Listening to Victor’s Children 

Tempest: Can you tell us a little bit about your political background?

David Camfield: I came to radical politics in Ottawa when I was in high school in the late 1980s, mainly through the peace movement and Christian liberation theology. I was fortunate to meet the local branch of the International Socialists (IS), which I joined. In hindsight, the IS had real problems but I got a really good introduction to socialism from below politics and classical marxist theory from the group. Along with its version of Trotskyist orthodoxy I got a streak of commitment to heresy and thinking for ourselves, thanks to a few members. This was invaluable because it later helped me rethink the politics I’d learned in the IS. Movements around abortion access and the 1991 Gulf War were formative experiences for me, and feminist and queer liberation politics were important influences.

I became part of a minority of the IS that concluded not just that the leadership of the IS Tendency (the international network to which the IS belonged) was wrong in important ways about what was happening in the world but that our approach to socialist organization, what we thought of as building a Leninist organization, was flawed. It’d contributed to sectarianism, undemocratic practices, and an internal culture with some really negative features. The IS had also failed to recognize that there was a crisis of working-class self-organization and that there was no vanguard layer of anti-capitalist militants in the working class.

The minority left the IS in 1996 and formed the New Socialist Group (NSG). The NSG evolved and tried to build an organization of independent-thinking, non-sectarian organizers committed to renewing socialism from below politics by learning from movements and ideas they generated. The NSG did some good work, especially in Toronto in the years 2000-2003. I was active in Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3903, which waged a long but winning strike in 2000-01. In Winnipeg, where I’ve lived since 2003, things have often been pretty slow politically but I’ve been active in a number of activist and socialist projects. I became active in the faculty union at the University of Manitoba once the opportunity to do that arose. For a couple of years I was on the executive of the Winnipeg Labour Council when there was a short-lived opportunity to change it. Late in 2023 I joined the Tempest Collective after it decided to admit people in Canada, since the local socialist group I’d been in had come to an end and I didn’t think any of the multi-city Canadian groups would be politically hospitable for me.

Tempest: You launched Victor’s Children in early 2021 and have just passed fifty episodes. What was the impetus for starting this project?

DC: The political reason I started it was a concern with the weak presence on the Left of the kind of socialism from below politics I support, and because there wasn’t an English-language podcast promoting them. Various kinds of Marxist-Leninist politics had become more influential, and various kinds of Trotskyism were visible, but our kind of politics less so, especially for people new to radical politics. I wanted to promote what, from my perspective, are the best kind of politics for the future.

Tempest: What are the major running themes across the episodes?

DC: That’s an interesting question I haven’t really thought about. I guess one theme is understanding and responding politically to the changing capitalist world we’re living in – a world in which the U.S. and other Western states aren’t the only imperialist powers, in which China is increasingly important and a rising imperialist power. Some of those have been about particular developments in so-called Canada, while many aren’t. Another theme is questions that face radicals today, like moralism, sexual violence, whether we should take jobs as union staffers, and how radicals should approach workplace organizing, which is the topic of an upcoming episode. There have been some episodes on histories I think are worth learning about. Another theme has been offering a socialism from below critique of Stalinism and anti-Western campism. The most recent one of those has been about Domenico Losurdo’s awful neo-Stalinist book Western Marxism, which was recently published in English translation. A few episodes have been about theory—the one with the most listens so far is David McNally (who has the same political background as me) on “Dialectics Demystified,” probably because he can explain complex ideas so clearly.

Tempest: Do you know who’s been listening and where they are?

DC: Unfortunately, I don’t have much sense of who listens (I appreciate emails from listeners but they’re rare). Since the podcast began, about half of the listens have been from Canada, with Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg as the leading cities. Most of the rest have been in the U.S., with Chicago the city with the most listens. Next country when it comes to listens is the UK.

Tempest: What have you learned from the guests, or from the experience?

DC: I’ve learned a lot but it all goes into the flow of grist for my mental mill, so to speak, so it’s difficult for me to put my finger on what I’ve learned from doing the podcast specifically. I guess it’s confirmed my belief that there are socialists and other radicals who really want what Victor’s Children tries to offer and who don’t find enough of it out there: serious socialist politics and analysis—different from shallow “easy answer” politics and a lot of the other stuff that’s online—from perspectives that reject social democracy and Marxism-Leninism, presented in relatively accessible, non-academic ways.

Tempest: Why the name, Victor’s Children?

DC: The “Victor” in the name is Victor Serge (1890-1947), the anarchist-turned-Bolshevik-turned-anti-Stalinist-marxist writer. His Memoirs of a Revolutionary is an extraordinary book that influenced me—every socialist should read it because of how Serge writes about so many important experiences he lived through and people he knew or observed. Serge’s idea of “double duty”—“defend the revolution, combat its flaws from within”—and his commitment to lucidity are valuable for us today, I think. I hope the podcast allows the ideas of people who’re in some sense political descendents of Serge, whether or not they think of themselves that way, to reach more people who need these ideas.

Tempest: What specific lessons or insights have you gained about Left media (social media) in producing Victor’s Children?

DC: Only that too few supporters of socialist politics that are neither social democratic/“democratic socialist” nor Marxist-Leninist are making podcasts and producing content on YouTube and other platforms where lots of radicalizing people go for political ideas.

Tempest: More than four years in, how does this project connect with your broader strategic perspective for the Left today?

DC: I think that supporters of socialism from below need to be engaging in the battle of ideas in as many ways as we can that are useful, along with working constructively with other people in workplaces, in communities, and on campuses to strengthen broad organizing that’s as democratic, solidaristic and militant as it can be. Podcasts are one of many ways we should be engaging in the battle of ideas.