Red Menace

In this episode, Breht and Alyson sit down with Arlene Eisen to discuss her new memoir, In the Worldwide Family of Militant Women. Eisen reflects on her political formation across the upheavals of the 1960s through the early 1980s, her encounters with Black liberation and anti-imperialist struggle, and the forgotten history of militant women who built relationships of solidarity across borders....

Alyson and Breht apply dialectical and historical materialist analysis to the current war of aggression in Iran. Together they break down the Marxist methodology into its three main parts - dialectics, materialism, and history - and showcase how they apply to the US and Israeli war on Iran, before bringing them back together into a coherent whole. Then they compare and contrast dialectical and historical materialism as a mode of an...

On this YT livestream (3/1/26) Alyson and Breht discuss the illegal war of aggression launched by the US and Israel against Iran. Throughout the discussion they take live questions from the chat.

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In this Christmas special, Alyson and Breht reinterpret Jesus through Jewish mysticism, Christian contemplative traditions, and Buddhist conceptions of Enlightenment, offering an understanding of his teachings and words as attempts to articulate the ineffable and non-dual, rather than metaphysical propositions to be believed. Drawing heavily on the Gospels, the Gospel of Thomas, the Christian concept of Agape, and early Christian s...

Most people, even on the Left, only know fragments of Italy's "Years of Lead." This episode pulls the whole picture into focus: the mass worker upsurge after the boom years, the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing and the death of Giuseppe Pinelli, the rise of the Red Brigades, the kidnapping and execution of Aldo Moro, and the 1980 Bologna massacre. Alyson and Breht trace how far-right stragismo (mass bombings) intersected with far-left c...

In this episode, Alyson joins members of the Ultra-Red collective to discuss their recent trip to Central America where they learned first hand about popular education movements of the past and present. The discussion gets into the history of popular education, existing social movements in Central America today, and what we can learn from these movements in our organizing work.

The journal of Ultra-Red ca...

Alyson and Breht critically engage with the concept of "technofeudalism" from a Marxist (and thus historical materialist) perspective, analyzing its origin and recent popularity, critiquing its depoloyment and the implication that it represents a "new mode of production", explaining related concepts like rent-seeking, discussing the role of private equity in the modern American economy, the politics of Yanis Varoufakis, and much, m...

In this episode of Red Menace, Breht and Alyson dive into Mao Zedong's pivotal 1957 speech On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People. This foundational text offers insight into Mao's dialectical approach to politics, particularly in navigating the complex terrain of class struggle within socialist society.

Alyson and Breht record an emergency podcast on the current riots in LA, and resistance across the country, to mass deportations. Together they highlight recent events, discuss the function of mass deporations in a decaying capitalist system, analyze the spontaneous and militant community response, how terrorizing undocumented workers is a form of labor discipline, the fascist tactic of scapegoating the powerless for the crimes and...

In this episode, Alyson and Breht explore Friedrich Engels' Dialectics of Nature, a bold and underappreciated attempt to apply dialectical materialism to the natural sciences. Often dismissed or misunderstood, this unfinished work offers a sweeping view of reality - from physics and chemistry to evolution, human consciousness, and ecological breakdown - throug...

This is small snippet from a much larger episode coming soon wherein Alyson and Breht cover Friedrich Engel's famous text "Dialectics of Nature", in which Engels argues for dialectical materialism as a scientifically grounded, philosophically rigorous, and holistic worldview—one that understands nature, society, and thought as deeply interconnected and constantly evolving.

Find the clip used at the end of this teaser here:

https://...

In this episode, Breht welcomes on Seth from Omaha Tenants United for an in-studio discussion about OTU's slate of recent successes organizing several tenant unions, and a subsequent new legal assault on the organization by the local landlord lobby. The legal implications of this attack are truly monumental for virtually all forms of organizing. They also discuss how landlordism is a feudal hangover with modern capitalist dynamics,...

In this powerful and wide-ranging conversation, Margaret Kimberley—senior columnist at Black Agenda Report and a leader in Black Alliance for Peace—joins Breht to dissect the spectacle of American decline and, as usual, Kimberley offers a razor-sharp analysis of late-stage capitalism's collapse into cruelty, chaos, and confusion.

Together, they explore the Democratic Party's complicity in ushering in this ...

In this episode, Alyson and Breht welcome Brendan to the show, a close comrade with a bit more sympathy toward Trotsky in order to be as fair as possible and get a fresh perspective. Together, we dive deep into Leon Trotsky's Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It, a sharp and urgent intervention written in the shadow of the Nazi rise to power. We unpack Trotsky's class analysis of fascism, the role of the petite bourgeoisie, his ...