause someone to die. Like, even if you do waste management or what's it called, the folks who do civil engineering, a lot of the folks that I've heard, they're writing the reports on why it's safe to build here. And it's just kind of making excuses for the company to overlook actual ecological or environmental factors too. So in one way, either directly through the military industrial complex, mining companies located in Congo, Sudan, other African countries, and then also in like the Philippines and stuff like that that are Canadian owned mining companies, and then even just polluting industries in Canada itself, like to, I guess, other communities and stuff like that, where we place this, think about Grassy Narrows and the pollution that's happening there is like they're all contributing to this. And so what I think is that the, yes, the revolution needs its engineers, it needs its scientists, it needs its academics of all sorts to be not only to defeat imperialism, but also defend a successful revolution, as I think Comrade Mahyar explained. And I think it's not to make just a few people rich, this combination of human intelligence, we need to be able to use it to, I guess to empower the people and to move forward the people too. And I guess in regard to this quote, again, it is the capitalist and imperialist thing, but it's not what it can be, if that makes sense. Matthew Remski: Well, it does. And I think what keeps coming up for me as you speak is that if you are in the discipline of building things on the level of the public good at this point, it seems like this issue of who controls the actual asset or who funds the building project is the key thing. And so I'm wondering if part of what you think about as a Marxist-Leninist who's studying engineering is, well, who's going to pay for this particular public works project and how can I secure the funding or the credit that it needs to go forward? Because the people who are doing infrastructure now are all private equity firms, right? Talia: Not necessarily that I focus on those particular topics, but I think the biggest thing is when we look to China and China's use of engineering itself too, to actually move forward the economy, not even the economy, but also the environment too. Yes, they did have the period where they were doing massive amounts of pollutions, but now they're the most green majority of the even. What's that big thing that we like now for the buildings are, oh my God, this is bad because I did work in HVAC. Matthew Remski: Oh, heat pumps. Talia: Heat pumps? Yes, the majority of heat pumps and stuff like that. I think there's maybe only one North American company that you can get the supply from. All of that technology is very well implemented and used in China too. And even with regreening places with like ingenuitive engineering of where to place solar panels so that greenery and animal life can still exist and thrive, while also collecting energy to power the cities and stuff, so there is a real place for engineering and sciences to do good. And I even want folks to think about what did science and engineering and academia mean before Western civilization. Right, folks. Even in the native perspectives and stuff like that, or native cultures and societies, it wasn't like they were devoid of engineering and science. They had their own science that worked together with the environment, not only to benefit themselves, but the environment around them too. And I think, like, we need to get rid of this idea. Like, especially like I don't want the engineers who come in wanting to make money. I don't want those people, right? I want the people who like, want to build something, want to do something cool, but also like derive benefit for everyone out of it too. And when I talk to like the students, I find some of the most intelligent students I have are also like the most empathetic too. And I think I attribute that to like critical thinking skills that even though folks in like engineering, like even with this quote here is just. I feel like somebody who hasn't seen this through just lacks the critical thinking skills to understand that like this building of the railroad through through the mountains and how they make the workers do the work will kill the workers, will lead to whatever. Sabine Fernandez: Right. Talia: That's a lack of critical thinking skills too, that I think we need to thrive for. And again, the revolution needs its engineers and needs its scientists. And I don't think that knowledge should be restricted again to the ivory towers. I think there's so many more people who can be our engineers and our technicians for that revolution. Matthew Remski: Okay, so do you adhere to the value of vanguardism? Because I think this is a. A sort of crucial point that a lot of people get wary about or wonder about, at least. Mahyar Mohaghegh Dolatabadi: It's very important to think about what it takes for the working class, because the working class are the only ones that have a vested interest in getting rid of the capitalist state. How are they going to do this? There is these different ideas. There's this notion that