BreadTube is dead, read books instead

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Hello. Are you tired of learning about politics through debates between content creators that seem to always devolve into drama? Are you confused as to how race, gender, queerness, abbleism, class struggle, climate change, colonialism, and war all seem to be opposing struggles on the online left, each of which have to necessarily be in conflict with each other? Doesn't that feel wrong? Are you tired of global north voices from the US or Europe or Canada or Australia or New Zealand dominating conversations about politics often with the goal of voting for slightly less destructive political candidates or affforementioned yelling sometimes? Are you tired of people talking about the global south like it's a noble savage character that can't speak for itself but must always be lionized or pied for credibility? taken up for by said global north voices almost all the time. Do you care about not bombing children and not robbing poor indigenous people of their land and resources, but also kind of care about the middle class mother of three in a global north nation who will be crushed by the debt she's taken on to fight a potentially life-threatening condition or whose neighborhood will soon host a data center that will ruin people's water and air, including her kids. Do you care about both of those?

[00:01:22]Right? Do you see value in media analysis and art criticism, but find yourself tired by how repetitive it can be on YouTube? The epificication of blank blank blank. Are you tired of hearing about the same white thinkers being cited for the same few concepts basically as flavor on commentary videos that ultimately say what everyone else is thinking, but with a few big words thrown in. Do you never want to hear the word mauled again?

[00:01:51]If any of these describe you, come to death row. No, read the exhausted of the earth by Aj Singh Chadri and also books in general. Today my title is a little bit over the top but I really do feel that in some ways or in most ways bread tube as we know it is dead. And I say that because death and life are in a cycle constantly mauled like mal. You're also tired in general. Again, exhausted of the earth. Operative term. I'm not interested in deep diving on any drama, but I am interested in what I think people kind of want instead. I say Bread Tube is dead in many ways because I think something new is emerging. I think I see sometimes on YouTube and other social media platforms these voices that are beginning to build up support or these little communities that are emerging. And I think that all of us, right, we all have feet of clay, but we all ultimately do want to do better. And many of us go to these channels and go on Bread Tube because we do want to learn, right? We want to be educated about specific issues. We want to apply that education into the real world in some way. And I feel that way. So I think it's really important that today we take a stand and we start reading books. YouTuber has discovered books and we don't just read what is typical for us to read or what we have been constantly assigned but we dig into newer things that have been published that work off of the pre-existing literature to create new ideas and ways of moving forward in our specific situation right now. Cuz I think that's what a lot of people go on bread tube for. Right? If you wanted to just hear what Markx had to say in the 19th century about English industrial exploitation, then you would just do that, right? Or you would watch the David Harvey lecture series or something. You want to hear people talk about what's going on now, and you want to hear people apply these lenses of like something radical to culture, to everyday things that you experience. You want your world to open up. And I think there is merit and there is importance to what everybody does here. I think there's merit and importance to making video essays to even some types of drama content or god knows even some types of debate. I'm generally very anti-debate as a concept in this world because it just doesn't work. Just doesn't really lead to anything productive. But all of it has its place. The problem is we've really reached a breaking point in certain sentences for what we know as the online left. There's just a lot of points of complete split. There are these things that people are going to split on very drastically over the coming months if it's not already happening. There are communities that are going to fracture. There are people who have alliances that are going to no longer have alliances. There's going to be a lot of angry fighting and sometimes that's part of how it goes. But in the meantime, I think it's really important that we understand that a lot of the things that we're fighting for or we're fighting each other over have been studied and discussed and lived and organized through and against and with for really centuries. We're not inventing the wheel. We're not inventing fire. I just read a book, but I found it shocking. I quickly want to first talk about why I feel like Bread Tube is dead. It goes off of what I just said.

[00:05:23]It's the idea that at the end of the day, you know, we had conversations about Contra Points like last year that's been done to death at this point.

[00:05:30]It's quite clear that Contra Points's opinions have diverged from a lot of people's opinions on the online left.

[00:05:36]That a lot of people feel like they were radicalized by watching Contra Points videos, but now feel like they've gotten a lot more radical than Contra Points.

[00:05:43]And I think we kind of pictured that as being the entirety of the bread tube split when in actuality it was always going to start manifesting in different areas. What I mean by that is on questions of race, on questions of gender, on questions of queerness, on questions of indigenity, there's something that doesn't get talked about on YouTube. All of these things have in a space like this where people are literally incentivized to fight, incentivized to [ __ ] post or to call out. In spaces like this where people are parasocial before they are practical, where people are not interested so much in what they practice and how to practice it better as they are in how to best support a content creator that they like and that they identify with. All of these things that contain within them great points of inflection. sometimes great points of debate are going to reach that place and they're going to cause a bit of a disaster. And I think if you guys think that right now the fighting is bad, I don't think you guys are prepared for how bad it's going to get. We have already seen some fracturing in like all types of left spaces and this is what happens right a movement or a space it's not here forever. Nothing is here forever. Especially not groups of people who don't have much personal relationships converging on like capitalist social media platforms to try to talk about making the world a better place. Like that's never going to last a very long time. It's always just going to like emerge, do something important for a while, and then basically explode.

[00:07:15]And we can see that now. What we call bread tube basically doesn't exist.

[00:07:20]There are so many different corners of it that have pretty significant differences with each other. Sometimes they clash very publicly. There's also a lot in this space that gets energetically put towards like the beef between different content creators or the desire for callouts rather than even expounding more on those those ideas.

[00:07:39]Right? So, I guess basically what I'm trying to say is it was the late 2010s.

[00:07:44]It was important that people saw left-leaning voices online kind of push back against a moment in which the online right was perceivably ascendant.

[00:07:53]That was always going to collapse. There was signs of fracturing from the beginning. What that means is not just like it's this person who's the problem.

[00:08:01]It's this group of creators that's the problem. It's this particular media network or this ideology that's the problem. What that means is it emerged and then just as quickly it exploded and more new things are being built from those ashes. I think us also just a lot of people have radicalized for various reasons over the past 10 years. A lot of people have decided you know what the way things are right now is unlivable.

