 And we're talking today with Michael Shukov. Michael Shukov is our special guest. He is going to share his monologue with us. He's a sociologist, a journalist, and an activist scholar. We're gonna find out what that means. And he's an author. We're gonna find out what he's writing about. Welcome to the show, Michael. Thank you, Jay. Very good to be here. So let's talk about CUNY. You went to CUNY. I went to Queens College, which is part of CUNY. And I guess your time was at City College, CCNY, right? No, this may be confusing even for folks who are not familiar with New York. But I was at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Ah, OK. And what did you study there? Sociology. That was my degree. So this is very important. It's a very important thread, because this is going to take us to a discussion of Herbert Marcu's sociology being assessed. So everybody who was watching the show should be writing notes. And it says, use crayon if you have to. Sociology. That's the first short notes on this. OK, then you went to Berkeley. What did you study at Berkeley? Well, I'm going to reverse the chronology on you. But it's very confusing, because I went back and forth between the east and west coasts. I got my bachelor's degree at Berkeley in political science quite a while ago. I don't want to give away my age, but it was 1976 when I graduated. And anyway, so that's where I started out my college career. Many years later, after having done my first graduate work here at UH Manoa and having lived in Seattle for a time and doing some graduate courses there, I moved back to New York, back because I was born and raised in the Bronx until I was 11 years old. So I decided to go home again. Soon found out, as they say, you can't really go home again. But it ended up being a very fruitful experience for me, because I first went to the new school for social research in Lower Manhattan, got my master's there. And then for my PhD program, I switched to the CUNY Graduate Center. OK, so we have this whole constellation of schools. The new school, Berkeley, CUNY. UH. UH, thank you. And it all pops out with Michael Sukoff. And here he is now today. And again, a sociologist, at least primarily. So but you've expanded beyond sociology. You've been a radio journalist in San Francisco. Tell us about your experience as a radio journalist in San Francisco. Well, it was very interesting how I got into that. It was actually in Berkeley on Radio Station KPFA. I had been living there for a number of years. And it was a long stretch of 16 years while I was working on my doctorate, my dissertation, that I worked pretty much full time for the California Public Utilities Commission. Whereas a policy analyst. And one of my colleagues there was a gentleman who was also producing shows for KPFA. So after I left that place of employment, I got in touch with this gentleman who was still producing for KPFA. One thing led to another. He invited me to come watch a show that was being produced there. The show was and is still called the Project Sensored Show. And the fortunate thing for me was, one of the co-hosts was also a sociologist. And as soon as we met... All the best people, you know what I mean? What's that? At heart, we're all sociologists. Yes, that's it. We have to understand the human condition of our society. It's all about sociology. We don't realize it, but there it is. Anyway, you found a camaraderie there? Yeah, and he invited me to be a guest host on the Project Sensored Show. And it was the most wonderful experience. It turned out that he's without tooting my own horn. I'm just quoting, he said, you're a natural on the air. And I really enjoyed it. So that was how I got involved with a radio. What was your show like? It was mostly an interview show. The short description in their advertising blurbs about Project Sensored is they cover the news that doesn't make the news. So it was a lot about covering stories that were either under-reported or mainstream press or not reported at all. And so I would take part in the questioning of our interview guests, post some questions of my own. And at one point, not on that show, I was interviewed about a paper that I had just written that's now the basis for my book on La Cousa. Well, so what kind of subjects did you cover on that show? Everything from Israel, Palestine to what was going on at Standing Rock at the time. I remember we actually, this was radio, remember? There was no video component, but we interviewed live on the ground, a gentleman who was in Standing Rock. We asked him questions about what was happening on the scene. So it was current issues? Yeah. Current events, current? Yes, mostly it was. Public issues. Yeah, it was always public issues. Yes, yes. You know what's interesting about radio? I think there was on radio for eight or nine years back on a Hawaii public radio from 2001 forward. And I always felt that radio had a special quality to it and I'll tell you why. With decent reception, you can hear the breathing. And breathing tells you so much about how this person is doing, how it's reacting. You know, it's the roar of the grease bent and the smell of the crowd kind of thing. It gives you another sensory dimension. And you don't really get that on video. You don't get the breathing. It may have good sound, but you are distracted maybe by the video and you don't listen for the breathing. You know, it's like in the Japanese culture, one of the challenges is to tell the other person's health by listening to that person breathing. And there's a lot to say about that. So I think radio is still a tremendous force in terms of communicating to the public. