About the Show
Beer. Politics. It's what we do best.
A prosecco prole, a Crown Royal commie, and a Colt 45 commissar team up to take on the world of socialist politics, from one sunny corner at the end of history in the not-so-frozen tundra of Western Canada… We feature guests, we drink beers, and discuss the most pressing issues facing the working class today.
Out of Left Field is a bi-weekly, left wing, socialist podcast recording from of the gulag archipelago of Soviet Canuckistan otherwise known as beautiful Vancouver Island. We discuss Canadian and world politics and culture with a wide range of guests including journalists, authors, politicians, writers, students and everything in between.
The podcast tries to push the overton window to the left as much as we can, and comment on the issues of our day in a laid back and irreverent fashion. They strive to shed light on topics that don’t get their fair share of airtime in the mainstream media and focus on “deep dive” episodes where topics are thoroughly discussed and debated from a left wing perspective.
Out of Left Field Podcast is part of a broader podcast network of like-minded programmes that you can find on http://ricochet.media including Rob Rousseau’s 49th Parahell, The Alberta Advantage, André Goulet’s Unpacking the News and more. You can support the show on Patreon and receive access to (albeit occasional) premium episodes, even $1 a month can go a long way.
About the Show Hosts
Ben
Producer/Editor/Sound Engineer
Ben, the producer/editor and sound engineer for the podcast, was born in 1987 just shy of the Black Monday stock market crash and the 25th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Originally from a sleepy, religious highway town in the Okanagan, he moved to the grand metropolis of Victoria, BC to pursue an education in political science and sociology which he quickly abandoned to go to music production school in Vancouver instead. Not content with the dreary, crowded, gray concrete city-scape he moved back to Vancouver Island at the soonest possible opportunity and he has resided there ever since. Ben was first turned onto left wing politics when he was gifted a copy of Noam Chomsky’s Understanding Power for Christmas one year. Soon after that, he got involved in local activism and eventually found his home when he discovered Marxism. He’s always been intensely interested in Latin American politics and has travelled to many a country in the Western Hemisphere. Ever the socialist, he doesn’t think it’s possible for humanity to save itself from catastrophic climate change without a radical transformation of the economy through the democratic control of the means of production by the working class. Although he loves politics his true passion is music production, composition and sound design.
Mackenzie “Mack”
Co-host
Mackenzie “Mack” was born in 1986 under the dual ill omens of the Chernobyl Disaster and Expo86. Having spent his whole life in his home town of Victoria has given him a broad, but irreverent, dislike of all mainlanders. He was first radicalized by both the 2004 HEU & 2005 BCTF General Strikes and would consider himself a socialist from that point on. Mack would later go into trade school and graduated just in time for the 2008 global financial collapse. He’s always considered himself a member of the NDP even when his membership’s lapsed a half dozen times or more. In a city overrun with crystal hippies and government bureaucrats, Mack, in contrast, considers the demand for honest, working class, socialism to be the truly pressing need for today. He spends most of his activist time (although he does not consider himself an activist) on education in Marxist theory and insinuating himself into any public debates or community media where possible. Whether on tv, radio or in person he has a tenancy of popping up in the strangest places to spout off about socialism. Mackenzie considers himself a true pragmatist, it just so happens he sees the total overthrow of capitalism as the only pragmatic solution for the working class. Always a cynic, his surly attitude is balanced only by his eternal belief in the inevitability of the world socialist revolution.
Anthony
Co-host
Anthony is the newest addition to the Out Of Left Field crew. Born in 1990, otherwise known as the dawn of the “end of history,” he grew up mostly in Victoria, having fled the brutal Siberian winds of Edmontonian winters with his parents and older sister as a young child. Anthony lived a fairly disaffected youth politically, flirting with anarchism, nihilism and emotions mainly via punk rock, black metal, and screamo (though not unscathed by a little Kropotkin here, a little Nietzsche there). His first political lessons came in the form of solidarity actions with CUPW and BCTF strikes as an adolescent, but he would only be truly radicalized after participating in the student strikes and anti-austerity protests in Montreal, eventually becoming an organizer, after moving there in 2014 to pursue an M.A. in Philosophy. It was in Montreal that he joined his first Marxist group, and in Montreal that he became a consummate commie scumbag. He has since returned to Victoria to pursue a PhD in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought (CSPT) at UVic, where he spends his days gleefully immersed in the holy scriptures of postmodern cultural Marxism.