[00:08:29]The way that the things that I'm seeing are unacceptable. People are angry like the way normie [ __ ] used to just be like oh my gosh like did you see Rihanna's new song with Drake and now pop culture is like the billionaire class is going to destroy us the Epstein files Luigi Manion can you believe what Sam Alman just said about AI I'm getting robbed at work I can't afford healthcare genocide genocide genocide right like this is normmy conversation online this is [ __ ] that gets a 100,000 200,000 a million ion likes on Instagram regularly. So these were not ideas that were at all like perceivable in the mainstream realm 10 years ago and now they are and now that they are for a space to really have power it has to be kind of pushing itself and pushing the limits in the sense and sometimes we push ourselves but we don't think about the external so we don't push the limits. So we just oh I'm going to self-improve self-improve but I'm not going to improve anything outside of me. I'm not gonna fight anything outside of me. And then sometimes or most of the time online, we want to push the limits, but we don't want to push ourselves. We don't want to self-critique, but we want to criticize others. And that's something that I've been talking about a few times recently.

[00:09:42]So, what the reason that I'm going to be talking about this book today is that it's quite remarkable in how much it folds all of these ideas into its thesis. I mean, it is ostensively, right, a book about climate change. It's a book about climate change politics.

[00:09:58]Climate realism is the term. It's a book about capitalism, but if you read some of the quotes, I'll have the I'll pull the PDF up in a second, but like you know, you have other really renowned authors basically describing it as wide ranging as like bringing together political, cultural, and psychological thought, says Julia Steinberger. The first quote was Raymond Goce. It changes what politics means in terms of what climate disruption is now. So like this type of [ __ ] is I think mindblowing. I think if you are used to reading, you know, community posts and tweets, and if you are used to listening to some YouTuber, usually a guy, talk about the news of the day with ex streamer and ex-politician and ex drama. If you start reading this book, you're going to feel like your brain is exploding. Like, you're going to get five or six pages in and be like, "Oh my god, where was this the whole time? What have I been doing the whole time?" I really mean that because it had a really big effect on me and I have been lucky enough to have a conversation with the author to have talked to him a couple of times and recently upon asking his permission he let me know he would be totally into me reading this book on live stream going through the full thing with you guys.

[00:11:12]So, if that's something you'd be interested in, definitely let me know because I have a reading channel that I can upload the VODs on and I would be really stoked to just read this book with you because it's just I can't get into like just how much it does. But here, I'll give you guys some preview into it. The way I'll preamble this is basically just start by saying like I mentioned at the beginning, the ideas of coloniality and race and gender and imperialism and capitalism. Like it seems like on Bread Tube, you have to go to one guy to get one of those things.

[00:11:44]And then the way that the one guy talks about the one of those things, it's almost like it doesn't really incorporate the other things. Or if it does, it's in passing mention or tenuously. If I want to learn about race on YouTube, I got to find somebody on YouTube who's popular and who just talks about race and doesn't necessarily incorporate other aspects of oppression, which has its benefits and negatives, but in a lot of ways it can be a negative thing because you can't fully understand one of these things is separate from the other. People say it's all connected all the time. It's kind of a cliche phrase, but like genuinely there have been times where I've read something about queerness and sexuality and been like, "Oh my god, like I understand capitalism way better now."

[00:12:28]Like that's the way this is supposed to work. More than that, it can feel like there necessarily is beef between different sectors. So the anti-imperialists are on YouTube and they're like angry about all the other people that aren't talking about anti-imperialism. And then the gender theory people are like angry that other people aren't talking about gender theory sometimes. Same things with regards to like like critical race theory with coloniality, indigenity, right? It feels like everybody's like suffocating and like trying to push each other down for air. And the frustration is always understandable because like when we're talking about mass murder and mass destruction and that is what we're talking about when we talk about any of these things then it becomes quite clear that like yeah this [ __ ] is really important and I get why people will get really really angry about this stuff and sometimes just like meltdown. I don't know what the word is right because I sometimes melt down. I don't tend to try to broadcast it, but there are moments in my life where I'm like I am overwhelmed. I find other people contemptuous. I find other leftists contemptuous right now. Um like I have those moments. So it's not that it's not understandable, but it's just that it's not sufficient. We live in a time period now where we don't have to and we can't afford to just pick one aspect of global imperialism, global oppression to discuss. we don't only have to talk about Palestine in order to talk about Palestine. As a matter of fact, if we're not talking about Sudan, and if we're not talking about Haiti, then we're really struggling in how we can talk about Palestine, if that makes sense.

[00:14:04]And if we're not talking about gender theory and rape culture, then we really can struggle in how we can talk about Palestine. And so, this is a structural issue that occurs on Bread Tube. And what that also means is the most successful content on Bread Tube, which is again like whatever loose category describes left-leaning videos and video essays on YouTube. Whatever content rises to the top is going to be the content that is the most friendly to the most people in the way that makes the most money, meaning it's the most advertiser friendly or it's the most social media engagement baiting, etc. Everybody has that in mind. Nobody is innocent of this when you do this kind of work. I do this kind of work and so I have to think sometimes like damn, how do I talk about Timothy Shalamé today and also talk about I don't know colonialism. Like I got to figure it out. But I'm not innocent of having to think about algorithms. We're using ultimately enemy technology, right? We have to be creative and how we subvert it. That said, because of this, and especially when there's not like a lot of folding these ideas together, no Dan Olsen, then like the biggest left-leaning YouTubers are of course going to be white. The biggest left-leaning YouTubers are of course going to be less inclined to say things that might get, you know, taken off of YouTube or censored. Rape does end up becoming something that's sensationalized rather than discussed in a way that really benefits victims.

[00:15:30]Something I'll talk about later on.

[00:15:32]Somebody on Patreon was asking me to to dive into that topic. You know, talking about Palestine does end up becoming, you know, Tucker Carlson basically weaving white nationalism and anti-semitism like conveniently into a narrative that also like supposedly pro Palestine, right? These are the kinds of things that happen and and that's why it's it's not only important to read, but it's also really important to read newer stuff. Exhausted of the earth is a book that came out in 2024 and I will continue to be recommending newer readings in order to sort of connect these ideas and it's not that reading Markx is irrelevant. I do think everybody should read MarkX at least a little bit. I do think everybody should read Fenol. I do think everybody should read Grahamshi but I also think that you'll notice this on YouTube as well.