spontaneously workers will rise up, there will be a crisis. Right. For example, the 2008 crisis. One of the actually guests. Guests at our show, at our show at the symposium, Seeds Beneath the Snow. Radhika Desai writes in very, I would say, thick but good text. It's called a Geopolitical Economy. She writes it about the 2008 crash, that it took almost a year for the mobilization to take off after the crisis. And even when they did, they were not ready to take over the state or use the state for basically class politics. They were just there to say, we are against this. We are the 99% against the 1%. Matthew Remski: Yes, right. Mahyar Mohaghegh Dolatabadi: They were never really willing, I would say, to lead the working class to the final defeat of their enemies. They were more like saying, we are protesting. You know, that the. Really the root of the word protest, this is a protestation, right? Rather than a revolution or organized defeat of the enemy. I would say, like my era of organizing the 2000s, 2010s, they were very, I would say animals, anarchistic, but more like decentralized, without a leadership. And that really was our cudgel, because what really we needed, all of us, was a center to rally around, to be able to say, okay, all these different forces need to come together so that they can actually confront the enemy, which is much stronger than us. And to be honest, it wasn't about the 99% against the 1%. It's not capitalists with top hats coming and shooting us with riot gear here. No, it's the. The working class that split. We have enemies amongst our ranks. We have people who, we must admit they are not with us. And so we must rally to the cause of our people against their enemies. Not assume that the enemy is always weak. We have to assume the enemy is very strong and organized and has many of us amongst them. And more importantly, when we are not organized, just like the police, just like the military, just like the state, state, we are going to be defeated. They're much stronger than us, much more organized and serious. So if we want to be serious about organizing, we should not be these commander structures of like telling the workers, oh, this is the way to the revolution, blah, blah. But we should also not be like tailing them, always saying wherever the workers are going, it's always good. No lead, be a good leader. Matthew Remski: I think you're pointing to this sociological angle on vanguardism that I'm really persuaded by. And it's in the sort of empirical account of Vincent Bevins in a book called If We Burn, where he researches the protest decade that follows your own. You're talking about from 2010 to 2020. And he looks at all of these mass movements organized on social media that have high intensity but volatile directions and are also vulnerable to right wing capture. Because anybody can say that they're against the 99%, but what are they going to do with that statement and with that energy? And then there's Anton Jäger, who I think agrees with this in his analysis of something called he calls hyperpolitics, which he defines as extreme politicization without political consequences, which leads to exhaustion and demoralization and just. More scrolling. So is that part of where you're coming from as well? Mahyar Mohaghegh Dolatabadi: I would say yes, there is something to be said about, I mean, Lenin says very famously, you should be working in yellow unions and business unions, because every site, like for example, Olivia Chow, right? We should get, get Olivia Chow elected a lot of people who are like, no electoralism, blah, blah. This is nonsense. No, we need to step away and think. Every site is a site of power and the second we move away from it, the enemy will take it. The bourgeoisie, the reactionaries, the fascists will come and speak for us in unions, in everywhere, in every one of these spaces. So there is of course this potential for right wing capture, but it's also how we conceptualize the entire operation. So for example, I'm sure you know, your readers know or your viewers might know this guy named Baudrillard, he came up with this idea of hyperpolitics, or basically the notion that. I always liked this example given by Rick Roderick. He was, he was actually a lecturer at Duke University. He says there was this politics around John F. Kennedy's assassination. How do we organize? How do we defeat, for example, the CIA or what people thought was the reason why JFK was assassinated? And then there is the movie about JFK's murder, and people were very interested about, like, the conspiracy. And then there is the movie about Matthew Remski: the movie, about the movie. Mahyar Mohaghegh Dolatabadi: And it's like almost like this, you know, and the example it gives us, the Iraq War, the 1993 Iraq War, that the soldiers who came back, they said they asked them how was the war? And they're like, well, we didn't know. We were just behind the computer. And then when I came and watched war on TV, that's when I realized what the war was about. Matthew Remski: God damn it. Mahyar Mohaghegh Dolatabadi: I would say this is a very cynical notion of politics, that it's all just