TV: Have you seen an increase in youth activism in the U.K.?

AS: Yes, certainly. I think that since 2010 especially, when there was a revived student movement, there has been a sense that street protest belongs to the young, and that's a really productive avenue of political expression.

I would think that when you put [on] something like an anti-Trump march, it's about a statement of values, right? And trying to define who you are through a rejection of the values that you find completely abhorrent. It's about defining yourself as the anti-Trump: being welcoming, outward-looking, and anti-racist.

TV: So can we talk about Piers a little bit?

AS: Oh, yeah. A bellicose walrus himself.

TV: He accused you of being pro-Obama by virtue of being anti-Trump; why do you think that people make that assumption?

AS: I think that the reason why he made that connection is because he really knew that if [he] got pulled into talking about Trump's policy platform, it would be completely indefensible. So then he had to do a bit of sleight of hand and set up what he thought the only anti-Trump person could be, which was a pro-Obama one.

What we know is that lots of the people who have protested Trump in the U.S. — for example, all the people of Black Lives Matter — were leading protests when Obama was president, too. And what they've done is highlighted a lot of the consistency of the kind of problems and issues that they've identified with Trump's presidency. So I don't think that it is a simple category error or accident that someone has made that conflation. It's a deliberate attempt to discredit opposition to ruling-class interests. That's all it is.

TV: How does being a communist impact your view of the U.S. presidency, whether it's Obama or Trump?

AS: If you've got politics which are left of social democracy, it implies that you've got an understanding that the economic platform used by Obama, which was [also] advocated by Clinton, did dispossess a great many Americans, and this isn't just the "white working class" everyone loves to talk about in relation to Trump.

Those who have suffered the most are working-class Americans of color. To me, having those politics means that you can look at economic problems without making it identity politics in the way that Trump has. Also, being a communist means being a fierce critic of the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex. The expanded use of drone warfare and the expansive use of deportation under Obama. You can be a vocal critic of all those things, while also looking at how Trump [has done them] because, quite simply, he was able to build on a lot of Obama's legacy, particularly in terms of executive overreach. He's been able to pursue extreme, draconian forms of state violence.

I also think that Obama represented a possibility of change, of weakened forces of racism in America — pretty meaningful. I'm not going to be someone who's going to discredit his legacy entirely.

TV: You mentioned the economic platform, and the prison industrial complex, and the military industrial complex. Are there any other big, big policies — of either or both Trump or Obama — that are at odds with communist beliefs?

AS: I believe that nothing so arbitrary as money should be able to come between a person and the means of survival. And that's a really fancy way of saying that it doesn't matter if you're poor — you should have top-quality health care. There shouldn't be a barrier between rich and poor in terms of the kind of health care that they can access.