[00:16:21]Sometimes people can be frozen in a time period that they talk about. meaning that somebody will be talking about Marx and if they're very, you know, so to speak, orthodox about that Marxism, then it's like their viewpoint on the world is still very colored by like labor struggles looking like people in labor unions and in industries in Europe banding together and doing a specific type of strike. While that's important to learn about, it also can make you really frustrated when you try to apply your ideas in the real world. Like one of the main things that I run into, it seems like a very masculine thing too, like a very male thing. One of the main comments you'll run into online is that idea of why doesn't everybody just do the right thing? Like why doesn't everybody just do the thing that I think everybody should do? Why don't we all just strike right now? While there can be important canonical theory and history books, I think the best way to approach it is to read newer radical interpretations and work incorporating those older frameworks into creating new conceptual frameworks. Meaning like if I'm going to read about race, I really want to read Olu Femi Taio and his book Elite Capture because it's right off the heels of 2020. It's right off the heels of like confronting liberal identity politics in this current moment. If I'm going to be reading about labor struggles, I want to read about labor struggles, you know, in a book like this that talks about it with a view on coloniality, with a view of what's going on not just here, but like what went on in India or Bolivia. Again, like these frustrations can come up because it's like, well, I read Markx write about it so greatly in the 19th century. Why doesn't everybody just read this and then realize that this is the truth and then apply it? And then you end up missing very obvious details, very important qualities of the current moment or a specific context because you've only regarded a specific type of theory from a specific time period as the only thing worth reading, which is in in fact not what the person writing those texts would have wanted you to do at all. So for instance, people are like, why doesn't the United States just strike like the French? Why doesn't the United States just protest like the French? If we protested like the French, we would have da da da da by now. And it's like, do you not understand how different in size, for one, the United States is from France? I mean, the equivalent of that would be calling for like a mass strike in the entire European Union and a little bit more. On top of like the fact that even when we talk about how the French strike, we're generally talking about Parisians, sometimes those Parisian protests are even like sometimes reactionary, right?

[00:19:04]There's not like a shared French spirit of progressivism that has led them to like some sort of enlightened democratic moment. And if you ask French people about the current state of their politics, they might tell you as much.

[00:19:16]Which is not to say that we can't learn something from the French or from anywhere else to apply to different contexts, but it is to say that sometimes we just miss really obvious [ __ ] because we're so angry and we're so focused on our one particular niche and our one particular theoretical framework that is from a particular time without expounding it into now. Another thing is like how do I talk about this? I'll just say, you know, I've had conversations with online white leftist content creators, some of whom are my friends, some of whom are great. You know, it's a lot of great content, but I've had conversations before with with a white online male left content creator where it's clear the ideas that he has have like clear blind spots and like he's not seeing it and like I think he's well-meaning about it, but also like we get to a point in the conversation where I just ask him, you know, what are some things that you've had your mind like sort of shifted on in recent months?

[00:20:14]What are some things that you have changed your opinion on or like really started looking into to bolster your ideology or your ideas in the past few months? And it was very awkward, I have to tell you, because he was like quiet most of the time just thinking like, huh, I don't know. Essentially, he brings up like, well, some people in the organization I'm with have basically told me, you know, that there's some importance to thinking about race and gender as important. And, you know, I'm sitting there and I'm like, uh-huh.

[00:20:49]Right. Then I believe he says something along the lines of but also you don't want to put so much emphasis on like the identity stuff because that can also distract from like understanding like the what we have you know as a class struggle and stuff like that. And I just kind of sat there a little bit confused because it would be one thing if this if this was like 1900. But like we have had over the past hundred years some really seinal really thoughtful work from important Marxists. Not just like you know the liberal identity politics books that you see in your local library that you might find annoying. Oh take a deep breath and think about racism. like Marxists who were in organizations who chronicled decades of labor history like Mike Davis for instance who were specific about like this is what happened. This is how racism and xenophobia was constantly used to destroy socialist movements in the United States. This is what the white working and middle classes did. This is why black and brown radical voices need to be at the forefront of a movement for socialism in the United States. So, as a white male American leftist in 2025, that was last year, like in 2025, it kind of was baffling to be like, man, what do we do about this race stuff?

[00:22:14]Because it's not like you got to, man, I I dug real deep into the into the annals of like African-American history books.

[00:22:20]I think I created a new theoretical.

[00:22:22]Like you don't have to do any of that.

[00:22:24]You could read Mike Davis right now. You could read James Bogs right now. You could read Angela Davis right now. And so I think part of the problem is that a lot of us are new here. I'm fairly new here. Listen, I've been like angry about imperialism since I was like 11. I started learning about imperialism through like Lincoln Park and Rage Against the Machine, you know? I was I was talking about Palestine when I was like 15, 16. I'm 29 now. At the same time, I haven't done this much reading as I've done over the past 2 years and this much work over the past 2 3 years, 4 years. So, I'm pretty new here in a lot of ways, too. And so, I'm not judging. But what I will say is a lot of us aren't recognizing how new we are here. A lot of us aren't recognizing how little we know still. We aren't recognizing how big the reading list is.

[00:23:15]Some of us aren't organized, right?

[00:23:17]Like, I I'm barely organized. And so this could be looked at as a great opportunity where like you observe where we were 10 years ago and where we are now. The consciousness is different. The leftism is more palpable, but we can't act like we just fell out of a coconut tree to quote, you know, everyone's favorite war criminal. So it calls us to be humble. It calls us to have humility and to be really grateful. I know this is kind of [ __ ] up because [ __ ] is bad, but like we should also be really grateful that people went through these struggles already. People sorted out already a lot of the intersections, right? The Black Panthers are a perfect example of like there is no contradiction between black radical thought and anti-imperialism. [ __ ] the Asian-American movement was saying the same thing. We just talked about that.

[00:24:03]Also, if you're not lost in life at 22, like you're not doing it right, April.

[00:24:07]So, don't worry. We should be grateful that we have this opportunity to learn from all of these people that have come before and that we have so many brilliant writers and I'm going to get into the writing in a bit that have done all this reading and more. I mean in the prologue writes that in the course of writing this book and he's not a scientist or he's not a science doctor.

[00:24:29]He makes a joke about that. But in the course of writing this book, he's done his best at digesting the key elements of a few thousand or so natural science papers. This is a person who is a philosopher, who is a political philosopher who has done work about religion in political philosophy. This is a Marxist who's like, "Yeah, guys, like I've done my best to basically think about and get at the key points of about a few thousand natural science papers or not." Like, are you kidding me? Like genuinely, how blessed are we to have that? And yet instead, I think we get trapped because of the way bread tube works in this mentality of like I know what it is already. I have to cuz I argue with this guy on Twitter.

