Just enforce what we want everyone to do in our own interests and you know a lot of latin americans are marxists because they think that capitalism has been really bad for them and they're right it has sure and and even uh western historians have pointed out this kind of thing to explain why they were communist in the wake of world war one in europe um saying things well what other options do we really have because we had seen what imperialism,
Capitalism had done and so these alternatives that the bolsheviks were talking about seemed like something that we could apply in our own countries and of course um we saw what happened with stalin but that doesn't mean that's the only option for a left-leaning socialist type of a program and i mean i think people are also really unaware of histories of communism in the united states um because when i started researching the history of the textile mill in the town i live in now it was one of the world's largest textile mills um from the 1850s to the 1950s,
There was a strong communist labor movement right here in salem and the workers at the mill were not little clones of joseph stalin they were workers who felt they were being exploited by their bosses and who wanted better working conditions absolutely and until people have actually experienced that kind of thing firsthand and kind of they circling back onto el mozote the uh the people that i know who joined the erp biggest faction of the feministic were uh people who had had family members that were killed not just at almost but in the surrounding areas and and many of them had to flee over the border to call moncagua,
And they were five or seven years old when it happened and and they had to flee from the military so obviously they're going to have some type of a push back on the traditional system which has led to their plight and try and have some type of change i think another thing that people were aware of maybe in the 1980s people in the united states but has also kind of gone down the memory hole was the role of the catholic church the revolutionary liberation theology of the catholic church which called upon poor people to fight for social justice in this world um and that it was god's will to create the kingdom of heaven here and creating the kingdom of heaven meant overturning capitalism,
So you know you have marxist priests in latin america and um again i think that instead of just seeing the term marxist as meaning something like cruel and evil we need to understand the the um the different ways that marx's thought has um informed movements for social change right now ignited people's action their imagination so they can think of a different world and so they can try and implement something different it's that it's unfortunate because we still see it in our modern day politics too i mean i was speaking to a group of vietnam veterans the other day who said who labeled biden as a communist because of the vaccine mandate,
And so it's becoming i thought it was gone you know 30 years ago but it keeps on coming up you know i i read as i was saying i read the paper every day um one of the phrases that i'm most annoyed about that has to be in the newspaper every single day is something about authoritarian china communism and their zero covid policy and like they're just so evil for having the zero coven policy and like you know i'm not an epidemiologist i'm not gonna opine about the best way of dealing with a pandemic because obviously we've done a lot of things wrong in this pandemic too but the idea that communism marxism china zero kovid authoritarian,
It's like can't we talk rationally about like do you just have to repeat those catch phrases like as this way of telling us oh you're supposed to think china's bad i agree absolutely especially if you take you look at opinion polls in china and the people are just about as happy as people are over here they don't it's not this widespread oppression that everybody senses that would be beyond what we would experience here too and likewise in places like central america too where this is a problem i don't know if you find this but when you teach the history of central america and there's a lot of oppression that's involved in that history that people don't necessarily always see the uh kind of the happiness that's there too the culture that exists the day-to-day life,
Which is much more about relationships uh than maybe than it is in most places in the united states could you talk about some of your experiences with that well before i do that let me just say something else that you were making me think of that i feel like young people today are actually quite critical of capitalism that is you know maybe 20 or 30 years ago when i first started teaching i used to say you know you only know capitalism in the united states and here in the united states capitalism seems to be working really well like we have all this stuff we have great this we have great that we um but you know go to haiti and look at how well capitalism is working there,
You know the reason that we're doing so well isn't just because of capitalism it's also because with six percent of the world's population we use fifty percent of the world's resources and capitalism allows us to do that but that's not necessarily a good thing um but i feel like there's kind of a more of a critical consciousness about capitalism now among our students like they're heavily indebted um they don't really see a secure financial future for themselves under capitalism um they see that capitalism is destroying the planet um so i think that there's some space for critical consciousness about capitalism that that kind of didn't exist as much a couple of decades ago,
I don't know if you see that too you know i completely agree i've been trying i've been wondering about this the past few years why this is taking place but when i started teaching in 2003 we just invaded iraq and patriotism was at its height and so if you brought up a criticism of capitalism it was like bringing up a criticism of the us and and over time as people have kind of seen that the wars weren't a good idea and and uh and all you know the financial crisis and covet and trump that you're right that if you bring up capitalism then they're um they're much more willing to kind of see it from a critical perspective plus where i live in west virginia there is this consciousness about the role of coal and timber,
Companies as being exploitative yeah and i grew up in the bay area and so that's something that i really notice here is how different people talk about corporations here on the one hand they're the source of jobs and everybody has somebody who's worked in the coal industry before and so it's you don't want to criticize coal necessarily but on the other hand people recognize the exploitative nature of that they can understand what guatemala and honduras have gone through from that perspective and where i'm doing a lot of my work now is actually in northern colombia in the coal mining region there and it's the same kind of conflict of course there it's a foreign company,
The social protections that people have it's a primarily indigenous and afro-colombian region of extremely poor and marginalized people um and most of them do not work in the mine because this is an open pit mine and so the uh the two main job categories are heavy machinery operator and heavy machinery repair they um require a high level of literacy and skills training um that most of the people in the region which has a 65 illiteracy rate uh don't have um but and you know people see their livelihoods being destroyed by the mine their land their water their survival their food sovereignty being destroyed,
And yet they also see the mine as their only salvation their only hope their only hope to get access to things like schools and healthcare because the government has never had a a social welfare presence it's had a military presence but not a social welfare presence in that in that area and um people also understand that if the mind were just to close up and leave that would be the most disastrous thing of all like it's done all this damage it's also employed thousands of people and it's in some ways brought development to to the region.
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