a show. All the protesters in France, this is all nothing. The war in Palestine, the war in Iran, this is all just a chimera and it's not real. Whereas I would say that cynical attitude is itself part of maintaining control, maintaining a sort of demobilized mass, making us so cynical that we withdraw into an isolated individual space. Whereas I think we didn't need, like, this notion of, oh, my God, what is. Where is politics? Is it on the television? Is it in the real world? We can see the uprisings after, like, for example, the Palestine movement. We can see people coming out in the streets. And that's not random. It is the truth of politics. It does happen. Events take place that transform our lives and our perceptions beyond the way that media and whatever ideological apparatus presents for us. I would say we need to step away from this again. My era's cynicism and a return to a type of real politics, how do we actually win? Instead of thinking about where politics is and if politics is real, if what we're seeing is real or not, and start asking the question of who are our friends and who are our enemies? Because that's our enemies are winning, and they've been winning for a long time by making us think that this is not real, that politics is just all a chimera and we should step away from it. That's what I think is a real issue that we, I would say, we have overcome in our period. Matthew Remski: So the next thing that I want to ask about is that you all have raised the issue of the development of class consciousness. And I wanted to bring up the fact that I find that today that whole issue can be kind of slippery in rhetorical terms. I don't think a lot of people are aware of, for instance, something as simple as what working class means. And the way this shows up in my view is, oh, the working class or working people are like X. So for instance, don't stand up for trans people with your full voice because that will alienate Joe Six-Pack and then they'll be hopelessly driven to the right wing. And so this happens all the time. And the effect of this is that essentially working men especially are stereotyped as close minded. And secondly, various sources of oppression within marginalized groups can be essentialized, as in, well, of course Muslims hate gay people, they throw them off the roofs in Gaza and so on. This is very useful to the reactionary centrist politician or the pundit who performs deference to a kind of, of mythologized working class so that they can launder their own reactionary policy while avoiding accountability. So I'm wondering how you navigate this issue of like speaking to the working person without stereotyping them or hemming them in. Sabine Fernandez: Honestly, when we saw this question, we were like collectively so glad that you asked it because it's something we encounter very often in our work and it's something we're working really hard at to have a disciplined and principled approach to with very little support. I think we feel quite alone in this. And maybe I'll try and give some. I'll contextualize it a bit. And please interrupt me because I might do a little bit of word vomit here. So I think one of the first ways we deal with this, what we call a vibes based approach. Right, right, right. Because this is just folks vibes, and they're essentializing and infantilizing workers and historically marginalized and underserved groups. And our response to this is investigation. Right? Mao said no investigation, no right to speak. And so we try to practice something called social investigation and class analysis. And it's a way to always kind of keep ourselves in check when we're confronted with questions about like, will the working class accept trans people? Or these, you know, like the example you gave of like working class men being pigeonholed as these people that are so one dimensional. Or can we expect our Muslim comrades to accept like queer folks in their spaces and so forth? And why are we assuming who these imaginary workers are? Right. Or these imaginary Muslims are. Matthew Remski: Imaginary is the great word. Because I think the liberal loves to imagine, imagine people who they can then put into their little chess games of, you know, like, this is how things are gonna work. Sabine Fernandez: Absolutely. And the unfortunate thing is, in our experience that this is a way of thinking that's also pervasive in our progressive spaces. Right? And this is like you can run the gamut like an anarchist, like more, you know, socdem and then even some so called socialist spaces. And so our response is always like, what is the data we're relying on? Like, where are you getting this information from? What questions have you or have we asked or not asked? And what anecdotes are we relying on to paint this picture of an entire group of people in this really ungenerous way? So if I may, I want to give like some examples because I kind of got excited when I saw this question. So like earlier this year we had a rally in defense of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And after the fact, I got like messages from organizers asking if, like, oh, if there