[00:25:11]Palestine and Zionism has been talked about a lot, thank God, over the past couple of years on this platform. One of the few things that we can see as like a bright spot of this particular political moment is a growth in political consciousness about Palestine. something Rashid Khadi has spoken about as well.

[00:25:28]It's a really interesting moment. But like there's still like when I did work researching Zionism and I wrote a piece about anti-semitism as Zionism, like the inextricable anti-semitism of Zionism, I was finding papers and books and historical record of things that I'm like, you know, this seems like it's pretty well covered and yet I never heard anything about this. And this is the difference, right? You go on YouTube, you go on Bread Tube and it's the same five points, very necessary points about spiritually Israeli things and about genocide and about the IDF and da da da. Important to note and also like you think you know what's going on until you start reading. You think you've got the feel for like what this discourse is and it's this Dunning Krueger effect. I really think like we could call it done in Krueger tube at this point because we all are operating as if like oh yeah we know what this is right and it's like no we don't no we don't I'm now going to show you just a few instances in this book small passages where we get real insightful writing and clarification about things that YouTube drama and online left spaces treat as like existentially impossible questions like the things that you would have thought oh I'm never going to get the answers or good thoughts about this that Audi Singh Chery writes about and like just to show you a couple of examples from a book that is sizable also on the point April of like if you're 22 and you're not lost you're not doing it right in this moment you should be feeling some real heavy things like if the past few years haven't shown you how important it is to really confront some of the biggest issues in your own life to really confront some of the ways in which friends and family and institutions and ideas that have shaped your life need to be reigned in or checked or called out or cut off. Like if you're not going through it in some way, you're not doing it right. I'm happy. I'm doing good and I have days where it's like, "Wow, it's all falling apart." Okay. Like you need to let it fall apart. Things need to explode. Like you need that. Also, thank you guys for putting out like Yeah.

[00:27:42]reading resources in the chat to put it to put it lightly. Conor Healey, sometimes I'm overcome with the choice paralysis on subject matter because it's like where do I even begin? Gender theory andor feminism, international history, black radicalism, basic Marxist theory. That's why I'm telling you I'm telling you I'm telling you this book and I think he'd find it really funny that I'm saying this. It's not even to just like fetishize the book. It's just to be like, here's one great example of how all this [ __ ] is like accessible and you don't have to feel like everything is like your your journey can really start here cuz so much folds into this and I'll show you. I'll do recommended reading lists soon. I did one for video essaists or YouTubers a while back.

[00:28:21]Okay, so one of the biggest things about this book, one of its main themes is colonialism. It's the coloniality of climate change of climate crisis. And so there's great quotes on that. For instance, few would claim that the world is decolonized today. If anything, it is less that the world has decolonized than that colonial relations have become more omnipresent. He simultaneously says, right, reconciling is something that a lot of people might struggle with.

[00:28:47]Anti-colonial struggles are not automatically, inevitably, or historically bound to fail. There have been many real victories achieved in the struggle for decolonization. and the politics of a left-wing climate realism, which is his main thing he's advocating for, right, is in many ways a broadened mode of anti-colonial struggle. Fenon's stretched Marxism stretched and transposed further as much as in the metropol and the periphery. It is in its simplest form the very real, very possible mitigation and adaptation scenario for a quasi utopian flourishing for the vast majority of people on Earth. Put differently, leftwing climate realism is the politics of a world relieved from social, economic, and ecological despair and exhaustion. This is absolutely possible. I think this is pace the doomongers. So there's like some hope and optimism in this. But like there's a key idea here tackling a subject of coloniality that I think a lot of white people don't really get. A lot of white leftists might struggle with hopelessness. For instance, in the aspect of anti-colonial struggles.

[00:29:42]Anti-colonial struggles you should look at and be inspired by. You should look at and be like these are things that are really important. I'm going to study them as much as possible. Anti-colonial struggles don't mean that the world is decolonized now. As a matter of fact, it can be that colonial realities are more omnipresent. So, I think for the average white person and for the average, you know, maybe global northerner, middle class person, the feeling is like, so what was it all for? People did these these big things and like it all just ends up the same way but worse.

[00:30:14]Everything is constantly getting worse.

[00:30:16]And it's like no, like there's real gains, real victories achieved in the struggle for decolonization. And you can say that and simultaneously say, hey, well, that doesn't mean that the world has decolonized today. And I think that white western thought really makes you think it's one or the other. Either you're you have to say that like we've decolonized, colonialism's over, the United Nations fixed that, and now all the problems that are occurring today are just a result of like, you know, these nations can't get it together. or what can you do or nothing ever decolonized the evil remains on top and shall forever remain on top all leftist struggles are doomed to failure and in this passage in just this short passage a singer is like look that's not realism what are some of the gains that have been made I mean political independence is still a really a really valuable project right like ask Palestinians sovereignty and independence is still a really valuable and important project and did have important knock-on effects for the colonized of Africa for instance, right? So, this is the kind of thing that this book will break for you.

[00:31:24]This binary mindset. But one of the things that I really love about this book that speaks to exactly how much all these things like all this [ __ ] that you think is impossible on YouTube like comes together in this book is through the concept of the extractive circuit.

[00:31:38]So, I'll read some passages from this.

[00:31:40]So the machinery, he writes, the actual form and function of 21st century capitalism is an extractive circuit which quite literally crisscrosses the world. This idea will change you forever. I'm not trying to be like hyperbolic YouTube guy, but literally like the idea that for one, extraction is the key terminology to understanding not just like the oppression of people, liberation movements, not just like anti- capitalism, whatever, but like extraction, right, of resources, of ecologies, of the environment, an extraction of us, which what happens when you have all of your your vital forces or all this energy extracted from you you get exhausted which what is the terminology that we use to describe an area that has been mined for instance and drained of resources for so long it's exhausted this is an exhausted pipeline for instance right this is a very funny question from faraliko hi is this book even good because I just see it on internet and reviews say other things I don't think you need to ask that I will tell you it's good if you want to read it for yourself and let me know if you don't think it's good then you let me know also Jennifer's points about abbleism extremely important and something that I will say isn't necessarily talked about in this book.

