1. How I became a socialist and my ideology👇🏽
    After being repeatedly beaten by Maslow’s Hammer, I’ve arrived at Epistemological Pluralism grounded in literal materialism, the scientific method as my lingua franca of reason. Much to the outrage of my parents, in the late 1960 and early 70s I was radicalized by both sets of grandparents’ profound beliefs in solidarity economics, with my maternal grandfather losing his license to practice medicine due to underground activities and barely avoiding imprisonment. I became active in an underground food cooperative, or conspiracy as we called it, volunteered at the Cincinnati Free Clinic/FreeStore after school, contributed graphics and sold copies of the Eye, or The Independent Eye, an anti-war, counter-culture underground newspaper originally working out of Yellow Springs, then Cincinnati, Ohio. I transferred from Walnut Hills High to New Morning, Ohio’s first free school experiment, further alienating my parents bougie Black aspiring capitalists, and found myself active in environmental justice, Black and Queer liberation through public visual art and music. For the past 40 years, I’ve primarily identified as an eco-socialist within a green culture that is filled with passive-aggressive white supremacists, who comfortably cosplay as socialists. Just as I believe in direct action, I also believe communication by demonstration of socialist principles will capture more hearts and minds than pedantic lectures and dialect arguments alone. I advocate our dialectic would greatly benefit from real-world empirical research that many reject, and to that end, I do not accept the common assertion that cooperatives and non-profits are intrinsically reactionary and cannot be socialist.
  2. What are your thoughts on intersectionality? The role of marginalized people in revolutionary politics?👇🏽
    I’m a 68-year-old Black Trans Lesbian and feminist who transitioned socially, medically, legally over 25 years ago, losing my entire family, my friends including gay and lesbian who reject the legitimacy of trans identity, and watched as my career went up in flames. I was deeply pained to also find myself not accepted in Black socialist communities, many of which are dominated by cis men, and Black Womanist/Feminist communities, both of which are commonly gender essentialists and have repeatedly treated me with the same cynical suspicion and I normally associate with mainstream Europeans and European-Americans who embrace whiteness.
  3. Explain why patriotism in the imperial core is different to national liberation and why it is incompatible with socialism?👇🏽
    State violence, interventionist militarism, socio-economic coercion and domination, can never be justified as patriotic.
  4. Are markets compatible with socialism, explain in your view why it is or isn’t.👇🏽
    Private property should not exist, so markets in the conventional understanding would not have a basis for existing when all capital is cooperatively owned and curated by the proletariat.