are future actions, would they be safe for queer people? And I was like, why are you asking me this? And so I was like, did something happen? Was something said? Was something done? Like, what is the basis for this question? Right. And so there was nothing reported. Right? Cause when I follow it up, I'm like, well, where is this coming from? There's no answer. And so I am left to understand that this is an anticipation connected to an action that was visibly Muslim. That's the only conclusion that we can draw. And kind of, we troubled this a little bit in the back and forth trying to understand where is this concern coming from? Was any actual investigation done? Like, did you get reports of people behaving in ways that made folks feel uncomfortable? Are you just assuming that this is likely a space to be uncomfortable? Matthew Remski: Well, are they making the argument that from what they understand of various homophobic structures or queerphobic structures within Iran, that the assumption is that that would somehow be overlooked or permitted or somehow not acknowled? Isn't that what their concern is? Sabine Fernandez: That's not what was articulated. Right. And so it's really hard to know when folks are just giving you. Well, we think that it's possible that this type of space might be X, Y and Z. Without actually investigating and assessing. Did this space actually do that in Canada? Right, right. Because again, concrete analysis of concrete conditions. We're not in Iran. We are in 2026 in Toronto at an action that our group was a part of, someone like me that again, I shouldn't have to justify it, is also a racialized, non binary and queer person. So that was one example. I think another example, this one is funnier to me is we were kind of talking to a group of organizers that organize mostly in, in the white collar sector or the corporate sector and kind of asking like, why do you not seem to have any women in your organization? And we were told that it's because women are scarce in the corporate sector. And so I didn't know this, right. I felt indignation. I was like, let's see what the data says instead of just having a reaction like I am prone to do as a reactive person. And we look it up and this is just like research. I didn't do a deep dive, but from like easily publicly open access information. It's my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, that entry level positions in the corporate sector, women are represented mostly at parity, right? And these are folks that are not like CEOs or CFOs or like executive directors like you. You know, this is more or less the position that they occupy, right? Entry level, middle. And so again, this is a vibes based claim, right? And then the last one that I thought of, which I thought I would share, which was funny, was that we were kind of told by somebody that anytime it's a woman, a femme or a trans person making allegations about misogyny about other comrades, we just have to believe it. Like we have to take it as the truth. And even if this person has like, you know, a more complicated history of like, conduct and you know, behavior that is disrespectful or what have you. And again, I was baffled that there's no like expressed interest in investigation, not just the claim, but where the claim is coming from. So what do I mean? Like, what am I trying to say by sharing some of these examples? These are all forms of liberal identity politics. Politics, right. Whether where like identity is used to either valorize, demonize, victimize or discount people without any investigation of the actual material conditions and the social relations, what happens Matthew Remski: is that the actual subject at hand, because you are at that protest against the illegal war on Iran for that particular reason. It is an anti-imperialist action. And the question is coming, well, will queer people feel safe there? And, and so your approach is, well, I'm not asking you to protest in Tehran, I'm asking you to, or you're being invited to a place in Toronto and the focus is anti-imperialism. And we cannot maybe solve the problems of bigotry against queer people in a theocracy, but we can make a stand against imperialism from where we are. So you're asking for, for those issues to be separated. But I guess what you're also saying is that it's characteristic of liberal identity politics to intervene and to muddy those waters for very specific reasons. Like it ends up taking away from the actual main content of what's being presented? Sabine Fernandez: Yeah, I think so. And I think that it's a way to, I don't think it's always conscious. I think, you know, the ruling ideas of a society are the ideas of its ruling class. Right. So I don't hold individuals responsible or even individual groups participating in this way of thinking. And I'll say two things. So the first thing I'll say is that we really need to, if we're going to be making these claims about Iran, which is maybe a little bit of a deviation on my part, we need to understand what are the conditions under which bigotry can be challenged and people can live anti oppressive lives. Right. And what are our