[00:32:57]But there is some really good work that we'll get into another time connecting disability politics with again all of this. But I want to get back to the extractive circuit and you can you can use extraction and the extractive circuit as a great way to understand also proliferation of disability and abbleism circuit which crisscrosses the world. Its global value chains stretched through physical infrastructure and frictionless financial flows at the speed allowed by fossil fuels, telecommunications and geohysical technological psychosocial and bodily limits and optimizations. It connects economically and ecologically dispossessed agricultural communities in the global south with regimes of hyper work in the global north. Pause. Get you some WD40 for that door, bro. You've been telling me that. That's the funny thing. We got creaky doors. This an old house. Sorry, guys. Did y'all hear what was just read? What I just read? It connects economically and ecologically dispossessed agricultural communities in the global south with regimes of hyper work in the global north. And he continues, rare earth sacrifice zones with refugees, migrant labor with social reproduction, ocean acidification and atmospheric carbon with profitable opportunity. It has transformed states.

[00:34:07]It has ripped through biomes and through flesh. I think some people might read that and be like, "Oh, this is like really cool flowery language to describe how [ __ ] everything is." That's not what's happening. What's happening is the exact description of what will make you break this idea in your head that the global north struggle and western leftism or whatever is necessarily separate from a global liberation struggle. Like it is a key way to understand it, the extractive circuit.

[00:34:37]So here's what I mean. We get taught sometimes about oppression of the global south, about imperialism, about dispossession. And so it's like there's this thing happening online about like, well, Americans and Canadians and Europeans and a and Australians and da da da like are robbing the global south.

[00:34:55]You guys are treaters, treatists. You guys don't have any like real liberation politics. The only way to like get true revolution is for all of you guys to basically die or something like that, right? Just basically the idea that talking about how universal healthcare is necessary in the United States is like necessarily disconnected from the real oppression going on which is mass murder in the global south. There's a few things that you miss when you have that framework which is that the extractive circuit is essentially that there's a big circuit going around. It's inside the global north. It's inside New York City. It's inside Arizona. And it's also inside Bolivia and it's inside South Africa. And all of it has different effects in different places and manifests in different ways or sometimes very similar ways cuz there's communities that you will go to in the United States that are so poor and so dispossessed that you would be like, I can't believe this is supposed to be the quote unquote global north. There's people suffering so bad here. And I've seen people have debates about like, would you rather be homeless in the US or homeless in Colombia? And it's like, I can't believe anybody having that debate has ever been homeless. Because the reality is it's dispossession does not discriminate. Well, it does discriminate, but dispossession does not spare people based off of what borders they're around. It finds whatever it can dispossess and dispossesses. And racism and sexism and imperialism are these key ways in which it does that. And this is a key point that Areas just made in the chat. They aren't the same fight if we aren't also working towards liberating the global south. It is not just a liberal viewpoint, but I would say it's a reactionary and imperialist viewpoint to your point to advocate for US rights and forget the exploitation of others one million%. But if you see it as like our struggle is interconnected, then you avoid two things. One, you avoid ignoring the global south. You avoid ignoring imperialism. You avoid ignoring the evil being perpetuated in order to, I don't know, build a building, a big tall building or or an iPhone. But it also makes it so that when you are talking about the global south, you do not have a a white western savior viewpoint of it. This is a key thing that I think for some reason people have like not thought about very much lately.

[00:37:11]I feel is that like just because you are talking about the poorest people and the biggest humanitarian crisis in Sudan and this particular genocide and you're just talking about them does not mean you are doing them favors because you can easily adopt a savioristic mentality if you do not recognize how what they are going through what they are being put through is not in some way connected to what you're going through which doesn't mean that you're at the same level my struggle is exactly the same as somebody in Gaza right now not at all. But it's to say that the same people that want to kill children in Iran are the same people that want to kill my family here through overwork, through medical negligence, through state violence. The same people that want to kill protesters here, the same people that want to kill immigrants here. We often do this thing of oppression Olympics where we're debating like who's got it worse. And every time we do that, the people doing it to all of us are sitting there rubbing their hands and laughing. Oh god, we've bought another day. We've bought another month of time. And so that's where the difference has to be is that folks in the global north have to say, I'm not turning my back on these people. I see their struggle as completely necessary because that trade that society society is talking about in the chat. It doesn't work. I'm basically handing the people that are killing me and my people a benefit. I believe there's a digital version you can purchase as well. Yeah. So some really good writing to sort of pinpoint exactly what this is, right? Chery talks about the Philippines and talks about the Filipino economy being increasingly dependent on the export of lowcost labor largely along gendered lines, care workers in North America and Europe and extremely lowcost manual laborers to the Gulf States. So remittances make up 10% of the annual GDP of the Philippines. So you have a lot of delving into the Gulf States exploitation essentially slave labor of global south workers right in the Gulf for instance male Asian workers are are considered additionally useful as less politically menacing than local and regional alternatives. Then he says something interesting. He says now imagine a global north worker across the globe likely middle class probably white but not necessarily so. Place her in California an increasingly unsuitable geography for mass human habitation.

[00:39:24]Those fires bros. Say she's white collar, perhaps an office assistant, accountant, or coder. In the 1970s, her labor, and now I'm shifting from the general philosophical she, would likely have been lower in waged hours than it is today. And it would have included, in the famous phrase of Orley Hawkchild, a second shift of unwaged free domestic labor. Cooking, cleaning, care, work, the often invisible aspects of social reproduction found in the home. Today, our imaginary Californian works longer hours in a productively optimized labor process, still for a lower wage than a male counterpart. even as part of her second shift is now itself displaced onto migrant labor, including everything from general health care services to at home family care and domestic work to independent contract labor for household maintenance, which can range from food preparation and delivery to and concentrated urban centers, laundry, and far beyond. The extractive circuit produces prodigious amounts of such disposable people. So, what happened here? You as the global north worker now have to work two or three shifts. But don't worry, all the home care stuff that you can't do now because of how exhausted you are, that's now the migrant laborers work because we figured out how to do that. We figured out how to make a Filipino do the food thing for you, a Mexican person do the food delivery thing for you, home care, everything. Now that we've given you that, work 50 shifts, work 60 hours a week, never stop working. The 40-hour work week is is essentially ephemeral.