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. Okay, anyway, so beyond that, you describe yourself as an activist scholar. And I want to explore that with you, Michael. I understand scholar. You know, a scholar, you can be a scholar, get a PhD like you have and you're a scholar, bingo. But an activist scholar, that's not so common. What is an activist scholar and what is it for you, Michael? Well, let me start out with what it is for me. I guess this goes back to when I was in high school and about to go to college. I turned 18 in my senior year and back in those days, there was a draft and there was a war in Vietnam going on. And I had to make some decisions about how to approach registering for the draft. At that time, many of your viewers and listeners who are significantly younger may not know that, they may know there was a draft, but they may not know how it worked. There was a lottery system. So on a certain day of each year, 365 numbers were picked for the 365 days of the year. And you get a number, the lower the number, the more likely it was that you get drafted and you go possibly to fight and die in Vietnam. So at the time that I turned 18, I did register for the draft. They hadn't done the lottery yet. So I was really concerned. I was very much against the Vietnam War and this starts to get to the activist part of my upbringing. I had a father who was very much against that war and he was also a strong supporter of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. And so I was brought up, I wouldn't say brainwashed, hopefully not, but I was brought up with certain values around doing the right thing and to question authority. And so by that time, and I also didn't wanna get killed and I didn't believe in that war. So I had to scramble to find out like, what am I gonna do if I get a low number? So I went to see a draft counselor and I ended up applying for conscientious objector status, which maybe some of your younger listeners and viewers may not know. That was a status that enabled someone to do what's called alternative service. In other words, you had to show that by principle and belief, you could not kill. So I pursued that option and I was very fortunate. I had the support of a black neighbor who was a business man. I had the support of my rabbi and others. I had to go in front of my draft board and make the case that I was a conscientious objector. I was very lucky to be granted that status. So long story short, I had this very early experiences of having to face crucial social, political and world issues and take a stand on them. And that thread has carried with me ever since. I could say a lot more, but I'll... That's okay. Sometimes I wonder, is it people when they say they're activists that are activists on every single protest you could find, including protests that are really not nearly as persuasive or important or correct in terms of the values. And I wonder if you could define for us the kind of activist issues that you're involved in right now today here in 2022. Okay, well that's a leap from then to today, but I would have to say my main form of activism right now is writing the book. And I can explain to you why that is. I'll just say that Herbert Marcuse was a theorist, scholar and activist who was most prominent in the mid to late 1960s, early 1970s. And he took stands on critical social issues. He took a stand in the early days of the environmental and ecology movement. He actually wrote about that movement. But not only that, when you had the May 1968 demonstrations all over the world, and especially in Paris, he was on the front lines. He went and spoke to crowds of students and workers. I think these were anti-war demonstrations. Yes, I should specify that, yeah. He was very much anti-Vietnam War, among other issues. So I've had that model, although I didn't know about Marcuse until I got to Berkeley as an undergraduate. I didn't even know who he was. Berkeley was kind of a hotbed of activism, wasn't it? It was. And the interesting thing was, I got to Berkeley in 1972, which was still felt like the tail end of the 1960s. There were still student marches and protests. It wasn't what it had been a few years before. But that changed my political consciousness. I could say it radicalized me, but I'm very hesitant to use the word radical or radicalized for reasons I can explain to you. But yeah, once I got to Berkeley- Radical is a very, boy, that has overtones a mile wide if you're talking about the late 60s and 70s. There were so many groups who were interested in exploding things and doing violence and kidnapping and what have you. So radical was a pretty dangerous business back then. Yeah, what I would like to say at this point is, and I'm gonna make this point in my book, I've made it before and talks. The original word radical, it comes from a Latin root word, which is radicalis. And it means going to the root of things. It has nothing to do with fundamentalists, Marxist, extremist, violent, any of that stuff. So that term has been appropriated for other purposes. So that's why I wanna say right from the outset, I'm using the term radical in its original meaning, which by the way, Karl Marx also used it in its original meaning. And it has almost nothing to do with the way that term is used now. And I would use another term, but it's like I don't wanna surrender, it's a wonderful term, it comes from the Latin. And there's no other term, I mean, you could say progressive, you could say, you know, try and replace it with another term, but I don't like surrendering our language to the powers of the, if I can say something provocative. Okay, let's get back to the book. Herman Merck, who was born in 1898, died in 1979, as I recall. And he was born and died in Germany. Did he spend a lot of time in the US or was most of his work in Germany? No, okay, he lived and grew up in Germany until 1933. At that time, he had just been studying with the famous German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. But when the Nazis came to power, he and a number of other Jewish intellectuals quickly saw the writing on the wall and they left. So he came to the US, he went to New York first. He was part of what was called the Institute for Social Research, which had been in Frankfurt, Germany, but it was reestablished at Columbia University in New York City. So he was there for, I don't remember exactly, a few years, and then he ended up getting a teaching position at Brandeis University. And but he ended up in California and he spent the last number of years of his life teaching, writing. He was teaching at UC San Diego, but he also did a lot of traveling. I saw him when he came up to Berkeley two different