expectations of a country that is besieged, that is blockaded, that is now being bombed, that is severely sanctioned with sanctions that I understand to be like worse than the sanctions on North Korea. Again, fact check me on that. What conditions are we asking? What are the material conditions that we are not considering when we have these expectations of what a queer friendly society is supposed to be? And I think that question is directly linked to imperialist violence. Right. And without dealing with that imperialist violence, I don't know how anyone in a blockaded, besieged and bombed country is allowed to be free. So I think that's the first thing that, that's a way to address some of those concerns. But beyond that, I think just circling back to this, either this essentializing of working class and marginalized people as victims or just infantilizing them or demonizing working class men. One of the ways we understand it is left and right deviations. There's one approach that any concern about systemic oppression and racism and what have you is identity politics. And that's the right deviation. Because we're not talking about identity, right? We're talking about systemic structures of violence that are articulations of the class struggle. And then you have this left deviation that it's like any time it's a person with a historically marginalized identity, they're infantilized. Like they can't be expected to grow or learn or be different or they're always wearing this badge of victimhood that that gives them moral authority. And that's also not an approach that we lend credence to. So we try to do this thing which is, I think very challenging, which is walk a straight and narrow path and not be one sided. Because we're Marxist-Leninists, we're dialectical. Right. And one of the ways we remain dialectical or we try and find this balance is through the social investigation and class analysis that I was talking about. And also criticism and self criticism. Right. Always practicing this self assessment of what questions are we not asking, what uncomfortable questions are we avoiding? How are our own biases and prejudices informing our positions? And are we reacting from a place of trauma? I think that often, I don't think that just because I hold certain marginalized identities, I'm always right. Right. That is not, to me, a materialist or strategic way to win to victory. That will not be. Matthew Remski: Or perhaps psychologically healthy. Sabine Fernandez: Yeah, yeah. And it was like, even, let's take all that away. That cannot lead us to victory, because victory requires us to be really grounded in the facts. Right. I'm sorry to sound like facts on feelings, but feelings are important. They shouldn't always be in the driver's seat. Matthew Remski: Okay, rounding up, guys. Mahyar, let's start with you. What has inspired you most? Where have you found your sources of support? Mahyar Mohaghegh Dolatabadi: What inspired me? I always say there's this quote that Iranians, Persians like to say a lot. It's from the Arab poet Khalil Gibran. He says, so someone comes up to him. I think it's from his book, The Prophet. Where are you? You who are so wise, you who are so moral, you who are so honest? Where did you learn all these virtues from? And he says, I had great teachers who I owe nothing to. I learned my wisdom from the ignorant, I learned my honesty from the liars. I learned my morality from the immoral. I would say, like again, my love for all the communists, all the organizers, all those who have done died fighting the revolutionary cause, they failed, right? They failed. And they failed drastically, miserably. And I learned from their failures. Like, that's like, as much as I love them, as much as I talk to them, still what they give to me all the time, even themselves, is their criticism of themselves. Like, this was the very, very bad thing we did. We will never do that again. And this realization or consciousness of what went wrong for the sake of going back to what, what works, or at least developing something new that works, is really the inspiration I get from them. Not just that they're proud we. We did something great there, there's many achievements that we can look to, but also, how did we fail at trying to achieve the. The greater goal of socialist transition or what, what have you. I would say what really inspired me was this. Not just the people who I think are, are I would say better than me because people who are fighting with guns in the street, getting shot in the face are like much superior to me who lives in a Western world and with the comforts of imperialism. But they themselves say we failed, we failed. And these are the ways that we failed. And we look to you for something new and something better that inspires me almost more than anything else. As much as I love them and I give them all my honor and respect, what really pushes me forward is recognizing what really did, what really went wrong and never to do that again or at least find out what were the conditions that made them do these things and what were the conditions that are necessary for success for I would. I