[00:40:46]You're always working. You're never making enough money. You can't afford healthcare. You're stressed. You're stressed. You're stressed. And now that's opened up even less ability for you to see solidarity with poor migrant laborer doing these other things in the city to keep the system running or now a robot doing the work for instance. Sorry who but now that robot that robot depends on killing or displacing or disabling black and brown people in the United States and outside of it. So one framework, the online left framework is you dumb American leftist, you dumb European leftist. You just can't see how privileged you are. You can't understand like how much all that you do is peanuts in comparison to somebody suffering in the global south, right? It's essentially there are people starving in Africa. You remember when people used to say that there are people starving in Africa? Your parents used to say that when you wouldn't eat your breakfast.

[00:41:37]didn't want to take the time to understand why you weren't eating as much food or why you were complaining about certain things you had the right to complain about because there are kids starving in Africa. It's strictly a reactionary viewpoint. You can't do anything about your own conditions cuz everything about your own conditions is good because it necessarily is based on the destruction of somebody else. All they've done with it is added some leftist framework to it. You can't complain about anything because and this is not I'm not even saying people actually have this viewpoint, but you kind of get this feeling online. You deserve nothing and your life is good objectively specifically because you are robbing these people without re recognizing that it's somebody else doing it in order to keep working and exploiting you. And you can simultaneously be like, "Yeah, I'm privileged compared to these people, but also we both have the same enemy. We both have the same enemy. I should center and prioritize those people in my activism. I can't sit here and only think about my health care. I have to think about these [ __ ] migrants. And like not in the I got to get these migrants out of here way, which a lot of them are also convincing you to do, but in the yo, this is what they're doing to these people. And by doing that, they [ __ ] us over more. So, you see how there are these things that appear like contradictions, but in actuality, they're connected. And if you're only engaging with debate and online argument, you miss basic [ __ ] If you fight for Palestinian rights, if you fight for migrant laborer rights for the Nepalese and the Mexican and the Honduran immigrants in your neighborhood who might be undocumented, who are barely making enough to feed anybody, have to work three jobs a day. If you prioritize and center them, you will also make gains on the same [ __ ] that is killing you. But the West doesn't want you to think that. Whether it's Western right-wingers, Western leftists, or Western centrists, or Western liberals, they're all focused on making you think these things are are completely separate and that there's just something wrong with you. There's something wrong with you. That's it. Why? Because it would really suck for people who have power for you to know that that's not true.

[00:43:46]for you to see that it's connected. It would really suck for them. And that's why even the idea of global north versus global south, right? I've talked about this in the past and it's going to be brought up as well when I put out this next video essay on the Elliot Sang channel. This idea like, oh, the global north has it good and the global south has it bad is like useful in some ways, true in many ways, but the closer you get to it, the more you realize, oh, it's not about just what country you're in. It's not even strictly about what you look like, although it has a lot to do with those things. It's about a circuit. It's a circuit, a massive extractive circuit that's affecting basically everyone except the elites who are doing you're either doing the extracting or you're being extracted from. So that means that like in the global north, there are people outside your window right now. Take a look around. If you're in some US city or some Canadian city, look out your window right now. Somebody in one of these houses or somebody on the street is abjectly like in a destitute economic situation, a precarious situation beyond your understanding, is suffering from a disorder that's so severe in its negative impacts and so untreated and so uncared for and they are poor and they can't afford anything and they're barely surviving. They might be about to die right now. Simultaneously, if you're in the global south right now, if you are in Brazil, you're in Indonesia, I don't need to tell you this, but if you look around, you know exactly who the people are that have the money are, don't you?

[00:45:16]You know exactly who's got the power in this in this city that you're living in right now, don't you? It's those [ __ ] politicians. It's those [ __ ] rich white girls, rich light-skinned girls, those rich white and light-skinned boys, those athletes, business owners, family group business. At Latin America, they got what they call like the family group, the business group, group of lux in Chile. Those people have everything.

[00:45:40]They are living better than most of us are living in the United States. And like there are people that make the decision, you know what, in the United States or in some other global north country, I'm making a middle class workingass salary and that's bothering me a lot. And I'm at the point where, you know what, I'm going to move to a Latin American country. I'm going to move to Mexico City or I'm going to move somewhere in Asia. I'm gonna move to somewhere in Southeast Asia, Thailand right now, Cambodia right now. And I'm going to live like a king. And again, I don't have to tell you this if you're in the global south right now. Isaia says in S. Paulo, we call them Enzos because that's what the most pretentious white name is, right? Taking so me so much not to dox myself because yes, I can quite literally step outside and see those people easier than you'd believe. So, let me tell you something, bro. Let me ask those of you global south people in the chat right now. If you're in Brazil, if you're in Mexico, wherever you're at right now, South Africa, wherever you're at, Haiti, wherever you're at right now, is it everybody that's in your country against the United States and against the imperialists? Is it everybody in your country are in it together? [ __ ] no. It's a circuit that's affecting you and it's affecting, you know, the majority of people in your country in a very specific way. And it's affecting specific indigenous communities in your country in a very destructive way. And at the same time, it just happens to be avoiding the Enzo. It just happens to be avoiding the rich kids in your neighborhood. Somebody said C in the chat and then deleted it. I think that's really awkward. I think I knew what you were trying to say though. Kavisha, Indian people who earn in dollars and then can spend in rupees. You guys know exactly what I'm talking about. But [ __ ] west western thinking has people convinced that as soon as you enter the United States you are rich and then as soon as you enter Peru you are poor and so the rich Peruvians are suffering and the poor Americans are exploiting them.

[00:47:36]Like this is the thought process that people haven't worked out. And then I've seen people try to defend it like, well obviously obviously it's not everybody but like the vast vast majority of people in the global south are poor and it's because of those damned Americans.

[00:47:50]And it's like okay but which ones? If it's the same group of Americans that are doing it to those people with of course the levels of tacid support or tacid ignorance from people in the in the United States, but those people are working with people in your global south country or in those global south countries and also being supported or ignored by the middle and upper middle classes of your country who are ignorant, who turn their eyes away, who just want to succeed. It's the dynamic replays itself. It's just that certain countries are quote unquote lower on the on the totem pole. But even if we all evened it out, so everybody had the same GDP or whatever metric, economic metric, that's silly, but you can look at, you know, the same dynamic would be happening because it's not about strict location. It's about where you are in the extractive circuit. Many Nigerians are obsessed with the US. Yeah. Brazil has internalized bootstraps and grind culture the United States. Yeah.