times. Is that a life-changing moment for you, Michael? Well, it's funny, it was a subtly life-changing moment. What I remember is the first time I saw him, there was a big conference in this, what's called Polly Ballroom on the Berkeley campus. It's a huge conference center with many smaller rooms. So there were breakout rooms. And so I went to one of these breakout rooms. I can't tell you exactly what the topic was, but it had to do with psychology. And I walked in there, there were maybe five or 10 people in there. I see this elderly gentleman just sitting there. I knew it was Markuza, probably because either I had seen pictures of him or I don't remember having ever seen him in person before. But that struck me and he was very quiet. He said a few things, but nothing that I could say, wow, that was a life-changing moment. But it struck me. And then a couple of years later, there was an off-campus institute called the Institute for Social and Cultural Studies. It was sort of like an alternative, not free university, but there were people who came there who were activists, some were Marxists, some were not. And he came there to speak. There was a church in the same building. And I just remember this booming German voice. You couldn't miss it for anything. And by that time, I had started reading him. So that humility was a life-changing moment. The other thing I want to mention is, which is I still laugh about it now, even though I was taking a political science major, I took an introduction to sociological theory course. It was one of these big lecture halls with like 300 students in it. And the professor was in the front. And this professor, which I didn't know at the time, had been and was a colleague of Mark Housa in Germany. And his name was Leo Leventhal. And I had no idea who he was, but he really struck me, had this booming German voice, speaking about sociology, about Marx, Freud, Weber, and forget the other classical sociologists. And then the more I studied about sociological theory, and then I became interested in what's called the Frankfurt School, of which Mark Housa and Leventhal were a part, I realized who this guy was that I had taken this class with. And it just blew my mind. So is he central, you know, I mean, you chose him to write the book. Yeah. Is he central in your thinking? You're thinking about, you know, these philosophical issues and for that matter, activism in general? Yes, partly because of what I said earlier. He was the model of an activist scholar. He started out as a scholar. His dissertation, which I think was finished in the early 20s, the English translation of the title is the German romance model, German romance novel, excuse me. And that was a very intellectual, you know, cultural theoretical project. But he changed over time. And by the time he wrote what was to be his habilitationschrift, which in Germany, you need to actually write two major pieces of work. The second one qualifies you to get a position at a university. By the time he wrote that second dissertation, he was well along the way to becoming an activist. So make me a high school senior, okay? And, you know, I don't have a lot of grounding in these issues. I don't know what happened with these classical philosophers, and activist philosophers in Germany, and with the Jewish community of philosophers and all that who left Germany during the 30s. I don't know how they fit in world history. I don't know too much about world history. So my question to you, Michael, is why should I care about Herbert Harkin? That would be, you know, I need to come up with an elevator speech on the spot. Why you should care is because we live in troubled times. And I think part of the reason why we live in troubled times, and when I say we, I'm using it globally, I have some problems with the term we, but I won't get into that now. Everybody on this planet is living on a planet that's on a ticking clock because of the climate emergency. You know, we're still dealing with COVID and we're dealing with the ever-present threat of a nuclear holocaust. And anybody who cares about this planet, I would say, or cares about how we live and get along with each other, needs to be able to see below the surface of issues, needs to be able to question things. And I think the main tool that thinkers like Markuza or Theodore Adorno, anybody who was part of the Frankfurt School, not that they're the only ones, they help us to how to think about things, how to question things, how to go deeper. And Markuza is part of that tradition. So that would be my, on the most general level, my answer to your question. Well, let's drill down a little bit on that, okay? I mean, we talk, and I mean, we, I mean, everyone about the need for critical thinking, the need for critical thinking in high school and college and in daily life, you know? And I think a lot of people will agree, most people will agree that one of the failures of this country and our present state of affairs is that we haven't thought our students or our citizens how to do critical thinking. Absolutely. And then you say, well, where do we get that from? How do you get, do I open a book on critical thinking? What do I do? And I think you've kind of given me an idea about that, is that there are not all that many people around who are influencers, okay, on philosophy and inherently on critical thinking. And so this is really important that we study philosophers in general and we do critical thinking on them because some of them are dead wrong, you know? But obviously you don't feel that Markoos is dead wrong and the people around him were not dead wrong in the sense that they can help that high school kid I'm talking about, understand what critical thinking is and therefore engage in it. Am I right? What would you add to that? Well, first of all, I would say that a lot of these folks, and I'm talking about these German critical thinkers, theorists, philosophers, they're not the easiest reads, okay? So anybody who wants to make use of what they're thinking and had to offer has to offer, there needs to be a translation process. And this is where the teaching is so important because Markoos is actually one