constantly go back to this word victory. We have to bring home something for the people other than just kind and fancy words. Matthew Remski: Sabine, same question for you. Very briefly, what mentorship and which elders led you here? Sabine Fernandez: I don't have good answers to this. I think it really. I'm always indebted to my supervisor Rachel Gorman for, you know, introducing me to On Contradiction and then telling me to read. I think The German Ideology was the second text and it really, really rewired my brain. And then there are all kinds of like, I think disabled folks that I've done care work with that also taught me a lot. A lot of other care workers that I learned a lot from. But the real meat of my answer, and I'm so sorry doesn't really answer your question, is it's like honestly meeting Mahyar and Talia because I was. And I know Talia is like way like a decade younger than me. Like these people don't count as elders or mentors, but they're my peer mentors and I was so alone before I met them. And then there was two and now we're the three musketeers. And I am only able to continue and do anything because I have been so fortunate to meet two other comrades who want to dedicate their lives to this revolutionary work in our lifetime and that they are mad enough. I think Thomas Sankara said you need a certain kind of madness for revolution. That they are mad enough to share in this madness with me. So I'm sorry, but that's what I have for you. Matthew Remski: So Talia, you are now the elder through some sort of New Age Marxism. But I want to ask you the same question to finish off. Who influenced you to get here and what elders or mentors did you have? Talia: Yeah, I don't know. For me it's definitely a weird journey through early 2000s Internet culture, that horrible era, all the way to liberal things like recycling and then zero waste and da, da, da, da. And then, then seeing more in my online era, like political commentators online, and then being open up to those facts and then just. I kind of just wanted to do more and was starting to understand, like, that I'm not an individual. Like, that my individual actions don't have as much impact as I thought. Like, oh, I can recycle all I want, but that doesn't mean anything's gonna happen. And now it really doesn't even mean it's gonna be recycled. So I think, like, it's all this, like, huge journey of, like, you're taught to do good as a kid. And then. And then what does doing good mean? And then there's the whole, like, ecological stuff. And like, I think one thing that I want to say, this is embarrassing though, but even, like, people like Hasan Piker, unfortunately, and stuff like that, why not, like, started like, getting. Getting me like, more thinking along the right lines. And this is embarrassing to say and sounds always like tooting my own horn, but because I've like reminisced and thought about it so much and critical thinking. Da, da, da, da. A lot of these ideas already existed. And for me, this is why I'm stealing Sabine. I actually said they're stealing my answer because this was like, my answer is like, they truly are my mentors too, because I am not very well read or like, academically have all the language. But when they say stuff, I was like, oh, my God. I was thinking about that. Oh, my God. Like, that, like, that makes like, da, da, da, da. So for me, that's again, like Sabine said, having somebody else who has that madness to put forward, I think they really inspire me. So I honestly, it is for me, Mahyar and Sabine too. And just like, seeing how dedicated they were, I was that little. I really came across them by random too. Not by random, but I saw like a little thing online. You're like, I. I did like, encampment stuff. Da, da, da, da da. But I wanted to, like, do more after. And it just didn't feel like things were sufficient and like, what existed in the city was, like, sufficient or even like, good organizing. And I was so thankful that I kind of just like tripped and fell into their hands and was like a little nerd that attended every single meeting. And they're like, you don't have to come to this one. And I was, I was like, it's okay. I'm here but yeah, sorry. I'm very grateful to them so much. Words cannot explain. Matthew Remski: Talia, Mahyar, Sabine, thank you so much for joining me. I think you have really been able to communicate a little bit of your synergy and thinking process and the kind of personality that is putting together this conference which I'll tell the listeners about. So thank you so much for your time and I'll see you on November 6th. Mahyar Mohaghegh Dolatabadi: Thank you. Sabine Fernandez: Thank you so much. Matthew Remski: So thank you. Thank you again to Sabine, Talia and Mahyar for really great conversation. I learned a lot. And please check the show notes if you're in the Toronto area or if you're in southwestern Ontario, if you're upstate New York if you want to travel to this thing. It's quite inexpensive and you can see all of the details in the show notes including the entire speaker roster over the three days and maybe I'll see you there. Take care of each other till then.