[00:48:45]Respectability politics is so so ingrained in West African culture is so sad. Yeah. Like coloniality is not just this white guy being like, "Give me that at a brown person." It is that and that's happening. But it's also the white guys in the brown people's country that's like, "I'm the same as the brown people." It's an extractive circuit. The last thing that I'll talk about and then close, but briefly, I'll just talk about also violence and nonviolence and ideas of what we do about the things that we're doing because this is where queerness comes into play. Do we have queer people in the chat? throw some different queer pride flags in the chat because a lot of you might think that this is irre identity politics. No, but this is actually a really interesting thing that Chry does in this in this book to really incorporate queer theory and feminist or gender theory into this conversation. Not just to, you know, you'll hear your average leftist or liberal be like queer people in the global south and that's it, right? But like to actually understand like how much you need to understand queerness and you need to be queering yourself in certain ways or you need to be deconstructing gender and queerness in order to participate in these anti-colonial and anti- capitalist struggles. Shout out to all the flags in the chat. We got trans flags, we got pride flags, we got rainbows, we got trans mask gender queers, we got yay, I'm gay in the chat. Right here's a really cool paragraph. Follow me. So this is in the middle of talking about sort of the idea of violent resistance.

[00:50:14]There is the necessity of official electoral politics to take state power to have pressure points within states.

[00:50:19]The lever of labor and strikes understanding the nature of political strikes and the blurry historical lines between lawful, peaceful and violent strikes. There are the institutions of counterhedgemonic organization, education and care. So just to stop there for a second for again the online left and online liberal space has got you thinking you're either an electoralist or you're not, which I just it's just kind of strange. Electoralism can be perpetuated by people who don't vote. Electoralism can be perpetuated by people who only vote for radical left third party candidates. Electoralism is not you've participated in an election.

[00:50:54]Electoralism is you think that the election is the main thing to focus on.

[00:51:00]That's why electoralism in many ways is a problem because and this is what I mean about even the left, right? A lot of people think that if you say if you just mention online, yeah, I went to vote in the local uh election to vote against this bill. Online will be like, you just killed a black person right now. And it's like, what the [ __ ] just happened? You literally are bombing me.

[00:51:23]You've just bombed me. It's very funny.

[00:51:25]Like a lot of times it'll be the same people who are like leftists and who are like, I hate liberal identity politics.

[00:51:31]I hate liberal frameworks. No liberal frameworks. And then they'll also just like invoke the same kind of a effective declaration of harm rhetorical strategy that liberals do, which is like instead of saying, "You just hurt my feelings.

[00:51:45]You just offended me." It'll be like, "You just hurt a poor person in the global south's feelings." Okay. Yeah, I did trip by saying black people because it's just like it's really brown people.

[00:51:54]They'll always say brown people, right?

[00:51:55]Because they don't really think about a lot of folks don't really do that application to like African politics for instance, but sometimes they do. In reality though, it's like instead of saying your point that you just made is completely irrelevant because you mentioned this word and that word is bad, like a lot of leftists online will do the same thing, but the word is I voted, right? Or the word is electoralism or the word is like we're comparing candidates. So like I don't think people actually think this in real life but in online left discourse you will get this impression of like I can't even have a conversation about voting being the fifth most important thing that I do but still do it without somebody being like and that is why you are basically Benjamin Netanyahu and it's like that's liberal what that is is liberal instead of having a conversation about strategy and collective organizing to maximize different levels of power you are having a conversation about this person's individual morality and whether or not they should be discredited based off of whether or not they are using the terms that you like and based off of whether or not they share the same moral and ethical values as you onetoone. The key is that we can't rely only on voting and honestly a lot of times voting has to go low on the on the on the totem pole. So this is what Chowder is saying.

[00:53:13]It's like, yeah, the problem with the nonviolent [ __ ] and the electoralism [ __ ] is that these people will say it and nothing else. Peacefully protest, but nothing else. Vote, but nothing else. It's literally that thing of like, man, all this [ __ ] is so terrible right now. Like, the world is collapsing.

[00:53:28]Genocide is occurring. You know, our countries are doing it. Imperialism, capitalism, da da, we got to go vote, man. It's like that's not you got you hear yourself, right? Same thing with like nonviolence, nonviolent peaceful protesters. And so people are like again western binary. Is it I should protest or is it that I should burn [ __ ] down?

[00:53:48]Should I do mutual aid or should I do violence? And it's like look this is for demonstration purposes only. I'm not advocating violence on my channel. I would never I would never advocate for violence on my channel. But but but it's not a binary. As a matter of fact, if you know history and I'll actually skip to a different passage here, right? Ask any Indian leftist. Gandhi's nonviolent peaceful demonstration worked because also there were a bunch of Indian leftwing militants that were ready to scrap. That's literally how it works is that one guy has the stick and one guy has the carrot. That's how it worked.

[00:54:25]Civil rights movement, black people in the 60s, they emphasize Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King. And then they trap you by making you think, well, Martin Luther King was actually not effective cuz he was only advocating for peace. But you didn't actually realize that the reason Martin Luther King was effective was that he was advocating for peace and also there were a bunch of black civil right militant leftists who were like and also I will burn some [ __ ] down by Singh right because that's how they do us. You don't understand like they give us a peaceful choice like just comply with the law so that like if you don't try you know comply with what exactly what they tell you to do then it's like well of course violence is going to happen of course violence is going to happen but this is western liberal ideology that then manifests in people who are decrying liberals online that they haven't killed the liberal in their own head because they're stuck in the binary like there's a passage where he talks about Gandhi as Grahamshy described Gandhi in the Indian anti-colonial movement in the 1920s that was a war of position which at certain moments becomes a war of movement and at other times underground warfare it was in other words civil war and then he goes on to say while the popular image of Indian independence is of nonviolent success through Gandhi sacha graa gshi's actually understating the case before and after Gandhi returned from South Africa they were both spontaneous uprisings and planned attacks while Gandhi and the Indian national congress proceeded in fits and spurts with formal politics and Gandhi's famous non-violent actions and prefigurative communities as all serious scholarship on possibly the world's best known case of mass as nonviolent social transformation attests. Its success rested in no small part on violence. And again to speak to the western duality, what then you as a westerner or a western trained colonializedrained person will say is, "Yeah, Gandhi did do [ __ ] Nonviolence never does anything. You have to be violent. Violence is the only thing that works." It's like, "No, you got formal and informal." These are Western colonial binaries. I I keep saying that, but it's really true. again. So, queer folks, I didn't forget about you. We're going to talk about this. We're going to talk about gender. Okay. Also, Gandhi was a predator. Yeah. That that like separate conversation about Gandhi. But the point is tactics. What we're talking about is tactics. Queerness and women's organization, so to speak, has always played an extremely essential role in every revolution. And these things necessarily then work together. In a philosophical examination, Maggie Fitzgerald argues that an ethics or politics of care does not preclude or logically dissolve Fenolon's political theory, including his understandings of violence. I would add that this is not only not a theoretical problem, it is a political necessity. Spaces and practices of care are part of the transactional beginnings, or again, as Gilmore puts it, the constant interaction of solidarity. Fitzgerald astutely argues that feminist and queer ethics of care are particularly compatible with Fenonian politics.

