You can't take the view of some of the sectarian parties that hard issues can't be confronted when dealing with workers. If you don't confront these issues, what will ever change?

You have to consider all workers as your equals and speak matter of factly about things. People do want to understand things and respect you if you know what they do not know. And you have to respect what they know that you do not.

I think the two issues, racism and chauvinism, are linked. Look at how much weaker was support for U.S. actions in Iraq among black people.

With respect to teaching, I couldn't make sense of mainstream economics when I had to teach it to college students. At the same time, I could see at the school that there was a whole lot of hypocrisy. Not much real respect for the "higher learning."

Most young people are or will soon enough be workers. They can help to energize and radicalize the workers' movement. And what revolution has ever succeeded without youth?

The system has a way of convincing people that because they live in the USA they are better off than all other people in the world. This gets them focused on the wrong things, of course, but it has been a tried and true way of deflecting class struggle, something I don't think Marx didn't fully anticipated. The education system, and the whole culture really, has a lot to do with how these feelings are transmitted to each new generation. When parents say their kids were heroes when they died for nothing in Iraq, you can see the power of this.

Capitalism is, in Mao's language, the main contradiction in the world today and so our efforts have to be focused on ending this system and making a new one.