of the more readable philosophers of the Frankfurt School critical theory tradition and he is not easy. So I would not just throw even my book that coming out hopefully, you know, early next year or any of Markoos' books at a student say here, read this if you learn, no, it has to be an engagement. There has to be a dialogue between the teacher and the student around the material and by the way, I think teaching and learning, it's a, if I may use the term a dialectical process meaning it works both ways. When I'm teaching, I'm learning as much as I'm imparting some faculty of critical thinking to the person who's ostensibly my student. So I just want to make that clear. But education is a process. It's a dialogue that needs to be engaged in, hopefully in a small, ideally a small group of people like that. I, you know, one-on-one is fine, but it's even better. My best learning experiences have been what we used to call study groups. Or like in a small seminar class where the ostensible teacher can engage the students in dialogue and question and answer. You know, I've been through the American academic system. You know, I know what it's like to sit in a room with 50 to 500 other people and just take notes and listen to a lecture. And there's something to be had for that, but it's also a very limited learning experience. Well, that's like law school. You know, law school is always a two-way street. And you can try to fall asleep if you want, but you run the risk of being called on and being asked to stand up and state the case and explain and answer questions about it. And boy, that'll keep you awake because you don't want to be criticized. And by the same token, you know, a study group is really important. That's why students, at least in law school who are in study groups always do better because they have a chance to articulate. They have a chance to ask questions. They have a chance to answer questions. They, in order to maintain their role in the study group, they have to do that. So I think this is very important. Now, one other thing I'd like to get to in connection with these philosophers that dealt with all these issues you're talking about, which is really important. And regrettably, I think that the American education system is largely forgotten about what you're studying, I'm sorry to say. But there's a lot of references in materials that describe Herbert Marcuse about critical theory. Okay, critical is a word that has been used a number of times in the last few days in the Senate and in the attempted excoriation of Ketanji Jackson and Brown Jackson. Well, now they call it critical race theory. So I'm like, it gives me bumps to use the word critical. Because I don't think it's the same thing. But let me ask you, well, A, what is critical theory as opposed to an ordinary theory? And B, what is critical race theory? I mean, is that a proper use of the term? Wow, that's a mouthful, but you on much less spit out something about it. Well, historically, the term critical theory as used by the Frankfurt School thinkers who were, they were Marxists. They were critical Marxists. They did not accept uncritically the dogmatic form of Marxism or even communism that was emanating from the Soviet Union or from the so-called really existing socialist regimes. Okay, so that's one reason, but in their earlier writings, even now, no one wants to call themselves a Marxist because Marxism in the popular vernacular equals communism, equals, you know, takes you down that rabbit hole. So the original term critical theory was their way of saying Marxist theory because they didn't want to use the term Marxist, but it's not just that. As far as defining critical theory, you know, that would be, I would have to say it's a questions assumptions that tries to go to the root of issues, sees things. Oh, I see. So the word critical means criticizing. Yeah, in a positive as well as a negative sense. Yeah, looking into it. So it's, yeah, critical thinking. So when you say a critical theory, it means we're having a theory, but we're not assuming anything. We're checking it out. We're asking questions about it. It's more of a methodology as to how to think about things. That's the way I see it. The second part of the question is critical race theory. What in the world does that mean? I don't think there's a lot of people in the Senate that know what that means. No, I don't think they do. And I have to confess a certain amount of ignorance about the term. I'm familiar with it. I've read some articles and I have not actually read a full length book about critical race theory. So I'm hesitant to say anything, but I do want to say that it's a completely distinct animal from critical theory, okay? It has some historical and theoretical relationship to critical theory, but it's much more specific to how to think about racial issues, racism. I'm very reluctant, Jay. I would love to do a show on that, by the way. Yeah, well, I think you should. My, frankly, my reaction, not that I pretend to know much about critical race theory is that it's a misnomer and it is intended to confuse you more than help you understand race relations in this country, and people have used it as a way to express racist thoughts or rather anti-racist thoughts against the teaching and discussion of race in this country. I find it really extraordinary that over the past, what is it, year or two, we have seen so much of this and it's no more nor less that when you criticize whatever they want to call critical race theory, you're just being racist. Anyway, there's so much more to talk about. We haven't even scratched the surface. And I would like to see you carry on with any number of things because we need critical thinking in a word. And we need to have the kind of activist journalist kind of way of looking at things on these shows. So I look forward to more shows with you, Michael. Michael Sukov, we're out of time right now, but it's been really interesting to talk to a scholar, an activist scholar, the more the merrier as far as I'm concerned. Thank you, J, thanks so much for this opportunity. I look forward to future opportunities to engage with you and folks out there. Aloha.