[00:57:10]Moreover, Fenon's own writings and psychiatric practice which do not celebrate some kind of triumphant swaggering warrior made whole by violence but rather emphasize how inflicting violence, bombings, attacks, deaths leave so many anti-colonial fighters fundamentally broken. alongside his serious lacun demand them. As Sugaya Dvventari meticulously reconstructs, there is a mutual influence between Simon Zuvoir's feminist arguments about justified political violence and fenons.

[00:57:36]And yet, gendered and racialized lacun gendered and racialized lacun. Lacun mean gaps. Okay, basically you can say gaps. Gendered and racialized gaps blind us to the practical implications of political militancy and ethical care work as complimentary and reinforcing.

[00:57:51]I've been using the find button to pull up specific passages. Right. Queerness is talked about specific times, right?

[00:57:57]Queer theorists are cited multiple times in this book. Feminist and queer ethics of care are particularly compatible with Fenonian politics. Lee Edelman's radical queer critique of futurity. The radical possibility of queer politics is precisely in embracing the pure juicance of non-productive sexuality as set against that of reproductive futurism.

[00:58:14]The best answer to the deep inscription of providential or reactionary history is to take seriously the seemingly hyperbolic right-wing critique that queer life might be a challenge to nothing less than civilization itself.

[00:58:24]In essence, yeah, like queerness can and will destroy the system, the civilization that we have now. And that's a good thing and that's why they don't want you to do it, right? And this means for instance like he does you know in-depth description of specific movements the specific solidarity movements that are like it required men doing care work it required women being on the front lines interchange of those gendered roles played a huge role in the success of XYZ movement. So again like we have this idea from liberalism and from western leftism and from western thought right not to do I'm not doing the Gabriel Rockill western western Marxism thing. It's not a conspiracy.

[00:59:03]It's just the way we think because of colonialism. Has us thinking like, well, it's either care work or it's civil war and simultaneously has us thinking like queerness is a matter of inclusion.

[00:59:14]Queer people have to be included. And then so we think that's all the politics is. And so then you have a lot of leftists online who are like, why are you bringing up queer [ __ ] when I'm trying to talk about colonialism? not knowing that queerness is antic-colonial because changing gender relations and also platforming and securing the feminized and the queer role as crucial is extremely important to any revolutionary movement. You know, if you do any research about the Haitian Revolution, this comes up. It comes up.

[00:59:44]Who do you think was feeding the soldiers? Who do you think was conducting the meetups? where what pretext do you think conducted the meetups in which people used coded language to plan out insurrection? It required women and spiritual leaders and healers, right? And it required also queered gender relations. There was literally a a figure in the Haitian Revolution who rebelled against the French and took over a town like multiple towns I believe who called himself so to speak a priestess and said that he was the embodiment of a goddess of a priestess goddess figure. Voodoo was crucial in the Haitian Revolution.

[01:00:23]So all this stuff is not separate. You don't have to think it's one or the other and you don't have to get caught up in debate and debate and debate because there is no debate. All you're looking at is different faces of the same struggle. So, this is where I'll leave you as far as this conversation.

[01:00:41]If you would like, come join us. I am going to announce on my community post soon dates on which I will read this book live chapter by chapter and discuss it with you. Because in order to read books, you know, and this is a point I probably waited too long to say, like it's more than just again western individualized binary idea of like the guy reading like this by himself. This is a new method of knowledge transference that just got platformed and became hegemonic in the past couple hundred years. For millennia, humans passed knowledge down through conversation. They passed knowledge down through creating spaces, through having specific storyteller figures, griots. So we can never get what we want out of the world and change the world in any positive way like this by ourselves.

[01:01:30]That's why it's important that people have book clubs and reading groups. And that's why I think with Bread Tube, it died because people need something else.

[01:01:38]They no longer need the old form of knowledge transference where we do a song and dance and we wear a costume. No disrespect to people to singing and dancing in costumes. I like them. And then we like work in conversations about how bad the rightwing is as we also talk about a video game or a film. I'm not saying that should never exist ever again, but no longer is that something that people need. What people need is spaces to read together. I don't need debate. I need people to read together.

[01:02:06]You don't need debate. You don't need content. You don't need online arguments. You need to read. And everybody isn't going to agree at the same time. Everybody isn't going to have the same opinions. But we're going to find that a lot of our divergences actually make it stronger and how we work together, not weaker. And like even just yeah, written language separate conversation, but yeah, like written language, it isn't just this this individualized scholarship being the only way to do proper knowledge. That's not actually how the world should work or how it works. That's imposed on us.

[01:02:39]And then the last thing I'll say is don't drag me into nothing. I don't want any smoke. I don't have any interest in beefing with people because that's not what I'm here to do. I recognize that me and my platform, you know, my Patreon's in the description if you want to support it. I have more than enough Patreons right now. I'm in a very lucky position, but I could always use more just for, you know, bills and things like that. But I I have a little space where I like to talk about reading and discuss it. I like to promote literacy and not just literacy like I know what this word means and I can pass a test.

[01:03:09]literacy, like actual literacy, like actually hearing a word and and knowing a bit about what it means or the context of it, digesting things. Like, we're all trying to get more literate. I'm going to make recommendations on YouTube and sometimes on Patreon of different resources you can tap into. People on YouTube right now doing some of this work that isn't getting talked about, that isn't getting censored and left this discussion because the old ways are currently dying. And when a living being dies, it has a way of making a lot of noise.