{"id":13884,"date":"2025-04-24T21:49:33","date_gmt":"2025-04-25T01:49:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=13884"},"modified":"2025-04-27T21:28:11","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T01:28:11","slug":"listening-to-victors-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2025\/04\/listening-to-victors-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Listening to Victor\u2019s Children\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tempest:<\/span> Can you tell us a little bit about your political background?<\/strong><\/p>\n

David Camfield:<\/span> 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. It\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> in 2000-01. In Winnipeg, where I\u2019ve lived since 2003, things have often been pretty slow politically but I\u2019ve 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\u2019d been in had come to an end and I didn\u2019t think any of the multi-city Canadian groups would be politically hospitable for me.<\/p>\n

Tempest:<\/span> You launched Victor\u2019s Children in early 2021 and have just passed fifty episodes. What was the impetus for starting this project?<\/strong><\/p>\n

DC:<\/span> 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Tempest:<\/span> What are the major running themes across the episodes?<\/strong><\/p>\n

DC:<\/span> That\u2019s an interesting question I haven\u2019t really thought about. I guess one theme is understanding and responding politically to the changing capitalist world we\u2019re living in \u2013 a world in which the U.S. and other Western states aren\u2019t 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\u2019t. 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\u2019s awful neo-Stalinist book Western Marxism<\/em>, which was recently published in English translation. A few episodes have been about theory\u2014the one with the most listens so far is David McNally (who has the same political background as me) on \u201cDialectics Demystified,\u201d probably because he can explain complex ideas so clearly.<\/p>\n